I read this in comic book format when it originally came out years ago, and I had a vague memory of being unimpressed. But in the years since, I have come to admire Jason Aaron as a writer so I thought I should use the reissue of the collection as an excuse to revisit a story I might not have fully appreciated on the first go-round.

Well, I wasn't wrong. This fever dream look at the Vietnam War is not something I'm ever going to be fond of reading. The fantasy elements don't really work for me, and the rest doesn't stand out from the many depictions of the Vietnam War I have previously seen and even seems pretty derivative of those same works. ( )

Set during the Vietnam war, this haunting graphic novel follows two young men, one an American and the other Vietnamese as they join their respective armies, are trained and sent off to war to kill each other. The art and colouring is fantastic and captures the increasingly hallucinatory quality of both men's experiences as move closer and closer to their final, tragic meeting at the bloody and ultimately futile battle of Khe San. ( )

This is a gut-wrenching look at the war in Vietnam as seen by the soldiers on both sides. It is a painful read that also does a beautiful job of portraying the psychological damage war does to those forced to endure it. It is not for the squeamish but I highly recommend it.

Note: This graphic novel is dedicated to pays homage to the author's cousin, Gustav Hasford, veteran and author of The Short-Timers, the novel that was made into the movie Full Metal Jacket. ( )

I topped my Vietnam reading spurt off with Jason Aaron's The Other Side, a graphic novel following the stories of two soldiers, one a U.S. Marine and the other from the People's Army of Vietnam. Illustrated by Cameron Stewart, the novel is both beautiful and harsh. For the American, Billy Everette, a farm boy from Alabama, going to Vietnam was not something he especially wanted nor did he believe he'd come home alive. He is haunted by the ghosts of fellow soldiers, scared and unsure of himself. He is fighting a war against communism, to help the Vietnamese people. Vo Binh Dai, also the son of farmers, sees the war more as a spiritual quest; it is his duty to protect his country from the outsiders, the Americans, who are bent on destroying everything the Vietnamese hold dear. Two different views, one war.

I wasn't overly impressed with the author's first volume of Scalped, I confess, but I was really taken with The Other Side. The artwork, above all, is what makes this graphic novel stand out. One of my favorite pages carried panels of the horrors of war while others of a beautiful butterfly. Those drawings said so much more than words could ever express. The Other Side is definitely worth checking out. ( )

http://jmgold.blogspot.com/2007/07/other-side.html ( )