The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

John Bartle and Daniel Murphy are soldiers, no more than boys who signed up from their homes in rural Virginia to fight their country's war in Al Tafar, Iraq in 2005.   Bartle's first person narrative alternates between his experiences in Iraq and the year after his return to Virginia.  Powers' describes Bartle's increasing sense that although he was the only one to return from Iraq in a very real sense both he and Murphy died out there.  Powers speaks with painful beauty of the heat and dust of Iraq, the emotions suppressed as he killed not just men but also women and children, and how the trauma reduced him to a walking ghost on his return, unable to reconnect with those around him, plagued by flashbacks.  Powers' description of the true nature of depression is one of the best I have ever read and this is to my mind as beautiful an elegy for what is lost in war as Sassoon.

Shooting War by Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman

Visually and narratively this is a treat. In a future in which McCain won the United States Presidential elections Jimmy Burns is a normal big boy playing with his new toy, a handheld video camera that streams live to the net, filming his Brooklyn neighbourhood for his left wing blog when the local Starbucks explodes in a suicide bombing. On the back of his ensuing fame Jimmy is employed by Global News to go out to Bagdad and report on the Iraq War. There he finds himself caught in a lethal war of words, public opinion and guns between the secretive Sword of Islam, the American military and UN forces and the US media.

I love the graphic art used in this story, on the one hand there are standard circular white balloons with black writing which contrast with internal dialogue in black boxes with white writing, but this is complemented by great little touches such as battery indicators and buffering speeds on the web streaming footage and the scrolling headlines running across the bottom of the news footage. The artwork itself is in the style of video games with drawn characters over photographic backgrounds.

The graphics and narrative work together as a brilliant indictment of the insularity of American culture and its media coverage, my favourite sequence is the reportage of the nuking of Bangalore by Global News where the concern is not humanitarian but rather the National Emergency McCain calls because of the widespread crippling of 24 hour customer services hotlines which have been farmed out overseas because of the low cost of labour.

A terrifyingly accurate and funny satire, it never understates the horror of war and the effect it has on Iraquis, rather, it reminds us of these horrors by presenting them through the lenses of blog footage, mass media news footage and the military engines of war and graphically demonstrating how each of these are deeply dehumanising and are as a screen we can place between ourselves and the reality of living through such a nightmare.