Take a Good Look at My Good Looks, by Martha Thomases
It’s not a secret that I worship Kyle Baker. Perhaps his wife, Liz, is a bigger fan, but that’s debatable. So it’s no surprise that I looked forward to his new series from Image, Special Forces. It’s even less of a surprise that I like it so much.
The surprise is the subject matter — the war in Iraq. We’re nearly five years into this war, and there have been very other few comics about it (notably Rick Veitch’s Army @ Love). I can’t think of another war in the modern media age that hasn’t inspired comics. Wars have been the springboards for some of my favorites in our medium, including Harvey Kurtzman’s Two-Fisted Tales and George Pratt’s Enemy Ace.
Special Forces is hilarious and terrifying. In the tradition of war comics (and movies), it follows a troop of lovable misfits. These are modern misfits, however. Using actual news stories as springboards, Baker casts his unit with the type of people being recruited for this war: felons, the mentally ill, the physically unfit. That’s what makes these forces “special.” And the most special is Zone.
Zone is autistic. He doesn’t look people in the eye. He doesn’t talk. He carries a small plastic toy soldier with him at all times. And he’s a perfect soldier: he follows orders precisely. Nothing stops him from doing what he’s been told to do, not teasing, not pain, not enemy fire.
Zone briefly went to high school with Felon, our narrator. Felon is a beautiful woman with anger issues. She enlisted in the army to avoid a prison term. Felon and Zone are the only two characters to survive the first issue.
In honor of Halloween, here are some things that have scared me during my lifetime.
There’s been a lot of conversation lately in the girls’ section of the comics blogosphere about the way women’s lives are depicted in superhero comics. Even so-called strong, independent female characters are little more than an excuse to 
What does one hum on the way to the comic book store? If you’re a person of a certain age, with a certain history with certain illegal substances, you probably have a few songs about the original super-hero stuck in the part of your brain that should be storing French vocabulary words. 
It’s great to have the comics on ComicMix now. I knew they were always planned to be part of the site, and so the site seemed to me to be a bit empty without them. Now the place seems to be filling in nicely, like a garden in mid-May.
