2001-12-01 - 11:57 p.m.

An Army of None

Hey, let's talk about comics!

Garth Ennis is an interesting guy. He's a comic writer from Ireland who made a name for himself writing the ultra-gross and super-violent but very funny Preacher series for Vertigo/DC.

Recently Mr. Ennis got it into his head to do a series of War comics, again for DC/Vertigo. Recently Garth has been very much into WW II-era stories, and he did a very nice Enemy Ace two issue mini-series last year.

Now seeing that his other books (Preacher, Hitman, Punisher) have been incredibly violent, with blood and mayhem almost used as slapstick, one would expect that an Ennis war story would be full of gritty, gung-ho military heroics. Nothing could be further from the truth: all of these books have been realistic, detailed accounts of how the war looked to ordinary soldiers. The violence is still horrific, but there is nothing funny about it at all. In fact, most of these books are quite depressing - the last one, D-Day Dodgers featured the entire cast getting pointlessly butchered at the end of the book.

The most recent one that came in last week is not quite so depressing. It's called "Screaming Eagles" and it's about a platoon of veterans taking control of a German schloss at the end of the war, only to discover that it is a Nazi treasure horde. The men spend several days living like kings, until the U.S. brass shows up and ends their fun. However, the message here is the same as in all the previous Ennis war books: war is ugly, war is stupid, the army is an elitist hierarchy with the common soldier on the bottom being used as cannon fodder, and so on.

Therefore, it was with some astonishment I got to the end of this latest epic and on the inside back cover found a full-page ad for the U.S. Army! It was part of their "Army of One" ad campaign which is the Army's latest attempt to fool another generation of young people into thinking that joining the army is all about driving tanks and playing with hi-tech toys and not about peeling potatoes and getting yelled at by sergeants. The "truth in advertising" rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to the Armed Forces. No "you may get killed" disclaimers here!

It just stuck me as very funny - the entire comic was essentially an ad about why you should never, ever join the army, and there, in the back of it, was an ad about joining the army. The irony was strictly unintentional - that particular ad was on the inside back cover of all the DC comics that came in this week.

An army of one, my ass.