The year is 2011, and Jimmy Burns, a young anti-corporate blogger, has
just seen his apartment blown to bits by yet another terrorist attack on New York City (he lives
above a Starbucks Coffee Shop). He's recorded the gruesome scene on his new
videoblog camera -- footage Burns beams live to a freaked-out world and that
makes him an overnight media star.
Exploited by his own network
(Global News: 'Your home for 24-hour terror coverage'), enraged by the
terrorists, and determined to tell the American people the uncensored truth,
Burns takes off for Iraq to get the real story of a war that's been raging for
more than eight years. But Burns's greatest dream (to be a war correspondent)
becomes his biggest nightmare as he nearly loses his mind in the paranoia,
chaos and destruction of the spiralling civil war.
I am so excited at the
prospect of this book – it started as a webcomic on Smithmag.net by Anthony (a
GNN reporter with first hand experience of the war in Iraq) and Dan
Goldman (a wonderfully weird artist) and hooked me right away, rapidly becoming
one of my favourite comics of 2006. I was delighted when the guys landed a
print deal for a book version, which they have set about to with a will,
expanding the story in a way that wouldn’t have worked for an online version
(over 2/3 will be totally new even for readers of the webcomic) and they
managed to wrap up the online version in such a way that those of us who read
it still won’t know how the print version will end. This is going to be one of
the best graphic novels of 2007, I think, and should be cropping up in a lot of
the traditional media too. Anthony talked to me last summer, explaining some of
the background to Shooting War, which you can read over on the FPI blog.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardback,
192 pages, published November 2007
MATURE
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