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Don't Forget Your Briefcase
Not yet published
Expected 17 Mar 26- GenresComics
128 pages, Paperback
Expected publication March 17, 2026
2 people want to read
About the author
Eliot Rahal
134 books10 followersEliot Rahal is a comic book and screen writer/creator.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
What Happens When a Child Picks Up the Nuclear Football: Eliot Rahal’s “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” and the Satire of American Collapse
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 25th, 2026
In “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase,” Eliot Rahal takes a premise so bluntly satirical it almost reads like a one-panel cartoon caption – a 10-year-old boy accidentally walks off with the President’s nuclear football – and then refuses to treat it as a joke alone. The result is a graphic novel that moves with the speed and profanity of a political panic attack while carrying, beneath all that velocity, a grim and unexpectedly tender argument about what adults do when they are entrusted with power they do not deserve.
The book, collected from five issues and drawn by Phillip Sevy, colored by Warnia Sahadewa and lettered by Frank Cvetkovic, opens not in the domestic register of a child’s life but in the ceremonial voice of state power. We are introduced to the “special military liaison” role and to the emergency satchel itself, with its folder of procedures, retaliatory options and “biscuit” authentication card. The sequence is a small marvel of tonal setup. Rahal lets the ritual language of national security do the work of incrimination. The state speaks in grave, constitutional cadences, and the reader can already hear the punchline assembling itself in the wings. The “nuclear football” is described as a symbol of American military might. It is also, in the panels that follow, a briefcase in a room full of other briefcases.
That gap – between what a thing is said to be and how it is actually handled – is the governing logic of the book. If Rahal’s script has a central obsession, it is with misrecognition. The wrong bag is grabbed. The wrong story is told. The wrong person is blamed. The wrong emergency is elevated. The wrong adult is treated as the responsible one. “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” is less a farce about a misplaced object than a satire of a country that keeps mistaking symbols for systems, and systems for care.
The child at the center of all this is Elmo Milfer, a bullied boy who has begun carrying his dead father’s old briefcase to school. Rahal is smart to begin Elmo’s story not with geopolitical chaos but with humiliation. In a principal’s office, his mother, Katrina, learns that classmates have been tormenting him, fixating on the briefcase, stealing it, emptying it, even defiling it. Elmo eventually retaliates by weighting the bag with a brick and seriously injuring a bully. It is a brutally effective opening movement because it establishes the book’s emotional scale before it detonates its political one. In Rahal’s world, a school assault and a nuclear command crisis are not separate genres. They are nested failures. The same adults who miss obvious suffering in a child will later miss, mishandle or strategically reinterpret catastrophe at the level of the state.
Elmo is not written as a saintly child, nor as a precocious little truth-teller dropped into an adult nightmare to expose hypocrisy with innocent clarity. He is frightened, defensive, angry, confused and often funny without trying to be. He is, in other words, a child. That matters. One of the book’s sharpest choices is to refuse the fantasy that children remain untouched by the emotional weather of institutions. Elmo’s life is already governed by adult negligence, adult secrecy and adult language. By the time he stumbles into the White House and then into the aftermath of a presidential assassination, he is not entering the world of adult disorder. He has been living in its local branch all along.
Katrina, his mother, is the book’s emotional fulcrum. A White House communications employee, she is also, as the plot reveals, entangled with Russian intelligence and carrying a private history Elmo does not know. Rahal could have rendered her as pure satirical utility – the compromised functionary, the overworked mother, the bad-luck mule dragging the plot forward – but he gives her something harder and better: competing duties that cannot be reconciled cleanly. She is a mother trying to protect a child, a worker inside an image-making institution, and a person with secrets that have become structural liabilities. In a weaker book, those tensions would flatten into twist mechanics. Here they become the source of much of the novel’s ache. Katrina’s panic is not abstract. It has a body. It has a son. It has a front door and a phone that won’t stop ringing.
If Elmo and Katrina give the book its domestic crisis, Colonel Vanessa Honken gives it its bruised institutional conscience. Honken, the military aide who loses the football in the chaos after the President is shot, is one of the book’s most interesting inventions. She is not idealized. She is exhausted, self-doubting, often reactive, and sometimes played for mordant laughs. Yet she is also one of the few people in the story still trying, however imperfectly, to behave like duty means something other than obedience. In a book filled with operators, opportunists and ideologues, Honken is a soldier who discovers that the chain of command is not a moral chain at all. It is simply a chain.
