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Vietnam Journal - Don Lomax Interview
Posted on: 2011-01-20 16:46:25 By Gerald D. Swick @ HistoryNet.com Don Lomax is a 35-year-plus veteran of the competitive world of comic and cartoon artists. He is also a veteran of a much tougher struggle—the Vietnam War. Drafted in 1965, the following year he found himself serving in Vietnam with the 98th Light Equipment Company. Notes and sketches he made during his time there led him to create a critically acclaimed "comic," the graphic novel series Vietnam Journal, many years later. His words and artwork were literary napalm that burned away the sanitized versions of combat and soldiering found in traditional "war comics." The images are often violent, the characters' language at times profane; we asked for some of his tamer pages to run with this article. Vietnam Journal garnered praise from Military Book Club, Publishers Weekly and numerous other sources, but it went out of print. Twice. Now the stories are being collected into graphic novel format and made available to readers again through Tranfuzion Publishing. HistoryNet's editor Gerald Swick recently interviewed Don Lomax about his work, his children—two sons have served in the military, one of whom is still on active duty—and what led him to break traditional comic-book boundaries and present a more realistic war comic. Read on... |