P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institute penned a book called Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, in which he explored the power of robotics and artificial intelligence to redefine global war as we know it in the coming years. Scott Chitwood explores the same idea in his new miniseries “Drone,” a comic book that sets itself up using a fascinating concept and ruminating over the most disastrous of global consequences.
Three couch-potato nerds open the first issue of Drone, where they all convene in an apartment belonging to David, a hacker who used his father’s National Security Agency’s clearance code to hack the government’s most private of military communication feeds. David and his buddies Mark and Phil later become glued to the computer screen as a secret war unfolds in Kazakhstan in which the United States employs remote-controlled drones, leveling the surrounding environment with ease. After a series of event, David, Phil, and Mark become involved in the battle with a hotwired Wii and some salt-of-the-earth patriotism.
If the general plot comes off as weak, that’s because it is. The three main characters are obnoxious and the story threads are coincidental at best, but those points are not where the strengths of the comic book lie. The theme of war and the morality behind it floats around the unfolding plot of Drone #1 like a bobbing question mark, forcing readers to ask themselves how they would feel about advanced robotics in warfare.
Is it justified because of its potential to eliminate human casualty? What of a nation’s investment of life into a campaign of war? If a citizenry’s collective blood is removed from the equation, won’t war escalate and engulf all continents? These are all of the ideas that popped into my head as I turned the pages of Drone.
So long as future issues of Drone don’t sidetrack into a storyline where the robots become sentient, the miniseries will hopefully continue to probe questions of war, leaving the answers up to us to decide. A moral and intellectual challenge like this is refreshing to find in a comic book, as it’s a topic of vital and dangerous ubiquity.
This comic book review originally appeared on Comic News on 11 September 2009.
