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Surprise Attack: The Battle Of Shiloh

	Author: Will Trotter Article Type: Book Review Publication Date: 2/16/2007 Book Author: Larry Hama, Ron Wagner, Scott Moore Publisher: Cover art by Ron Wagner Related Categories: American Civil War, North America

THE WORDS ARE VERY GOOD

To regular readers of The Wargamer, Osprey Press needs no introduction. This publisher has commissioned and mass-distributed what is surely the most numerous, comprehensive, and far-reaching series of military history books ever to grace a library's shelves. Osprey is also one of those rare trademarks that seems always to deliver the goods plus a little something extra. Whether you're interested in the Condor Legion's part in the Spanish Civil War, or the equipage of Mongol horse-archers, chances are that Osprey has or eventually will publish a title dedicated to that particular niche, no matter how esoteric.

Pick up an Osprey book and you can feel the mystique (and hear the seductive little voice in your head, whispering: "Don't you want to collect all of us?"): each volume is relatively uniform in size and format and the slim yet content-rich design, it has always seemed to me, practically cries out "Collectable! Collectable!". And what lover of military history would not want to collect them? Their very uniformity - almost haughtily understated - is the very essence of classy; they're easy to carry, store and organize; they're always written with crisp authority and clear, graceful prose; and they always - like a circus car disgorging an impossible number of scrunched-up clowns - contain more photos, maps, and artwork than you would think could possibly be packed into such slender volumes.

Now Osprey's added a new line to its variegated catalogue, and one whose time is long overdue. The new imprint is called "Osprey Graphic History", and let no man speak the words "comic books" without throwing salt over his shoulder and importuning Mars not to chastise him with thunderbolts. Clearly, Osprey's positioning these books to be a respectable, school-system-approved alternative to what have come to be known as "graphic novels" (which is more or less synonymous - unless the author/artist is a genius auteur such as Art Spiegelman, Harvey Peckar, or Robert Crump - with "pretentious comic book"; and which proliferated so swiftly in the mid-Seventies because "comic books" per se had to be certifiably gutless, sexless, and bloodless by the Comics Code Authority, whereas a pricey black-and-white "graphic novel" could be as full of sex and gore as its creator(s) wanted it to be.

Needless to say, these Osprey volumes don't even mention sex, and, even though large and grimly sanguine battles are depicted - and quite skillfully so, in terms of the books' faithfulness to historical events - the depictions of violence are muted and stylized. The dead are shown, and the lethality of combat acknowledged; the ghastliness of the wounded soldiers' suffering is alluded to, but like their matter-of-fact inclusion of death itself, Osprey's chosen to treat this whole dodgy aspect of combat in a carefully decorous manner - the corpses strewn across the battlefield are rendered with a sad, muted dignity that strikes me as appropriate and…um…tasteful. As these things go, that is.

Nor does the text "talk down" to the 12-15-year-olds who are presumably the target audience. Author Larry Hama, a distinguished alumnus of the Marvel Comics line (he scripted a multitude of G. I. Joe stories and did his share and more of scripts for Batman, Electra, Wolverine, and capped-off his Marvel years by creating the popular Bucky O'Hare character) has the chops to get the job done smoothly. All that expertise shines through in his clear and vigorous analysis of the Battle of Shiloh and, perhaps a more difficult task, his comprehensive but very compact treatment of the strategic considerations that led to this horrific encounter.¹ Nothing crucial is left out: why the armies met there and how they marched to arrive at the fateful little country church whose name ("Place of Peace") became forever attached to what was, at that time, the bloodiest day in American History.

Hama does accomplish one thing that I found mildly surprising and also laudable - he makes the point, one that may never have occurred to fifteen-year-olds before, that no battle takes place in a vacuum; big engagements don't "just happen" (even when they appear to on a tactical level) - like storms arising from the collision of major weather fronts, they are set in motion long before they erupt.

An excellent summary of Civil War causes and issues leads off this well-organized young-readers' account; and although brief, the thumbnail sketches of the major commanders are accurate and helpful.

How "violent" do you want a war comic to be when it's aimed at pre-adolescents-to-17-year-olds (my estimate of the targeted audience's range, not Osprey's)? Osprey has chosen, perhaps, to err on the side of caution; it won't warp younger minds to learn that soldiers don't always have time to wear clean uniforms, or that a wound inflicted by a .58 caliber Minie ball generally caused more discomfort and damage than the bee-sting impression you get from this drawing…

How many times have we (i.e., the wargaming community and/or this web site in particular) heard the hoary old complaint about our favorite genre ("It's just all SOOOO complicated!") advanced as a justification for indifference or intellectual sloth? Such mind-narrowing attitudes may already be lurking in the subconscious of adolescent readers who pick up these Osprey books, and the publisher has wisely tried to pre-empt their negative effects by carefully setting the stage for each major battle covered in the series. This is accomplished by wrapping around the core-chronology a concise, logical, and easily-followed narrative-of-context - the vital building-blocks of information are presented in discreet, easily digested segments made more inviting by the clever, ample use of "white space".

¹ Like most people who haven't tried it, I used to think that comic-strip writing would be a snap! Until 1978, that is, when I was invited to script a weekly one-page sci-fi satire entitled "The Adventures of Sam Exegius, Private Eye" It plumb wore me out trying to match the tight restrictions of space with the need for snappy patter, multiple sight-gags, and a swift narrative flow, one which was always required to end with a cliff-hanger so this week's readers would be lured back next week, in perpetuity it was hoped. Piece o' cake, right? It took me six months to get comfortable with the demands-of-the-medium (and the strip itself was canceled after three years); probably just as well - we were starting to recycle old gags and hoping nobody would notice. That was an enlightening gig, and although I became proficient at the genre, I was definitely not a "natural" when it came to scripting a comic book narrative. Mr. Hama clearly is, and anyone who can crank out this kind of writing, to merciless deadlines, week after week, has my deepest respect.