Working as a freelance war correspondent, David Axe has visited a fearsome number of the world’s most volatile hot spots, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and Chad. Between hitting deadlines for The Washington Times, C-SPAN and the BBC (or anyone else who offered license to travel and a minimum of editorial meddling), Axe chronicled the more personal side of his exploits via the Web comic War Is Boring (warisboring.com), illustrated by cartoonist Matt Bors.

Now, Axe’s eponymous graphic novel offers a unique glimpse of the dicey intervals between the bylines and the broadcasts: long stretches of tedium punctuated with random outbursts of violence and danger. The memoir’s structure serves the premise well. Slow to start, it picks up steam when Axe reaches Afghanistan, and detonates in Mogadishu, where he and his girlfriend encounter mortal peril.

Equally significant are the unvarnished insights Axe provides into his own deeply conflicted psyche. It takes nothing away from his achievements as a journalist – mostly unmentioned here – to suggest that the most urgent struggles Axe details are his own ambivalence toward his motivations, his near-narcissistic need for action and his growing inability to cope with domestic normalcy.

Bors’s clean, simple style suits Axe’s perspective; faces look much the same from one failing state to the next. That slightly whimsical neutrality turns out to be one of the book’s greatest strengths. In the aftermath of one especially gruesome car-bomb ambush, the playful smiles its innocent victims wore moments before linger and haunt.

Steve Smith