Terminal Lance Ultimate Omnibus

January 22, 2018
In this hefty and frequently hilarious compilation of strips about “the often absurd experience” of being a U.S. Marine, Uriarte (The White Donkey) satirizes everything from the endlessly proliferating and sadistically enforced dress code rules to the fury of “Angry Facebook Veterans” bemoaning gays and women in today’s corps. Uriarte, who created the strip in 2010 after multiple deployments to Iraq and currently publishes it in The Marine Corps Times, aims his humor squarely at his fellow Marines. The acronym-dense three-panel strips are peppered with politically incorrect barracks humor, swearing, and references that will send most POGs (“person other than grunt”) to Google. Sidebar commentary and a character glossary from Uriarte provide context. A winking self-awareness and compassion for the daily drudgery of the grunt’s life makes this collection more than a mere peek into a troop’s insider experience—he’s poised to become a Bill Mauldin for the social media generation. Agent: Katherine Boyle, Veritas Literary Agency

February 15, 2018
Uriarte's acclaimed graphic novel, The White Donkey (2016), was an unstinting look at the Iraq War through the eyes of a marine. With Terminal Lance, he takes a lighter but no less clear-eyed view of life as a grunt. Uriarte launched the strip, originally published online and in the Marine Corps Times, while still on active duty. Demonstrating that actual combat takes up a minute portion of a soldier's time, the strips, drawn in a simple, unadorned style, sardonically depict the near-daily tribulations and occasional pleasures of military life: boot camp and drill instructors, absurd regulations regarding uniforms, the inedibility of MREs, the difficulty of maintaining a long-distance relationship, and the green weenie that the corps routinely uses to screw marines. Much of the dialogue is arcane jargon and technical terms, which speaks to the strip's original audience but might be off-putting to civilian readers; that insider approach, however, makes Terminal Lance a rare opportunity for those on the home front to get a sense of the true concerns and feelings of those deployed overseas.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)