Over the past two decades, there has been some brilliant reporting by graphic artists, aka drawers of comics, on our seemingly endless involvement in Afghanistan. Now that our invasion seems finally to be ending (well, we’ll see...) I thought I’d start a thread here on some of the best.
This, by the way, is more of what Wikipedians call a “stub” than a real story, because unfortunately I’m too far behind too many deadlines to devote the time it would take to put together anything close to a definitive look back on the war comics of the past two decades. Instead, I’ll start off with just a couple of links to comics that have popped up on my e-radar in the past day or two, and hope that others can start to fill in the gaps with links in the comments. We’ll see!
Ok, so I’ll start with Matt Bors, an old DKos favorite who has now (happily for him, sadly for us) semi-retired from the comics biz. Back about a decade ago, Matt went on a comics reporting trip to Afghanistan and came back with these striking images and texts, which just today he re-uploaded to the interwebs to keep them from being lost to digital oblivion. Oh, and, um, links only here! You gotta go to the link to see & read the comics. Seems only fair to me.
Matt Bors, “My comics journalism from Afghanistan”
So what has Matt been up to since retiring from the pencil-end of the comics industry? He continues to edit and publish his brainchild, The Nib, which recently reminded me of one of the great comics reports they ran on the war. This is from back in 2017:
“I am a 39-year-old Afghan. I have never known a homeland at peace.”
And, last but, well, probably least in my book, but important to many, here’s a link to David Ree’s clip-art cartoon about war mania, which he began just weeks after 9/11 and continued to the last day of the disastrous Bush administration. This archived version is in reverse chronological order, so if you want to read through all the (hundreds?) of cartoons, you’ll want to start at the bottom and then move “up” through the 63 archived pages. I have to admit, I’ve only had the stomach to read a handful of them. They were considered brilliant in their time, but after two decades of endless tragedy the satire is too much for me, personally.
David Rees
I’d go on, but… deadlines call! Please, please, please add more links below. Or even better, write a better story than this! Thanks all. It’s been a grueling two decades.