The definitive collection of Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart’s Vietnam War series

Writer Jason Aaron (SOUTHERN BASTARDS, THE GODDAMNED, Scalped) and artist Cameron Stewart (MOTOR CRUSH, Fight Club 2) will release a deluxe hardcover edition, brimming with extras, of their acclaimed miniseries THE OTHER SIDE this July from Image Comics.

THE OTHER SIDE tells an unforgettable Vietnam War story from the point of view of two young soldiers on either side of the conflict. This deluxe edition will also include loads of extra materials straight from the files of both writer and artist—including Cameron Stewart’s pictures, drawings, and journal entries from his preliminary research trip to Vietnam.

“I've never worked harder on a comic than I did on this,” said Aaron. “And if I hadn't, I don't know where I'd be today. This book gave me a career. And in these pages, Cameron and Dave McCaig gave us all some of the most intense and haunting visuals the war comic genre has ever seen.”

“Working on this book was one of the highlights of both my career and my life so far, and I'm thrilled for it to be re-released in this deluxe edition,” said Stewart. “I think it remains as visceral and powerful today as it did a decade ago.”

THE OTHER SIDE SPECIAL EDITION HC (ISBN: 978-1-5343-0222-8, Diamond code: MAY170642) arrives in comic book stores Wednesday, July 26th and bookstores Tuesday, August 1st. The final order cutoff deadline for comics retailers is Monday, June 26th.

THE OTHER SIDE SPECIAL EDITION HC is available for preorder via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, and Indigo.

Select praise for THE OTHER SIDE:

“This book isn’t trying to be important, it just is. Highest possible recommendation.” —Brian K. Vaughan (SAGA, PAPER GIRLS)

“Solidly executed in every way, THE OTHER SIDE is both a great start for newcomers to graphic novels and an achievement veterans of the form will appreciate.” —BookSlut

“Nothing short of a true classic, up there with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and Alan Moore’s Watchmen.” —Library Journal

“THE OTHER SIDE perfectly nails the gruesome reality of war, but diverges from what you've seen and read previously through stark hallucinations, mangled moving corpses, and other unexpected elements—that never compromise the emotional integrity and reality of what you're reading.” —MTV News

“THE OTHER SIDE demonstrates that war comics, out of favor for decades, retain substantial viability.” —Booklist

- See more at: https://imagecomics.com/content/view/eisner-nominated-miniseries-the-other-side-collected-in-deluxe-hardcover-th#sthash.9xI6nyrE.dpuf

All weekend on the comiXology app, you can download lots of Vertigo titles for 99¢ each, including my first series, the Eisner-nominated THE OTHER SIDE, featuring amazing art by Cameron Stewart. As far as I know, this is the first time THE OTHER SIDE has been available digitally (legally, at least).

More info here.

Screen capture from my iPad

Love for THE OTHER SIDE:

CBR's "A Year of Cool Comics -- Day 161"

THE OTHER SIDE at Bookalicious

Found this file while cleaning up some old folders.  Before THE OTHER SIDE became THE OTHER SIDE, it was going to be titled GRUNTS.  But then another book came out called GRUNTS, so we needed a new title.  It took a long time to come up with one.  Me and Cameron Stewart and our editors all threw out ideas.  Here are some of the ones that were suggested:

ORDNANCE

OUR TIME OF DYING

BROTHERS IN DARKNESS

US DAMNED

US WRETCHED

THE DEEP GREEN

BEYOND ALL RECOGNITION

MOTHER CARBINE

FIRE FOR EFFECT

TAKING FIRE

BLOOD MAKES THE GRASS GROW

IN EACH OTHER’S BLOOD

SHELL SHOCK

ONCE UPON A TIME IN VIETNAM

LAY DOWN FIRE

I CORPS ‘68

MAGGOTS

THROUGH HELL

ALL HELL

FIELDS OF FIRE

BLACK RIFLES

FATIGUES

THE LUCKY GRUNTS

JUST A GRUNT

LAST GRUNTS

BORN GRUNTS

HELL SUCKS

DEEP SERIOUS

BEYOND THE WIRE

AMONG THE LOST

JUNGLE ROT

DECOMPOSING

LITTERS

CORPS

BOONIE RAT

BODY COUNT

PRAYING FOR WAR

ENEMY GRUNTS

INTO THE FIRE

EXPECTANTS

BEATEN ZONE

SNUFFIES

expectants -- casualties who are expected to die

double veteran -- Having sex with a woman and then killing her made one a double veteran.

beaten zone -- area where the majority of bullets will strike when a machine gun is laid-in to cover a part of a defensive perimeter or part of an ambush zone.

