This is a book about the disastrous mess of war, with art that uses a medium that most artists turn into a disastrous mess: charcoal. What stands out the most in this book is the art. Though the artistic side of me thinks that I should run around telling everyone about it because of the charcoal drawings, I have to acknowledge that many comic book fans aren’t going to like this book because it doesn’t look like anything else on the shelves right now.

Those who haven’t experienced the joy of working with charcoal may not realize how painful it is to use. Grains come off in the wrong places, it sticks to your skin, and it smears all over. Rarely is it pretty to look at, and I’m willing to bet that St. John would be upset if I described his work as “pretty.” The message of the book is very clearly that war isn’t pretty, so I love that the art befits the message.

There are six short stories here--four about the same soldier that work together to create a longer overall story, and two that aren’t connected other than that they are about war. Five of the six stories are written by Waltz, and the last is written by St. John.

Unlike Apocalypse Now, the stories by Waltz don’t ram the message down your throat. These stories are meant to show a slice of what war is like for most soldiers--situations involving a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. The slices of life are meant to leave the reader with a sense that war isn’t glamorous.

The first four stories are the ones about the same soldier, PFC Jones, in different situations. They are mostly image-driven narratives, so the artwork is what makes them work so well. First, we see PFC Jones in a riot that he’s policing, and St. John’s art is filled with controlled scribbling and images that take a second for you to figure out what you’re looking at. Some people might see that effect as a sign of bad artwork, but it perfectly matches the confusion of a riot.

Next is a scene where Jones is pinned down in a city street by a sniper, and he watches a French soldier die after being shot by said sniper. No one can find the sniper, so people are confusedly and aimlessly firing on a building. A nice touch is that to add to the confusion, the soldiers are a mixture of French and Americans, so the language barrier builds on the confusion. (As a side note: most modern military personnel would be annoyed by this pre-Viet Nam mentality where the soldiers destroy an entire building and endanger, if not outright kill, dozens of civilians in order to kill one guy.)

The third is another story that would not work without the images. It’s about finding a mass grave and, since there isn’t a lot that happens in the course of twelve pages, there isn’t a lot to say. In fact, Jones doesn’t take any action in this story and is merely a witness to what happens. To match the tone here, St. John fills over half of each page with solid black since it is all about death of innocents.

That story leads into the final one in which a soldier gets a letter from a prima donna back home who says that the soldiers have it easy overseas whereas he is stressed about school. Obviously, the soldiers don’t care for that sentiment--with the message being that even when soldiers aren’t in an “official war, they still have it hard.

The fifth story in the book is even more focused on soldiers thinking about home. In this one, the characters are sitting in a bunker after incoming sirens have sounded. While sitting there thinking about his own situation, the soldier focused upon in this story notices that one of his hard-nosed superior officers is crying--and the focus goes to what he knows about her home life.

The last is the story written by St. John, and it stands out the most. Though the first five stories are all set in the same city, this one seems to be set on a different continent. Unlike the other stories, this one’s narrator is a woman, not a man. She also isn’t a soldier, and the story is not one scene. Rather, it’s a series of scenes spread out over years.

It’s a story about a refugee who moves from an urban capitol to a convent in the country, and how it turns her into a different person. What’s interesting is that though Waltz came up with the idea for this book, St. John’s story takes up more then half the book.

I do like this book and must recommend it. However, I have to say the average comic fan isn’t going to agree with me.

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