Before reading this review, take a minute to read my review of the previous two trades, available at this link. As I explain there, this comic is one I really love, even though a war comic--depicting a second American Civil War taking place in the years after 9/11--doesn't really seem to be my cup of tea. However, Wood's excellent storytelling and Burchielli's gritty and intense artwork create a compelling and thought-provoking alternate reality, in a genre appropriately labeled "poli-fi" by the author of volume 12's introduction.
Volume 11 opens with Wood taking us back to the events that led up to the civil war, filling in some details I had always wondered about. Journalist Matty Roth is reunited with some old friends in the second half of the trade, and rumors of peace and a truce are flourishing. In Volume 12, Matty actively works to see those rumors come to fruition, tying together many storylines we've encountered throughout the 72-issue run. Sadly enough, volume 12 also marks the conclusion of this series. It's always disappointing to see the end of a good comic, but I also appreciate authors who have a sense of story and know when theirs has run its course. I'll be watching out for Wood's next project, and I look forward to dinging out what unexpected places he draws me into next.
I chose this book based on Amazon's recommendation and the fact that both Cory Doctorow and Stephen King provided blurbs for the jacket. King said, "Robert Charles Wilson is a hell of a storyteller," and since I think King is quite the storyteller himself, I thought this was pretty high praise. The book turned out compelling enough to keep me going through 400+ pages of small font (My perspective has been skewed by all the TeenLit I read these days.), but it's a hard book to describe in many ways.
Mainly the problem of describing the novel arises in assigning it a genre. Wilson is considered a SciFi author, and I suppose that loosely fits things--but very loosely. The story is set in a futuristic 22nd-Century America, but one that looks much more like things did in the 18th century. There are scattered pockets of technology, but on the whole it's much more of a feudal society, with landowners and serfs, a mixed civil and religious political structure with military leanings. There's a constant war that is being waged to maintain the American borders--and a corresponding flag of 13 stripes and 60 stars. It's low tech enough to keep it out of the Steampunk genre, yet there's a flavor of something futuristic at the same time--in a collapse type of way common to Post-Apocalyptic novels, but well after any horror has dissipated.
With all that aside, the novel is primarily a story of friendship--between a lower-born aspiring author (the book's narrator) and the aristocratic son of the slain US President. The two travel across country, engage in numerous battle scenes, make critiques of high society and religion, and comment on socialism and totalitarianism. All in all there is a bit of something in here for everyone, and while I think that it's a more male-oriented plot, there is enough drama and interest to pull most readers along.
When I attended Comic Con for the first time in 2007, I bought my first DMZ trade so I could get it signed by Brian Wood. My sister Sarah was a Wood fan, so I decided to become one on the spot. Since we have pretty similar taste in other literature, it makes sense that the same is true of the comic medium as well. It's good that I had Sarah as a guide, because at first glance it's not really my thing--DMZ stands for DeMilitarized Zone, after all--but Wood is one of the best comic authors around today, and his tale of Manhattan being caught in the crossfires of a second American Civil War is both horrifying and compelling.
The premise of this series is a war between the Free States (a coalition of anti-establishment militias whose numbers swell as the US attends to overseas wars), holding New Jersey and the inland, and The United States, stationed in the boroughs. Enter Matty Roth, a young man who uses his parents' connections to get attached to a famous journalist as a phototech. It's no real spoiler to tell you that the insertion of this press team goes awry immediately, leaving Matty as the only living member of the team, as it happens in the first or second issues of the series. Rather than leave the DMZ, Matty decides to stay and report from the inside, becoming the voice of the people who remain. It's a rough and desperate world, where people fight to survive and hold power, in both barbaric and heroic fashion.
I'm not going to catch you up on the whole series, leaving that pleasure up to you, but suffice it to say that Matty ends up as both hero and savage in varying episodes, witnessing the harshness and kindness of the DMZ's citizens. Volume 9 of DMZ charts Matty's actions as he contemplates his need to atone for his role in events which heightened unrest among DMZ citizens after a period of relative peace (for which he was also partly responsible). Volume 10 continues Matty's quest for atonement, while also sharing the stories of a variety of DMZ residents--mothers hiding with children, the boss of Chinatown, an army infiltrator working to fit in with the local populace--all while under a continuous onslaught of bombs from the US.
Each time I pick up a DMZ trade, I reflect on the war theme and wonder, "Is this really for me?" Yet, again and again I find myself drawn into the gritty world imagined by Wood and illustrated by Riccardo Burchielli (and others). Having read Wood's other work--which runs the gamut from short stories of identity-seeking teen and twentysomethings in Demo to big, hairy Vikings in Northlander--I can recognize that his writing is one of the main reasons I like a comic series on modern (if imagined) warfare. I simply admire all of his work--including his regular tweets about NYC (where he lives), his interests, and his three-year-old daughter and her famously mismatched outfits.