Rahal has a gift for dialogue that sounds like panic, not exposition. People in “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” do not speak in neatly differentiated literary voices. They interrupt, posture, curse, deflect, overshare and weaponize slogans. This is, in part, the book’s satirical engine. Everyone is talking, and almost nobody is saying what is true. But it is also one reason the book feels so contemporary. Rahal understands the American crisis idiom – the way official speech, therapy speech, conspiracy speech, military speech and internet speech now coexist in the same room, each claiming authority, each already half-memed. At times the script evokes the deadpan apocalypse of “Dr. Strangelove”; elsewhere it has the succession panic and institutional knife-work of “The Death of Stalin.” In its most manic stretches, with a child dragging a state secret through a nation of twitching adults, it edges toward the gleeful tonal whiplash of “Chew,” if “Chew” had been irradiated by cable news and constitutional crisis.
The plot, to Rahal’s credit, does not simply escalate. It metastasizes. The newly sworn-in President, Gretchen Longe, is immediately enclosed by handlers and generals who speak the language of continuity while practicing the art of narrative capture. Russia is collapsing into factional struggle. Intelligence is fragmentary. The assassin may be a lone extremist, a patsy or both. A Russian operative arrives at Katrina’s home. Elmo runs. Cars are stolen. Jails are improvised holding pens. Every room becomes a command center for someone’s version of reality.
This is where Rahal’s satire gets risky, and where the book earns most of its admiration. Political comics often make a mistake that prose satire sometimes escapes: they confuse topicality with insight, stacking references, archetypes and familiar outrages until all that remains is recognition. “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” flirts with that danger. Its world is thick with allusions to the current American atmosphere – collapsing trust, disinformation loops, sovereign-citizen psychosis, analytics-obsessed messaging teams, the speed with which “lone wolf” explanations harden into doctrine, the ambient possibility of geopolitical miscalculation. But Rahal mostly avoids the trap by keeping the book fixed on a simpler and more corrosive question: Who is actually caring for what they have been handed?
The title, initially read as a gag, accumulates force as an indictment. The briefcase is the obvious object, but everyone in this book is carrying something. A child carries grief and shame. A mother carries secrets. A colonel carries duty. A president carries the performance of steadiness. A state carries the power to end the world. The catastrophe begins because one bag is mistaken for another, but the real disaster is older and wider. It is the adult habit of treating responsibility as theater until the moment consequences arrive.
Sevy’s art is crucial to making this argument land. His line is clean and legible in a way that suits the book’s speed, but he is especially strong at staging bodies under pressure. The White House scenes pulse with choreographed chaos – agents lunging, civilians folding, officials reassembling themselves into posture. Domestic interiors, by contrast, are given enough physical detail to register as lived-in and vulnerable. Sevy is very good at faces caught between registers, particularly Katrina and Honken, who are almost always performing composure while leaking fear. The action scenes are brisk and readable, but what lingers are the half-beats – the look before a lie, the flinch after a command, the child’s stare while adults debate abstractions over his head.
Sahadewa’s colors do a subtler but equally important job. The book moves among domestic spaces, institutional corridors, emergency lighting and media glare, and the palette shifts without drawing attention to itself as “style.” There is a practiced intelligence to how color carries tone here. The world of state power often appears clinically lit, flatter, exposed. Domestic scenes can feel warmer but more claustrophobic, as if safety itself has narrowed. In the book’s climactic passages, the colors help sustain a paradox the script depends on: the sense that everything is at once absurdly overlit and morally illegible.
Cvetkovic’s lettering deserves the kind of praise comics criticism too rarely gives lettering. This is a book in which timing is ethics. The interruptions, broadcasts, shouted commands, muttered asides and cross-cut transmissions are not decorative texture. They are the architecture of panic. Cvetkovic lets multiple channels of authority collide without sacrificing clarity. He also knows when to let silence or a sparse bubble do the work after pages of verbal overload. In a story about noise as governance, that restraint matters.
For all its pleasures, “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” is not without limits, and they are mostly the limits of the mode it embraces. Rahal writes in a register of permanent brinkmanship. Even the quiet scenes carry a fuse. That makes the book compulsively readable, but it occasionally compresses complexity into velocity. A few supporting figures function more as embodiments of institutional types than as fully surprising presences. Some satirical beats arrive already sharpened, and the script presses them into the page with such confidence that one wishes, now and then, for a half-step of ambiguity. The book is strongest when it lets contradiction breathe – Katrina as both compromised and caring, Honken as both dutiful and disillusioned, Elmo as both reckless and perceptive. It is slightly less interesting when it turns a character into a delivery system for a thesis the reader has already grasped.
