We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Josh Dysart, writer of Unknown Soldier. Given a slight tendency to speak at length on both sides, here is the first part (which will be three altogether) of the highly anticipated interview with a man who has created probably one of the best, literary graphic novels of the decade. The complexities of this piece of fiction is seemingly infinite; but like any well made web, the only way to really understand the labor that went into it, is to begin untangling.

The Unseen Eye: With the unfortunate cancellation of the series, do you feel that the story will be complete in its ending? The initial flashbacks of Moses’s origin story implies a much longer story arch.

Josh: If I’m being completely honest I think you’re going to see a lot more density of the pulp elements than you did in previous archs; we’ve really worked hard in this series to submerge those elements and keep the series as grounded in reality as we can… considering that we’re discussing a CIA programmed super soldier.

And what you’re going to see in these last 5 issues is a lot more of that brought up to the surface. But I still think that we’re going to see a complete ending. It’s not the ending I would of ultimately liked to have done, but back in December I literally had a dream that we were canceled. And it wasn’t a prophetic dream because our numbers were bad it was just kind of my unconscious waking me up, literally. I called my Editor and decided, before we ever got the cancellation notice, that we would start working on the ending. And so we devised a way to begin planting these elements that would allow us to wrap up if we had to in a quick manner, but still give us open enough spaces that we could put other stories in there.

That allowed us to do what we’re hopefully going to be able to pull off in these next 5 issues. We even have a one-shot that takes up a lot of space, or real estate, as I like to call it. I think we’re going to be able to pull this off.

UE: Are you going to have any double sized issues or is it going to be the standard 30 pages?

Josh: No, we have 22 pages of story and art in each issue, nothing oversized. They really kind of swooped in on us with the cancellation so it’s going to be interesting. I’m actually writing issue 23 today, so I haven’t even really done it. It’s just talk right now. Who knows, really.

UE: About the balance of violence present in your comic, specifically in issue 20 we noted that he commits his own kind of suicide, in which he experiences the afterlife through the manifestation of a white rhino. He lets the Unknown Soldier take over, all the violence it implies. Do you think that violence is ever justified? Which we ask given the non-fictional content of your stories.

Josh: Institutionalized violence is tricky, especially within the context of East Africa with groups like the Lord’s Resistance Armies. And to be quite honest, I don’t really know the answer. I used to identify myself as a pacifist. I have since changed my views on that. I don’t have a problem with Navy seals snipers taking out a Somali pirates to save human lives. I don’t have a problem with killing high level Al’Quaida operatives. I had to redefine my notion of what passes as legitimate violence. And that is a philosophical discussion that I will probably have with myself for the rest of my life. I don’t engage in violence, and I’m not in a position where anything I can do that’s violent is going to make the world a better place.

The book is an attempt on my part to deal with that exact question with out presenting an answer because I don’t presuppose to know.

I think I would like to see Joseph Kony taken out of the equation. Now whether it’s done through death or capture is irrelevant to me. I want to see what’s going to bring the most social healing to the East African areas that are inflicted. We have 22 years of failed attempts to kill Kony and what that has done has caused more aggression and more violence. There really is a difference between haphazard violence and directed, meditated, careful violence. Surgical violence versus the kind of thing that Moses represents in the book which his non-surgical violence. He’s a loose cannon. He hasn’t made the situation any better.

UE: Like during the first trade, his interference with the Catholic Nun and the girls at St. Mary’s School.

Josh: It’s interesting… we try to find the balance between him doing good and him doing ill-will. That first story arch is very loosely based on the Aboke Girls incident, where several women were stolen from an all-girls school in Alcholi Land. Comparatively none of those girls escaped that situation. Many died, many were forced into LRA for slavery, some may have escaped but a lot didn’t.

In our rewriting of this moment, Moses does save lives, he did bring people back. Children also died in doing that; children that were socialized into an unconditional life of violence, which by no means was there personal choice. Besides, what kind of a personal choice can a 12 year old make anyway?

