America+-+'The+War+on+Terrorism'

America: "The War on Terrorism" Ah, comics, a very interesting style, one that can speak volumes for any given work, and one that I have mixed feelings for where this work is concerned. By no means am I saying that the medium is bad, I enjoy comics, mostly of the newspaper comics and non-super-hero related graphic novels (Batman the exception), but those are mostly works of fiction. Now, in a work of fiction, the art can add volumes: artistic style, color choice, pannel size, time sequence, and angle all add to the depth of the work and can create atmospheres that picture-less stories only dream about. This work is not fiction, in fact it doesn't even accept the term "graphic novel", a term older readers give a comic to try and set it apart as being not something you would let a young child to read, in favor of the term "illustrated exposés". Actually looking at the work itself, it's safe to say the choice of medium was very poor. The illustrations come off as political cartoon-esque, which isn't necessarily bad, but take a look at political cartoons and the distinction becomes clear: politcal-cartoon artists put time and thought into their work. Can you say "wall of text"; The work is terrible with this. Traditionally, wall of texts are avoided because when you're reading a comic, you want pictures, and there should be few words because the pictures are taking the role of what nearly half the words of a plain, written story uses to set itself up. Wall of texts also clog up the space of a pannel, but this can be avoided by splitting pannels up, which would also add more punch to Andreas's points. Andreas, however, doesn't do this, there's no absolute system to his panneling. His choice of type font is atrocious and completely adds to the bad-political-cartoon vibe the work has and the clogged feel of each pannel. Then you have the actual illustrations which are just, for the most part, upper-body shots, with three, maybe four, decent illustrations. The characters in all other works that utilize the medium are very purposefully drawn, each detail is given to make the reader react a certain way to the character. Andreas does do a fine job in this regard, mostly because he gives everyone frowny or distroted faces, showing very little positive emotion; most of the characters seem to be caricatures anyway. Despite their poor quality, I do think the characters make the reader react the way Andreas wants them too. There is, though, very little dialouge, maybe a few speech bubbles, but most is explanatory text, which again is a no-no in the comic world. When all is said and done, it appears as though Andreas doesn't understand the way comics work. The illustrations are set up, not guides; if the illustrations are guides to a work and not the main focus, as they are in Andreas's work, then there's no reason for the work to be in comic form to begin with. Since he's already in a bad position with explanation because he can't draw it, he's in a really bad place with emotional appeal because he can't write it. Long story short, I think Andreas made a terrible decision to put his essay into comic form.

Then there's the actual content, which is pretty much all over the place and filled with anti-military and anti-government conspiracy. Andreas sets himself up fairly quickly in the first pannel with the question, in the context of 9/11, "why did they do it (742)?" Andreas does fairly well to stay on this subject and manages to give an answer in three pages; the problem is that the entire work is eight pages long. Before the third page is even done, Andreas is now discussing the war on terror as a whole, not in the context of middle-east relations as his introduction suggested. Andreas then keeps on Floridan terrorism for all of a page before his ramblings begin into the Pentagon, whic he barely stays on until he's talking about military power, and that just rambles into weapons development. The only way Andreas could even imagine he has an organized argument would be because he uses the date 9/11 to keep everything together, like someone would use duct-tape to fix everything. What I've been taught about writing is that you keep a clear topic and you stick with it, and if you have to make a change, it should still figure into your main topic; if your writing begins to change topics, it's a sign of a bad writier. Andreas doesn't keep a single topic throughout his writing and, again, his choice of medium hurts him. He doesn't take the time to actually develop his specific points with examples, insteda throwing out little speech bubbles "like Nelson Mandela (748)" and leaves onto another topic. He writes in haste and if the work were transferred to the typical essay format, it would be considered terrible writing. The plus that Andreas has with multiple topics, though, is that he can construe and use whatever little evidence he pleases to prove his point. I'm not sure what his point is when everything is said and done, but I do know that if he's having to bring in so many topics for one or two examples, his argument is likely severely flawed. Still, there isn't an argument that jumps out to me immediately; the only thing I got out of it was "military and government bad; you shouldn't trust them, they do vaguely-described bad things".

I think Andreas shows his conspiracy-theorist colors with the last page of the work, page 750, where Andreas is discussing biological and nuclear warfare. Andreas asks the question "can other countries trust a government that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and actually developed plans to use smallpox and other biological weapons against Vietnam and Cuba? Would you? (750)" While I think that a little bit of skepticism is greatly beneficial, this quote just further demonstrates Andreas's fear-appealing "argument". First, the question is being asked on a fairly ridiculous premise: that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were part of an evil, militaristic government's plot. True, the nulcear weapontry was developed in secret, but it wasn't much of a secret that Josef Stalin knew about it before Truman, the man who authorized the attacks, knew about the weapons. Then there's the use of nuclear weapons, which has been handled very well. True, it's impossible to tell whether or not Truman made the right decision with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he did make the right decision with Douglas MacArthur, to get rid of him. During the Korean war, MacArthur wanted to use nuclear force... against all of China, he had the plans ready and everything, but Truman fired him before he could single-handedly bring about the end of the world, so yes, I would trust the government's decisions. Andreas also discussed the arms race, which, while it has amounted to large supplies of weapons, it has amounted to nothing else as of now, and in some ways is simply a safe-guard against other countries with deadly weapons, the whole "you kill me, I kill you" approach. As for the plans to use biologically engineered diseases to attack a country, that's just playing off of fear, and it works, but it also leads to conspiracy theory questions: if we've got the power, who else has the power; if everyone has the power, what's actually the "truth" behind every case of illness from the last fifty years; have we already been infected? None of these answers can be concretely answered, which then makes them rhetorical reaction-getters. At last, there's the "would you?" part. Andreas is trying to get everyone in on his paranoia, and it's just that. Every government has a military, and all of those militaries have secrets, and some of the military plans are extremely convoluted, others are bone chilling, but at the end of the day, it would take a lot of these plans to go into action, and it isn't anything we've seen yet.