Conscientious Sequentials by Russell Burlingame

Iraq's Future Through The Camera Lens:
Talking Shooting War With Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappé

More has been said or written about Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman's Shooting War than about perhaps any other political comic of the last ten years. Starting as a free webcomic at Smithmag, the popularity of the series exploded and it was recently republished in a hardcover edition by Warner Books, and optioned as a film last month. The graphic novel, which follows the exploits of a liberal blogger who becomes a famous-if-somewhat-inept war correspondent in 2011 (yes, we're still in Iraq).

Shooting War Lappé, one of the founders of the Guerilla News Network and one of the key players in the documentary film BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge, says that he had never produced a work of fiction before (his background is in journalism), when the idea for Shooting War struck him: "A friend of mine late at night, inebriated at my apartment at 3 a.m., I was telling him the story and he said, 'Man, that would make a great comic!'," Lappé explains. "I thought, I'd never really even read a comic—how would I write a comic, let alone get an artist and sell it?"

The answer came with a call to Larry Smith, who runs SmithMag. A friend of Lappé's, Smith was looking for a serial webcomic to run on the site around the same time that Lappé had used a Craigslist post to find himself an artist—Dan Goldman, one of the founders of ACT-I-VATE and writer/artist of Everyman, a graphic novel about elections. Goldman's mix of traditional art and digital photography, which gave a surreal edge to Shooting War, has been dissected and admired by critical outlets from the Internet to the New York Times.

"All the pieces just kind of fit perfectly," Lappé says, "and then I found Dan Goldman via CraigsList and his work was exactly what I was envisioning in my head in terms of combining photo sources and original drawings; his twisted kind of vibe just fit perfectly."

"I've been experimenting with this stuff," Goldman says of his style. "I went digital five or six years ago—meaning there's no pens or paper involved. I've been strictly digital for five years, maybe six, and as I learn things, the style keeps mutating. Shooting War has its own look. I like playing with collage and mixing different media—I think that's a lot of fun—but every project's different, and ultimately the art serves the story."

There was no clear indication at the start that Shooting War was going to be such a runaway success, but according to Lappé it didn't take long: "We launched as a serialized webcomic, and in the third week we got a full-page write-up in The Village Voice and it just kind of blew up from there."

While they may not have always known where the book was going to land, or the kind of acclaim it would receive, the process had taken into account from the start the process of moving from the Internet to print. "We created the artwork for the website, knowing we were going to go to a book so I worked at triple-size at 300 resolution dpi," Goldman (pictured left) explains. "The idea was from the beginning to create the art in these widescreen format tiers and then arrange the tiers into the book, so the book wound up being roughly two tiers high and whether it was two tiers or three tiers that was largely up to what we could get away with from the publisher. When we sat down for the first time, they were great about letting me bring unusual frame sizes to the table."

In spite of the activism that defines so much of its central character, Shooting War is at its heart not a "liberal" or "conservative" story, but is driven more by the issues. Lappé says, "One of the lessons I learned from Battleground was really a break of doing something that's non-ideological—not trying to hit someone over the head. In trying to do something that has a total agenda and is willing to try and call people out on all sides. I'm kind of trying to get beyond the partisan media and trying to tell just good stories. That's the most interesting thing for me and if you do that, I think people really respond, too."

Adding to this, Lappé says that he doesn't see a lot of difference in the foreign policy of the major Presidential candidates. "No major candidate is going to get us out of Iraq," Lappé says. "I think it's going to be a rude wake-up call for a lot of lefties when Obama gets elected and then come 2011—which is when Shooting War is set, really—we're still bogged down. It means one thing on the ground, but it represents something else totally—which is that it's the world's greatest jihadist training tool. I really don't see anything different in Obama's foreign policy substantively other than a rebranding of it."

As much as it's easy to see Shooting War as an anti-war graphic novel, though, it's more than anything else about the state of the media—and particularly the "citizen journalists" that populate the Internet.

"I'm trying to do something a little bit different, and that's just the function of my own take, which is that I'm a lot more critical, as I'm getting older, of everyone," Lappé says. "Maybe I'm getting carmudgeony, but one of the things I'm trying to do is point out the failures and the perils of the blogosphere in this book. Sitting around on your sofa or in Starbucks and thinking you've got the whole world figured out when you haven't gone out and really experienced it, is not journalism."

