Rick Veitch & Gary Erskine - Army@Love: The Hot Zone Club

WAR/SATIRE

Given the irreverent nature, speedy production and counterculture placement of the medium, it’s unsurprising that comics should come in under the radar with a satirical first strike at the bogus war in the Middle East. American writer-penciller and long-time Alan Moore collaborator Rick Veitch and Glasgow-born inker and 2000AD alumnus Gary Erskine’s ongoing series is a wickedly funny, sharply political comment on the war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It imagines a new US Army recruitment drive filling the front lines with weekend warriors, adrenaline junkies and fun-loving yuppies seduced by the promise of danger, sex, power, drugs and hi-tech ordinance. The initial story arc outlines an attempt to whistleblow the new military craze of soldiers shagging during combat, the so-called Hot Zone Club. Hilarious and horrifying, the really scary thing (bearing in mind the Abu Ghraib scandal) is that Army@Love doesn’t seem far removed from reality.