I ended up grabbing Notes For a War Story after reading an old Library Comics review and ended up getting a used copy off Amazon which aptly turned out to be from a library. Translated from Italian, this war story comes from an unnamed war in an unnamed country. However, it closely resembles the breakdown of Yugoslavia in this translation. Originally, in French and Italian, the names and locations were localized to ensure the feeling that this story could happen anywhere.

The novel follows three friends who get into trouble at the outskirts of a civil war. Eventually, they're drafted by a gangster with ties to one side of the war to perform some more serious crimes. The slide of the country into chaos and the luxury afforded by moral grey areas is excellently portrayed.

Gipi has this rough art style. It isn't sketchy, and the backgrounds are fully realized. What I mean is that the lines are thick and the colors are muted. The art style matches the story's grit. Gipi has an excellent grasp of faces, even with a minimal amount of line work.

If you're looking for a portrayal of war that isn't heroic but isn't buried in the weeping, this is it. Notes For A War Story doesn't get gratuitous, and that humanity makes for a story looking for questions instead of answers. It’s not that there aren't villains, our protagonists included, but weird supposed to see how war takes their humanity from them. There are other threads about class, and who profits and avoids war.

I'm not sure in the current state of society that everyone is going to want to read a story about the slow-motion breakdown of society. It's a shame the translator didn't work to give the book American names and places to match. The fragile nature of society is palatable in these pages. It demonstrates you can go from spray painting buildings to sitting in the back of a troop truck with a rifle in just a few months.