Army of God: Joseph Kony's War in Central Africa
Unlike fellow war reporters Ted Rall and Joe Sacco, who are also cartoonists, Axe collaborates with a different artist on each of his comics projects. Hamilton may be the best he has ever worked with. The story is bigger than before, as well. It began in the 1980s when erstwhile altar boy Joseph Kony turned his own religious movement into the Lord’s Resistance Army, vicious guerrillas roaming central Africa, sadistically destroying whole villages and kidnapping children to make them soldiers after sexually abusing them. Though greatly reduced in numbers, the Army is still rampant. In the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2010, Axe interviewed a young teacher, two priests, and a 13-year-old girl who escaped the LRA. Axe tells those informants’ stories, sketches Kony and his band, and describes the recently more organized—thanks to U.S. technical aid pushed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—hunt for Kony, as well as the somewhat unstable state of that effort in 2012. Hamilton’s assured and detailed black-and-white brushwork art impressively maintains a serious, even dark atmosphere throughout. --Ray Olson