by Chris Arrant
Some people look towards the future with the hope that it'll be better than the days we're living with now. With wars in the Middle East, Africa and other regions, the threat of a global pandemic with the Bird Flu, and the increasing tension of violence by terrorists, it's not hard to see why people would look for better times. But in the upcoming webcomic
Shooting War, the tensions of today and grown, and sadly become a fact of reality in the in the near future of 2011.
Shooting War follows a young reporter/blogger named Jimmy Burns, who works for the news network Global TV (GTV). Living in relative obscurity in the media eye, he's suddenly thrust into the limelight when he videoblogs the aftermath of a terrorist attack that hit his own home. By pulling himself together while his house fell down around him, Burns beams it live to a media-frenzied world and becomes an overnight media sensation. The tragedy turns into a blessing and then turns into a tragedy again as his employers at GTV exploit his new-found stardom to their own ends. In a fit of anger, Burns takes off for the battlefields of Iraq to get the real story of a war that's been raging for more than eight years.
Created and written by journalist Anthony Lappe, the subject matter is one close to his heart and his own experiences. His experiences in the field writing for
The New York Times, and in filming his own recent documentary of Iraq,
Battleground: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge, have left Lappe with the background, memories and inspiration to extrapolate today's event into a possible and frightening future. Partnering with cartoonist Dan Goldman of ACT-i-VATE fame, their story begins this May 15th.
But we couldn't wait that long.
Newsarama got in touch with both the writer and artist to talk about their upcoming serialized webcomic to find out about the story, the collaboration, and the technology that goes into this story.
Newsarama: What led you to coming up with the ideas of
Shooting War, Anthony?
Anthony Lappe: Shooting War was inspired by my own reporting in Iraq, not necessarily exactly what I saw, but what I felt and dreamt afterwards. If one wants to see exactly what I saw they could watch
BattleGround; the [documentary] I produced that aired on Showtime. I traveled all over Iraq, reporting from all sides of the conflict which I chronicled on my
blog. Since I got back, I’ve been featuring a lot of unembedded reporting from Iraq on the
Guerrilla News Network, the web site I edit. Guys like David Enders and Borzou Daragahi have been huge inspirations in the badass intrepid journalism they do. As have Iraq vets like my frequent radio talk show partner
Paul Rieckhoff, a lieutenant in the National Guard, founder of the of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) and the author of the newly released book,
Chasing Ghosts.
The concept itself for
Shooting War was born out of an immediate desire to create the first Iraq war animated feature film, one that felt like a video game but that had all the raw emotional and physical reality of war – you’d feel the pain when someone gets shot, and not just the exhilaration of garnering hit points. The wounded, friend and foe, groans, screams and cries for momma when hit. Like so many great projects, the genesis for the
Shooting War graphic novel came about at a bar; I was telling my friend Jeff Newelt, aka JahFurry - reggae singer, comics-head, and PR pro, about the idea over drinks one night and he said, “Screw film, make a graphic novel...NOW.” Comics weren’t so much on my radar yet so he gave me a crash course, throwing
Transmetropolitan,
Watchmen,
Ultimates,
Invisibles, and other greats my way. I’m purposely waiting until after finishing the first book of
Shooting War to check out Garth Ennis’s
War Stories…
NRAMA: Can you tell us more about the lead character Jimmy Burns?
Dan Goldman: Jimmy is a young turk citizen journalist who is gets hooked on the danger buzz.
AL: Jimmy is the ultimate outsider journalist, with a nose for a story, and ear for reporting, a fierce anti-corporate bias and a knack for talking smack. He’s a hipster, but has little time for fashionistas or the ill-informed.
DG: He's a politics-fixated anger-blast of a young video-blogger trying to do the buck the system on his own terms... until the larger machinations of the world that he rails against come crashing into what's left of his home.