SNUFFY: was/is the term Marines use in the same way Army calls themselves grunts. This term's footnoted in one of the major books on Khe Sahn and was in common use in I Corps (1/67-7/68).

It has triple meaning to Marines: 1. to snuff is the mission, 2. we don't grunt under our loads, and 3. a wry reference to the historical willingness of Marine leaders to expend their lives for what may seem like small gains (arising from the fact that this small service just doesn't have the logistical ability to throw much ordnance on an objective beforehand). 

I'm still kinda partial to ONCE UPON A TIME IN VIETNAM.  Oh well.  I think we made the right choice.

Somehow I missed this. It's Cameron from last year talking about THE OTHER SIDE.

SCALPED #12 is out today and people seem to be liking it. Wizard calls it "one of the strongest issues to date" and says, "Shocking imagery, magnetic narrative and wicked dialogue help this Western noir stand tall in the saddle."

Also, THE OTHER SIDE popped up on another "Best of 2007" list, courtesy of DRAWN!

And if you want an idea of where things will be headed when I take over GHOST RIDER, you should check out this week's issue #18, which features a big revelation about the character. It's the issue with the kick-ass Tony Moore cover.

THE OTHER SIDE made it onto the Washington Post's list of the Best Comics of 2007:

Army@Love #1 By Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine, Vertigo/DC Comics, $2.99
Aya By Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95
Beyond! By Dwayne McDuffie and Scott Kolins, Marvel, $19.99
Exit Wounds By Rutu Modan, Drawn & Quarterly, $19.95
Luxuria: Casanova, Vol. 1 By Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba, Image, $24.99
The Other Side By Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart, Vertigo, $12.99
The Plain Janes By Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg, Minx/DC Comics, $9.99
Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm By Percy Carey and Ronald Wimberly, Vertigo/DC Comics, $19.99
Silverfish By David Lapham, Vertigo/DC Comics, $24.99

Cameron's response: "The old gal has life in her yet." Yes, she does, Cameron. Yes, she does.

From his blog:

I just recently finished reading THE OTHER SIDE published by vertigo, between sleep and work. What a great read that was. I’m not a big fan of war stories unless they offer something different than the usual stuff. This one certainly did. I was at first compelled to check this out because of the amazing Cameron Stewart. I love his work. But as I got into the story I was really impressed with how well it was written by Jason Aaron. Very intense, and hard to take at times, but a story like this should be. Cameron drew the hell out of this book, stunning. The combination of Jason’s thought provoking writing and Cameron’s extremely detailed art (that doesn’t forget the emotions of the scenes) made for a powerfully emotional impact. The ending just hits you very hard and haunts you for quite sometime afterward, which is very appropriate. When you see the content you’ll know what I mean by that. Great stuff.

Talk about nailing the zeitgeist: Vertigo Comics brings the horrors of war home to disconnected America with two different works, THE OTHER SIDE and DMZ. While neither one is specifically about Iraq, it's nearly impossible to read them without considering our country's neo-con New World Order...

Peering into another senseless quagmire, the self-contained OTHER SIDE is a stunner of a comic. In fact, few war stories in any medium blend such horror with such a poetic humanization of the enemy. Newcomer Jason Aaron weaves a gripping Vietnam tale with two leads, Billy Everette and Vo Binh Dai, both rural boys swept into an incomprehensible conflict. As their paths inexorably cross in a war-ravaged hell, each experiences his own increasingly bizarre reality: Billy sees ghosts of dead American G.I.s, while his gun goads him toward violence; Vo Dai believes gods and dragons cross his path, spurring him to action.

As grippingly tragic as Aaron's tale is, artist Cameron Stewart elevates it to a higher level. Stewart and colorist Dave McCaig give us a comic both beautiful and dreadful to gaze upon. There's excellent material in the appendices, including photos and diary excerpts from Stewart's research trip to 21st century Vietnam. This book's so good, it deserves a hardcover edition on top-notch paper, but you won't go wrong with this paperback.

Click here for the full text, including a great review of Brian Wood's DMZ. Also, check out Wizard Magazine this month for an interview I did about RIPCLAW and SCALPED.

