War During Lifetime

A depressingly relevant comic I drew in 2014.

While I was living in France, I taught in a then-new comics program in Amiens, way up north. It was a hike from my base in Angoulême in the southwest but thanks to high-speed rail, it wasn’t very hard to head up there a few times a semester for a weekend workshop with the undergrad students going for their “DU” (diplôme universitaire) in comics at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne. It’s the first program of its kind in France and has since expanded to add a master’s program, last I heard.

In 2014, the students edited and produced their own comics anthology and they invited me to contribute. They did a great job with the design, including this cute group photo as soldiers with their pencil-nosed mascot front and center:

Lieutenant Madden on the left—note the arm band labeled 99!

The theme for the issue they chose was (alas!) war.

I was hesitant to commit since, as a rule, I’m not all that excited by “themed” anthologies (as common in comics as they are in literature and poetry). But as their teacher I felt a sense of noblesse oblige —plus it was yet another opportunity to see if constraints could push me to find something at all novel to say about war.

On the one hand, here was an opportunity to be “forced” to make a one page comic. All I had to do was follow the parameters of the assignment: I had a theme, print specs, a deadline (“Give me the freedom of a tight brief.” —David Ogilvy).

On the other hand, “a one-page comic about war” is still pretty vague as a prompt. As always, I found that the real trick to getting started was finding an additional constraint, something random and surprising that would “tighten the brief” and lead me to an engaging idea…

2014 was a relatively calm period in the West. It was before the pandemic and the aggressions of recent years—before even the Charlie Hebdo massacre and Paris attacks that would happen in the following year and hit very close to home.

Societal violence has a cyclical element and I had a feeling that whatever I drew out of my imagination might come to look like on-the-ground reporting at any moment in the future. I was all too correct:

The constraint I settled on involved a doubling or rhyming. Every other panel shows the same character at work or at war: In the first panel, we see him setting up the patio of a café and in the next panel we see him (or someone very similar) kicking down the door of the same café—the table from panel one overturned, a dead body behind it (the barista?)—and so on. I tried to maintain an ambiguity throughout—are we seeing alternate realities? A fantasy? A flashback? If so, which storyline is in the past?

In the last two panels, the worlds seem to converge as we see waiter participating in the violence followed by the soldier calmly mopping up (blood?) in front of the café.

I was grimly satisfied with the way the comic seemed to express the unpredictability as well as the lamentable workaday mundanity of modern armed conflict.

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This comic and many other exciting experiments in cartooning and narrative are collected in my latest book Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed Under Pressure, which is currently on sale for $19.99 on the Uncivilized Books web store! You can also ask for it in your favorite independent bookstore.

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Bonus Feature: my preparatory notes

As I was researching this post I came across my original notes for the comic. Since they are preserved so pristinely (in Evernote) and show some of the false starts, inspirations, and themes that all fed into the final comic (and its title), I thought I’d share them here:

story ideas:

détournement of “Imjin” [reference to Harvey Kurtzman’s comic “A Corpse on the Imjin—M]
Afghan/Iraq
constraints?
Dr Strangelove
War of Words
bugs eye view
Occurrence at Owl Creek
former child warriors, unrepentant khmer rouge soldiers doc [the second is reference to Joshua Oppenheimer’s astonishing The Act of Killing (2012) which is actually about Indonesia, not Cambodia—M]
NYT photos of Rwanda Hutus and their Tutsi victims, 20 years later
NYT photos of US soldiers before and after battle

How to do one page that is worthy of the subject and also interesting for me to draw?
(also: must be quick, easy to do)

restrictive constraint:

• no people

• fixed POV (of dead soldier?)

• imageless

• zoom or pan

Ideas NOT to do:
zoom from war scene into insects fighting
battle narrative where each panel is a diff. historical era

Idea 1: monologue from a character who was a soldier in a horrendous war, now respectable citizen. Or some other kind of juxtaposition btw banality/horror of life during and after war.

IDEA 2
a one page sequence that alternates between mundane activity and brutal violence (chopping wood, opening up a store… butcher too obvious. Alternating or parallel? I think alternating would be more subtle.)

bartender:

• serving beer from tap

• taking payment

• taking out trash

• clearing table

• mopping

• drinking

soldier:

• sniper

• hacking someone w machete or hammer

• kicking in door

• hiding for cover behind wall

• setting fire to house

• rape, about to rape/after

• slitting throats

• drinking/doing drugs

“Life During Wartime” would be an appropriate title but it’s overused. “Warrior’s Way” or something like that?

What is war today?

• not battlefields, populated areas

• not armies, bands of guerrillas, loosely connected Al Qaeda like networks

• erupting overnight for unclear or misunderstood reasons (Rwanda, Syria, Ukraine)

Lastly, here’s a process photo I came across where you can see me about 2/3 of the way through inking the final art:

Thanks for reading along if you made it this far!