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Special Feature
SPX Spotlight: The Hot Breath of War
By Adam McGovern
Published: 2008-10-08
Being a sporadic accounting of self-made masterworks I picked up at the premier indie-comics event, the Small Press Expo.
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The Hot Breath of War
Writer: Alixopulos
Artist: Alixopulos
Publisher: Sparkplug
5 out of 5 stars
People who’ve lost their way – it’s the one
characteristic that links the distant protagonists of
Alixopulos’ graphic novel The Hot Breath of War. From
soldiers wondering what they’re doing in Afghanistan to a lost
boy wandering toward his idealized grandparents’ house from his
neglectful mother’s trailer, Alix shows himself to be a
wisecracking poet of unbelonging.
In Chapter 1, “We Are Defated” (that’s
not a typo), two American soldiers in an Afghanistan-like wasteland
navigate the absurdities of their pistol-packin’ diplomat
mission in perilously comic meetings with local bystanders and
warlords. One jarhead narrates his predicament like a recitation of
some deconstructionist prophet mashed up with far-off think-tank
pundits of unilateral “liberation,” while his superior
officer spouts strategic psychobabble like Sgt. Rock by way of
Samuel Beckett (“That’s asymmetrical warfare! You do
the unexpected. Somebody coughs, we blow up the town – someone
shoots, we plant a field of watermelons!”). At the end, a
neighborhood strongman gives them reason to suspect that where
they’re gotten to is the real world and the life we all knew
before the hundred-year war on terror is the fantasy, but this
launches us into the next series of chapters, which may or may not
be what the two soldiers go on to hear from their storytelling
shotgun host.
In “Data Recovery” we get a scenario of
literal drift in the several-block odyssey of a bored, sarcastic
office drone who wanders off his night job for a party-and-pub
crawl and ends up perched above it all as the only apparent
survivor of a sudden, surreal flood. Are there grim metaphors of
Katrina and our emotional remoteness from each other? Not to this
a-hole.
Next, in “There’s a Monkey on My
Back…”, the tale of a lost runaway boy, we see the
best expression of how idyllic and lyrical childhood really
isn’t since the heyday of Calvin and Hobbes. Then
in “Vallodolid 1936” and “…And His Breath
Is Hot,” Alixopulos creates two of the most poignant
vignettes of the internal wastelands left by war that the medium
has ever seen; his deftness with human comedy well prepares both
him and us for the shock of these poetic, tiny
tragedies.
The final chapter, “A Journey (of Several Cute
Cartoon Characters Through a Brief Moment) in Time,” centers
on the coincidental made and missed connections between a funny
animal and some most unfunny humans, and features two tragic but
easygoing barkeeps who may or may not be the two guys we saw on the
battlefield in Chapter 1.
Alixopulos has a brilliant post-Kochalka cartooning style,
dashed off with a keen eye and an immediate brevity that make you
feel as if he’s getting too pissed off to go on by the time
you finish looking at the page but he’s also taking down
everyone’s identity for long-term remembrance and applicable
revenge. He excels at distorted but expressive perspective, brisk
yet particular facial and body language, and twisted masses of
human anatomy and situational confusion that make the book at
crucial points seem like “Guernica: The Comic” to
hilariously farcical and advisedly dissociative effect.
Using the definitively ephemeral medium to convey the
fragility of life and progress, Alixopulos has slyly created a
durable monument to saneness and humanity.
—CCdC— Read all of ComicCritique.Com’s columns, old and new,
at our columns archive!
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