Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Pg. 69: A. Lappé & D. Goldman's "Shooting War"

The current feature at the Page 69 Test: Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman's Shooting War.

About the book, from the publisher:
The year is 2011 and Jimmy Burns, a young anti-corporate blogger, has just seen a Starbucks (and his apartment above it) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn blown to bits by yet another terrorist attack on New York City. He's recorded the gruesome scene on his videoblog camera — footage Burns beams live to a freaked-out world — which makes him an overnight media star.

Exploited by his own network (Global News Network: "Your home for 24-hour terror coverage"), enraged by the terrorists, and determined to tell the American people the truth, Burns takes off for Iraq to get the real story of a war that's been raging for more than eight years. But Burns' greatest dream (to be a war correspondent) becomes his biggest nightmare as he nearly loses his mind in the paranoia, chaos and destruction of the spiraling civil war.

Among the praise for Shooting War:
Shooting War is a satire that could serve as the Apocalypse Now of the War on Terrorism, told in the form of a brilliantly rendered graphic novel…. This is a winner. But hopefully not prophetic.”
--Forbes.com

“The book version looks nothing short of spectacular, reveling in a near-future (2011) technological distopia where the global war on terror rages further and further out of control, lurching ever closer to apocalyptic fulfillment.”
--Wired.com

“For this horrifying vision of the future we can thank journalist Anthony Lappe and graphic artist Dan Goldman, co-authors of ‘Shooting War,’ (Grand Central Publishing) a stunningly rendered graphic novel that manages to stick a red-hot skewer into the war on terror, Islamic jihad, the mainstream media and the antiestablishment blogosphere in one fell swoop.”
--Newsweek

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

“[Dan Goldman] employs the computer to the full, overlaying figures on photo backgrounds and manipulating everything with software effects. The result is an eye-frazzling, mind-warping collage, like a sequence of Banksy murals, all aglow with doomy orange hues…The satire is ferocious. At one point a soon-to-be Islamic martyr scoffs junk food, saying, ‘This burger makes me feel sated yet vaguely disgusted with myself. What I imagine it feels like to be an American every day.’ Moments like this, both terrifyingly plausible and plausibly terrifying, abound, as Lappe extrapolates from current events to warn how White House foreign policy may well take us all to hell. Originally free online, this strip deserves its enshrinement between hard covers.”
--Financial Times
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 book True Lies (Plume) 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.

Miami-brewed and Brooklyn-blessed, Dan Goldman is a writer, artist and designer. A founding member of daily comics anthology ACT-I-VATE, he is the artist behind the Eisner-nominated Shooting War and co-author of the political graphic novel Everyman.

Check out an excerpt from Shooting War and learn more about the book at the official website.

The Page 69 Test: Shooting War.

--Marshal Zeringue