Whatever else you say about Vertigo, you've got to give them credit for experimentation.  It's hard to imagine anyone else putting out a comic as frankly bizarre as Rick Veitch's satire Army@Love. 

When I saw the preview pages of this a few weeks ago, I couldn't make up my mind whether it was genius or an absolute trainwreck.  I'm still not altogether sure, although I'm leaning heavily towards trainwreck.  But it's an incredibly weird premise, and there are more than a few things that don't really click.  That said, you've got to give it credit for sheer audacity.

It's the near future and the US Army is caught up in a war in "Afbaghistan."  Nobody bothers to explain the purpose of that war, because it seems to be pretty much incidental to them.  Instead, the Army has resorted to encouraging its soldiers to head to war under the dubious inspiration of the new Motivation & Morale project, which does ridiculous things like allowing them to take cellphones into combat, and sponsoring orgies.

The basic satirical idea here is, presumably, the increasingly absurd lengths which the US government might have to resort to in order to persuade anyone to sign up for the military in the first place.  Certainly there are recruitment problems, so there's a germ of truth to this.  The problem is that it doesn't ring true.

We've got an army of American soldiers here who, a couple of beleaguered officers aside, seem to think they're appearing in a pornographic video game.  Even if you might be able to enlist people on a ridiculous "war is fun" campaign, here we're asked to believe that soldiers are sticking to that mentality even while they're killing other people and, presumably, seeing their friends get shot from time to time. 

On top of that, the plot involves the Motivation & Morale crew being shocked to learn that news of their officially-sponsored orgies have been leaked to the media.  But why would anybody halfway sane have thought they could keep that kind of thing secret in the first place?

This is the basic problem with Army@Love.  Even allowing for the fact that it's absurdist satire, and giving it a huge amount of leeway, the book is full of characters who just don't seem to have any relationship to recognisable human personalities.  And for this to work, you can get away with "wildly exaggerated", but not with "divorced from reality."

So to be honest, it doesn't really work.  But despite myself, I have to admire it - partly for being a good-looking comic, and partly for the sheer gall of attempting it at all.

Rating: C

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