Lappé (pictured right in Bagdad), who has been extensively published for more than a decade and who studied journalism himself, stresses that many people who don't have that kind of background don't have the necessary knowledge to write well. "So much is missing for a lot of people--they don't learn to tell a story or report. That's what journalism is about, not just having an opinion and doing Web searches. It involves incredibly complicated ethical tapdancing. There's a lot of tricky ethical decisions and that's what Shooting War is all about. It's about this kid who thinks he's got it all figured out, and he ends up getting thrown into this situation that he's totally ill-equipped for and he turns out unable to do it not just from not having the education and the ethical framework. Do you tell the whole truth in the particular to protect your access and your job for the long term or do you tell the truth about this person you're embedded with even when that person may or may not have saved your life? Someone sitting at home on their couch are never going to understand how difficult that is."

In spite of a general reputation as a liberal, Lappé has, as a result of the success of Shooting War, become a regular contributor on a conservative television network owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. "One of the funniest ironies of the whole Shooting War thing is that I got invited onto Sky News to be a guest and talk about Shooting War and ironically we were also on Channel 5 News while we were there," Lappé says. "But that turned into basically a guest spot since I was over there. Every couple of weeks on Sky News, so it's literally like Shooting War come to life. It's hilarious and totally appropriate, you know, brought into the Borg, so that's been hilarious. There are interesting ironies about how the book has kind of propelled me to a different stage--ironies that I'm aware of actually."

After the film was optioned by Power, a British production house that specializes in TV miniseries like the recent Sci-Fi Channel production Tin Man. Currently, while Goldman is working on a nonfiction graphic novel about the 2008 Presidential race (Diary of the Campaign Trail, being co-written with Mike Crowley of The New Republic), Lappé is working dilligently on a screenplay for Shooting War: the TV show. He also says that he's not at all opposed to returning to the universe created for the story. "We are thinking about doing a sequel to Shooting War," Lappé confirms. "Maybe even something like a paperback series that would come out around and be tied in with the TV show but I'm not focused on it."

Russell Burlingame ... Russell is a journalist and graphic novelist currently living in Greenwich Village. He interned at Wizard: The Comics Magazine in the '90s and is currently a Special Projects Editor for Greg Palast Investigations, where he is overseeing a graphic novel for release in summer 2008.


