Art at War: Web Comix Set in Future Echoes Reality

The year 2011: President John McCain has plummeted (we're talking about a work of speculative fiction: the real though equally unpopular president is more likely to be Lindsay Graham); the war in Iraq rages on -- don't laugh, how many years did it take to get from Tet to the roof of the US embassy in Saigon?; gasoline is $10 a gallon; and Tom Cruise and Mary-Kate Olsen have just called it quits (mainly, because it turns out it's Brad's baby -- okay, I added that). When videoblogger Jimmy Burns captures a suicide bomb blast that rocks a Brooklyn Starbucks and destroys his apartment upstairs, he's hired by maverick network Global News and sent off to Iraq. "Shooting War" is Jimmy Burns' story, an engaging web comic by author Anthony Lapp and artist Dan Goldman. Though only a half-dozen chapters of "Shooting War" have been published by SMITH magazine so far, the series has already made salient comments on such topics as the future of Iraq's warring factions, globalization, and the struggle of citizen journalism against mainstream media, and promises to be a useful tool for raising consciousness about the Iraq War among certain segments of the population.
<http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/>