BuzzFlash Reviews

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Created by the Executive Director of the Guerilla News Network, Anthony Lappé, and illustrated in color by Dan Goldman.

From the Publisher:

"The global war on terror is raging out of control. The president is popping Prozac. And the #1 selling videogame in 2011 America is the terrorist-simulator Infidel Massacre: Los Angeles. On the streets of gentrified Brooklyn, videoblogger Jimmy Burns' latest anti-corporate rant is cut short by a terrorist bombing of a Starbucks...but his live feed isn't. When his dramatic footage is uploaded by Global News ("Your home for 24-hour terror coverage") and rebroadcast across the planet, the obscure blogger is transformed into an overnight media sensation. The next thing he knows he's on a Black Hawk helicopter inbound for Baghdad, working for the same mainstream media monster he once loathed. Burns soon finds that everyone from his ratings-ravenous network overlords to Special Ops troops with messianic complexes to a charismatic band of tech-savvy jihadists all want to make him their pawn. Shooting War is an irreverent and unflinching graphic novel satirizing network news, the Iraq War, and the burgeoning "citizen journalism" movement that Rolling Stone magazine calls "a scary-smart take on what the horrors of the future may hold.""

An online reviewer:

"Originally published as a webcomic, Shooting War transitions seamlessly to the page. Viewed purely as satire, it does a very good job of positing a world gone mad in the wake of Dubya's ill-conceived war on terror, offering a particularly novel take on the rise of a new terrorist organization, and delivering some unexpected LOL moments without straying too far from a very serious underlying message, one even most conservatives would be hard-pressed to disagree with."

Another online reviewer:

"I loved Dan Rather's presence in the book, and I have to wonder how the authors and publisher got him to agree to be presented with such a strong opinion on the war and the presidency. The line between fiction and non-fiction, reality and possibility, is definitely blurred at this point, and during several others."

SHOOTING WAR creator and writer Anthony Lappé is Executive Editor of GNN.tv, the web-site for the Guerrilla News Network. He is the co-author of their critically acclaimed book True Lies (Plume, 2004) and the producer of their award-winning Showtime documentary about Iraq, BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge. He has written for The New York Times, the Huffington Post, New York, Vice, and Salon among many others, and has been a producer for MTV News and Fuse. He is a frequent guest on Air America and other radio stations across the country.

SHOOTING WAR artist Dan Goldman is a writer, artist and designer. He is the co-author of the political graphic novel Everyman: Be the People, and a founding member of the daily on-line comics anthology ACT-I-VATE, where he serializes his psychedelic romance-thriller "Kelly."

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS