SAN DIEGO ' America's newest comics publisher has a $200-billion-a-year budget, more than a million employees and just one title in its catalog. At Comic-Con International, the U.S. Army ' yes, that U.S. Army ' announced the release Friday of America's Army No. 1, a partially animated digital comic for the iPad and Android tablets.
America's Army is impressive from both visual and auditory perspectives and, as far as weapons and technology go, it's highly realistic. What the comic does not provide is a compelling story, at least not in the preview of the first three issues that the Army provided to Wired. The ground combat branch is planning to release six issues of America's Army digitally in coming months, followed by a print edition that will be available in comics shops and bookstores.
America's Army is, frankly, boring. The government-funded comic doesn't try very hard to create believable, sympathetic characters caught up in meaningful conflicts. Instead, America's Army focuses on making the Army look good. As an advertisement, the digital comic only partially succeeds. As a work of art, it falls totally flat. That might come as a surprise to Mike Barnett, a civilian Army employee who co-created America's Army with writer M. Zachary Sherman and got his start designing videogame-style training systems for soldiers.
'It's about the people,' Barnett says of America's Army.
Only it's clearly not. The story in America's Army No. 1 amounts to a mostly bloodless firefight between the protagonists and some nameless but vaguely Slavic enemies, interrupted by a flashback in which square-jawed officer types brief the main characters about a civil conflict in the (fictional) country of Czervenia. The Czervenians are unabashedly evil and doing terrible things to their plucky neighbors from the 'Rdo' tribe.
The Army intervenes to protect Rdo refugees. Before parachuting into combat, our heroes spend several pages joshing around in their tent, swapping clichés.
'Cut the new dude some slack,' says the handsome black soldier.
'We help each other out. That's what we do!' the barrel-chested leader chimes in. Deep in the battle zone, the soldiers spot Czervenian soldiers hauling around a metal case with a radiation symbol helpfully painted on the side.
That's right: The Czervenians have weapons of mass destruction.
The plot is rote, the bad guys are generic to the point of being invisible and the McGuffin ' the WMD ' is an almost laughable apology for George W. Bush-era warmongering. But, yes, the Army uniforms, firearms, helicopters and vehicles are portrayed very realistically, down to the buckles on the combat vests and the sound of an M4 carbine firing.
In short, America's Army shoots for ultrarealism for all the things that don't really matter, and glosses over the stuff that counts. Like, you know, believable emotions, real countries and conflicts, enemies with actual personalities and any admission at all that the good guys aren't perfect and even the U.S. Army fights bad wars.
The failure of America's Army reflects its creators' ambivalence. Barnett and Sherman insist the comic isn't propaganda, even though the Army approves all stories, scripts and art. But Sherman, a former Marine, admits he's motivated to portray the Army positively.
'I'm tired of seeing all the crap on TV,' he says, recalling shows such as 24 that feature 'psychotic' former soldiers. 'I want people to understand that our young soldiers put themselves in harm's way for our safety.'
In one breath, America's Army co-creator Barnett insists, 'It's about the people.' In the next, he says the really compelling part of his comic is how it establishes back-story for the America's Army videogame, a government-owned first-person shooter released in 2002 as a recruiting tool. Not coincidentally, America's Army the game is set, in part, in the fictional country of Czervenia.
Barnett's boss, a former engineer named Marsha Berry, seems equally unsure what America's Army is really for. The point of America's Army, she says, is to spread 'awareness of the different types of jobs in the military.' But she adds that the comic isn't an argument in favor of enlisting in the Army.
'We're not trying to influence anybody,' she says.
The good news, for anyone wary of the military buying its way into publishing and the arts, is that America's Army probably won't influence very many people as long as its characters are flat, its antagonists even flatter and its stories clichéd.
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