Review time! with ‘War Birds’

“And imagine city streets and desert storms and foreign fields and bullets flying”

Dark Horse brings us War Birds, which is by Geoffrey D. Wessel and Steve Parkhouse. I don’t love the title – it’s a play on “Love Birds,” but “lovebirds” is usually spelled as one word, because they’re actual birds, and neither of the protagonists in this book is a bird, as you can see from the cover, so it doesn’t make much sense … look, I have a lot on my mind; I’m a complicated fellow, all right, and I think about these things!

War Birds takes place in the near future, when we’re using a lot of drones and AI-powered robots to fight our battles for us. It takes place in Syria and Turkey (are we calling it Türkiye now, or are we ignoring that because the dude who mandated it is becoming more and more of a dictator every day?), where the U.S. is fighting Muslim bad guys. One of the insectoid drones breaks away from formation and flies in between a soldier robot and the rocket an insurgent fires at it, essentially sacrificing itself to save the robot’s life. This does not go unnoticed by the American command, and they and their scientists can’t explain it. They also can’t explain why the robot picks up the drone and takes it back to base. Then, when they decide to destroy the drone, it calls for help and the robot wakes up, zips over to where they’re storing the drone, rescues it, and the two robots break out of the base and go on the lam. Oh dear.

Into this mix comes Sibel, a Turkish gamer who is contacted in her RPG by a player who claims to be the robot and requires help. She gets her brother, Berat, and together they manage to get to the two drones, with the military bearing down on them. This is a relatively brisk story (it’s 80 pages), and Wessel has several moving parts, so while Sibel doesn’t quite get as much character development as we might like, some things work in Wessel’s favor: she’s a recognizable and instantly sympathetic stereotype – the geek girl who believes that peace is better than war, so Wessel simply has to give her a few good lines and point her in the right direction. The drones are not as interesting, because despite the fact that they gain consciousness and fall in a kind of love, they don’t get to develop personalities all that much, but again, their circumstances make them sympathetic, not their characterization. Dr. Khurana, the scientist who discovers the drones going off-programming, is the best-developed character, but mainly because she’s so integral to the plot, as she begins to have her own crisis of conscience with regard to the robots and begins to figure out how to save them. So Wessel keeps the plot zipping along, and if there’s some character development along the way, that’s fine, but it ain’t the reason we’re here. The story does work, though, because it’s an easily digestible tale – love in the time of war, and all the attendant problems that come with that – and because it’s two robots, we’re not exactly sure how it will end (if it were people, horrific death would be an option, but robots can’t really “die” “horrifically,” can they?). Wessel does some clever things with that, so it works. He also brings in the concept of “endless war” – when he started writing this, we were still in Afghanistan and appeared like we were never leaving – and how that impacts not only the civilians in the war zone, but also the soldiers and even those calling the shots. The commanding officer, General Starnes, doesn’t appear to be an evil man, but he does want to “kill” the robots, which makes him the “villain” in the story. It’s clear that he believes drones are the future because he wants to limit human casualties, and he can’t make the leap of faith required to admit the drones have achieved consciousness so his argument for using them – saving sentient beings – is out the window. Sibel, as a contrast, is much more willing to believe, partly because of her youth but partly because of how she lives life. So there’s an interesting contrast between old and young and between practical and creative. Wessel doesn’t make it too obvious, but it’s there.

Parkhouse is superb as usual. His strong, slightly ragged line work fits a war zone perfectly, as his men are grizzled and his women stark, with Sibel providing some youthful vigor in this world of hard-bitten veterans. His dragonfly drone (which doesn’t look too much like a dragonfly, but that’s what they’re called in the book) is actually pretty creepy (it seems like the perspective might be off on the cover there, but no, it’s really that big), which is a clever idea by Wessel and Parkhouse because when the drones “fall in love,” we as readers need to overcome a fairly common revulsion to bugs and get to the “humanity” (“robotity?”) behind the drone’s exterior. Parkhouse uses lots of chunk blacks, short thick lines, and drops holding lines to create a war-torn atmosphere, and he uses Zip-A-Tone effects very well to add texture. A decent amount of the book is not in English (I’m not sure if the other language is always Turkish, but some of it is, and Parkhouse’s lettering to show the non-English words is excellent), and Parkhouse does a nice job with the “acting” of the characters to give us the gist of what they’re saying. He does well with the action sequences, showing that even though the combatants aren’t human, that doesn’t mean war is any less brutal, and so at the end, when the general sends in “unaffected” robots to take care of his rogue pair, things do get a bit ugly even though they’re “only” machines. Parkhouse has been one of those solid, dependable artists for years, and he does excellent work on this book.

This book might zip along, but Wessel does a good job introducing ideas on the fly and letting them sit there, challenging us. By using robots, he can dredge up a whole host of moral conundrums that we might gloss over if he used humans because we’ve seen it all before. He’s not necessarily re-inventing the wheel, but simply by changing the “lovers” to machines, he can give a fresh spin to an old plot. And the book looks great. Not too shabby, I should say!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