Escalation. This is a ridiculous comparison, but I'm going to make it anyway: back in 1977, when I saw Star Wars, I was eleven years old that summer, but I had already read a lot of science fiction and fantasy, and I enjoyed the visuals and the action and the characters and the speed--the velocity!--of that movie, but even then, at the age of eleven, I thought, well, that was fun, but that Force stuff is really stupid, and I wasn't really all that compelled. (I really wasn't--I guess you kind of had to know me back then.)
Three years later, I was older but not really much wiser, and The Empire Strikes Back will always remain, for me, a high water mark in what a sequel can truly accomplish, because that film took what had come before and kicked everything I didn't like or felt moribund about OUT and put a whole lot of crazy dark mind-expanding mess IN. It was eye opening.
More than thirty years later, I'm typing on a computer a bunch of words that I will soon send out into the world, for better or worse, and Star Wars has been sequelled into irrelevancy, but storytellers have moved on, and gotten wiser, and learned to craft compelling story arcs . . .
The first book of Unknown Soldier was all about the set-up: the characters, the main character, Uganda, the violence, the horror, the brutality.
This second book is a definitive ratcheting up of the tension and the violence (I didn't think the violence could be more overwhelming than it was in the first book but I was wrong) and the stakes involved for the characters, and it's just tremendous.
And there is a wonderful note from one of the artists, as well as a very insightful and brief essay surveying the tragic history of the Ugandan "nation"--the imposition of borders, the religious fervor, all the things you may have known but still need to learn.
And . . . one of the many distinct and powerful advantages of choosing to tell a story, especially a graphic story like this one, in a graphic narrative, is that it is so simple and yet so very complex, at the same time. Choices in mood and camera angles are as easy to change as pen nibs. But here, ah here, in this arc, we see how drawing what you cannot fully explain can be used also as a method to heal, within a story of how nearly impossible it will be to end such internecine conflict.
I TOLD you to read this. Why haven't you started yet?