Still, the novel’s broadness is not mere bluntness. Rahal is writing in a tradition of American black comedy that understands exaggeration as a method of precision. Like “Catch-22,” the book knows that bureaucracy becomes clearest when rendered as a language game no sane person would invent. Like “Wag the Dog,” it treats crisis management as a branch of entertainment. Like “The Department of Truth,” it is fascinated by the political consequences of narrative ownership, though Rahal is less metaphysical and more immediate. He is interested in what happens before ideology becomes system – the hour when someone reaches for the wrong briefcase, says the useful lie, chooses optics over care, mistakes authority for competence.
And then there is Elmo, still the best thing in the book. It is easy to praise “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” for being timely, and it is. The book catches, with unnerving accuracy, the texture of a moment when nuclear anxiety has returned to public language, when foreign instability and domestic spectacle feed each other, when every event is instantly narrativized by institutions and influencers alike. But timeliness alone is cheap. What gives the story its force is that all the national-security machinery keeps collapsing back into one boy asking, in one form or another, whether the adults around him are telling the truth.
That question gives the ending its bite. Rahal resolves the plot in a way that is both theatrically satisfying and morally barbed. Publicly, events are folded into a digestible story. Privately, the damage remains unevenly distributed. The internet gets a meme. The state gets a cover story. Indictments land where they can. The machinery rolls on. But the book has spent too much time with its wounded and bewildered people to pretend the cleanup is the same as repair. It understands, as many political satires do not, that the aftermath is where ideology enters the body.
A reviewers verdict on a work like this often turns on whether one believes satire should reveal or merely lampoon. “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” does both. It is foul-mouthed, fast, ridiculous and frequently very funny. It is also, in its own jagged way, a careful book about carelessness. Rahal and his collaborators build an entertaining apocalypse machine, then use it to ask a child-sized question with nation-sized implications: What happens when the people entrusted with the world cannot tell the difference between holding power and holding responsibility?
Quite a lot, this book suggests. And usually all at once.
My rating: 87/100.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 25th, 2026
In “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase,” Eliot Rahal takes a premise so bluntly satirical it almost reads like a one-panel cartoon caption – a 10-year-old boy accidentally walks off with the President’s nuclear football – and then refuses to treat it as a joke alone. The result is a graphic novel that moves with the speed and profanity of a political panic attack while carrying, beneath all that velocity, a grim and unexpectedly tender argument about what adults do when they are entrusted with power they do not deserve.
The book, collected from five issues and drawn by Phillip Sevy, colored by Warnia Sahadewa and lettered by Frank Cvetkovic, opens not in the domestic register of a child’s life but in the ceremonial voice of state power. We are introduced to the “special military liaison” role and to the emergency satchel itself, with its folder of procedures, retaliatory options and “biscuit” authentication card. The sequence is a small marvel of tonal setup. Rahal lets the ritual language of national security do the work of incrimination. The state speaks in grave, constitutional cadences, and the reader can already hear the punchline assembling itself in the wings. The “nuclear football” is described as a symbol of American military might. It is also, in the panels that follow, a briefcase in a room full of other briefcases.
That gap – between what a thing is said to be and how it is actually handled – is the governing logic of the book. If Rahal’s script has a central obsession, it is with misrecognition. The wrong bag is grabbed. The wrong story is told. The wrong person is blamed. The wrong emergency is elevated. The wrong adult is treated as the responsible one. “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” is less a farce about a misplaced object than a satire of a country that keeps mistaking symbols for systems, and systems for care.
The child at the center of all this is Elmo Milfer, a bullied boy who has begun carrying his dead father’s old briefcase to school. Rahal is smart to begin Elmo’s story not with geopolitical chaos but with humiliation. In a principal’s office, his mother, Katrina, learns that classmates have been tormenting him, fixating on the briefcase, stealing it, emptying it, even defiling it. Elmo eventually retaliates by weighting the bag with a brick and seriously injuring a bully. It is a brutally effective opening movement because it establishes the book’s emotional scale before it detonates its political one. In Rahal’s world, a school assault and a nuclear command crisis are not separate genres. They are nested failures. The same adults who miss obvious suffering in a child will later miss, mishandle or strategically reinterpret catastrophe at the level of the state.