Other Side: moving, haunting Vietnam War comic

I found Other Side, Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart's gripping, savage, thoughtful Vietnam War comic, by going into Secret Headquarters (my favorite comic shop) and asking "What's good?" Dave, the co-owner, said, "I just sent this guy my first-ever fan letter" and passed me a copy.

It was a well-deserved fan-letter.

Click here for the full review

From Best Shots at Newsarama, review by Sarah Jaffe:

THE OTHER SIDE is not fun to read. It isn’t high-gloss fantasy or allegory or anything less than full-on brutal reality. But the work of Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart has created a larger-than-life entrée into the horrors of war, and into the psyche of soldiers from both sides of the Vietnam conflict...

“War is hell,” we hear it said over and over again, often with a knowing shake of the head that says, “You’ll never know, you weren’t there.” We weren’t, that’s true. Neither were the creators of this comic. But it feels real, visceral, gut-wrenching, and every other cliché that of course will never do the reality justice. The ghosts that haunt Private Everette do not speak, perhaps because there is nothing more to say, perhaps because to begin with, they had nothing to say about the war. Dai is different, committed, a volunteer, determined to reach the battle and glory through all obstacles. The narration from his side is beautiful, poetic, speaking of the beauty of war at the same time as its horrors envelope him. The horrors are dictated simply, as if Dai simply accepts them as necessary, while Everette cannot accept even his own rifle, which talks to him in riddles, taunts, and Sex Pistols quotes. Death surrounds these two young men, and there is no pretty life-affirming moral here.

Click here for the full review

And Semper Gus.

I got my very first trade paperback this week, and I'm a proud papa.

THE OTHER TRADE trade handsomely collects all five issues of the Eisner-nominated mini-series, plus an introduction by Capt. Dale Dye (technical adviser on PLATOON and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), a short piece I wrote about my cousin, the Vietnam War author Gustav Hasford, Cameron Stewart's photos and dispatches from his trip to Vietnam, sketches, layouts and more.

All that for only $12.99.

Order it from Amazon.com

The book that began life as an unsolicited submission is now an Eisner Award nominee. What a long strange trip it's been.

Eisner Nominees for Best Limited Series

Batman: Year 100, by Paul Pope (DC)

The Looking Glass Wars: Hatter M, by Frank Beddor, Liz Cavalier, and Ben Templesmith (Desperado/Image)

The Other Side, by Jason Aaron and Cameron Stewart (Vertigo/DC)

Scarlet Traces: The Great Game, by Ian Edginton and D’Israeli (Dark Horse)

Sock Monkey: The Inches Incident, by Tony Millionaire (Dark Horse)

Full Story Here

WOLVERINE #56 cover by Howard Chaykin, originally uploaded by Jason Aaron.

JASON AARON ON SCALPED/THE OTHER SIDE/WOLVERINE

Featuring info on what's coming up in the next few issues of SCALPED, what extras you'll find in the trade paperback of THE OTHER SIDE and what you can expect from my issue of WOLVERINE.

That's right, Cameron Stewart is giving away - totally free - a page of original black and white artwork to someone on MySpace. The 11 x 17 page, seen below, is from THE OTHER SIDE #3 and features both of the book's main characters, Marine Private Bill Everette and NVA soldier Vo Binh Dai.




All you have to do to be elligible is have the THE OTHER SIDE added as one of your Top Friends on MySpace. The winner, chosen at random, will be notified by email and will have to answer five trivia questions, one pertaining to each issue of the comic.

Do you have what it takes, maggot?

About THE OTHER SIDE #5, Don MacPherson of Eye on Comics says:
"Writer Jason Aaron brings this war story to a satisfying and fitting conclusion... The power of this storytelling sets up Jason Aaron as the heir apparent to the legacy that Garth Ennis established at DC/Vertigo in the 1990s."

Dalton Walker at Reznet News writes about SCALPED:
"Jason Aaron’s new creation hits the mark. His latest work might start an avalanche unlike Indian Country has ever seen... If SCALPED doesn’t leave shivers down your back, read it again."

Newsarama's Best Shots praises SCALPED:
"First things first: the new SCALPED has the best-looking cover on this week’s rack. Now, on to the reviewing, right? Like LOVELESS, DMZ, and several other books these days, SCALPED reads like an action movie or a TV show. It bounces backward and forward in time, punctuated by dollops of violence, splashes of sexuality, and seeds of future storylines planted everywhere you look. It could be a film directed by Scorsese, or a Sopranos spinoff, but it’s got one unexpected element for a tale of corruption and organized crime: it’s set on an Indian reservation."

