Comic Review: Drones #1- Television stupid and depressingly banal

Writer: Chris Lewis
Artist: Bruno Oliveira
Publisher: IDW Comics
Released: 22nd April 2015

So, here it is at long last. A comic book that is actually going to look at the favourite dehumanising murder weapon of the neo-liberal elite’s, the death from above that is the satanic predator drone.

How to deal with such a subject matter? How do you look at a nasty bit of US imperialism in a comic book without depressing all of the (largely American) readers? How do you make the drone pilots look like the heroes that are demanded by the corporate whore mainstream media? After all, they sit in a warehouse and murder people all day, a lot of those people being women and children and civilians just getting on with their everyday lives. It’s going to be difficult isn’t it?

Readers might get upset. They might not want to read a comic book about nasty US war policy. There is a reason why comic book geeks prefer the insular safety of their superheroes fighting aliens and cold war era Russians. It’s a nice safe nowhere land where they can pretend that Nato and the west are somehow making the world a better place, and not doing what they are actually doing.

That’s what comic books offer, a respite from the unpleasant reality around you, a reality where your tax dollars are used to bomb the crap out of countries for banks and corporate interests. The countries are then turned over to the Sunni proxy army (known as ISIS this week, I think) to completely destroy what is left and behead anybody that disagrees with their ideology of turning the country back to the stone-age. Ah, welcome to reality in 2015, got anywhere I can hide?

Comic books let you hide from the desperate, pleading hunger pangs of your guilty conscience. They offer you a comfortable hole in the sand where you can safely place your head and pretend that the world that you’ve helped to create and maintain doesn’t actually exist.

So, yes, it’s going to be difficult to write a comic book about drone pilots in 2015, a time where reality is thinning out, and what is left is some bizarro fantasy land with comic books existing in a alternative dimension immune to reality post 9/11.

Writer Chris Lewis could have been really brave and shown the drone situation for what it really is. He could have written a comic book about the horror of it all. He could have focussed on children terrified to look at the clear blue sky, knowing that somewhere a drone could be lurking to rain death from above. He could have done that, but that’s expecting too much. Like I said before, people would be upset, soldiers would look like the murderers that they actually are, and people (comic book readers in their fantasy 1990’s nowhere land mainly) wouldn’t want to read that kind of book.

What he has decided to do instead is construct some kind of weird sexy fantasy narrative that is commenting on the pornographic nature of watching war on television by turning his entire comic book into an exact duplicate of that sick televisual popcorn and bombs experience. His characters are silly, everything is a joke and none of it really matters because it’s not serious, it’s not real, and it’s pretty much a waste of everybody’s time, exactly like the television war porn that I guess it’s attempting to satirise.

I didn’t like it, and it took me a while to understand what exactly it was trying to do. To me it read like a very disrespectful way to talk about a serious subject matter. I found it depressing, empty, shallow and desperately trying to be clever whilst somehow not being very clever at all.

There’s something fat, smug and American about this book, and that’s coming from a guy who likes America. I understand that is the whole point of the comic book, that it’s satirising that dehumanised mind-set, but by doing so it has fallen into the trap of becoming exactly what it itself is attempting to mock. People will read this, have a laugh, and nothing will have changed. All resistance to US corporate sponsored neo-liberal imperialism will be labelled as terrorism, and the drones will continue to fly.

If you want to get a serious comic book that looks at the impact of drone warfare and how it has become nothing more than a recruitment tool for insurgents fighting US/Nato wars yet to come then you won’t want to read this book. The light-hearted way that it is scripted, the banality and unlikeability of ALL of the characters is nauseating and whilst others will read the book, feel confused, then leave it be, I have to call it out for what it actually is.

Drones #1 is a deeply unpleasant comic book. It has taken a delicate subject matter and turned it into a very unfunny joke. If there is subtle social commentary going on here then it’s lost underneath a wave of comic book silliness. Drone warfare is state-sponsored murder. No evidence, no trials, no judge, no jury, no law. It is terrorism, designed to terrify an entire country, so to see it being portrayed in such a light-hearted, inhumane, jocular manner is a bit shocking really. I should be disgusted, and it shows how much I’ve been normalised to the horrors of our time that the abiding emotion I feel after reading this book is merely disappointment that a comic book about drone warfare could be so depressingly banal.



Rating: 0/10 (Depressingly banal)