At the back of the first issue of Rick Veitch's rip-roaring Vertigo series Army @ Love, Veitch includes a note for readers that starts with the helpful Lenny Bruce quote: "Satire is tragedy plus time." He's trying to throw a line to people who may be scratching their heads after finishing his bawdy, prophetic and just slightly insane comic and are wondering, "What in God's name is this?" The series vividly imagines the U.S. military a few years from now, still in Iraq (a look-alike stand-in here, called "Afbaghistan" and so pressed for manpower that it’s resorted to selling overseas deployment as a juiced-up adrenaline kick: it's like playing XBox in a whorehouse during a raging shootout, offering soldiers bacchanalian "retreats" and letting them carry cellphones into battle, all the better to call Mom from the Humvee. It's all coordinated by a Pentagon department called Motivation & Morale, whose personnel operate more like soulless public relations flacks than career military.
Veitch writes that our culture is so hyperaccelerated these days, that satire, per Bruce, can't wait. If the series has an uncomfortably familiar ring to it, that's probably because we seem to be already at least part of the way there, with the hot-blooded young soldiers in his series "a rowdy, bawdy bunch, brought up on Paris and Tommy Lee, addicted to adrenaline like it was diet cola." While it may seem extreme to some, Veitch told PW Comics Week that the feedback he's been getting so far is that "the absurdity levels of Army@Love [are] high, but that it hovers not too far above the absurdity level of real world events." Rather proud of this response, as any satirist would be, Veitch says, "That's the sweet spot I was trying to hit."
Given Veitch's electrifying treatment and the supremely topical subject matter, you would think that Army@Love would be an easy sell. However, as PWCW's The Beat reported back in April, based on ICv2.com's estimates, the comic's first issue from March failed to crack the 15,000 mark. This, even though, as series editor Karen Berger confidently told PWCW, it's not like the comic doesn't have a wealth of selling points: "Anyone who likes smart, funny and irreverent stories that say something about our world will love this book. And for those who just like good old-fashioned soap opera, sex and romance with a little violence thrown in will love it, too." Berger also pointed out the "huge amount of overwhelmingly positive press" (from the Los Angeles Times to even the Army Times) that Army@Love received following its first few issues, "which is unusual for a periodical, but speaks to the power and strength of the series and its themes."
To some extent the series has struck a nerve among people who would know it best. According to Veitch, after the Army Times profile, "I got a bunch of e-mails from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan asking how they could get a copy. I was concerned that people getting shot at over there might see the series as an attack on them, but the ones I heard from seemed to like the whole concept."
This month, Vertigo released the series' first bound volume, The Hot Zone Club, collecting issues #1—6 ($9.95, 128p), which should help expose Veitch's work to a wider audience. Berger (who says she has worked with Veitch "forever") believes that because of the book's "complex cast," the graphic novel format "is going to make it easier to keep track of everyone."
On a more practical level, having the graphic novel out there may make it easier for overseas personnel to get their hands on it. Veitch found out that "it's impossible to purchase a copy on the Web and get it shipped to the war zone" (a problem that would never come up in consumer-friendly Afbaghistan, by the way). "So when the trade comes out, I might buy a few boxes and maybe send copies to the guys who took the time to write me."