Matt Fraction, amazing writer of THE IMMORTAL IRON FIST and CASANOVA, tells Silver Bullet Comics:
QUESTION: When you say "I think the art of writing the single issue has been lost." It's clear that you're trying to resurrect that lost "art" in some of your work... What contemporary storytellers do you think are attempting to practice this done-in-one "lost art"?
MATT FRACTION: Jason Aaron, whose SCALPED and THE OTHER SIDE both function to me as self-contained experiences that connect to a larger whole, absolutely knocks me out.

Thanks to Matt and all of the reviewers. The checks are in the mail.

New interviews and reviews and whatnot this week, as the second issue of SCALPED and final issue of THE OTHER SIDE both hit stores.

Interview with Publishers Weekly:
Jason Aaron, your average 33-year-old American, turns the axiom "write what you know" on its head, instead crafting stories about North Vietnamese soldiers and life on a corrupt Indian reservation.

Interview with Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota):
While its plot is a mafia-like conspiracy story complete with an undercover FBI agent returning to his homeland to spread justice, the story feels too real. It reads like a bloodier version of the reservation corruption stories I heard while growing up next to the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. That's what makes this comic so good.

Reviews of both books from WizardUniverse.com:
THE OTHER SIDE #5
"You won’t find a horror comic on the racks that will jar your bone marrow the way Jason Aaron can in The Other Side. The way he and artist Cameron Stewart delicately balance the typhoon of carnage and shaded morality that warfare renders irrelevant for this series’ characters is absolutely masterful. Don’t pick this issue up without preparing yourself for a sobering experience that offers no answers and a splattered mess of questions about demands and sacrifices imposed on Vietnamese and American soldiers. The puddle of vomit at the end of issue #5 speaks volumes for the horrors of war Aaron grapples with."

SCALPED #2
"If anything, you’ll find all sorts of new ways to use cuss words from this book, but fans of crime fiction are in for a nice follow-up to the debut issue. There’s an engaging use of flashbacks, counting down the days of Chief Red Crow’s growing suspicion of Bad Horse toward a big ambush/gunfight that will probably take place in the next issue. The art is still in the ever-capable Vertigo style, with a little dirtier 100 Bullets feel, but it definitely doesn’t feel like a rip-off, story- or art-wise. The use of the Native American element is a fresh twist on the crime concept, filling up the book with colorful, intriguing characters."

A review of THE OTHER SIDE from last month at The Wire:
"With the war in Iraq escalating and the specter of other wars looming on the horizon, we may be seeing more war comics—and war movies and war books, not to mention actual war footage—than we’d care for. If we’re lucky, a scant few might be as good as THE OTHER SIDE."

From comedian Patton Oswalt's blog on MySpace:
I JUST GOT COMICS
How can I un-break my habit -- having to plunk down and blaze through my pile in front of coffee, eggs and bacon before I do anything else today? I actually have shit to finish. I should focus on...oh shit, a new issue of SCALPED!

Finally, I was able to actually buy an issue of Playboy Magazine just for the articles. But only because I get a nice plug in the newest issue, which also features a nude drill instructor and Number Six from "Battlestar Galactica." In an article titled "Graphic Content: The Best of Today's Smart Comics," both THE OTHER SIDE and SCALPED are mentioned alongside Grant Morrison's SEVEN SOLDIERS and fellow Vertigo series THE EXTERMINATORS and TESTAMENT. I particularly liked this passage:

"January sees the debut of Aaron's new long-run series, SCALPED, which takes place on a present-day Indian reservation ("a third-world nation in the heart of America") replete with rough road houses and meth labs, ornery Indians and undercover FBI agents. Aaron's talent for dialogue is complemented spectacularly by R.M. Guéra's vivid pencil work."

Thanks, Hef. Now when do I get my invite to the mansion?

Season's Greetings from THE OTHER SIDE, originally uploaded by Jason Aaron.

Art by Cameron Stewart

THE OTHER SIDE #3, originally uploaded by Jason Aaron.

A sweet little story entitled "Hell Sucks." Just look for the gorgeous cover by Cameron Stewart.

You can also download a desktop background of this image from DC Comics.