AL: Through a journalistic fluke that every reporter dreams of he becomes an overnight star. All of a sudden, he finds himself embraced by the mainstream media, and the next thing he knows he’s on a Black Hawk helicopter flying over war-torn Iraq. It’s his worst nightmare and his biggest dream: to be a war reporter…
DG: With nothing left to hold him here and an opportunity to step up his game, he signs with Global TV and heads to Baghdad to find out see things first-hand.
NRAMA: Like Dan mentioned, Jimmy's Williamsburg home is hit by a terrorist attack on NYC. Is this his first direct confrontation with terrorism?
AL: He was in NYC on 9/11. But he was only 11 and it didn’t really penetrate his shell. Like a lot of kids, the attacks were almost like a TV show. The reality only sunk in later when they found out their friends’ parents died. This terrorist attack hits home, literally, blowing his apartment to bits right in front of his eyes.
NRAMA: How would you contrast today's world and the year 2011 Jimmy lives in?
AL: Imagine today’s rash of BAD news… I mean there’s a sh%^load of REALLY BAD NEWS right now… and then multiply that by ten, maybe eleven. It’s an admittedly dark vision of the worst-case scenario of where the Bush agenda is leading us. There’s a global oil crisis, the economy is busted, and the Middle East is …again, just horrendous times eleven. Iraq has devolved into a full-on brutal civil war, but our allies are not who you think they’d be. Americans overwhelmingly want out, but President McCain is trapped, like his bosses back in Vietnam, in a war they can’t figure out how to get out of.
NRAMA: Woah woah woah… President McCain? When 2008 comes around, I'm be interested to see if you're calling this right.
Anyway, Jimmy works for a network called Global TV. With the myriad of flavors in network available to us here in 2006, can you explain to us what Global TV is?
DG: Global TV reflects our 2011 America, which it posits that after 10 years of war in Iraq/etc and after years of media spin and deception interwoven with our Media of Fear, America's created a news network to deal with that fear... mostly free of partisan agenda. The biblical idea of "Know Thy Enemy" crossed with the unblinking eye of the media, Global is 24-hour uncensored coverage on the war on terror.
AL: In 2011, both political parties are morally bankrupt, and everyone knows it… the faithful are faithless. With Bush’s exit in ‘08, Fox News loses its luster as the voice of the right. Global TV (tagline: "Your home for 24-hour terror coverage”) steps into the void with a hyper-nationalist, almost nativist, no-holds-barred reporting style. They promise to show the reality of the global war on terror to the American public. No more censoring of brutal images, no more sugarcoating reality. All terror, all the time. It’s rated R for reality.
Faces of Death here we come. Unspun, uncensored and unsane.
NRAMA: As a reporter, you have your own experiences from covering the Iraq War. Who were you reporting for during your times there, and how would you describe the current situation?
AL: I was producing a film and writing a book,
True Lies, with my partner at GNN,
Stephen Marshall. I also wrote a blog about what was happening each day for GNN. The current situation is horrible, but entirely predictable. I saw it everyday there in the fall of 2003. The Americans had a window of opportunity to make the invasion work. But they blew it at every point. While few Iraqis welcomed the Americans with garlands, most were happy to have Saddam gone. They hoped the Americans would restore order and justice to their screwed up country. What they got was almost total chaos and horrendous violence. They’ve already had the equivalent of ten to twenty 9/11’s (in terms of dead). The current situation is a disaster and will be for years.
NRAMA: This project is being presented online in Flash animation over the course of eight weeks. Why did you choose this format for the story?
AL: Just to clarify, there’s a Flash animation intro, created by
Indelible and the panels are programmed into Flash, but it’s not animated.
DG: To get technical: it's we're using Javascript to PRESENT the art, but it's very much a COMIC, not an animation. We do have an animated intro that was designed in Flash by Indelible that proceeds each weekly episode and gives an intro-slash-origin-story for Jimmy so that we hit the ground running every week. Indelible has taken pieces of my art from the series, which is also completely digital in creation, and animated bits of it around a concept/storyboard Anthony and I worked up. The final "movie" is exported in Final Cut, where Anthony has scored it and created the music himself. Like many other of the "young cats" in comics, I am creating my work digitally from top to bottom, paper-free. I'm combining techniques from digital painting, fumetti and illustration into this chemical cosh that I've figured out and still exploring all the time; the art for
Shooting War is something I am especially proud of as it marries a handful of ideas I've been expanding upon over the years into something sexy and new.
