Army of God

February 11, 2013
It is not easy to contemplate horrors like those perpetuated by guerilla army leader Joseph Kony against the people of Central Africa—and it’s equally difficult to get a good picture of the political involvement of the nations allied together to end the threat of Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. Journalist Axe and Eisner-nominee Hamilton bring the history of the LRA into its proper context, from the history of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo to Invisible Children’s viral video “Kony2012.” The result is an approachable report on both the politics and the personal stories, giving readers a strong overview of where the LRA came from, and the threat it continues to pose to Central Africa. Axe has a clear grasp of how to turn solid journalism into a compelling series of interconnected stories, and Hamilton’s art removes just enough horror from the terror of life in the Congo to make it possible to look at the situation, rather than feeling compelled to look away. The prose preface and epilogue, and the notes on the graphic novel process, are informative bookends to a powerful work that deserves wide notice.

February 15, 2013
A graphic narrative illuminates the atrocities of Joseph Kony in Central Africa, yet the horror and the complexities of the story are a challenge for such a short work. The figures themselves are staggering: By 2011, Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army "had abducted at least 50,000 people and killed at least 12,000. No fewer than two million people in three countries had been displaced by Kony's attacks." Yet it took a viral video titled "Kony 2012" to stir massive public outrage, and even that was undermined when the head of the Invisible Children organization devoted to raising consciousness "cracked under the strain" of the attention. That provocative episode is given short shrift in the narrative, as is much else in a story of little more than 80 pages. Axe (War Is Boring, 2010, etc.) and Hamilton (Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation, 2009) don't fully come to terms with Kony, though they do suggest the difficulty of such a challenge: "Dominated by its mysterious, volatile founder Joseph Kony and governed by a complex body of rules, customs and superstitions, the LRA is ostensibly a fundamentalist Christian religious movement, an army of God. In reality it bears no resemblance to Christian institutions elsewhere. Its methods are rape and pillage. Its major aim is to sustain itself." The artistic rendering of rape and slaughter is as powerful as it is horrific, and the narrative hits hardest on an individual, human level in the chapter about a young girl, kidnapped by the LRA and forced into "marriage," and the ongoing trauma after she was rescued at age 13. There's enough here to make concerned readers want to learn more about Kony, whose forces have dwindled even as he continues to elude capture, but the condensing of the graphic narrative falls short of the immensity of the barbarism.

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April 15, 2013
Unlike fellow war reporters Ted Rall and Joe Sacco, who are also cartoonists, Axe collaborates with a different artist on each of his comics projects. Hamilton may be the best he has ever worked with. The story is bigger than before, as well. It began in the 1980s when erstwhile altar boy Joseph Kony turned his own religious movement into the Lord's Resistance Army, vicious guerrillas roaming central Africa, sadistically destroying whole villages and kidnapping children to make them soldiers after sexually abusing them. Though greatly reduced in numbers, the Army is still rampant. In the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010, Axe interviewed a young teacher, two priests, and a 13-year-old girl who escaped the LRA. Axe tells those informants' stories, sketches Kony and his band, and describes the recently more organizedthanks to U.S. technical aid pushed by Secretary of State Hillary Clintonhunt for Kony, as well as the somewhat unstable state of that effort in 2012. Hamilton's assured and detailed black-and-white brushwork art impressively maintains a serious, even dark atmosphere throughout.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)