The newcomers were added to the team earlier this month in Fantastic Four #543, a special 45th-anniversary issue that also introduced the new writer, Dwayne McDuffie, and featured short stories by indie artists Paul Pope, Nick Dragotta and Mike Allred.
The new two and their Fantastic Four debuted this week in Black Panther #26, by regular writer (and BET president) Reginald Hudlin and new cover artist Niko Henrichon, of last year's Pride of Baghdad.
In the river of recent history, our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq flowed directly from the September 11 attacks. So perhaps it's no surprise that Rick Veitch has chosen to turn his attention immediately from 9/11 to the global war on terror. Last year the prolific cartoonist delivered Can't Get No, an ambitious 350-page, black-and-white graphic novel following a fictional New York businessman on a road trip that began at ground zero. Narrated by a sort of prose poem that never quite matched up with the visual narrative, it was a deeply weird meditation on the psychic fallout of the attacks, and how they affected the American myth.
He follows that with a more traditional comic book series, this one looking at the U.S. military's war machine in that most fertile ground for speculative fiction, "the not too distant future."
Riffing on the old 1950s comic Our Army at War, Veitch appropriates the title for a war comic like no other. The U.S. Army is still slogging its way through block-by-block urban warfare in a third-world country of brown-skinned insurgents, this one called "Afbaghistan," allowing Veitch the freedom to talk about modern U.S. warfare in general, without pinning it down to a particular front (and to get away with drawing the buildings however he wants).
Since a seemingly endless war tends to hurt recruitment, the Pentagon had to get creative, and the result was the Motivation and Morale department, or "Momo." They approach selling war-fighting like a lifestyle product, and have instituted new and controversial programs to keep spirits high, like allowing soldiers to carry cell phones into battle. Oh, and hosting orgies for the troops.
We follow Switzer, a former member of Momo who got off on the high of battle so much that she switched to combat, who cajoles a handsome G.I. into joining her in "the Hot Zone Club" (like the Mile High Club, except, you know, in a hot zone). Her husband back home doesn't know what goes on over there, just like the rest of the country, although someone seems intent on letting them know. An incriminating video has been leaked over the Internet.
A tongue-in-cheek military satire told as an R-rated soap opera, Army @ Love seems just as ambitious as Can't Get No, but much more accessible, narratively and visually, which only serves to makes it all the more subversive.