Obscure Comic of the Month is a monthly
feature which takes a detailed look at little known entry from my
personal comic book collection. Some will be from major publishers,
others self published projects, Original Graphic Novels, issues and
Manga. What they'll all have in common though, is that I've rarely,
if ever, seen anybody talk about them.
War-Fix by David Axe and Steven Olexa –
ComicsLit/NBM 2006
Contains Mild Spoilers
Weened in his youth on scenes of war
in the evening news, a small town journalist named David discards
life as he has known it to report on the war in Iraq. But what
outwardly appears to be nothing more than a dangerous job is in
reality a strange personal quest, where David is both a voyeur and
participant in the condition which intrigues, frightens, excites and
consumes him – violence.
War-Fix is another book I picked out of
the indy section of Worlds Apart Liverpool back in the day. It looked
pseudo-intellectual and was cheap, perfect for my developing tastes.
I'd never even really heard of Joe Sacco at the time (And to be
honest I still haven’t looked into enough of his stuff), so this
was my first tastes of what could be described as the war journalism
genre.
Unlike Sacco and his contemporaries
however, War-Fix is a purely fictitious tale. It's plot is
immediately familiar to anyone who's seen the film The Hurt Locker,
though following a journalist rather than a bomb disposal expert.
It's a story about war addiction and
the disconnect from reality it provides. Despite appearances the book
is very short. Pages tend to contain no more than five lines of
dialogue apiece. Some pages none at all. You could get through the
book in less than twenty minutes. That's isn't a flaw though. The
story is more concerned with communicating it's point through visuals
that it is through words.
Steven Olexa's art is very similar to
that of Vertigo mainstay Jock. For most of the book he disregards
more traditional panel structures, tending to let one scene melt into
the next. This is all part of the stream of consciousness
storytelling on behalf of the book's main character David. David
isn't particularly complex, you know who he is and what he wants
right from the get go, but instead he serves to communicate to us our
social, and by extension personal, obsession with war.
War-Fix manages to avoid becoming dated
by exploring war as a whole. While it takes place during the
occupation of Iraq it'll also touch on other conflicts. Croatia,
China during WW2 and the medieval battlefields of the past. Indeed,
it also takes a nuanced look at some of the lesser known participants
of the war, such as Nepalese contractors or Georgian irregulars. The
story may take place in one specific war, but in it's way, it is
about all wars.
The storytelling includes quite a lot
of nice touches. There is heavy use of visual symbolism and
juxtaposition with the text. One stand out moment near the end
involves David taking photographs of civilian casualties, where for
one panel he's portrayed holding a gun rather than his camera. This
shows him, and indeed ourselves, to be just as complicit in these
crimes as the soldiers and combatants.
It's not all perfect however. Most of
the text is rendered in a faux-handwritten font, making it difficult
to read at points. It's a head bangingly stupid decision that damages
what is otherwise a tight delivery.
War-Fix gets in, makes it's point and
finishes up without outstaying it's welcome. I think it cost me about
a fiver at the time and it's hard to argue with that price for what
you get.
NBM Publishing is still going strong,
apparently, and David Axe likewise is still keeping himself busy.
Couldn't really find much on Steven Olexa though. They're still
selling a wide range of comics, War-Fix included. It's a little
bizarre to say the least, I've been to quite a few cons and expos
over the years now and I've never seen them promoting. I remember
checking out the ComicsLit range back in the day. I'd kind of assumed
after all these years they'd probably have gone bust.
So War-Fix is a nice little ditty with
an important point to make. General fiction comics tend not to have
so wide an audience and it's kind of easy to get buried under the
giants of the genre. It's hard to say if War-Fix deserves any
recognition for that, but it is a moving read. It'd be great in a
classroom or school library.
And in the end, it also kind of got to
make a point three years before Hurt Locker did.
Jack Harvey 2015. War-Fix (c) 2006
David Axe and Steven Olexa. Images used under Fair Use.
