Shoot­ing War by Anthony Lappé and illus­trated by Dan Gold­man, pub­lished Nov 2007 by Grand Cen­tral Pub­lish­ing is a hard­cover graphic novel that is best described as media and polit­i­cal satire that taps into the “what if” the­ory of the pol­i­tics of the near future, ripped from the head­lines of today.

Shooting War by Anthony Lappe

“If cit­i­zens are jour­nal­ists, who will be the audi­ence?”–Shoot­ing War

Shoot­ing War by Lappé started out as a ser­ial in Smith Mag­a­zine and was an appar­ent hit with read­ers. It’s a polit­i­cal satire of how the world’s polit­i­cal land­scape and for­eign pol­icy plays out three years from now. The story fol­lows lib­eral blog­ger, Jimmy Burns, who overnight becomes a media sen­sa­tion. He man­ages to cap­ture a live feed of a Brook­lyn Star­bucks being blown apart by a sui­cide bomber right below his apart­ment build­ing. His feed is then hijacked by a news net­work and is shown to mil­lions of peo­ple around the world; he imme­di­ately becomes a pop­u­lar face with a pen­chant for being in the right place for trou­ble. Burns gets his fif­teen min­utes of fame, grac­ing every major mag­a­zine cover and appear­ing on Larry King Live.

Burns’s fif­teen min­utes is extended even longer when he is shortly approached by an exec­u­tive of Global News, which pro­vides its view­ers with 24/7 break­ing news on ter­ror. Burns is not a jour­nal­ist but a civil­ian with a blog that focuses on cor­po­rate cor­rup­tion. Global News hires him and part­ners him with a pro­ducer who is an Iraqi native and sends him off to Bagh­dad where he inad­ver­tently becomes a source of pro­pa­ganda for a jihadist group that no one knows about but who is wanted by the CIA.

Mean­while, under McCain’s watch, the war in Iraq is vamped up a notch, send­ing in more troops to bat­tle insur­gents. His for­eign poli­cies are more of the same fail­ures from the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. Pretty much more of the same news torn from the head­lines of today espe­cially with McCain’s win­ning the White House frac­tur­ing the Repub­li­can Party.[g]

The story is quite thought pro­vok­ing in high­light­ing the media’s role in glam­or­iz­ing vio­lence. I know I am speak­ing to the choir when I say that there is no such thing as an inde­pen­dent media source. The news is always unbal­anced, fil­tered and watered down for pub­lic con­sump­tion. While the graphic novel makes some seri­ous claims and argu­ments con­cern­ing America’s for­eign pol­icy and polit­i­cal cli­mate — there are some humor­ous moments to lighten things up a bit. The art­work is dig­i­tal, inno­v­a­tive and quite amaz­ing to look at. The author gives us plenty of famil­iar media faces like Ander­son Cooper and Larry King from CNN and even Bill O’Reilly from Fox News. There’s more humor to be found in Jimmy Burn’s blog entries and his cover story by The New York magazine.

I liked Jimmy Burns. He is pas­sion­ate in his cause and quite inno­cent when he begins to cover the war. After being sent to Iraq, how­ever, his inno­cence (as expected) was shat­tered. He becomes dis­il­lu­sioned by the actions of US troops and the real war that is being fought over­seas that no one dares report about. The authors make it clear that the war has loss of life from both sides.

To wrap things up, I enjoyed the end­ing and closed this book with a sigh. I know many read­ers don’t care for polit­i­cal satire but I couldn’t resist. I know for myself I don’t really care to dis­cuss pol­i­tics on this blog but this graphic novel just screamed my name and it didn’t hurt that it received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. My grade, B.