He’s an unusual artist for being equally strong when it comes to designing technology and depicting people. Mandella is an everyman pawn, but every person from his companies throughout the book is named, in the early stages given a face by Marvano to accentuate their humanity amid a bureaucracy that considers them numbers. It’s not just via the blindness of the military mindset that Haldeman delivers his anti-war message. Establishing the tone applied to military decisions throughout, three months of utterly lethal advanced training takes place on a planet with harsh cold temperatures, only for the surviving troops to be shipped out to a planet where the lowest temperature exceeds the highest recorded on Earth by twenty degrees. The opening pages show William Mandella, his surname a near anagram of Haldeman, one of a hundred specifically selected troops being sent off planet for advanced training readying them to fight the Tauran enemy, rarely seen, yet continually demonised. The result is this version of The Forever War, collecting the three English language volumes long out print. Unusually for the times, when Belgian comics creator Marvano (Marc Van Oppen) contacted Haldeman about adapting the story, Haldeman supplied the script. Having been unable to defer his own co-opted participation in the ideological dogma of the Vietnam War, Joe Haldeman served his time and then wrote an ultimately award winning novel slamming war and the military mindset.
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