Elmo is not written as a saintly child, nor as a precocious little truth-teller dropped into an adult nightmare to expose hypocrisy with innocent clarity. He is frightened, defensive, angry, confused and often funny without trying to be. He is, in other words, a child. That matters. One of the book’s sharpest choices is to refuse the fantasy that children remain untouched by the emotional weather of institutions. Elmo’s life is already governed by adult negligence, adult secrecy and adult language. By the time he stumbles into the White House and then into the aftermath of a presidential assassination, he is not entering the world of adult disorder. He has been living in its local branch all along.
Katrina, his mother, is the book’s emotional fulcrum. A White House communications employee, she is also, as the plot reveals, entangled with Russian intelligence and carrying a private history Elmo does not know. Rahal could have rendered her as pure satirical utility – the compromised functionary, the overworked mother, the bad-luck mule dragging the plot forward – but he gives her something harder and better: competing duties that cannot be reconciled cleanly. She is a mother trying to protect a child, a worker inside an image-making institution, and a person with secrets that have become structural liabilities. In a weaker book, those tensions would flatten into twist mechanics. Here they become the source of much of the novel’s ache. Katrina’s panic is not abstract. It has a body. It has a son. It has a front door and a phone that won’t stop ringing.
If Elmo and Katrina give the book its domestic crisis, Colonel Vanessa Honken gives it its bruised institutional conscience. Honken, the military aide who loses the football in the chaos after the President is shot, is one of the book’s most interesting inventions. She is not idealized. She is exhausted, self-doubting, often reactive, and sometimes played for mordant laughs. Yet she is also one of the few people in the story still trying, however imperfectly, to behave like duty means something other than obedience. In a book filled with operators, opportunists and ideologues, Honken is a soldier who discovers that the chain of command is not a moral chain at all. It is simply a chain.
Rahal has a gift for dialogue that sounds like panic, not exposition. People in “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” do not speak in neatly differentiated literary voices. They interrupt, posture, curse, deflect, overshare and weaponize slogans. This is, in part, the book’s satirical engine. Everyone is talking, and almost nobody is saying what is true. But it is also one reason the book feels so contemporary. Rahal understands the American crisis idiom – the way official speech, therapy speech, conspiracy speech, military speech and internet speech now coexist in the same room, each claiming authority, each already half-memed. At times the script evokes the deadpan apocalypse of “Dr. Strangelove”; elsewhere it has the succession panic and institutional knife-work of “The Death of Stalin.” In its most manic stretches, with a child dragging a state secret through a nation of twitching adults, it edges toward the gleeful tonal whiplash of “Chew,” if “Chew” had been irradiated by cable news and constitutional crisis.
The plot, to Rahal’s credit, does not simply escalate. It metastasizes. The newly sworn-in President, Gretchen Longe, is immediately enclosed by handlers and generals who speak the language of continuity while practicing the art of narrative capture. Russia is collapsing into factional struggle. Intelligence is fragmentary. The assassin may be a lone extremist, a patsy or both. A Russian operative arrives at Katrina’s home. Elmo runs. Cars are stolen. Jails are improvised holding pens. Every room becomes a command center for someone’s version of reality.
This is where Rahal’s satire gets risky, and where the book earns most of its admiration. Political comics often make a mistake that prose satire sometimes escapes: they confuse topicality with insight, stacking references, archetypes and familiar outrages until all that remains is recognition. “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” flirts with that danger. Its world is thick with allusions to the current American atmosphere – collapsing trust, disinformation loops, sovereign-citizen psychosis, analytics-obsessed messaging teams, the speed with which “lone wolf” explanations harden into doctrine, the ambient possibility of geopolitical miscalculation. But Rahal mostly avoids the trap by keeping the book fixed on a simpler and more corrosive question: Who is actually caring for what they have been handed?
The title, initially read as a gag, accumulates force as an indictment. The briefcase is the obvious object, but everyone in this book is carrying something. A child carries grief and shame. A mother carries secrets. A colonel carries duty. A president carries the performance of steadiness. A state carries the power to end the world. The catastrophe begins because one bag is mistaken for another, but the real disaster is older and wider. It is the adult habit of treating responsibility as theater until the moment consequences arrive.
Sevy’s art is crucial to making this argument land. His line is clean and legible in a way that suits the book’s speed, but he is especially strong at staging bodies under pressure. The White House scenes pulse with choreographed chaos – agents lunging, civilians folding, officials reassembling themselves into posture. Domestic interiors, by contrast, are given enough physical detail to register as lived-in and vulnerable. Sevy is very good at faces caught between registers, particularly Katrina and Honken, who are almost always performing composure while leaking fear. The action scenes are brisk and readable, but what lingers are the half-beats – the look before a lie, the flinch after a command, the child’s stare while adults debate abstractions over his head.
