It’s difficult for me to think about war reporting without Michael Herr’s Dispatches quickly coming to mind. Seeing as Herr’s account of Vietnam inspired elements of Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now, and that Herr helped write the screenplays for both films, it’s not difficult to see how my fondness for Dispatches played against “Shooting War.” Where Herr’s Dispatches viscerally displays the horrors of war, with the author himself changed by the events he lives through, Jimmy Burns’ emotional register seems rather limited — he sometimes looks scared, looks bored a lot, drinks a bit, shoots off a few snarky remarks, lusts after women, and that’s about it. In many ways, Jimmy is not very different from the soldiers continuing the wars he claims to be against. Because of his detachment and distance, the horrors of war are little more than background noise (a remark the character himself basically makes when talking about sleeping in the hotel in the green zone, how the blast shields keep out a lot of the noise, but not the mortar blasts and gunfire), unpleasant detours and interruptions, and so on. With the authors and artists choosing to mix brutality with satire, parodying almost everyone in the text, including Burns, it’s difficult to see “Shooting War” as anything but a doomsday scenario played out by vaudevillian actors, none of which I particularly cared about.
The medium of the web comic seems to have led to many of the creative decisions behind “Shooting War” — the focal character of a web comic is a blogger, the archetypal detached, snide rabble-rouser or hipster “douchebag.” The fact that we quickly see Jimmy on television screens and on the covers of magazines is interesting, almost as if the creative forces behind the web comic still see older, established manifestations of mass media as “more authoritative.” (It’s also difficult to ignore the constant advertisements for the print publication of “Shooting War,” a text that allegedly offers the narrative a life it couldn’t find online, with “important story & art changes” that I shouldn’t miss.”) The web gives birth to both “Shooting War” and the journalistic career of its focal character, yet the story moved to the “established,” “respected” medium of print, a medium in “Shooting War” that eventually claims Jimmy is impotent, unable to “get it up” in the world of television journalism. A web comic finds an audience and jumps mediums; a blogger stumbles into a journalistic career, but fails to connect with anyone but “sluts” who want to have his baby. What is “Shooting War” trying to tell us about the internet? Is it really just a place to watch porn and bitch about movies, to paraphrase the once-humorous filmmaker Kevin Smith, and not a legitimate medium for the expression of ideas? It’s interesting that the longest web comic we read seems almost ashamed to have started out on the internet.
Some great thoughts. A few quick responses:
FWIW, I feel saying we don’t care about characters has become a bit of a go-to criticism in this class. Now, I don’t say that out of disdain for your comment…far from it! I’m just remarking on its frequency–perhaps there’s an overall trend here symptomatic of the GN medium that we should explore?
That said, I found the blogger a heck of a lot more sympathetic than, oh, say, Omar. (easy shot at that poor guy, ha). If nothing else, he seems self-aware of his hipster hypocrisy/inconsistencies, which is oddly endearing.
But I do think that word “hipster” is the right one to use in re. to this comic. It takes continual pot shots at the establishment, but then accepts a book deal w/a major corporation. It decries advertising and then covers its website with it. It pokes fun at blogging, but it is a blog. I don’t think the comic is ashamed to be an “indie,” as it were, but it certainly isn’t above “selling out” to a variation of the very thing that fuels its criticisms…much like its main character!
Maybe its creators view the entire process as a successful subversion or appropriation–but it causes me to roll my eyes a bit. Then again, I guess that’s the problem with any dramatic, counter-cultural claims.
Josh, thanks for pointing out the frequency of our criticism that the characters we’re encountering aren’t sympathetic or worth caring about. I, too, have wondered why that criticism is prevalent this semester. Are we holding graphic novels to a different standard than other works of fiction or non-fiction? After all, there are plenty of widely-read and widely-discussed novels that do not feature likable characters. Consider something like Madam Bovary, one of the canonical novels of 19th century realism, yet there are no sympathetic characters in it.
More recently, postmodern literature is full of characters who are not likable and have no depth—and indeed, that’s part of the point of the postmodernism. Blank characters that reflect the blank, surface-level discourse of our media environment.
So what is it about graphic novels that makes us feel like we are owed characters who are worth caring about?
Well, I don’t know that I would agree that I hold comics to a different standard. I find myself drawn away from much contemporary literature because of the lack of admirability in the characters. So my criticisms of the unsympathetic (or pathetic) nature of many of the protagonists don’t, to my mind, come from a different place than my analysis of print or filmic narratives.
I definitely see the touch to Dispatches however, the reporters and the medium’s of old have been replaced by the new and are so far left behind that I did not and do not see a full comparison. It is true that in past wars the reporter was more than often, on-site, in theater, engaged with the troops, but the reporting was simpling doing that: reporting. There was no on-line stream capability of the actual events of battle, and often the re-presented material was edited before it reached the audience.
Today’s era has initiated a change in this movement. When people know that a Warship is going through the Panama Canal, they simply pull the continuous, 24/7, live stream feed of the entirety of the voyage and the the 3 locks. No fee. No editing. No limits. No question as to how so many people observed the “Fire-Flight” incident LIVE in 2007; of course, big government being what it was, quickly shifted the focused attention to our ability to shoot down some “satellite”. There are even units within certain U.S. Marine corps detachments that have reporters with them, right now, providing an online, continuous 24/7 feed of the events with that unit. No fee. No editing. No limits. You just have to know where to find the links…
I’m not knocking dispatches or the reporting of the day, but in a time where the reporter is essentially “Creating” (or more appropriately, directly providing the unedited viewing) the picture for today’s audience, not merely just “reporting” it. In fact, a large number of these subsiduaries don’t even have a reporter visible. Simply a corporation’s live, streaming camera attached to the top of the humvee, and eventually, roll credits.