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	Iraq's Future Through The Camera Lens: Talking Shooting War With Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappé More has been said or written about Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman's Shooting War than about perhaps any other political comic of the last ten years. Starting as a free webcomic at Smithmag, the popularity of the series exploded and it was recently republished in a hardcover edition by Warner Books, and optioned as a film last month. The graphic novel, which follows the exploits of a liberal blogger who becomes a famous-if-somewhat-inept war correspondent in 2011 (yes, we're still in Iraq). Lappé, one of the founders of the Guerilla News Network and one of the key players in the documentary film BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge, says that he had never produced a work of fiction before (his background is in journalism), when the idea for Shooting War struck him: "A friend of mine late at night, inebriated at my apartment at 3 a.m., I was telling him the story and he said, 'Man, that would make a great comic!'," Lappé explains. "I thought, I'd never really even read a comic—how would I write a comic, let alone get an artist and sell it?" The answer came with a call to Larry Smith, who runs SmithMag. A friend of Lappé's, Smith was looking for a serial webcomic to run on the site around the same time that Lappé had used a Craigslist post to find himself an artist—Dan Goldman, one of the founders of ACT-I-VATE and writer/artist of Everyman, a graphic novel about elections. Goldman's mix of traditional art and digital photography, which gave a surreal edge to Shooting War, has been dissected and admired by critical outlets from the Internet to the New York Times. "All the pieces just kind of fit perfectly," Lappé says, "and then I found Dan Goldman via CraigsList and his work was exactly what I was envisioning in my head in terms of combining photo sources and original drawings; his twisted kind of vibe just fit perfectly." "I've been experimenting with this stuff," Goldman says of his style. "I went digital five or six years ago—meaning there's no pens or paper involved. I've been strictly digital for five years, maybe six, and as I learn things, the style keeps mutating. Shooting War has its own look. I like playing with collage and mixing different media—I think that's a lot of fun—but every project's different, and ultimately the art serves the story." There was no clear indication at the start that Shooting War was going to be such a runaway success, but according to Lappé it didn't take long: "We launched as a serialized webcomic, and in the third week we got a full-page write-up in The Village Voice and it just kind of blew up from there." While they may not have always known where the book was going to land, or the kind of acclaim it would receive, the process had taken into account from the start the process of moving from the Internet to print. "We created the artwork for the website, knowing we were going to go to a book so I worked at triple-size at 300 resolution dpi," Goldman (pictured left) explains. "The idea was from the beginning to create the art in these widescreen format tiers and then arrange the tiers into the book, so the book wound up being roughly two tiers high and whether it was two tiers or three tiers that was largely up to what we could get away with from the publisher. When we sat down for the first time, they were great about letting me bring unusual frame sizes to the table." In spite of the activism that defines so much of its central character, Shooting War is at its heart not a "liberal" or "conservative" story, but is driven more by the issues. Lappé says, "One of the lessons I learned from Battleground was really a break of doing something that's non-ideological—not trying to hit someone over the head. In trying to do something that has a total agenda and is willing to try and call people out on all sides. I'm kind of trying to get beyond the partisan media and trying to tell just good stories. That's the most interesting thing for me and if you do that, I think people really respond, too." Adding to this, Lappé says that he doesn't see a lot of difference in the foreign policy of the major Presidential candidates. "No major candidate is going to get us out of Iraq," Lappé says. "I think it's going to be a rude wake-up call for a lot of lefties when Obama gets elected and then come 2011—which is when Shooting War is set, really—we're still bogged down. It means one thing on the ground, but it represents something else totally—which is that it's the world's greatest jihadist training tool. I really don't see anything different in Obama's foreign policy substantively other than a rebranding of it." As much as it's easy to see Shooting War as an anti-war graphic novel, though, it's more than anything else about the state of the media—and particularly the "citizen journalists" that populate the Internet. "I'm trying to do something a little bit different, and that's just the function of my own take, which is that I'm a lot more critical, as I'm getting older, of everyone," Lappé says. "Maybe I'm getting carmudgeony, but one of the things I'm trying to do is point out the failures and the perils of the blogosphere in this book. Sitting around on your sofa or in Starbucks and thinking you've got the whole world figured out when you haven't gone out and really experienced it, is not journalism." Lappé (pictured right in Bagdad), who has been extensively published for more than a decade and who studied journalism himself, stresses that many people who don't have that kind of background don't have the necessary knowledge to write well. "So much is missing for a lot of people--they don't learn to tell a story or report. That's what journalism is about, not just having an opinion and doing Web searches. It involves incredibly complicated ethical tapdancing. There's a lot of tricky ethical decisions and that's what Shooting War is all about. It's about this kid who thinks he's got it all figured out, and he ends up getting thrown into this situation that he's totally ill-equipped for and he turns out unable to do it not just from not having the education and the ethical framework. Do you tell the whole truth in the particular to protect your access and your job for the long term or do you tell the truth about this person you're embedded with even when that person may or may not have saved your life? Someone sitting at home on their couch are never going to understand how difficult that is." In spite of a general reputation as a liberal, Lappé has, as a result of the success of Shooting War, become a regular contributor on a conservative television network owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. "One of the funniest ironies of the whole Shooting War thing is that I got invited onto Sky News to be a guest and talk about Shooting War and ironically we were also on Channel 5 News while we were there," Lappé says. "But that turned into basically a guest spot since I was over there. Every couple of weeks on Sky News, so it's literally like Shooting War come to life. It's hilarious and totally appropriate, you know, brought into the Borg, so that's been hilarious. There are interesting ironies about how the book has kind of propelled me to a different stage--ironies that I'm aware of actually." After the film was optioned by Power, a British production house that specializes in TV miniseries like the recent Sci-Fi Channel production Tin Man. Currently, while Goldman is working on a nonfiction graphic novel about the 2008 Presidential race (Diary of the Campaign Trail, being co-written with Mike Crowley of The New Republic), Lappé is working dilligently on a screenplay for Shooting War: the TV show. He also says that he's not at all opposed to returning to the universe created for the story. "We are thinking about doing a sequel to Shooting War," Lappé confirms. "Maybe even something like a paperback series that would come out around and be tied in with the TV show but I'm not focused on it." Russell Burlingame ... Russell is a journalist and graphic novelist currently living in Greenwich Village. He interned at Wizard: The Comics Magazine in the '90s and is currently a Special Projects Editor for Greg Palast Investigations, where he is overseeing a graphic novel for release in summer 2008.
	Page last updated on April 5, 2008 About Us \| Contact Russell Burlingame \| Contact Comic Related All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2008 Russell Burlingame