While the creaking, wheezing geriatric dinosaur of the literary novel is still gathering its ponderous thoughts about the war on terror (six years in and still no Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22 or M*A*S*H), the gibbering little comics monkeys have been all over the conflict—satirizing, parodying, glorifying and deconstructing.
Latest ’Raq-com on the block is Special Forces, the slightly deranged brainchild of comics artist Kyle Baker. That’s special as in special needs. In the not-so-distant future, a veteran U.S. Army sergeant—crippled by post-traumatic stress syndrome—is forced to recruit a new platoon or be sent back into combat himself.
He recruits a flamboyant fem-gay (who later snorts cocaine off a Little Kitty mirror during combat), a morbidly obese kid, crooks, methadone addicts, a child with severe autism and (what are the odds?) a staggeringly beautiful punkzoid anti-cheerleader with basketball breasts and a penchant for not wearing very many clothes.
But Special Forces is all about the cannon fodder, not the wank fodder. It’s an even darker twist on the future-Iraq storyline than that seen in the critically acclaimed satirical comic Army@Love.
In Love, any critique of the ongoing neo-con madness is undermined by a sneering racist contempt for the anonymous brown-skinned enemy. You might remember these fanatical but clownishly incompetent Arab stereotypes from the embarrassingly racist Schwarzenegger movie True Lies. And the exact same crazy-but-crap “natives” also appeared in the jingoistic Empire fiction marketed to British schoolboys in the 1900s. The reality back then was that the real British army was getting the shit shot out of it by the insurgent Boers in South Africa (just as it’d been previously shot to shit by the Zulus, the Afghans and the Americans—the more things change, etc.).
Like that other badly flawed war satire, the movie Team America: World Police, Army@Love’s satire is undermined and eventually negated by its bottom-line “we might f--k up, but we’re all right, really” quasi-patriotism. Hell, if the writer of a war satire can’t see that the entire shooting match is a crock, the work is worse than useless.
Special Forces takes no such prisoners. It opens with a full-page panel showing a new recruit getting his face blown off. And then builds to a farcical, intestine-strewn bloody climax as the big-titted narrator and her autistic chum, slipping and sliding in the spilled guts of their comrades, charge the enemy with guns blazing like John Wayne on stupid drugs.
“In this whole f--ked-up world you’re all I’ve got, you autistic son of a bitch,” says the semi-naked Valkyrie.
Sure, it’s as subtle as a brick. But at this stage of the war, when our chimp president—abandoned even by his Bible-believing base—responds to the overwhelming evidence that this war is a complete and utter disaster by (sheer genius, this) sending in more troops (making this the worst year for U.S. casualties since the occupation started), subtlety is the last thing we need.
We need offensive art. Art that screams. Special Forces sure as hell does that. Six years ago it would have been impossible to write a comic like this. It’s a mark of Bush’s absolute failure that today a comic like Special Forces is absolutely necessary.