“…Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman are starting to build out Jimmy Burns’ world into something truly big and truly compelling. If you’ve ever gotten in on something important at the very beginning, you understand what’s in store for you — and even seven chapters in, I think this is just the beginning for this project and this creative team. Expect greatness. Go read.”
This week Jimmy and Sameera head out on their embed with Lt. Crash Crowley’s special forces unit into the dangerous Sector 23… and Crash promises to deliver some “prime time holy war.”
This is a personal doozy: BRUCE STERLING, one of the founder fathers of cyberpunk, links to SHOOTING WAR via his WIRED Blog:
Sterling’s work (and his contemporaries/descendents) spun my head round through high school and college during caffeinated nights on cigarette-burned couches; it’s an honor to be on his radar.
In fact, I was reading my dog-eared and rain-rippled copy of Sterling’s ISLANDS IN THE NET while sleeping on the streets in New Orleans the week of my 21st birthday, and anyone who thinks Al Gore’s documentary AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH is the slightest bit shocking obviously never dug into HEAVY WEATHER back in the mid-nineties.
Week 6 of SHOOTING WAR is now online at SMITH.
This week, the coming ugliness in the world approaches as a new assignment reveals itself, a familiar face is not what it seems to be, and our Iraq-embedded “Hero of Grand Street” does what he does best: writes in his stupid fucking blog.
Alternative news site AlterNet interviews Anthony and I, and Dean Haspiel even throws in his two cents.
“Only a half-dozen chapters of “Shooting War” have been published on SMITH magazine since May 15, yet this episodic series has already become a prescient commentary on the future of warring Iraqi factions, globalization and citizen journalism’s struggle against mainstream media.”
Part 5 of SHOOTING WAR is online now at SMITH. This week sees Jimmy’s blood-alcohol level dropping enough for him to hear the phone ringing… and it’s officially his first day on the job for Global News.
Apparently there’s some sort of press conference he’s supposed to be at…
Comic Book or Political Manifesto? From the article on Entertainment Weekly’s website:
“[SHOOTING WAR] is a fearsome, near-future vision where the thrills and chills have no supernatural or science-fiction component… The anger, the artistry, and the very local detail (a Gawker 2011 page, a future issue of New York Magazine with headlines like “Tom Cruise, Mary-Kate Olsen Call It Quits” and “When Did Staten Island Become So Cool?”) make this a must-read.”
Recent illustration for the upcoming relaunch of CRACKED magazine.
Says Village Voice’s Julian Dibbel:
“Ever since comic-book theorist-artist Scott McCloud discovered and extolled the “infinite canvas” of the web page, comic geeks have been waiting for the Internet to revolutionize the medium… the light-handed but searing political satire of SHOOTING WAR is taking the Sunday comic strip places it could never have gone before.”
After talking lots lately about our government’s manipulations of black box electronic voting in the 2004 election, with both Anthony (who covers it in his book TRUE LIES) and IAVA founder Paul Rieckhoff, I spent a recent subway ride into the city with an old friend:
Two years later, the story still gets me engaged and enraged, and my abandoned synapses roar to life regarding Steven’s and my plans for Mack and Dita and the OneLove party, whose story we’d outlined as an 8 volume series of OGNs (of which our self-published BE THE PEOPLE was the first). There was so much story to tell, and our hopeful little tin drum was drowned out in the noise of the 2004 election furor, despite any/all “I told you so’s.”
I don’t know if any of you more recent fans of mine have missed on this one, but it is still available on Amazon.com. I’ve rejigged the EVERYMAN page on my website in the hopes that more people will find this book that my brother and I intended as a wakeup-America-love-explosive, as the nation sleepily walked into the polls two Septembers ago pretending this was still a democracy.
His critically-acclaimed graphic novel SHOOTING WAR was listed among 2007's top graphic novels in the Village Voice and Publisher's Weekly. He is also a founding member of online comics anthology ACT-I-VATE, where he serializes the psychedelic psychodrama "KELLY".
Dan is currently working with The New Republic's Michael Crowley on 08: A GRAPHIC DIARY OF THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, a nonfiction comics memoir of the presidential primaries to be published by Crown Books in January 2009.