Written by Ivan Brandon
Illustrated by Tom DerenickOn the ground and on the front lines, a young, headstrong soldier known as Joe Rock assumes command of Easy Company — a team of ex-military men turned contractors. Will they survive the battle-scarred landscape carved by the DCU’s Super-Villains? Find out in this explosive new series from Ivan Brandon (Viking, DOC SAVAGE) and Tom Derenick (JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA)!
One of my earliest experiences buying comics came in the form of multi-pack comics sold at K-Mart. For $3 or so, you’d get an assortment of comics. Because of the packaging, you could only see the outside two books. I’d look for a Batman or an X-Men on the outside, and take my chances on what was on the inside. Sometimes, that middle comic was a big letdown. Many times, that let down was because of an issue of The ‘Nam or Sgt. Rock. As a 6 year old, the last thing I wanted to read was a war book.
When I saw that Men of War was one of the titles being launched as part of the New 52, I was surprised by my initial reaction: I was intrigued. As a card-carrying liberal pacifist, it wasn’t because I wanted to read stories about soldiers fighting; it wasn’t even because the book had a writer or artist attached that piqued my interest. My interest in seeing a Men of War book had everything to do with DC publishing different types of comics. If they could make a successful, unique war comic that people would buy, who knows what other types of comics they may try?
So, I picked up Men of War #1 hoping that as a 29 year old, I would have a different reaction than I did as a 6 year old. Did I?
There are two stories in the first issue: the main story is “Joseph Rock,” about the iconic DC hero Sgt. Rock’s grandson, an enlisted man with a history of insubordination who is beloved by his fellow infantry men, despite being held down by his bureaucrat supervisor. If this sounds cliché, it is because of course it is.
The artwork by Tom Derenick takes all the paths you would expect it to, but handles himself well enough. There are some nice uses of shadow and darkness alongside those staples of war comics: guns, puns and moustaches. An explosion late in the issue uses Matt Wilson’s colors well, and, to some degree tips the hand of who the mysterious hero flying through the sky wreaking havoc is (my money is on Captain Atom).
A lot of the pre-release chatter about this book has been about how the book will deal with private war contractors in the age of the super hero. That could be an interesting book, but there are only a few hints of that here (Plus, Rock is not a private contractor, and the superheroics seem out of place and tacked on. So, yeah.); instead, we get lots of dialogue that offers no surprises and little to no character development.
And that is in the FAR superior of the two stories.
When I saw the first panel of the back-up story, “Navy SEALS: Human Shields,” it instantly brought me back to those books I got at K-Mart. The artwork is classic war comic — if this was meant as an homage, bravo Phil Winslade. Everything from the multiple panels with no backgrounds to the muted colors to the sea of square jaws reads classic 70’s.
This story is so cliché it makes “Joseph Rock” seem like The Thin Red Line. Written by Jonathan Vankin, (of last month’s boring and pointless Brightest Day Aftermath: The Search for Swamp Thing), the only thing more insulted than women is the reader’s intelligence. Soldiers calling each other “girls” when they are slow are offensive, sure, but is it any worse than more than one person saying “hooyah” unironically, or the painful exposition of the soldiers explaining their cheesy nicknames? Each page gets worse and worse, until the predictable cliffhanger ending mercifully saves us until next month. The writing, too, could be an homage to the classic war comics of the Silver Age, but I don’t think that sexist soldiers who try to justify murdering a teenage girl (really) without a shred of absurd humor or irony have any place in 2011’s comic marketplace.
I knew going in that this was going to be a tough sell for me. It’s $3.99 price tag doesn’t help either; I’m willing to pay that for a top notch creative team, or a book that is genuinely exciting (DC’s other three $3.99 books meet that for me: Justice League, Action Comics and All-Star Western are all established creative teams offering stories people want to read), but this is not even close. Perhaps there is an audience for this type of comic; all I know is that I am not part of it.
Final Verdict: 2.0 — Pass
