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Warfix
Posted 16 Mar 2007
Writer: David Axe
Artist: Steve Olexa
Publisher: ComicsLit
1.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Hueso Taveras
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First-hand accounts of historical events — like Art
Spiegelman’s Maus, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and
Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis — established comics
as a viable art form capable of addressing complicated issues with
genuine insight and scholarly merit. In light of this, War Fix
written by David Axe and illustrated by Steve Olexa drags in as a
disappointment.
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Lacking much historical context for the war,
David sleepwalks
through the story as despair and carnage rampage in the
peripherals.
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Little David grew up fixated on the televised broadcasts of the
Persian Gulf War. Twelve years later as a young journalist covering
local government in a nameless town in the US, he asks his editor to
be sent to Iraq to cover the upcoming elections. After getting the ok
from the nameless editor and dodging a flowerpot flung at him by his
enraged girlfriend, David travels to the other side of the world to
get his “fix.” As an embedded journalist, he dons an
expensive flak jacket and camera and wades amongst disillusioned
American soldiers, bombings, and fellow war correspondents, all in a
seemingly endless quagmire.
Lacking much historical context for the war, penetrating
journalistic inquiries, and psychological probing, David sleepwalks
through the story as despair and carnage rampage in the peripherals,
fomenting the protagonist’s dreaming. He travels through the country
from Baghdad across the Green Zone into Balad to Anaconda and back to
Baghdad in a string of pointless scenes. He chats with independent
contractors, exchanges awkward pleasantries with US military officers
and befriends a BBC reporter who doctors diagnose as being
“addicted to war.”
Even the protagonist’s plentiful visions of war are cliché
with stereotypical Iraqi women mourning over their loved one’s
tattered bodies and exploding cars that look straight out of last
summer’s action blockbuster movie.
Steve Olexa presents his illustrations of the destruction wrought
from this war in gray washes and generous amounts of spot tones in
dynamic manga style. Yet in scenes — such as when David decides
to leave his comfortable life with his nameless, live-in girlfriend
for war coverage — Olexa’s use of extreme camera angles and
slick design makes the sentiment vacuous. The numerous double-page
spreads and free-flowing layout make for difficult reading, dulling
the edge the book aspires to.
“God, I’m so bored,” David utters while being driven in a truck,
echoing my exact thoughts. The fact that a graphic novel on the
ongoing Iraq War was published should be commended but not be allowed
as license to produce superficial work. This book offers nothing more
than what a casual reader could get from a daily newspaper. War
Fix is a book readers could do without. If you want your “fix,”
just borrow it from the library.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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