Riccardo Burchielli and Brian Wood - Artists
Jeromy Cox - Colourist
Jared K. Fletcher - Letterer
Published by DC/Vertigo
Simply put, entering DMZ is the closest you're going to get to entering a war zone without flying to Iraq or Afghanistan. Wood and Burchielli's creation serves as both an amazingly entertaining and engrossing read as well as critique of sanitized and propagandized war time media coverage.
DMZ literally drops us into an alternate present world where the United States has just completed the fifth year of a civil war. New Jersey and the inland states have declared themsleves "The Free States"; Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island are still part of the original USA, while Manhattan Island is designated as the DMZ (demilitarized zone - see map below).
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| Page 1 Panel 1 - The DMZ |
As Matty quickly learns, the manufactured reality he was being fed by the media about life in the DMZ is as far from the truth as the sun is from a lightbulb. The fact is that there are real people in the DMZ trying to do the same thing that people everywhere are trying to do...survive. The comparison to what the reality of warzones like Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, etc. are actually like vs the North American media depictions of those places is fairly obvious.
The strength in Wood and Burchielli's creation is in the characters, not the least of which is the city itself. Wood and Burchielli's characterizations, pacing, dialogue, and artwork are spot on throughout; from the initial helicopter takedown, Matty's meeting with Zee and her medical rounds, to meeting the 'Ghosts' of Central Park, the story never lags and always leaves you itching to turn the page and see what comes next.
As Cory Doctorow writes in his introduction to Volume 3 of the series, "DMZ is a special kind of angry comic, the kind of angry war comic that tells the side of the other side of the war...It's a wake-up call to stop letting greedy profiteers sell fresh wars to cement their authority and profitability."
Other works by Brian Wood worth checking out:
The strength in Wood and Burchielli's creation is in the characters, not the least of which is the city itself. Wood and Burchielli's characterizations, pacing, dialogue, and artwork are spot on throughout; from the initial helicopter takedown, Matty's meeting with Zee and her medical rounds, to meeting the 'Ghosts' of Central Park, the story never lags and always leaves you itching to turn the page and see what comes next.
As Cory Doctorow writes in his introduction to Volume 3 of the series, "DMZ is a special kind of angry comic, the kind of angry war comic that tells the side of the other side of the war...It's a wake-up call to stop letting greedy profiteers sell fresh wars to cement their authority and profitability."
Other works by Brian Wood worth checking out:
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| Channel Zero |
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| DEMO with Becky Cloonan |
