Invisible Wounds: Graphic Journalism

An Air Force brat herself, Ruliffson (Trained To Fight the Enemy) went to art school and then became drawn to depicting veterans’ stories. These 12 come from both women and men, diverse in sexual identity and race, who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. A few vets found satisfying stateside post-discharge careers in the National Park Service, as a firefighter, or as a successful writer. Others felt like permanently twisted outsiders, broken beyond repair or redemption. Shocking hostility and incompetence from other military people, the surprising humanity of “the enemy,” a constant fear of being blown apart by hostiles or “friendly fire,” and the cluelessness of everyday Americans about the wars unmoored them. All describe toxic mental disruptions that continued after discharge, and all struggled to reconcile their wartime experience with their postwar lives. The art is an empathic broad-brush realism, with dominant bold tones of gray, tan, blue, and orange, and no explicit violence.