Jobnik!

"Jobnik" is the the humorous name used by Israeli combat soldiers for rear-echelon personnel, like the Vietnam-era "REMF," or Rear Echelon Motherfucker, but without the bitterness.

Miriam Libicki is an American girl who joined the Israeli Army. She was given the usual women's assignment as a jobnik. In her drawn book short story collection, "Jobnik!" Libicki gives a day-by-day report about living as a woman in any army, foreign or domestic.

As a woman who spent three years in the American Army, I found this book head-shakingly familiar. Armies don't change a lot; Prussian, ancient Egyptian, modern Japanese, going back to the guy who threw rocks at the other guys so the women could get on with the work. Jobnik is Jobnik. The title of Libicki's book ends in a exclamation mark, that suggests she heard the term yelled down a hallway, calling her and her fellow office-workers to their latest mundane task.

A woman in the army does the slub jobs, such as motor-pool duty - driving and light maintenance -- burning documents, cooking, acting as company secretary, or communications operator. Nobody should make fun of a jobnik. Who else is going to make sure a soldier gets paid? Fed? Shipped back home in the right body-bag to the right grave? Disrespect for secretarial duties is at the root of the POW/MIA mythology in America.

Libicki talks about the boredom, the boyfriends, the background of war that doesn't get into a jobnik's life except through the combat people who drift through her or his life. Sometimes the front line people are boyfriends, sometimes they're nice. Sometimes they're assholes. At that age, it's still high school, just with automatic weapons.

Drawn-book master Joe Sacco went to Palestine with the intent of producing a report that resulted in his "Palestine." "Jobnik" is more like the memories of a participant who needs to talk. The two books form a mirror image, on a very personal level, of the war that has been focusing the attention and informing the policies of the world for more than a half-century.

Radio reports float through the background of "Jobnik" in block-letter narratives. Over the years, we've heard a lot of these incident reports on our own radios, but I wonder if here they're meant to be read in detail. They may be as much an ignored background in the Israeli barracks as they are on these pages. Only now and again, when they alert Libicki's pencilled self to dangers faced by a friend or comrade, do they come to the reader's attention.

The book itself is at the beginning of its technical development, but this was an advanced reader's copy, so things may change before final publication. The pencil art shows hard work, the kind of sweat labor that is part of forcing muscle memory between the artist's brain and hand.

The human body proportions of the drawings are child-like, but this looks more like an artistic choice than a lack of skill, perhaps reflecting the childishness of soldiers. There are two pages of artistic brilliance, where a sky full of lights are Stars of David and fighter jets, strung like holiday lights across a vast blackness. This shows promise.

The text is difficult to read; I'd suggest a bit more border on balloons and narrative panels. If the text is going to be this small, it needs to be in a font, rather than hand-done. In the later pages, the font really assists legibility. The tight, prickly panels full of radio reports may be an artistic choice, but it doesn't quite work. Again, a more generous border around the words would keep the eye from tiring.

Drawn books aren't easy to produce, and require a long developmental period, with thousands of discarded pages of art and writing before anything makes it to publication. Libicki's pages look as if she was so driven to tell her story she dived right into her pages without polishing her technical skills. This makes the book seem like a diary or sketchbook, giving it an immediacy it might have lost if the author had waited until she was practiced in her craft.

"Jobnik!" is worth reading, if only for its subject, its personal voice, and its view into an unusual life. Most drawn books with voices have gone off to the prose book market, and are sold as such. At Seattle's Emerald City Comicon this year, the only other book with a voice -- not locked into Pretty Manga or Men In Tights -- was a Victorian robot hoax.