Shooting War: Anthony Lappe & Dan Goldman

The global war on terror is raging out of control. The president is popping Prozac. And the #1 selling videogame in 2011 America is the terrorist-simulator Infidel Massacre: Los Angeles. On the streets of gentrified Brooklyn, videoblogger Jimmy Burns' latest anti-corporate rant is cut short by a terrorist bombing of a Starbucks...but his live feed isn't. When his dramatic footage is uploaded by Global News ("Your home for 24-hour terror coverage") and rebroadcast across the planet, the obscure blogger is transformed into an overnight media sensation. The next thing he knows he's on a Black Hawk helicopter inbounds for Baghdad, working for the same mainstream media monster he once loathed. Burns soon finds that everyone from his ratings-ravenous network overlords to Special Ops troops with messianic complexes to a charismatic band of tech-savvy jihadists all want to make him their pawn.

This is most certainly not your everyday coffee table quick read type graphic novel. Shooting War is one of those tales that takes a long time to process because the message is so very deep. It takes time to be able to piece together not just the complex story and its characters but the reason behind the novel's own publication. I found the images splendid in morbid detail but could not help but feel sick as I was reading it, the message was that blunt. The artwork was quite lifelike and I felt sucked in as if I was part of the story and like any good movie, I had to yell at the book for the main characters to get out of the gunfire.

The mixture of freedom of speech meeting terrorists touched with a bit of sexual frustration and the glamour of ice in the deserts of the Middle East, threw me for a textual loop. Even in its fiction form we do realize that even a single man's blog can change the fate of history, a single camera touching the lives of millions via the glorious world of the World Wide Web. I highly recommend this piece to anyone that is a fan of political satire, war stories, horror or morbid scenes and any eco-terrorist environmentalists out there. This should be placed into the hands of every political science major even in its fiction form as something to ponder over for the 'what-ifs' of this tale are really not that far from the truth of any war.

------------------------------
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (November 14, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0446581208
ISBN-13: 978-0446581202
Buy the Book