Unknown Soldier Vol. 2: Easy Kill

Welcome to Northern Uganda. In 2002, it's a place where tourists are hacked to death with machetes, 12-year-olds with AK-47s wage war, and celebrities futilely try to get people to care. Moses Lwanga is a pacifist doctor caught at the center. But when his life is threatened, Moses suddenly realizes he knows how to kill all too well. What is this voice telling him the only way to fix what's wrong with the country is by slaughtering those responsible? What is Moses' connection to another past bandage-wrapped warrior?

The second volume of this unflinchingly intense series set in war-torn Uganda continues to deliver a powerful mix of action, espionage, and real life–inspired tragedy. Dr. Moses Lwanga was once a pacifist doctor who left America and returned to his birthplace to help those caught in the middle of Uganda's civil war. But horrible events and mysterious voices in his head have changed him into a one-man army out to stop rebel leader Joseph Kony and his forces. In this volume, Lwanga is approached by a militant cell and drawn into a plot to kill a Hollywood actress making charity visits to the country. In the second story, Lwanga guides an escaped child soldier named Paul back to his home village. Both sections examine the series' recurring theme, Lwanga's belief that Africans must be able to solve their own problems rather than relying on First World nations for aid. Dysart's writing is thought provoking, tense, and holds nothing back. Ponticelli and Masioni, the latter a political refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, both excel at using characters' expression to convey the desperation, fear, and hope driving the story. (Mar.)
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Since its December 2008 debut, Unknown Soldier has won raves for its politically charged depiction of war-torn Uganda. In it, Harvard-trained doctor Lwanga Moses repatriates to Uganda with his wife, intending to help but instead succumbing to the ambient violence. After killing a boy soldier, he survives self-mutilation and thereafter, wrapped in bandages, roams the countryside, protecting children from the ravages of guerrilla warfare. As the story continues, Moses confronts new enemies, including the voice inside his head spurring him on to more bloodshed. In one episode, he is recruited by a CIA operative, who is himself being strong-armed by rebels, to assassinate a Hollywood starlet visiting Uganda on a humanitarian mission. In another, Moses drops an orphaned boy, Paul, at a sanctuary for war-traumatized children, only to have the child return to the jungle and Moses, urging the doctor to find his own sanctuary in Paul’s tribal village. Artists Alberto Ponticelli and Pat Masioni provide masterfully rendered images in support of Dysart’s impressive take on Uganda’s nightmarish recent history. --Carl Hays