Vietnam Journal Book Two: The Iron Triangle

by Don Lomax

I'm really happy to see that Transfuzion Publishing picked up Vietnam Journal, after previous publisher iBooks fell apart after Byron Preiss's death scuttled plans at that company.  I've become a big fan of Lomax's approach to depicting war, both in Vietnam Journal and in his later Desert Storm Journal.

This second volume contains two comics that were in the first iBooks edition, and two comics that weren't, so in the interest of being a completest, I figured I'd start my acquiring of this series with The Iron Triangle.  Before I can even begin to talk about the content of this comic, I need to take a few moments to complain about the printing quality of this book.

Were someone to tell me that I was reading a samizdat photocopy of the original comic, I wouldn't be surprised.  The grays in this comic are almost completely washed out, and Lomax's line work, which looked so good in the iBooks edition, is faded and blurry.  It doesn't detract to the point of making the book hard to read, but it is noticeable, and when I compared this edition to the same pages in the other edition I own, it reminded me of when I got my first pair of glasses at sixteen, and realized that trees had individual leaves instead of masses of undifferentiated green.

I can understand how a small press project like this may not receive the best quality reproduction due to financial matters, but if someone is paying $18 for four comics, things should look better than this.  I'm just saying...

Content-wise, this stuff is fantastic.  It feels like Lomax really starts to hit his stride as a writer with this volume, avoiding some of the easy sentimentality of his earlier issues, and starting to tackle some much more complex issues and facets of the war.  He has his embedded journalist, 'Journal' Neithammer become much more involved in the war in these issues, making the conscious decision to return enemy fire while in a helicopter that is under attack in one issue, and risking his own safety to rescue civilians in another.

Journal receives some injuries during an attack at one point, and the effect of these injuries are explored for a while.  This book is quite cerebral in its treatment of the war, and makes a serious effort to provide a balanced view of what was going on.  Highly recommended, even with it's printing quality issues.