4 out of 5

I was just getting back into comics as a young adult, following that general path of rediscovery many of us do, and finally settling on a local comic book shop routine with a sense of the books I liked to read, and sifting through back issue bins I was finding tons of this weird-ass thing: a 2001 series that was part of the inaugural Marvel MAX line, at a cheap cover price, printed on, like, newstock, and featuring… digital art? It was kinda ugly, and weird, but also – at a glance – not what I would’ve expected, and some research suggested it was received and sold well, but also also this was stuffing up the used bins, and I wondered if there was something to the fact that this writer I was digging – Chuck Austen – was the creator, and I knew that his X-Men book (that I was enjoying) was causing some type of furor…

I was able to snatch up all 12 issues out of various bins in short order, and two things happened: I confirmed that this was, indeed, a weird series; and I confirmed my fandom for Austen.

While there are a lot of “representative” series for Chuck, I think this one has a bid as being the one: it tosses in pointless nudity; it’s ignorant of lore beyond what Chuck feels makes the story work; it drops us right in the middle of various narratives; it’s loud and stupid; it’s funny along a half-surreal, half-dad joke axis; it reads at a fourth grade level; and then, somehow, it’s also very, very human – and, sneakily, intelligent. Not smart – these are not deep concepts by any means – but it’s written with a bold, top-down awareness and bottoms up confidence that tells you the writer intends everything, as presented. Delivered in the aforementioned cheap printing and with the bizarre computer art, it’s even more indicative of an Austen project: it is an event, but not one that screams of prestige. …Which I know sounds like hate, but the workman like vibe of Chuck’s body of work – even when assigned to a major title – is part of its charm.

U.S. War Machine goes somewhat back to basics in the Iron Man world: Stark is still a drunk; War Machine is his bodyguard. Someone is in that big, blocky suit fighting A.I.M. on a highway, and – much to the chagrin of the media-centric Stark – decides to explode some A.I.M. soldiers with a missile, then pose for some selfies. Welcome to Marvel MAX.

The man in the suit is James Rhodes; Stark fires him, but he’s re-hired by a Mr. Nick Fury at S.H.I.E.L.D. to put those A.I.M.-killing skills to use, leading a pack of these-look-awful-similar-to-the-war-machine-suit armored soldiers. On most levels, that’s it: Rhodes leads some rag-tags through some rough missions that go awry, and the series cycles through a couple of these initiatives, with some pretty good “this is not your daddy’s Marvel U” remixes tossed in. However, right from the get-go, Austen starts to toss in some pretty meaty explorations of race, not only motivated by the Nazisms of A.I.M., but even down to explorations of how a black man like Rhodes might refer to himself – as black, as African American – or how his speech patterns and skin tone compares to the darker-skinned and less collegiate-sounding Parnell Jacobs, also a member of the S.H.I.E.L.D. crew; or the naivety of can’t-we-all-just-get-along “allies,” and the faux-sincerity of religion in these regards. Now, on the one hand, Austen is kind of as cornbread as it gets, and he codes as one of those allies; on the other hand, even a few decades on I’m surprised at how un-cringey most of this reads, making for a fascinating filter: U.S. War Machine as a kind of hoo-ra violence and tits splashpage (one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. members is a woman, and god forbid a guy can work with a chick without picturing her naked – this is the paralleling drooling ape simple-mindedness of Chuck’s writing); but also as a way to explore, in a fairly open-ended way, race relations, and then more cynically tiers of power not only in relation to race, but just in general – the mindlessness of officer/soldier interactions.

Again, I do want to kind of underline that this isn’t mind-blowing stuff, it’s just surreptitiously intelligent, mingled with over-the-top comic bookdom: heads explode in panel A, and then in panel B you get an oddly sensitive chat between two soldiers. Panel A is written with clunky one-liners; panel B with more care. Overlaying all of this is a kind of streamlined hyper-reality, such that panels A and B don’t conflict. It’s… a lot more complex than it may seem, especially when, again, Chuck likes to fall back on boobies here and there. Like, why is the girl they rescue naked? It’s not a glorified shot, and I bet there’s some Naxi-coded justification, but it gets tossed into the pile of MAXisms.

While I think this book only exists due to the free-wheeling vibe of the initial MAX launch, and is responsible for some of its hilarious canon-flaunting additions, Chuck also works well with some borders to bounce off against, and there’s likely a slightly more refined version of this tale that doesn’t waft dumb as much as this one does (excepting that, again, that surface level overkill is kind of why it works…). Also, I can’t get over the art and printing quality. The computer art is kind of fitting for standardizing the War Machine outfits, and I think the dehumanization of the art works thematically well, but combined with the super murky printing and some fairly unclear action at points, it’s ultimately a distraction. Once more, it’s all part of what makes the book unique, but I bet there were some ways to achieve that and have it be a better looking document at the same time.