Combat Junkie: David Axe's War Fix

by Sunyoung Lee, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 5/2/2006

The increasing popularity of book-format comics and an equal demand for first-hand accounts from the frontlines of the Iraq war have raised the visibility of comics journalism for readers, publishers and writers. So much so that David Axe, a freelance journalist from South Carolina, decided to go to Iraq himself and do an account of his experiences in comics. "I've always wanted to do a comic book, I just didn't have anything to write about," says Axe. War Fix, the unusual book that resulted, will be published in hardcover this month by NBM.

Part memoir and part reverie on the seductions of war, War Fix follows Axe from a childhood fascination with the falling bombs of the first Gulf War to the alternating moments of carnage and boredom he finds when he finally gets to Iraq more than a decade later. As drawn by his collaborator Steve Olexa, Axe is a rumpled young man wearing light-glazed glasses that give him the perpetually blank look of someone slightly adrift. Still, the book as a whole could be said to embody a perverse triumph of the will. Axe goes to Iraq not as a soldier, or even as a reporter on assignment, but as someone so drawn to the spectacle of conflict that he buys his own discount body armor and pushes himself to the front lines. "If I have to, I'll pay my own expenses," he tells his flabbergasted editor.

Six visits to Iraq, 60,000 flight miles, numerous articles and one graphic novel later, Axe is still trying to make sense of what drove him to Iraq in the first place. "It wasn't easy, and I'm still paying the price. But I had to go," he says. The mystery of this compulsion—what Axe calls the "magnetism" of war—is War Fix's driving preoccupation. It's also what attracted NBM publisher Terry Nantier to the book. "Here's a regular sort of guy who's deliberately sending himself into harm's way, and who comes to realize that he's become hooked on war and the danger and excitement of being in the middle of it," says Nantier. "I thought the story really needed to be told. There's even a bit of a parable there for where we have been over the last few years as a country."

NBM will release 5,000 copies of the initial hardcover and plans to have the paperback edition out by the end of the year. NBM will distribute the book to the trade itself (NBM was the first to distribute to the trade for Dark Horse back in the 1980s). The house has hired a freelance publicist, Martha Thomas, former publicity director at DC comics, to work on promotion for War Fix as well as Rall's Silk Road to Ruin. Axe will be appearing at the NBM booth at BookExpo America in May. "Washington, D.C., is obviously a very good place for the book to be," says Nantier, "so we'll be taking advantage of that for hitting the capital's media when he's there."

Unlike another of NBM's spring releases, Ted Rall's forthcoming Silk Road to Ruin, however, War Fix doesn't aspire to political commentary. Axe, who has written articles for media outlets ranging from the Village Voice to the Washington Times, explains, "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."

Axe, a former medieval history major with an MFA in fiction, had long been interested in working with Olexa, a talented artist from the University of Tennessee and the brother of a friend. "I had to have something worthy of his talent, and it wasn't until I went to Iraq that I had that," says Axe. In the months leading up to Axe's trip, the two began laying out rough plans for a possible structure and tinkering with a visual style and character studies. As Axe explains it, "We had created this vessel before I even left. It's strange to be a journalist and to be living the thing that you know you're going to write about, because you can't help but try real damn hard to make what you're doing interesting."

While Axe was in Iraq, Olexa worked off of postcards, letters, photographs and writings that Axe sent him throughout his trip to put together a rough draft of the story. The visual results, though powerful, were also disconcerting. "I look at some the drawings and they look utterly alien to me because they're composites of a lot of different things all collapsed together."

Still, the results of their collaboration were promising enough to get them a contract with NBM. The book itself was finished in the pauses between Axe's six trips to Iraq over the course of a year. Axe arrived in Iraq just as the first Iraqi elections were about to take place in January 2004: the last batch of drawings were handed off to NBM this past January.

Axe is already looking ahead to future projects. He's currently working on a prose memoir about his experiences called War Is Boring, and War 101, a book he wrote about a group of ROTC cadets at University of South Carolina, is due out from the University of South Carolina Press this fall. He also hopes to continue writing comics and he's already written another script, this time fictional, but also set in Iraq.

"It's been a remarkable process for me, figuring out just how deep real experiences can be," says Axe. However, in the end, he has no illusions about the impact of his efforts. "My experience is shallow compared to the experiences of people who are actually pulling the triggers. I just want to get as close as possible to their stories, to sort of glom onto them and gather them into a bag. And lucky for me, the process of doing that is itself a fascinating story."