It’s the year 2012: the USA’s border wall is electrocuting illegal Mexican migrants by the thousands, and John McCain’s government is still stuck in a futile, bloody occupation of Iraq. Jimmy Burns, an anti-corporate video blogger, is catapulted into the limelight when, through luck rather than judgement, he films a bomb blowing up his local Starbucks. His footage gets picked up by Global News (‘Your home for 24-hour terror coverage’) and Burns becomes a media sensation. Lured by money, he finds himself on a helicopter bound for Baghdad, an embedded blogger for the media network he loathes.
Lappé and Goldman’s dystopian graphic novel is a satirical take on the future consequences of America’s current foreign policy. Wielding its politics like a sledgehammer, it presents a darkly funny trip into a shattered country as Jimmy struggles with fundamentalists (on both sides), and his conscience, to try to tell the truth. Each page is packed with in-jokes and references but ‘Shooting War’s’ acerbic, world-weary satire is sometimes too clever, bordering on the cynical, with little regard for its characters.
