How War Begins

A short biography of Igort in the back of How War Begins ends by listing a few of his earlier works. Listing the books by the Italian cartoonist that have been published in English would likely be more helpful. Specifically, American readers should be aware that in 2016, Simon and Schuster published The Ukrainian And Russian Notebooks: Life And Death Under Soviet Rule, which collects two books published in the European market, Russian Notebook and Ukrainian Notebook, as well as ten pages of comics made in 2014 that serve as a postscript to those stories. 

2011's Russian Notebook tells the story of a journalist, Anna Politsovskaya, who was killed for criticizing Putin’s government after a campaign of intimidation. In Ukraine Notebook, written in 2008 and 2009, Igort speaks to older Ukrainians with firsthand memories of the famine imposed by Stalin that killed millions. In 2014, Russia again invaded Ukraine in order to annex Crimea, a tourist-friendly peninsula to Ukraine’s south, important for shipping purposes.

The Russo-Ukrainian war really began then, after Ukraine had ousted the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych into exile in Russia, in favor of greater free trade with the EU, which Russia opposed. In 2021, military presence along the border built up. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. How War Begins is largely structured by Igort’s real-time chronicling, originally posted to Facebook, of the lives of Ukrainians struggling with the chaos and upheaval their lives were newly subject to. Most Americans seemed to view the conflict through a partisan lens, as a proxy war between a Putin-aligned GOP and Democrats who sought to monetarily aid an embattled Ukraine. Igort, whose wife is Ukrainian, and got married in Dnipro, offers an important corrective to that blinkered view of the war, acknowledging the lives destabilized, if not outright ruined. People were killed, and the survivors are traumatized. Igort tells these people’s stories, human interest reportage of the lives of people seeking refuge.

The pages I am highlighting to excerpt here are those that come closest to comics, though a reader will surely notice they are fairly text-heavy. Far more of the pages hew closer to illustrated prose, and the quality of the illustrations varies considerably, with some demonstrating Igort’s strength as an image-maker, and others being perfunctory and dull. Towards the end of the book, as if we are watching enthusiasm for the project wane in real time, we get drawings of ticket stubs, passports, and canned meat. Dozens of the book’s pages basically just consist of text in a typeset font, printed on a background of lined notebook paper. On one of these, the author reports how it feels to be the contact person for people in the Ukraine, able to repeat the news he has access to that they do not, but sugarcoating the horrors as a way of providing hope. In the writing of the book, he is doing essentially the opposite, presenting anecdotes of people suffering to a western audience. 

The text is a procession of proper nouns, with people being introduced by their first name and rarely returning in the book’s pages after their initial mention. We don’t learn much about these people beyond their present circumstances. The ratio of abundant text to scarcer images means we often do not get faces to go with the names. One person, Masha, gets a drawing. When we first learn her name, it’s because she is calling Galya, Igort’s wife, on the phone, though they have not talked in a long time. Later, speaking from her perspective, we learn she calls her cousin. It is not clear if Galya is her cousin or not, but this is still one of the few people whose name comes up throughout the book repeatedly, three times in total.

There are figures of broader importance to the war that come up just as rarely, demanding a reader take notes to remember who Igort’s talking about. Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right philosopher whose ideas inform Putin, is also mentioned exactly three times throughout the book. A postscript at the end explains that Dugin's daughter was killed by a car bomb, although she remains intact in her coffin for propaganda purposes, with her death attributed to a Ukrainian secret agent. While her death is used as right-wing propaganda, there are also theories that she might have been killed by right-wing actors for reasons unrelated to the war, which Igort says he can neither confirm nor refute. How War Begins seeks to contest propaganda narratives by focusing on civilians, but the book becomes confusing because there is not a counternarrative offered. It is just as difficult to keep track of Dugin’s surname as it is to keep track of all the civilians Igort briefly mentions, unless you are already familiar with right-wing Russian philosophers enough to know who he is.

As important as the overall intentions of the book are, Igort’s artistic decisions do not highlight the importance of any particular bit of information. One spread presents two full-page images of a Russian sniper, Sergey Maksimov, each labeled at the bottom. He is never mentioned in the book again. Googling him finds a site listing him as a torturer, but there is no evidence of political importance outside his military role. Images and their positioning within the book seems independent of importance to any point the author wishes to make. This makes for a confusing book, particularly if you went into it thinking that it would be good, either in terms of being informative or well-cartooned. While the illustrations are always accomplished and often attractive, they are not communicative in terms of a larger narrative.

