I toy with a various different writing assignments in my composition courses, typically crafting assignments based on our readings. Last spring I had students construct zines since we read riot grrrl memoirs. I’ve had students create their own comics, either scripts or full fledged comics. This semester, I am having students write fan letters. Since we are reading some early EC Comics, notably a collection of Weird Fantasy and a collection of Shock Suspenstories, students will construct a fan letter to the publisher of these series, either praising them for a story, criticizing a story, or writing about some other aspect of the story. Rhetorically, their letter will contain an argument, but it will be more informal than most other essays that they will write. To help them see what this will look like, they are reading the letters’ pages in the comics, and I am providing them with an example of a fan letter of my own to Rick Remender and Daniel Acuña on the publication of their new series Escape.

Escape Team!

I just finished Escape #1, and all I can say is wow! You have something really special brewing here. I don’t typically look out for new series. I don’t scan the internet for new books to read. Instead, I go into my local shop, pick up my pulls, and then scan the shelves. It was during my last trip to my shop that I saw Escape #1. I have been reading Remender’s The Seasons and a colleague actually just let me borrow The Sacrificers, which I devoured in a couple of days. When I saw the cover, I did pull up the series online to get a synopsis, and that, combined with Acuña serving as illustrator, led me to purchase a copy. When I got home, it was the first thing I read, and I reiterate, wow!

The issue did not disappoint in the action department with Milton Shaw and his crew flying to their target and eventually getting shot down over enemy territory. The action recalled the dog fights in Star Wars that George Lucas modeled after World War II dogfight footage. It maintained a pulse-pounding pace, causing me to feel like Milton, gripping the flight stick as he tried to maintain control of Ol’ Sockeye. However, the action merely served as an appetizer to the main course, a thought-provoking examination of war and the psychological cost of conflict.

As they approach the target, the crew debates whether or not to follow through the bombing since the Narenian military surrounded the target with civilians, hoping to stave off an attack. The debate comes down to the cost of war, whose civilians “deserve” to die, and what cost Milton, his crew, and others are willing to pay to their own psychological wellbeing, to bring about an end to the war. While some, like Milton, argue that the Narenian soldiers kill babies and torch old folks, Flynn points out that most “had no choice.” They had to “follow orders or watch their families hang for it,” and now that they are in this deep, they know what will happen to them when they get caught, so they keep fighting. The crew drops the bombs, hoping to end the war because, as Milton says, if they don’t act, “we bury twice as many of ours tomorrow.”

At the end of the issue, you point out that the series is a war story, an action fueled adventure in the vein of war movies and serials. Yet, you also point out that it serves as “a stark look at the cost everyone pays in war, from the righteous pilots and innocent civilians to the generations that follow.” This aspect made me think about Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, which I actually rewatched with the kids the night before I picked up Escape #1. Watching that film as a middle-aged man whose grandfather, like Rick’s grandfather, served in the war, I kept thinking about the trauma that war causes, bringing everyday individuals into the conflict. Specifically, I kept thinking about Captain Miller’s tremors and his fears even as he leads his men. Back home, Miller taught high school English, but in the war he became a leader, a captain to a group of men under his command.

What drew me into Escape #1 is the exploration of the complexities of war, the ways it becomes easy for us to create an “us” for “them” mentality, especially during conflict. The crew’s conversation about whether or not to bomb the cannon, specifically because of the civilians surrounding it, brought to mind Captain Miller’s conversation with Technical Sergeant Mike Horvath. Miller tells Horvath that he thinks about those men he has lost under his command in relation to how many people he saves. It becomes his way to justify war. Miller tells Horvath, “Every time you kill one of your men, you tell yourself you just saved the lives of two, three, ten, a hundred others. We lost, what, thirty-one on the cliffs [on D-Day]? I’ll bet we saved ten times that number by putting out those guns. That’s over three hundred men. Maybe five hundred. A thousand. Ten thousand.”

While Miller talks about men under his command, Lillian Smith, when speaking with girls ranging in age from 6–18 at Laurel Falls Camp for Girls in 1945, following the bombing of Hiroshima, tells them about the horrors of war. The young girls ask her if they would have died in the explosion, and Smith tells them, “Yes.” One of the girls continues by saying, “. . . suppose we felt everything our enemies were feeling, it’d be terrible! You’d never be able to fight them. It’d be like bombing your own family!” To this, Smith tells the campers, “We’d find it hard to have enemies if we cared about what happened to them. War makes us cut a lot of bridges we’ve been spinning all our lives.” The use of anthropomorphic animals as the characters, as you point out at the end of the issue works to “evoke deeper sympathy and reduce bias,” allowing us to see what Miller, Smith, and you point out about the atrocities and impact of war on our very beings.

The crew’s debate about whether or not to drop the bombs on civilians, and then the justification of dropping the bombs in relation to how many people on their side that the bombing would save, highlights the horror of war and the horrific split-second decisions individuals make in war that reverberate throughout the years. Like Saving Private Ryan and Lillian Smith’s comments, Escape doesn’t shy away from these aspects of conflict, and it presents us with important questions about ourselves and the ways we think about other people.

Congratulations on a fantastic first issue! I can’t wait to see where it goes from here!

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.