War Comics Are Boring
A paperback collection of War Is Boring’s best comics
by DAVID AXE
For as long as I’ve been a reporter, I’ve also been a comics writer. And now I work alongside a bunch of other talented people—Kevin Knodell, Kyle Mizokami, Matt Bors and Blue Delliquanti—who are also comics scribes and artists.
People often ask why we write nonfiction comics about war. I usually say, “Why not?” No, ahem, medium is necessarily better than any other for recreating and commenting on true events. They’re all just different, each with their own quirks.
But over the years I’ve found that war and comics can work nicely together. That’s because war sometimes feels like a comic book—big, colorful, visual, unsubtle, even silly. I should know. My journalism career has taken me to dozens of war zones in as many countries in the past decade.
And there are time when war definitely doesn’t feel like a comic book. When, as our name War Is Boring implies, it’s quite simply dull. Or confusing. Or seemingly too awful for words or pictures.
And that’s when comics truly excel as way of talking about war. When the expectations you bring to the medium clash with the subject of the story. That’s irony, and it serves to highlight the most extreme aspects of a tale. A gut-shot child is terrible. A gut-shot child drawn in the style of an Archie Comics character is somehow even more terrible.
We’ve just collected, into a 130-page paperback, all the best real war comics that we’ve published at War Is Boring in recent years. Enjoy. Or at least learn something.