Sahadewa’s colors do a subtler but equally important job. The book moves among domestic spaces, institutional corridors, emergency lighting and media glare, and the palette shifts without drawing attention to itself as “style.” There is a practiced intelligence to how color carries tone here. The world of state power often appears clinically lit, flatter, exposed. Domestic scenes can feel warmer but more claustrophobic, as if safety itself has narrowed. In the book’s climactic passages, the colors help sustain a paradox the script depends on: the sense that everything is at once absurdly overlit and morally illegible.
Cvetkovic’s lettering deserves the kind of praise comics criticism too rarely gives lettering. This is a book in which timing is ethics. The interruptions, broadcasts, shouted commands, muttered asides and cross-cut transmissions are not decorative texture. They are the architecture of panic. Cvetkovic lets multiple channels of authority collide without sacrificing clarity. He also knows when to let silence or a sparse bubble do the work after pages of verbal overload. In a story about noise as governance, that restraint matters.
For all its pleasures, “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” is not without limits, and they are mostly the limits of the mode it embraces. Rahal writes in a register of permanent brinkmanship. Even the quiet scenes carry a fuse. That makes the book compulsively readable, but it occasionally compresses complexity into velocity. A few supporting figures function more as embodiments of institutional types than as fully surprising presences. Some satirical beats arrive already sharpened, and the script presses them into the page with such confidence that one wishes, now and then, for a half-step of ambiguity. The book is strongest when it lets contradiction breathe – Katrina as both compromised and caring, Honken as both dutiful and disillusioned, Elmo as both reckless and perceptive. It is slightly less interesting when it turns a character into a delivery system for a thesis the reader has already grasped.
Still, the novel’s broadness is not mere bluntness. Rahal is writing in a tradition of American black comedy that understands exaggeration as a method of precision. Like “Catch-22,” the book knows that bureaucracy becomes clearest when rendered as a language game no sane person would invent. Like “Wag the Dog,” it treats crisis management as a branch of entertainment. Like “The Department of Truth,” it is fascinated by the political consequences of narrative ownership, though Rahal is less metaphysical and more immediate. He is interested in what happens before ideology becomes system – the hour when someone reaches for the wrong briefcase, says the useful lie, chooses optics over care, mistakes authority for competence.
And then there is Elmo, still the best thing in the book. It is easy to praise “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” for being timely, and it is. The book catches, with unnerving accuracy, the texture of a moment when nuclear anxiety has returned to public language, when foreign instability and domestic spectacle feed each other, when every event is instantly narrativized by institutions and influencers alike. But timeliness alone is cheap. What gives the story its force is that all the national-security machinery keeps collapsing back into one boy asking, in one form or another, whether the adults around him are telling the truth.
That question gives the ending its bite. Rahal resolves the plot in a way that is both theatrically satisfying and morally barbed. Publicly, events are folded into a digestible story. Privately, the damage remains unevenly distributed. The internet gets a meme. The state gets a cover story. Indictments land where they can. The machinery rolls on. But the book has spent too much time with its wounded and bewildered people to pretend the cleanup is the same as repair. It understands, as many political satires do not, that the aftermath is where ideology enters the body.
A reviewers verdict on a work like this often turns on whether one believes satire should reveal or merely lampoon. “Don’t Forget Your Briefcase” does both. It is foul-mouthed, fast, ridiculous and frequently very funny. It is also, in its own jagged way, a careful book about carelessness. Rahal and his collaborators build an entertaining apocalypse machine, then use it to ask a child-sized question with nation-sized implications: What happens when the people entrusted with the world cannot tell the difference between holding power and holding responsibility?
Quite a lot, this book suggests. And usually all at once.
My rating: 87/100.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Rounded down from 3.5 stars.
Don't Forget Your Briefcase is a difficult comic to review without spoiling everything. It wasn’t the comic for me, but I’m glad I read it.
Don't Forget your Briefcase
- Author: Eliot Rahal
- Illustrated by Phillip Sevy
- Colorist: Warnia Sahadewa
- Letterer: Frank Cvetkovic
- 128 Pages Long
- Published on 3/17/2026 by Mad Cave Studios
Thank you Mad Case Studios for providing an Advance Review Copy of this ebook for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Vanessa Honken, special aide to the President, is tasked with carrying the nuclear football, a briefcase holding the nuclear launch codes of the United States. Following an assassination attempt on the president, ten-year-old Elmo's school briefcase is inadvertently switched with the nuclear football. Shenanigans ensue and Katrina, Vanessa, and Elmo are pulled deeper and deeper into a spiral of violence and intrigue. Throughout its narrative, we meet shady politicians, warlike generals, cynical anarchists, cutthroat spies, and violent extremists.
