Graphic Memoir Explores Combat High
While I was at graphic novel publisher NBM’s BookExpo booth, I met up with journalist David Axe, who was there to promote War Fix, a memoir of his combat reporting from the Iraqi frontlines created in collaboration with artist Steve Olexa. “I worked long and hard to get my ass to Iraq,” Axe recalled, describing how he’d finally convinced the South Carolina newspaper where he was working to send him so he could ostensibly cover the state National Guard’s presence in the war. Almost immediately after arriving, however, Axe quit his staff position and freelanced for anyone who would hire him—creating a portfolio that, as PW observed, runs the spectrum “from the Village Voice to the Washington Times.” To that reporter, Axe explained: “I don’t care about politics. I’m there to get shot at. I’m there to live in a hovel and eat bad food and be scared all the time. I’m there to see interesting things and meet new people and do something hard.” Or, as he told me, one day he ran into a military psychologist, “and he diagnosed me on the spot as a war addict.” That scene appears, in slightly different form, in the book, which depicts the war, and Axe’s turbulent personal life, with a dynamic fluidity that calls to mind manga, especially in Olexa’s willingness to think outside the grid format of most comics.
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