UNKNOWN SOLDIER #25
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Art by ALBERTO PONTICELLI
Cover by DAVE JOHNSON
Size: 32 pages
Price: 2.99
This review contains spoilers, click here to read
The series ends in really the only way it could, with a single bullet. The set up from number 24 seemed to suggest an epic battle between Moses and the forces of Joseph Kony, but that kind of Ramboesque conclusion was never what this story was about. Moses lies dying and he dreams that he succeeded in killing Kony and reuniting with Sera, when in truth a naive boy soldier has killed him with a single lucky shot. The rest of the cast and the country of Uganda meanwhile move on with their lives.
Dysart managed to tell the story of the war in Uganda right up to the present day, but still gave us a deeply personal tale of real human beings, which is quite an amazing feat. We get a sense of finality and closure, helped by the fact that Kony was forced out of Uganda, although still commands his LRA as a terrorist faction starting to make fresh incursions into the country. Of course, the course of peace doesn't run smoothly, with the current regime in Uganda still causing an air of unfairness amongst the people. Dysart writes a final narrative that is both compelling and unfailingly objective...here are the facts as they are currently known, make your own mind up.
The final page is presented as a BBC news report of the increase in hostilities. It supposes that young men in Uganda are going off to fight the likes of Kony's raiders dressed as the stuff of myths, wearing bandages around their faces. It's a nice touch. More importantly is the message conveyed, which is that these men and boys feel they have to fight and possibly die now, in order to prevent a state of perpetual war for their country and people. Unknown Soldier is without a doubt a book with an anti war message, but it has this additional undercurrent. It seems to say that a country without war is a wonderful idea, but that in reality it's never that simple, that there are reasons that some people have to fight. Those reasons aren't money, land, oil and the rest, but rather family and freedom. This view of the fighting as awful but in some way necessary is uncomfortable but nonetheless realistic, and adheres to the book's admirable loyalty to the truth.
Last issue and mention has to be made once again of Alberto Ponticelli, a man so gifted that he could draw for us a strange country and make it as real as the next street over. The colours by Oscar Celestini burn on the page, and the book would be a shadow of itself without them.
The end of Unknown Soldier had been announced some time ago and I feel that we got a complete story in the end. It doesn't feel rushed and instead it feels like the finale that it had to be. The cancellation of this comic is a real loss to us readers, but let's be thankful it ever existed at all.
Art: 5 - Excellent
Great review!