Bumf Vol 1

As more proof of CIA torture breaks through the semi-opaque surface of official cover and denial, the extent and the criminality of their acts should surprise exactly no one. After all we’ve known since the 80’s, since the 60’s, for all my life, that the US secret state has committed acts of shocking cruelty and illegality in the name of the homeland.

There’s no stemming the shit spout of truly disturbing facts. This time, heavily redacted reports released by the US senate in December 2014, confirm what knew already: routine torture – forced rectal “rehydration”, waterboarding, hooded beatings, protracted suspension by the wrists, week long sleep deprivation, mock executions, freezings, soakings, starving and more.

These are only the most recent additions to the rap sheet – a rap sheet that goes way back and includes Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the occupation of Iraq, death squads in the 80’s, black ops and atrocities the death counts of which could be measured, as Alan Moore once had it, in swimming pools of blood. And that’s just the Americans.

For someone like Joe Sacco, who has spent years in killing zones from Serbia to Gaza and Iraq, the stress of recording and reporting on an unrelenting catalogue of human inhumanity, the psychic scars must run deep. I saw him speaking last year, on a Jonathan Cape promo panel and he told us that he’d felt it was time to step down – that someone could only take so much and it’s hard not to have sympathy – though retiring from the field to draw an epically detailed 24 feet wide panorama of the carnage of the Battle of the Somme is perhaps not the most effective way to sooth a troubled mind.

And from reading Bumf Vol 1, an 80 page infernal fever dream fantasy, that’s funny and disturbing in equal measure, his mind doesn’t seem to have had much soothing. Turning his back on the measured and fairly impartial reportage of his more recent comics, Sacco’s returned to his earlier comix roots and unleashed a raging, surreal, stream of conscious that rips into the awful excesses of American power.

It’s a brilliant piece of work. Superficially a collection of short stories in the Underground style, but actually a collection of interwoven chapters with overlapping and reinforcing motifs, we’re faced with a not at all coherent psycho-stream of masked torturers, crusty British colonels, an Obama/Nixon mutation, and scenes from a privileged POTUS hell that the Chapman brothers would be proud of.

It’s not a measured comic and it’s certainly not a tasteful one (there’s a dedication to ‘The Gentlemen of Viz’, and plans for a ‘mass buggering of the Kaiser’), but it’s a howl of pure invective and rage that sits well with the most scalpel sharp satire you could find.