The War
It’s been said that the only thing keeping nuclear war from breaking out is that The People In Charge just don’t want it to. If it breaks out and wrecks everything then what happens to cat videos on YouTube? Buying an awesome car, tricking it out, and then racing it down a neighborhood street in the dead of night? Hanging out with friends and family? Starbucks? All the good things we enjoy in life just go away and we’ll have to adapt to not having them anymore and no one really wants that.
“The War,” from writer Garth Ennis and artist Becky Cloonan shows us what happens when that’s not enough.
It started as a contribution to a horror anthology from BOOM! Studios before being expanded into a three-issue miniseries, and it’s for the best that it didn’t go any longer. Suffice to say that it starts off with a youngish group of friends in the city gathered at an apartment discussing the issues of the day. Then the world around them promptly falls apart and they’re left to deal with it as best or as badly as they’re capable of.
This is not an easy read and it offers no reassurance to the reader about our prospects should its events come to pass. What makes it worthwhile is that it never stops feeling real and goes into some awful realm of self-parody. By all rights the final, awful image of this story should have done that and it’s easy to imagine it as the grotesque punchline to one of Ennis’ comedic works. Here, it’ll stick with you even if you just read this once.
It’s probably worth mentioning that Brian K. Vaughan delivers some pitch black humor in his back-cover endorsement where he notes that “Your stupid fucking nuclear war comic looking to be your most ‘relevant’ yet.” He’s not wrong, but what sets this apart from other comics I’ve read that try to tap into the awfulness of the zeitgeist, like Tom King’s “Animal Pound” and Ennis own “A Walk Through Hell,” is its focus on where it leads rather than how we got there. I’ve never stopped resenting Ennis for writing a comic like that one which felt like his effort to make us all as miserable as he is. This one, however, with its unsparingly direct art from Cloonan, communicates his feelings in a way which blew right past that.
Whether or not that’s something you want to read, well, that’s up to you. I think it’s worth it, but only once.