Unknown Soldier #22

Written by Joshua Dysart
Art by Alberto Ponticelli

I really don't want this title to end.  With each issue, I find myself almost completely immersed in Dysart's portrayal of Uganda, and I recognize how much I'm going to miss this title when it's gone.

With this issue, Dysart starts 'Beautiful World'.  Moses is in the custody of the US army, and we see his meeting, years ago, with the original Unknown Soldier.  I expected that this issue would be about his past and whatever it was the government did to him, but I was wrong.  The rest of the issue is centred around Sera, Moses's wife.

She is still hunting for her husband, and spends most of the comic in the company of Momolu, the reporter she hired to help her track down the 'bandaged man'.  Instead, Momolu takes her to an Acholi wedding, and Sera begins to return to herself.  Of course, this idyll is shattered when she learns that Moses has been spotted in the North, and when she runs into Jack, the former-CIA agent who has been hanging around for some time.

With this issue, Ponticelli returns to a traditional pencils and inks approach to the art, although in some panels (one of Momolu's photos, Sera's drive through the countryside) he returns to the more burnished look he's been employing over the last few issues.  One surprise was the different paper stock this month.  This issue is printed on the kind of glossy paper that is usually seen on DC's superhero books, instead of the paper (Baxter?  Mondo?  Do those still exist?) usually used for Vertigo titles.  I have no idea why this was done, and while it made the colours much brighter, it didn't really add to my enjoyment of the book.  It seems like a strange decision to put more expensive paper in a comic that has been canceled for low sales.