“Vietnam, 1969. Then Juarez (Mexico), forty years later. Three men tied by the war they left behind—on collision course with a new one.” It’s our brief intro to Lost Soldiers #1, a miniseries from Image Comics. Okay, let’s move on.
Creator and writer Aleš Kot (Zero, Wolf, The Surface, Wild Children, etc) places us in the war zones. If ‘war’ is the right word, politically speaking. Or ‘conflict area’, or ‘area of most interest’. Most interestingly, there are no punches being pulled in this grim, hard-lined world of foreign involvement, killing, hand to hand combat and testosterone testing.
Artist Luca Casalanguida (Adrift, James Bond, Rebels, etc) has the mighty chops to pull of this violent and brooding tale of guys at war. The largely horizontally shaped panels inhabit the page like a landscape of horror. The figures usually small and partially visible amidst the destruction. Garish visions of sudden attack amidst the daily tedium of dust, mud, and bogs of bodies. Colourist Heather Marie Lawrence Moore bathes the goings-on in dark hues of earth, blood, and battle. Not whitewashed, but coolly illuminated by flickering fluorescents, flickering lighters, filtered dark tones intermittently blasted bright with screams.
Letterer Aditya Bidikar (Isola, These Savage Shores, Motor Crush, Bloodborne, etc) has his work cut out for him on this mission. Dialogue is long, complicated and balloons are often filled with wordy passages. Captions are spaced like land mines in and among the figures. We stop in our tracks, absorb the message and move on, carefully, picking our way through the narrative that is deeply sore and wanting more. War is hell.
Lost Soldiers #1 (of 5), Image Comics, $3.99 for 30 pages of content. Mature readers
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