The global war on terror is raging out of control. The president is popping Prozac. And the #1 selling videogame in 2011 America is the terrorist-simulator Infidel Massacre: Los Angeles. On the streets of gentrified Brooklyn, videoblogger Jimmy Burns' latest anti-corporate rant is cut short by a terrorist bombing of a Starbucks...but his live feed isn't. When his dramatic footage is uploaded by Global News ("Your home for 24-hour terror coverage") and rebroadcast across the planet, the obscure blogger is transformed into an overnight media sensation.

The next thing he knows he's on a Black Hawk helicopter inbound for Baghdad, working for the same mainstream media monster he once loathed. Burns soon finds that everyone from his ratings-ravenous network overlords to Special Ops troops with messianic complexes to a charismatic band of tech-savvy jihadists all want to make him their pawn.

Shooting War is an irreverent and unflinching graphic novel satirizing network news, the Iraq War, and the burgeoning "citizen journalism" movement that Rolling Stone magazine calls "a scary-smart take on what the horrors of the future may hold."

"A scathing near-future satire of the Iraqi occupation that rings with eerie plausibility, this Web comic-to-print hardcover collection follows a cocky young journalist named Jimmy Burns, who finds himself video-blogging across the front lines of Iraq in the year 2011. An accidental Internet celebrity transplanted suddenly to the Baghdad battlefields, Jimmy quickly progresses from arrogant to regretful, then jaded — in short, he is America in Iraq. As the world slowly disintegrates around him, Jimmy finds himself caught between the competing agendas of Muslim insurgents, the American military and a sensational cable news network as they all clamor for blood on the battlefields. Journalist and first-time graphic novelist Lapp takes obvious delight in skewering all three with a whip-smart, left-leaning indictment of both American media and foreign policy that offers little hope and fewer heroes. The bleak prognostications are cut with black humor and a penchant for explosions that keep the narrative moving. The collection adds 110 pages of new content to the Web version, and Goldman's art, a cinematic blend of photography and digital painting, is framed in widescreen panels that lend an air of video documentary to a grim graphic novel that manages to make media — and the truth — seem more fluid than ever." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

New York Times

Friday, August 12, 2011

As Rating Nose Dive Blogger Comes Under Fire

Despite a new round of terror attacks on American soil and a tenfold increase in U.S. military deaths since 2010, cable news ratings continue to plummet, according to the latest Nielsen ratings.

At the bottom is upstart Global News. The self-titled extreme news network has been critcized for its unorthodox programming, including live broadcasts of Mexican migrants being electrocuted by the U.S. Border Wall. But no move has surprised media watchers more than naming an obscure left-wing blogger as its Baghdad correspondent.

Jimmy Burns, who rocketed to stardom after videotaping the suicide bombing of a Brooklyn Starbucks, has come under fire from media critics from across the political spectrum. The New York Post called Burns "an America-hating deer in the headlights." The Nation wrote, The ill-informed yet cocky Burns might be best suited for a job in retail."

An executive at Global News' parent company, Lockheed Martin, told the Times the twenty-five-year-old neophyte's days at the network could be counted on your fingers of one hand.

This scary-smart graphic novel is a bold, irreverent, unflinching spoof of network news, the war in Iraq, and the burgeoning citizen journalism movement set in 2011.

The global war on terror is raging out of control. The president is popping Prozac. And the #1 selling videogame in 2011 America is the terrorist-simulator Infidel Massacre: Los Angeles, On the streets of gentrified Brooklyn, videoblogger Jimmy Burns' latest anti-corporate rant is cut short by a terrorist bombing of a Starbucks...but his live feed isn't. When his dramatic footage is uploaded by Global News (Your home for 24-hour terror coverage) and rebroadcast across the planet, the obscure blogger is transformed into an overnight media sensation. The next thing he knows he's on a Black Hawk helicopter inbound for Baghdad, working for the same mainstream media monster he once loathed. Burns soon finds that everyone from his ratings-ravenous network overlords to Special Ops troops with messianic complexes to a charismatic band of tech-savvy jihadists all want to make him their pawn.

Shooting War is an irreverent and unflinching graphic novel satirizing network news, the Iraq War, and the burgeoning citizen journalism movement that Rolling Stone magazine calls a scary-smart take on what the horrors of the future may hold.

Fierce, shocking, over-the-top, and wickedly smart. -New York Magazine

Astute, timely, entertaining...Predicts, in dramatic terms, the logical evolution of the war. Pundits say there's no good outcome. This book illustrates what that looks like. -Penthouse

A scathing near-future satire of the Iraqi occupation that rings with eerie plausibility...The bleak prognostications are cut with black humor and a penchant for explosions that keep the narrative moving. -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Ambitious...A determined citizenjournalist (and overnight celebrity) infuriated by the mainstream media's indifference to the endless war, Burns aims to bring home the facts on the ground. -Paper

This is a winner...the Apocalypse Now of the War on Terrorism, told in the form of a brilliantly rendered graphic novel. -Forbes.com

A stunningly rendered graphic novel that manages to stick a red-hot skewer the war on terror, Islamic jihad, the mainstream media and the antiestablishment blogosphere in one fell swoop. -Newsweek.com

Shooting War creator and writer Anthony Lappé is Executive Editor of GNN.tv, the web-site for the Guerrilla News Network. He is the co-author of their critically acclaimed book True Lies (Plume, 2004) and the producer of their award-winning Showtime documentary about Iraq, BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge. He has written for the New York Times, the Huffington Post, New York, Vice, and Salon among many others, and has been a producer for MTV News and Fuse. He is a frequent guest on Air America and other radio stations across the country.

Artist Dan Goldman is a writer, artist and designer. He is the co-author of the political graphic novel Everyman: Be the People, and a founding member of the daily on-line comics anthology ACT-I-VATE, where he serializes his psychedelic romance-thriller "Kelly."