“DMZ: On The Ground”

by Brian Wood, drawn by Riccardo Burchielli

Vertigo, 2006

Formations of bombers are patrolling the skies. Putrid, makeshift medical clinics are full of limbless kids. People are trying to live amidst booby-trapped streets, looting, gangs of militias, car bombs and snipers. Bodies are hanging from fire escapes as a warning to trespassers. Military forces are instructing photojournalists to crop “small bodies” out of their images. Sound like someplace in the Middle East? No, this is Manhattan in Brian Wood’s powerful graphic novel “DMZ: On the Ground.”

In an alternative version of America’s recent history, things in New York City have gone very differently after 9/11. While the Army and the National Guard are distracted with wars across the globe, militia groups in Middle America have risen up and pressed toward the coasts. What this means for New York is that New Jersey and Inland have become part of The Free States while Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island remain part of the United States of America. And Manhattan? Manhattan is the DMZ: the demilitarized zone. No man’s land. The trouble is 400,000 people are still living there—hung out to dry by both sides in America’s second Civil War.

After five years of this, Matty Roth, a typical college student with headphones and a messenger-bag full of attitude, receives the dream internship of every aspiring photojournalist: he’s to accompany a famous war correspondent into the DMZ to provide the first documentation of civilian life there. But Matty has to worry about much more than college credits when his helicopter is shot down by insurgents and the war correspondent and his military bodyguards have their brains spilled across the sidewalk. One failed extraction by U.S. forces later, Matty has chucked his cell phone to become a rogue—America’s only active journalist inside the DMZ.

He sells his stories to Liberty News Service, whose slogan is “News for America… and Americans!” But it soon becomes painfully apparent his work isn’t about his career anymore. It’s about telling the stories of the innocents whose homes and neighborhoods have become a battleground of someone else’s making.

Drawn by Riccardo Burchielli in an incredibly detailed style that often resembles documentary news footage, “DMZ: On the Ground” collects issues 1-5 of Wood’s ongoing comic (currently on issue 13). Like the rest of Vertigo’s roster, it’s directed at “Mature Readers” and provides some of the most compelling storytelling to be found anywhere in this country.

While “DMZ” may be set up like the greatest action movie you’ve ever imagined, it quickly begins to take chances and violently dig deeper than anything Hollywood would have the courage to produce. This is a story about what might have been. But what makes it potent and interesting and vital is that it is also a tale about what might still be. While you will impatiently await each new issue of the series, your stomach will simultaneously wrench in fear of the day when you can no longer distinguish the plot of the comic from the plot of “CNN: Headline News.”