When it comes to good agitprop, I prefer the underlying biases to be put front and center, self-righteous fury cranked to 11, with no pretenses of a “fair and balanced” perspective being offered. It’s why right wing maniacs like Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage dominate talk radio, and it’s what made Michael Moore’s inflammatory Fahrenheit 9/11 so effective.

Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman’s Shooting War springs forth from that all-consuming geyser of leftist rage over President’s Bush’s ill-conceived and criminally conducted war in Iraq, and is much better than I expected it to be as the main character, self-righteous video blogger Jimmy Burns, isn’t terribly appealing at first, cut from the same whiny, privileged cloth as the average Brian Wood protagonist.

Lappé un-self-conciously wears his politics AS sleeves, not ON them, though, delivering a fast-paced bit of leftist agitprop that asks only the slightest suspension of disbelief from its less extremist readers, largely by making the story personal, focusing on how Burns is changed as a result of his experiences. Set in 2011, with an embattled President John McCain nearing the end of his first term in office and the War in Iraq still raging, Burns uses his vlog “Burn, Baby, Burn” to rail against “The Corporate Takeover of America”. In the midst of a live feed focusing on the evils of eminent domain, he captures the terrorist bombing of a Starbucks in the gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn — the second bombing on American soil of McCain’s presidency — and the resulting 15 minutes of fame leads to his hiring by a Fox News analogue, Global News Network, as an embedded journalist, reporting firsthand from Iraq.

While in Iraq, Burns endures a series of life-altering events, including his abduction and exploitation by the charismatic leader of the terrorist organization Sword of Muhammad; the censoring of some of his more damning footage, including that of a My Lai Massacre-type incident; and the constant threat of alternately losing his job, his fame and his self-respect. Lappé embellishes Burns’ story with myriad details, incorporating them through a variety of means, including heavy exposition, full-text asides, and perhaps most entertainingly, Dan Rather himself. Dan Goldman’s mixed media artwork complements the surreal tone of the story, and even when using actual photographs for backgrounds or individual elements within a panel, he is ultimately an impressionist, deftly using color and precision framing to accentuate the emotion and energy of each moment, whether high-energy scenes of battle or tense scenes of dialogue.

Originally published as a webcomic, Shooting War transitions seamlessly to the page. Viewed purely as satire, it does a very good job of positing a world gone mad in the wake of Dubya’s ill-conceived war on terror, offering a particularly novel take on the rise of a new terrorist organization, and delivering some unexpected LOL moments without straying too far from a very serious underlying message, one even most conservatives would be hard-pressed to disagree with.