Intro aside, the online presentation of my comic 'pages" is inside a "viewing gallery" on our
Shooting War mini-site with a simple and elegant interface, but the pages themselves remain comic pages. You read a page and click forward or back; we're not trying to marvel you with anything but the ideas embedded in Anthony's story and my sexy pictures that get them to walk around. Our intention from the get-go was to begin online with this complete story and end in print with a much longer graphic novel, so I wanted to keep any elements essential to the storytelling in a medium where nothing would be lost once we go to print (animations, sound effects; any information conveyed is conveyed on the page).
NRAMA: Gotcha. But with it primarily being static panels, why Flash?
AL: We wanted to use a fast-loading and stable platform that people could easily navigate through, and Indelible’s tasty Flash teaser is our icing.
DG: There is nothing sequential art can't do in the right pairs of hands. Let me repeat that: There is nothing sequential art can't do in the right pairs of hands. The format and presentation may change, but the medium is static by definition. If it moves, if it sings... it's animation. If the sound and movement happens in YOUR MIND, then you're reading a comic. And that is the magic that makes me do what I do.
NRAMA: According to the press release, you are using actual sounds recorded in Iraq. Are those ones you've recorded?
AL: Yes, and from other sources too.
NRAMA: How did you two come together to work on this project?
AL: I met Dan through an ad I posted on JDate…, I mean Craigslist. I posted a call for artists on Craig’s List and got responses from an amazing array of artists. If any are reading this, thanks so much for sending me samples of your work. It was very inspiring.
DG: Anthony had a posting up on NYC's Craigslist that was already a few weeks old; we'd just launched ACT-I-VATE (
http://act-i-vate.livejournal.com ) and I was all about getting my groove on with "Kelly" and prepping for some other upcoming comics collaborations with Chris Radtke and Damon Hurd, but something about the ad just... sparkled. I dropped him a quick line and said that even if they'd already found an artist, I was curious to know more about what they were doing.
AL: When Dan replied, I recognized his name from his ACT-I-VATE affiliation. The day before Dan sent me his stuff, Jeff had foisted the ACT-I-VATE link upon me, so I was up on Dan’s most recent work, his surreal urban, existentially nauseous roommate-from-hades tale,
Kelly.
DG: Anthony called me back in about 20 minutes and said he was familiar with what we were doing over at ACT-I-VATE. Anthony sent me links to his GNN site and a link to the trailer for the
Battleground documentary that aired on Showtime. They were doing a screening of his documentary in Williamsburg that weekend for its DVD release and he invited me to come check it out. From the trailer of the film alone, I think I was sold, even though I didn't know much about
Shooting War's story… but after meeting with him and rapping about it, we both agreed that "the click" was there.
AL: We immediately clicked, and when I read
Everyman – Be The People graphic novel, that Dan wrote with his brother Steven, it was hyper-apparent that Dan was the only one to illustrate this story. … He’s not just an artist, he’s a fantastic writer with an impeccable story sense and a unique juxtaposition of twisted irony meets in your face earnestness.
NRAMA: Just for a moment, let's talk about Dan's previous political-inspired comic work of the aforementioned
Everyman: Be The People. Is this type of material something you're drawn to, and if so, why?
DG: In topical-work sense it is, but I've also been working on some other stuff since as well...
Kelly over at ACT-I-VATE, for instance, which is a whole graphic novel in weekly chunks. I'm also developing a Brendan McCarthy-inspired psychedelighettovigilante book called
The 718 with Chris Radtke at the moment. But like the Pharcyde says, "I gotta kick something that means something." Bad trips and enemas aside, "Kelly" is about why people hurt those close to them.
