Indie Comic Review: World War 3 Now?

The world is a depressing place with more than enough misery to go around. It's also not isolated to any one region. All over the globe there are conflicts causing pain, destruction, and despair, all of which are fuel for art. That appears to be the motivating factor behind the anthology World War 3 Now?. As a collection of work, it's an extremely impressive editorial endeavor to curate so many different comics, poems, essays, and art pieces from around the world. When viewed as a whole, the anthology certainly accomplishes the job it set out to. But the individual pieces themselves have a varying degree of success.

The anthology starts out detailing it's long history. It's always been dedicated to highlighting the atrocities of war, and that mission hasn't changed regardless of the shifting geopolitical landscapes of the world. Because of this, the works all have a unifying theme that war is bad. Through this lens, it tries to cut through the heavy political tension associated with the subject by criticizing aggressors in all their forms. It discusses the war in Israel as well as Ukraine and elsewhere. It does so with a wide assortment of art pieces, comments, poems, and more, all spread out and organized to give the reader a well-rounded and versatile experience. 

Due to the heavy propaganda-like nature of the storytelling, it's very heavy-handed in its messaging. Some of the works fall squarely in the category of agitprop. As an avid consumer of news and media, I feel fairly well versed in these issues, so the comics and pieces that did a lot of describing and telling of the situations felt cramped and bulky. I understood a lot of them were from personal experience, and that came through in the work. However, it was still hard getting into them, especially when the lettering felt raw and rough. The pieces that really shined in the anthology were the ones which highlighted "show. Don't tell." These were works that took a much more minimalistic approach to their messaging. The pain and grief came through in the artwork and the narrative. Those were the pieces that resonated with me more, rather than the ones that felt as if they were pushing a particular viewpoint on me. Still, even given the various levels of reception I had to the pieces individually, the work as a whole is something to be proud of.