"Shooting War"

Shooting War creator and writer Anthony Lappé is Executive Editor of GNN.tv, the web-site for the Guerrilla News Network. He is the co-author of their critically acclaimed book True Lies (Plume, 2004) and the producer of their award-winning Showtime documentary about Iraq, BattleGround: 21 Days on the Empire's Edge. He has written for the New York Times, The Huffington Post, New York, Vice, and Salon among many others, and has been a producer for MTV News and Fuse.

Lappé applied the Page 69 Test to Shooting War, which is illustrated by Dan Goldman, and reported the following:

Page 69 (below, click to enlarge) in my new graphic novel Shooting War has no dialogue. It shows our protagonist Jimmy Burns placing some kind of electronic device in the corner of his Baghdad hotel room. He has just told his producer, a local Iraqi woman, that he think he's under surveillance. He's only been in country for a couple of weeks, and the paranoia is already eating away at his sanity. He will find out soon enough that just because he's paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get him. The year is 2011, and the 26-year-old Burns has found himself in the unlikely position of being a network news correspondent in war-torn Iraq. The Brooklyn-based videoblogger got his big break when he happened to be uploading a live rant in front of a Starbucks when a suicide bomber blew the coffee joint to kingdom come. He becomes an overnight mainstream media star, and is snatched up by a new controversial, no-holds-barred network (Global News: "Your home for 24-hour terror coverage"). The network makes him an offer he can't refuse - a shot reporting from civil war-torn Iraq, where the situation is so dangerous most of their competitors have pulled their star reporters. Burns' greatest dream (to be a war correspondent) becomes his biggest nightmare as he nearly loses his mind in the paranoia, chaos and destruction of the spiraling civil war. On page 69, we see him trying to take matters into his own hands for the first time.

Check out an excerpt from Shooting War and learn more about the book at the official website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue