It’s not just via the blindness of the military mindset that Haldeman delivers his anti-war message. Establishing the tone applied to military decisions throughout, three months of utterly lethal advanced training takes place on a planet with harsh cold temperatures, only for the surviving troops to be shipped out to a planet where the lowest temperature exceeds the highest recorded on Earth by twenty degrees. The opening pages show William Mandella, his surname a near anagram of Haldeman, one of a hundred specifically selected troops being sent off planet for advanced training readying them to fight the Tauran enemy, rarely seen, yet continually demonised. The result is this version of The Forever War, collecting the three English language volumes long out print. Unusually for the times, when Belgian comics creator Marvano (Marc Van Oppen) contacted Haldeman about adapting the story, Haldeman supplied the script. And has me that much more excited to finally read the original novel too.Įdit 08/2022: this review is for the full first book, not just the first issue reposted here to the correct entry.Having been unable to defer his own co-opted participation in the ideological dogma of the Vietnam War, Joe Haldeman served his time and then wrote an ultimately award winning novel slamming war and the military mindset. Highly commendable is also the coloring the final touch to bring the art alive and add mood to the scenes with subtle toning - the decisive color palettes for both the bold contradictions and the uniform washes rather enhancing the resemblance to Moebius.įantastic story, which will surely stay with. And perhaps somewhat in the designs of the spacecrafts not based on real life too (and those that are, add a certain delight with the fact that for the on-orbit transportation vehicles of choice the book chooses to employ the space shuttles of its time giving a rare opportunity to see the retirees in action on the edge of the universe war beyond their planet of origin - and way past their real life decommission). Still, the human characters aside (but not the figures), the art is powerful in drawing out evocative scenes noticeably reminiscence of - and surely on some degree inspired by - Giraud's Moebius art, detectable from the determined and even pen stroke, and from the presentations of scenery and scope. The art - it has some quite sharp disparity between gorgeous settings and action, and the unfortunate sloppiness and uncertainty in depictions of human facial features.

And with a side of centuries of pathos, to truly earn its name.

What a wonderfully epic space saga - yet from a very closely personal perspective -, with such humanity and frailty, poignantly describing the gruesomeness and redundancy of warfare.

The forever war comics