The text is also just shoddily copy-edited. On page 157, a paragraph reads “Yulia’s father is arriving in Mariupol. He managed to get out alive and join his daughters in Italy.” Presumably that first sentence should read that he is arriving from Mariupol. There are multiple instances of words or phrases being repeated right next to each other that are obvious mistakes, (“defended defended” on page 81, “that once that once” on page 102) as well as some instances of repetition that could be artistic choices but most likely are not. (“The mass graves are an act of kindness on the part of the living” is presented as a stand-alone sentence, and the opening of a much larger sentence immediately afterwards, on page 65.) One of the sequences that originally appeared as the postscript to The Ukrainian And Russian Notebooks is seemingly newly translated here, but in weaker and more confusing form. “Within three days, they’d built a new storehouse. Anastasia was happy to give them a bag of potatoes and some semolina,” is much clearer than “They built her a new storage shed in three days. Anastasia happily gave them bags of potatoes and kasha (grain).” There is a point where, referring to the events of 2014, says it compromised the Budapest Memorandum, “signed ten years earlier in 1994.” We all hate to be reminded of how long ago the nineties were, lest we be reminded of our age, but when keeping track of the timetable on which geopolitical events occurred it’s useful to be a stickler.

While the book is too wordy to function as comics, it is still the work of a cartoonist who will not give himself the same latitude to go into the sort of informational detail that a prose writer would. One wants information, context, and nuance from a work of nonfiction, but those things are in short supply here. While the book succeeds in registering the fear and outrage and sympathy for the victims that is often lost in the analysis of current events, its origins as a collection of Facebook posts, meant to be considered in the context of other real-time reportage of the events of the war, lead to something that becomes more confusing the closer you try to read it.

Several pages are devoted to Mariupol, the “martyr city,” where people hide in rubble of bombed buildings. Much later in the book, mention is made of a Mariupol resistance, but stories of soldiers fighting for Ukraine are absent from the book. Perhaps depicting stories wherein the Ukrainian soldier prevails to tell the tale in comic book action sequences would romanticize the war, in a way that runs counter to Igort’s goals. Also, Igort might just be uncomfortable with the reality of who is fighting such battles.

Russia describes what it is doing in the Ukraine as “denazification.” Igort at first acts like this charge, that some of the Ukrainian forces are Nazis, is founded on a historical figure from World War II, Stepan Bandera, who cynically aligned with Germany against the Soviets as part of a broader goal for Ukrainian independence. Later, he acknowledges the existence of Ukrainian right-wing forces, splinter groups like Pravy Sektor and the Azov Regiment, which wears Nazi symbols on its outfits and were honored by President Zelensky as heroes after their defense of Mariupol. Igort simply says of these groups “there’s a lot of say” about them, but does not offer information or historical context, beyond mentioning that there is also a lot to say about the Russian paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group. The existence of right-wing forces within the Ukrainian military is seemingly too complex for him to address beyond a gesture towards acknowledgment. In order to cut through the murk of war and propaganda with a degree of moral clarity, he would need to offer a narrative, and he doesn’t want to do that.

Greater context is provided by The Ukrainian And Russian Notebooks, which also features more sequences that can pass for comics. What How War Begins offers that the earlier book didn’t is the hook of immediacy, the urgency of discussing the recent past rather than historical evils. Neither are his best work.

Prior to the Simon and Schuster volumes, Igort’s historical fiction series Baobab was one of his few comics to make it to English, as part of the Ignatz line co-published by Coconino Press, which Igort founded, and Fantagraphics, whose Kim Thompson translated the Italian cartoonists into English. Baobab, for the three issues it lasted, gave indications of being a masterpiece in the making. It engaged with political realities affecting life and art-making through a fiction. In one of its narrative threads, cartoonists in South America found a publisher willing to run their work in a left-wing newspaper whose press ended up being destroyed by a right-wing government. Baobab is beautiful, evocative work, whose homages to the cartooning of the early 20th century feel neither excessively modern or particularly affected. It’s understandable that events requiring the artist bear witness to them led to placing the work of fiction on the back-burner. Still, it’s a loss, because the form Igort has chosen in How War Begins hampers him considerably. Historical fiction allows the author to depict everyday life under occupation as the heroic act that it is, and to make comics that tell a story without apology.

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