Everyman was about blowing on a tiny ember of hope for the future in a dark and corrupted present.
The 718 is about being addicted to your own legend.
Since writing
Everyman for the 2004 "election" I've done a lot of thinking and reading and marinating on the American system and I needed to take a big step back from all of that and see how it fits into the larger system of power on this planet.
Shooting War came along at the right time, ideologically, for me... when the senseless disaster and violence and manipulation of the herd drowns out all the good stuff and you're forced to drop the "hope for the future" line and own up to the consequences of a system you're paying your taxes to feed.
Shooting War isn't really about "the war in Iraq" as much as it's about the bloody gears of geo-politicking that nations in the plural do to turn the wheels of the world. The fact that the story is grounded but actually about something abstract that makes me angry, written by someone who's seen these things first-hand... and that I could even learn a thing or two in the process of creating this piece of art is pretty fantastic.
NRAMA: Dan, let's talk more about what synched it for you regarding Anthony's story once you read it...
DG: Other than the energy and sparkle of everyone else involved (which is fearsome to behold), the story is important... there's an anger and passion in this project that I share. It burns in my stomach when I suffer through newsfeeds and documentaries and look at what we are doing overseas to other peoples (which has been going on forever). There's nothing worse than reading something that's interesting and pretty but makes you feel nothing; let's be frank, there's enough of that in comics. I am a writer myself, and
Shooting War is a very intense story; sitting with Anthony at our first meeting and listening to him tell me about it instantly made me see pictures in my mind... pictures I wanted to draw. And that's all great enough, but there is the additional sexy having our work serialized as a prominent feature on something like
Smith magazine, which is a really forward-thinking publishing concept.
Smith is off mainstream comics-radar but definitely embedded into the blogosphere and the circles of the literati; it's going to bring our work to a whole other audience that wouldn't otherwise witness the blazing magic that is
Shooting War.
NRAMA: Shooting War is being published online through
Smith Magazine. Why did you choose this outlet for your story?
AL: Shooting War is a perfect fit for
Smith Magazine. The magazine is all celebrating and showcasing storytelling in all its many shapes and forms with a big emphasis on bottom-up, highly democratic forms of personal, or participatory media like blogging. And
Shooting War is the sort of the penultimate blogger fantasy. Larry Smith is an amazing, pedigreed editor with a real vision. I had met Larry years before at Burning Man, of all places. Once again, it was Jeff, who hooked us up. Larry was Jeff’s editor on the University of Pennsylvania newspaper back in the early 90’s and they kept in touch. Again, over drinks Jeff said, “You’ve got to talk to Larry Smith.
Smith is the perfect place for
Shooting War.” Jeff and I (who’s a partner and creative consultant on the project) had originally thought about just putting together a book proposal and going straight to publishers. But launching on
Smith has turned out to be much more exciting and utterly apropos. I love the idea of a weekly serial, the ability to create a community around the work, built from the ground up. This isn’t a big media conglomerate trying to make a buck off the war, but a few dedicated creators putting everything they have into a project that believe in and putting it out there for free. The Web’s a perfect medium for the graphic novel, and
Smith is the perfect home for
Shooting War.
Would we like to talk about
Shooting War War some night on the
Daily Show or some morning with Matt Lauer? Absolutely. But we suspect the way we’ll get the word out is the comic sites and the [military blogs] and friends sending links to friends who dig and devour the story of Jimmy Burns and do what we all do when we hear a great story: we pass it on.
Shooting War is written by Anthony Lappe with artwork by Dan Goldman and a Flash intro by Indelible. This free serialized online comic launches on May 15th at Smith Magazine, and will run new installments weekly for 8 weeks. A teaser video for the title will be online next week prior to the official launch of the comic. In addition, the Shooting War crew invites you to friend them on MySpace under SmithMag, Dan Goldman, GNN and Jeff Newelt.