On the one hand, it is a bloody political satire in which the apparent stability of American politics is revealed to be filled with charlatans and maintained by acts of violence, small and large. In the world of the comic, the American way of life teeters on a knife's edge and is doomed, like the Roman Empire before it, to decline and fall. It's a sometimes heavy comic intended for adult readers. You can expect violence and language. Your milage may vary.
The emotional core of this comic, however, is formed by Katrina Milfer, her 10-year-old son Elmo, and Colonel Vanessa Honken. So many of us find our safety and stability in the political and societal structures of America. The story of this comic pulls this rug out from under its protagonists and forces them to grapple with just how vulnerable they really are. In a world in chaos, where can we find a sense of safety and security?
Don't Forget Your Briefcase is apocalyptic in the ancient literary sense (a word that literally means "unveiling). It pulls back the curtain on America's sense of safety and security. In four fell strokes (assassination, espionage, radicalization, and nuclear war), the old world order is coming to a close. What remains on the other side?
Each of our key players has their own ideas about what the new world should look like and their own means of getting it there. I’m not sure all of the plot points add up in hindsight, but the ending was excellent. I won’t spoil the ending, but the comic lands in an unexpected and hopeful place.
I found myself feeling melancholy when I finished this comic, but a good melancholy I think. If you’re feeling discouraged or cynical about the state of the world, this comic might be the catharsis you’ve looking for.
3.5/5 stars
Don't Forget Your Briefcase is a difficult comic to review without spoiling everything. It wasn’t the comic for me, but I’m glad I read it.
Don't Forget your Briefcase
- Author: Eliot Rahal
- Illustrated by Phillip Sevy
- Colorist: Warnia Sahadewa
- Letterer: Frank Cvetkovic
- 128 Pages Long
- Published on 3/17/2026 by Mad Cave Studios
Thank you Mad Case Studios for providing an Advance Review Copy of this ebook for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
Vanessa Honken, special aide to the President, is tasked with carrying the nuclear football, a briefcase holding the nuclear launch codes of the United States. Following an assassination attempt on the president, ten-year-old Elmo's school briefcase is inadvertently switched with the nuclear football. Shenanigans ensue and Katrina, Vanessa, and Elmo are pulled deeper and deeper into a spiral of violence and intrigue. Throughout its narrative, we meet shady politicians, warlike generals, cynical anarchists, cutthroat spies, and violent extremists.
On the one hand, it is a bloody political satire in which the apparent stability of American politics is revealed to be filled with charlatans and maintained by acts of violence, small and large. In the world of the comic, the American way of life teeters on a knife's edge and is doomed, like the Roman Empire before it, to decline and fall. It's a sometimes heavy comic intended for adult readers. You can expect violence and language. Your milage may vary.
The emotional core of this comic, however, is formed by Katrina Milfer, her 10-year-old son Elmo, and Colonel Vanessa Honken. So many of us find our safety and stability in the political and societal structures of America. The story of this comic pulls this rug out from under its protagonists and forces them to grapple with just how vulnerable they really are. In a world in chaos, where can we find a sense of safety and security?
Don't Forget Your Briefcase is apocalyptic in the ancient literary sense (a word that literally means "unveiling). It pulls back the curtain on America's sense of safety and security. In four fell strokes (assassination, espionage, radicalization, and nuclear war), the old world order is coming to a close. What remains on the other side?
Each of our key players has their own ideas about what the new world should look like and their own means of getting it there. I’m not sure all of the plot points add up in hindsight, but the ending was excellent. I won’t spoil the ending, but the comic lands in an unexpected and hopeful place.
I found myself feeling melancholy when I finished this comic, but a good melancholy I think. If you’re feeling discouraged or cynical about the state of the world, this comic might be the catharsis you’ve looking for.
3.5/5 stars
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Great read!! I love the storyline so much!! The story so funny and a simple read!! I love that Elmo mom loves him so much she rather betray the country she served as spy. I love the ending that all 3 of them stay together.
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Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for giving me the chance to read this book in advance~
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Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for giving me the chance to read this book in advance~
November 10, 2025
not for me.
Read
December 22, 2025entretenido pero un final anticlimatico
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews