Susie read and liked Ken's review of War Fix:

"add this book to the pile of crossover-wannabe graphic-novel Memoirs from creators self-important and shallow enough to assume hype is all it takes to make a bestselling comic book. you know -- because it's so much easier than writing a Real book, an...more add this book to the pile of crossover-wannabe graphic-novel Memoirs from creators self-important and shallow enough to assume hype is all it takes to make a bestselling comic book. you know -- because it's so much easier than writing a Real book, and the audience is so much dumber.

the art was well-rendered, but doesn't belong -- the work-for-hire manga style comes off as too slick and neutered for a first-person yankee account of war.

and that doesn't leave the book left with much to stand on. the real problem with this book was the writing, which was more than a little self-indulgent and one-dimensional. as the autobiographical story of yet another journalist "embedded" (and thus, predictably, terminally biased) with the US military during the second gulf war, the author/protagonist sets his reader up with some mighty tall expectations in the first chapter. he then proceeds to utterly fall short on his delivery, page after page, until the book is done and you're forced to accept that the exposition you've been patiently waiting for -- surely writing this corny is just a deft use of the unreliable narrator, right? right? -- is not forthcoming. it turns out that olexa is just another american war-fetishist trying to cop a quick buck/pulitzer-stab off of some military voyeurism and a bunch of generic, hokey attempts at profundity. never mind honing that craft, dude -- you got the plane ticket, the body armor, a big fat camera and an ego -- just go for it! opine first and ask questions later! no.

olexa spends much of the book shying away from a real examination of the grim realities of the war he's supposedly arrived to report on. before long it becomes obvious why this is so: he lacks the depth and rhetorical talent to say anything of worth about it. perhaps this is why his editor, his wife, and all his friends keeps telling him not to go -- so he doesn't have to risk his life just to foist another comic book of zipatoned photo-refed drawings and pretentious, bombastic snippets of text into barnes & noble. not only that, but inviting us to spuriously join in the author's war-joy at iraq's expense is just... yecchh. it's almost infuriating to think of all the crucial, important, interesting and horrific stories that must have been going on all around him, uncaptured, while his attention remained steadfastly focused on himself and his navel-gazing war tourism.

there's also something unintentionally sad about the way he ditches his poor wife, twice, to go play at "war junky" with the big boys -- especially after it becomes obvious that the drug he keeps saying he's "addicted" to isn't so much adrenaline as it is testosterone. olexa uses an entire theater of war (well, the part they'll let the fragile freelance journalists into, anyway) as little more than his own personal viagra -- and i'm not sure i can think of many things that the world needs less than that. even hemingway had the decency to at least drive an ambulance.

the weird narrative disconnect between this book's writer and artist also has me suspecting that someone down at the publishing office was editing the living shit out of this book. the word-picture connections frequently have that labored, obtuse, overly polished, even deadened feel that denote the influence of a very clumsy invisible hand.

if you're looking for comics war reportage, stick with joe sacco, who knows where the stories are, and has the heart, brains, and fingers to report them well.(less) "