Unknown Soldier #20

Written by Joshua Dysart
Art by Alberto Ponticelli

While I'm not happy to hear that DC is canceling Air, I'm really bummed out by the decision to stop publishing Unknown Soldier with the twenty-fifth issue.  This title has been one of the nicest surprises to come out of Vertigo in the last decade.  It's a series written by an American, drawn by an Italian (I assume) about Uganda and its civil war.  Sure, it features an American citizen as it's main character (even if he is Acholi) and has an undercurrent of CIA black ops running throughout, but I don't know of any other comic series that has attempted to portray such an accurate and human accounting of such a foreign place.

In this issue, Moses is still running from the Karamojong cattle rustlers that began to chase him last issue, and when he finds a tactically secure hiding spot in some rocky formations, it is not uninhabited.  This forces Moses to work with a small widowed tribal family, hoping to hide its last three cattle from thieves.

Almost the entire issue is narrated by the disabled and mal-formed son of the family, and it gives some interesting insight into the region.  In a textpiece, Dysart discusses the issue of cultural appropriation, which has always been in the back of my mind when reading this title, and comes to some useful conclusions.  As always, the art in this book is fantastic, as is the incredible Johnson cover.