It gets very complicated… what is the right way to do this? And that’s a perennial question that units who face child soldiers have to deal with all the time. Do we bomb them out of existence and just write off these children…who in no way choice to be in this life, or do we find some other way to combat them? It’s a very very difficult question. Probably one that a comic book cannot bear out, I now know in retrospect.

UE: You can only show an iteration of that situation and leave it to the reader to make their own judgment.

Josh: It’s kind of my job as the persona making the dominant creative decisions to find ways that both show this as a successful method of attack, for lack of a better term, or an unsuccessful method- and then weigh that. Generally, that’s how we should approach these very complex issues, by just being open and honest with ourselves and our dialogue. As honest as a pulp action comic can be.

UE: Jack is an open and honest speaker, for example. Do you think he balances out Moses’s character by serving as a voice of reason? And what provokes the character transition we see when Jack helps Moses during the Memorial Dinner scene?

Josh: It’s true that Jack does step up and behaves in what appears to be an ethical manner to a certain degree. But what Jack ultimately wants to see by the end of that trade, is the people who are making his life hell– dead. He does manage to achieve that through his friendship with Moses; something he couldn’t have achieved on his own. Jack has ability to do whatever is in his best interest. Having said that, I believe (because I’m writing it right now) that Jack needs a friend. He’s all alone, and so is Moses. They are the kind of people who don’t make friends; a tribe of two, really. Jack has spent his whole life on the run pissing off everybody who put any faith into him, including the institution that hired him and brought him out to Africa in the first place. While Moses has only the memory of Sera. Moses has made a decision to surrender to the Unknown Soldier’s personality: the killing in the IDP camp that Moses learns he was involved in, and what we just saw in Issue 20 with Moses being subsumed. I think all of that would have happened a lot sooner if he didn’t have the moment with Jack; those few days where he had a friend. And the friend was manipulative and self serving.

UE: And he knew that.

Josh: Exactly, and you know what? All friends are manipulative… haha.. That’s not true I don’t actually believe that.. But anyway, Jack and Moses serve each other a great deal and I never thought about the possibility of them being opposite aspects of the same person, but I really love that you brought that up. That’s interesting to me, and maybe unconsciously that’s something that made it into the works. It’s a nice observation.

UE: So Sera’s initial impression of Jack in the first trade, where she calls him out and instantly doesn’t trust him, is accurate? It’s interesting that she picks up on this immediately.

Josh: Sera is the best human being in this book. And Maluku. Two people who have a sound humanist philosophy and stick do it and don’t waiver. Sera can just see Jack’s aura: and it’s this dirty gray, drug induced, hooker stained aura that Jack walks around with. Sera is one of those amazing human beings that you come across in life and she sniffs him out, absolutely. He’s totally dogdy. Look at him.

UE: Just as she sniffs out her husband, turning it into a hunt. In that situation, she doesn’t react like a ‘typical’ person would be expected. Which for us, really demonstrated the strength of her character.

Josh: That’s a really interesting thing. My editor and I were having a discussion, a lot like you and I are having right now, about what to do with Sera. We really loved her… and the the three women in the world who are reading the comic book (laughter) that knew her very well.

I am a non-religious person, but I was really interested in the notion of Sera as a good Christian, but not a stereotypical Christian that we see represented in the media a lot. I was really into this character and we were worried that we had created this really strong, interesting, intelligent person who was a great counterbalance to the book. A book where everyone else has descended into these very dark places.

So what was she going to turn into? A doting wife? A loving suffering creature? I thought that would do her such a disservice. And that’s when we came up with our angle: No, she’s actually sick of this. This is bullshit. She knew a man once, and she loved a man once and now that man has turned into everything she could not possibly imagine that man would turn into. She’s pissed off and looking for him. And not because she’s looking for her love, although sometimes it feels that way to her, but because she wants certain questions answered. This is an impossibility that has been brought into her life and she’s not the kind of person to back down from impossibilities.

UE: Considering his actions were influenced by this super soldier engineering; do you think that Sera as a character would understand or take him back, should she know the full story?

Josh: Well, that’s what we’re going to find out.

What is it that you want to find out? Leave comments below!

Related posts:

1. Reviewing Unknown Soldier Volume 1
2. Unknown Soldier is Put to Rest