By Benjamin Marra (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-878-6
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Comedy as Black as Santa’s Coal for Naughty Kids… 8/10
We live in perilous times and everywhere Terrorists lurk, just waiting to get the jump on us. Everybody knows that…
Mercifully, thanks to the blessed wisdom of President G. W. Bush there are professionals in place to take the war right back to them. Following the attacks on 9/11 the clearly-prescient Dubya, in his infinite wisdom, convened a team of All-American specialists in excessive force and clandestine skulduggery. They were designated as Terror Assaulters: utterly autonomous from government oversight and tasked with ending any and every threat to world Freedom & Democracy by any means necessary…
Thus the scene is set for a sly and ferociously stark satire on the American Public’s simplistic view of its pre-eminent role in a very complex world, conceived and concocted by a master of visual retro-stylisation, deftly utilising nostalgic forms to pillory modern sensibilities and the country’s obsessions with untrammelled masculinity, consequence-free sex, violence and conspiracy.
Benjamin Marra was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1977 and after graduating with a Degree in Fine Arts from Syracuse University studied in Florence (Europe!) where he was clearly seduced away from clear-thinking and right-mindedness. He later studied under David Mazzucchelli at the School of Visual Arts and, as well as running his own self-publishing comics imprint Traditional Comics, works as web designer for Major League Baseball Advanced Media, freelances for advertising companies, Marvel and in publications such as Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and many others.
Rendered in hard-edged, stiff-figured ink-lines, augmented by dot-screens and flat primal colours like a classic four-colour comicbook from the 1960s or 1970s (and looking and feeling very much like Spain Rodriguez’s iconic Trashman tales), these extremely over-the-top adult escapades are delivered with machine gun rapidity and bleak economy, all softness and nuance carefully excised in favour of inexpressive, declamatory, expository dialogue – like a little boy playing out scenes with action-figures until he smashes them all in his building frenzy…
Our harshly-drawn hero is an emotionless, lethally capable agent codenamed O.M.W.O.T. (One Man War on Terror) whose propensity to find trouble wherever it lurks is only outmatched by his capacity to expunge it with ruthless efficiency. And of course whenever there’s evil and death there also plenty of callous, selfish sex, with whoever is left breathing when all the shooting stops…
Our involvement begins with ‘Cyber Attack Part 1‘ wherein a perpetually sunglasses-wearing wonder man invades a nondescript business building in Jakarta and spectacularly kills all the bad guys before his search for ‘Funding’ leads him into a pitched, brutal battle on an airliner jam-packed with hijackers before a profitable meeting with the lizard-men who actually run everything…
Abruptly changing tack, ‘Cyber Attack Part 2’ reveals how, after Terrorists sneakily invade and conquer America, the Terror Assaulters lead the fightback; with the indomitable O.M.W.O.T. at the forefront of battle, exposing a TA traitor who is almost as deadly a fighter as he…
With America free again our ultimate hero then deals with another outrageous attack on decency when ‘Loyalties’ sees him framed for child abandonment by an invisible enemy using the latest gender-bending technologies to trap him in matrimony and a spurious child-support scheme. It’s the Terrorists’ greatest and most insidious and apparently inescapable trap…
Blending rebellious Punk Rock sensibilities with a trenchant, deadpan yet aggressive expressionism and irrevocably linking hyper-violence to loveless, self-gratifying casual sex, this so-very-graphic inquisition into the nature of a society’s obsessions and the excesses of its self-appointed protectors is a blackly hilarious attack on US interventions, NeoCon demagoguery and the self-delusions of the oppressed and near-extinct God-Fearing, White American Male that will delight and amaze all us dubious lefty, liberal-humanist weirdoes…
Terror Assaulter is © 2015 Benjamin Marra. This edition is © 2015 Fantagraphics Books Inc.