"Army@Love: The Hot Zone Club" is the first collection of Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine's demented satirical war/romance comic book, concerning the pornographic adventures of the middle-managers drafted to serve in America's endless war in "Afbaghistan," where corporate sponsorship logos adorn the fuselages of jets, and combatants gossip with their loved-ones via cell-phone while taking heavy casualties defending the contractor-erected shopping malls in the middle of the wasteland.
The world of Army@Love starts from a simple and savage premise: the corporatization of war-fighting will lead, inevitably, to the ultimate stop-loss program, through which middle-managers from giant corporate marketing organizations will be inducted (at employers' expense) to fight the war through novel ways. It is these marketers who conceive of the war as permanent peak experience, a high that can only be achieved through constant life-endangerment, massive, mid-combat orgies, and relentless slaughter.
This is a funny comic book, but it's a deeply offensive — and extremely thought-provoking — kind of funny, the kind of funny we need a lot more of if we're to keep from laughing ourselves into the grave.
