DMZ: A Journey into our Society’s Heart of Darkness
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There are two sides to every story. Two versions. Two factions in every Civil War.
Except when there’s not.
That’s the beauty of DMZ’s first collection of the DC-Vertigo comic series by Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli: there are two armies with so many people caught in between, each with their own story to tell. Matty Roth, an aspiring photo journalist, ends up trapped alongside of them, trying to understand their plight and the depths that the two warring nations, the United States of America and the separatist Free States.
In this volume Matty travels inside of civilizations that have cropped up in the DMZ located on Manhattan. It’s a little bit Apocalypse Now, a little bit Planet of the Apes, but all too real. And his journey into this heart of darkness leads him further and further away from the simple black-and-white truths that he thought he knew before he boarded the helicopter in the opening scenes.
The issues came out nearly at the same time as Marvel’s big crossover event Civil War, but nothing in those 100 issues comes close to the originality and timeliness of DMZ. The ideas draw on the best war literature and expand on what Tim O’Brien and Ambrose Bierce and Joseph Conrad wrote in a medium that could tell the story with immediacy. The illustrations are almost sketches of people against a solid background — temporary lives against a temporary city. They are walking the ruins at the end of the world.
The one qualm about this collection, as presented here, is that the story feels episodic and unconnected by the end. There is a journalistic quality to how Matty appears to not judge the people he meets, but I hope that the overall narrative builds the story into a solid direction instead of doing a tour of horror, which in some ways is my biggest complaint about Apocalypse Now, too. But it’s my first encounter with Brian Wood’s work and it’s tantalizing enough to keep reading this or branch into his other comics work.
In short: DMZ’s fiercely frightening. It’s exciting. It just might be brilliant enough to resonate decades into the future when readers want to understand the polarization and anxieties of our time.
Buy it here: http://www.amazon.com/DMZ-Vol-1-On-Ground/dp/1401210627
