Army @ Love Vol. 1

A surprisingly enjoyable read that I only happened on thanks to Res!

While it is certainly not perfect, I have decided to start with the things I really liked about Army@Love before moving on to some of my criticisms.

First off I was really hit over the head by how great Veitch's female characters really are. Not many guys I read pull off sexually and morally liberated women without coming across as judgmental in some way. And while you aren't necessarily supposed to really like any of these people, you aren't supposed to dislike Switzer any more or less than any other character. Yet not only does this woman take sexual initiative with her husband (and other guys) she almost single-handedly creates a trend to have sex under fire on the front line; Switzer won't leave her husband for a love-sick puppy of a soldier (brought on, we find out at the end, by a love charm planted by another character). Switzer's husband accepts her as his equal, even when it comes to both of their infidelities, and she's a great shot. Everyone is flawed and dirty, quirky and caught up in drama that is down right hilarious.

That's not even mentioning some of the other really interesting and exciting characters in the series. None of the characters are particularly forgettable, but I think Switzer, Gest and Mors are surely my favorite. There's a lot of switching back and forth, but I never felt like I got lost either in plot or in keeping track of who was who or where was where. The plot unfolds in a pretty satiric way and there's more than a few red haring thrown in to throw you off the scent of truth.

The art was also another high point for me. Having read a lot of vertigo comics at this point, some of them with barely any line and some of them that I thought (initially at least) had way too much line, I felt like Army@Love really hit the happy medium. With enough hatching and cross hatching to make things feel three dimensional and expressive, but not distractingly so. Each page layout is a little different than the one that comes before and, again, helps to progress the plot in a way that is interesting but not distracting. Overall, very solid.

All that gushing aside, I do feel like there are some issues to be addressed. For starters, I felt like the minimal use of torture was a bit unrealistic. Especially when you take into considering how power, adrenaline and the forbidden all play as much into the army's use of torture as anything else that is covered by the plot thus far. Perhaps it would have been too serious, but I do think it's an issue that needed to be dealt with - and not in the sanitary and gadget dependent "torture of the future" that does get used once in a truth test that one of the commanding officers is subjected to.

The next issue I did feel was representation of Islam, for both good and perhaps ill. Not that you should be taking my opinion of this at all seriously, I haven't been able to locate any real opinion from practicing Muslims (feel free to let me know if you do know of any) so this is purely abstract conjecture. I will try and keep this part brief and to the point:

1. The focus of this story is on the secular American side of things. We need more stories from pretty much any opinion besides this (and the Christian American perspective) on pretty much anything. But of course the solution to this is not to have Veitch tell the perspective of people he's even further removed from, but rather that other people get to tell stories. So not really a critique of Veitch (since I've only read one interview) but more of the system.

2. Since he is focusing on the American army it does make sense that a lot of the enemies in this book end up being a faceless mass or hoard. And, considering how he could have tried to justify the army's actions by making the enemy look really bad. Making them faceless and rather characterless means they actually seem more sympathetic in this particular instance (for me anyway) so in this story I do think the lack of development ends up being a good thing. Although I have a brain prone to sympathy at this point in time.

3. The few times that the people of Afbaghistan are characterized as individuals with dialog and even a name or two, they are perhaps the ones with the cleanest hands. I want to think this is good. I don't think it's enough characterization to place any of them on a pedestal but perhaps I am wrong.

A hard M read for sex, nudity, violence and language. The subtle nuance, and ways that Veitch plays with you, make for a mature, rather than just an adult read.