Written by: Brian K. Vaughan
Art by: Steve Skroce
Publisher: Image
More akin to Ex Machina than a Saga, We Stand On Guard is Vaughan and Skroce pulling all of their robot action figures and army men out of their giant toy treasure chest and imagining deep, complicated, and biting political commentary, emotion, and pain beneath their plastic plotting and hand-painted horrors of war.
We Stand On Guard, like most Vaughan books, focuses more on characters and settings as opposed to intricate plot and structure. The world displayed in the pages of this comic is unfolded before your eyes not through exposition or blatant explanation, but through the eyes of the people who are living in it and the book is better for it. And while the idea of “USA vs. Canada…With Robots!” may seem slightly absurd in concept, Vaughan pushes it to its entire potential historically, fictionally, and in the way the war is waged through it’s high-tech drone weaponry. Vaughan’s world is well realized through Steve Skroce’s pencils. His detailed double-page spreads and intricate rendering of vast-vistas of robotic destructions are a sight to behold which is well worth the price of admissions ($2.99, what a steal!). While his pencils may falter a tiny bit in displaying organic facial expressions, it never brings down the book whatsoever.
This books trajectory remains hard to gauge, and that can be both a strength and a weakness for some readers. While so much of this book is dedicated to (brilliant) character work, some may find the lack of a concrete plot trajectory before them. However, I doubt this will deter any reader.
It’s a new BKV book, what the hell are you doing reading this? Buy it.
