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WARBURGER
(
Strip Core; distributed by
Top Shelf and others)
These
Stripburger specials keep getting bigger and bigger. This one is a whopping 400 pages and boasts talent from around the globe. The covers by Stéphane Blanquet are pretty disturbing (wait 'til you see the back), but once I noticed that this kid – in the middle of a warzone, bombs going off around him – appears to be on the brink of sticking an army man up his nose, I realized that it's touches like these that make the
Stripburger specials what they are.
Inside you'll find efforts from 90 international contributors and a variety of approaches for the grim theme. The work that really stands out for me includes: "Zyklon Boy" by Knut Larsson, about a kind of gas-chamber-created superhero; Peter Kuper's "Screwed", which suggests that power will get you in the end; Kati Kovács' rape allegory; Ulli Lust's staggering adaptation of school essays by Berlin kids of 1945; Rocco Lombardi's story of tear gas and a son's love for his father; Eric Braün's gag strips; "Noir Canada", David Lester's adaptation of Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King's journal entries from his 1930s visit to Germany (sobering); Letac's cartoon journal drawn during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999; and... well, I'm just going to stop there, even though there are still more that really struck me. So I'll say that, in addition to the above, there's also very good work by Mr. Stocca, Ulf K, Jean Bourguignon, Gomé, Roland Trost, Carol Swain, Squaz, Niklas Asker, Maaike Hartjes and others.
Also included are contacts for the artists and even a page of stickers. It's an impressive collection and certainly one of the more positive things to come out of the recent "war" with Iraq.
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