The Forever War: Forever Free (graphic novel)

The Forever War: Forever Free. Joe Haldeman, with Gay Haldeman, writer. Marvano (pen name for Mark van Oppen), artist (Steve Kurth, cover artist). London, UK: Titan Comics, "a division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.," 2018. No pagination. "Originally published in French as Libre A Jamis. (c) Dargaud 2002.

In a sense a sequel to the Haldeman/Marvano The Forever War, "a 1988 Belgian science fiction graphic novel trilogy drawn by Marvano and closely based on the award-winning The Forever War novel by Joe Haldeman, who has noted that he 'supplied all of the dialogue and scripted [the comic] like a movie'." Original Dutch title De Eeuwige Oorlog.[1]

Haldeman's 1999 Forever Free story is supplemented in the graphic novel with literal images that combine the mechanical and organic in ways that can be usefully compared and contrasted with the "biomechanics" of H. R. Giger,[2][3] and that illustrate what Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich called "The Ovion/Cylon Alliance" (1980) for "the tendency to associate and even merge insects (necessarily organic) with the mechanical as a motif in SF literature and film from E. M. Foster's [1909] "The Machine Stops" on."

Naked, the Tauran clone Antros 906 looks like a chimera quadruped with a camel-like (or manatee-like) head, humanoid body, and a rear section like the large abdomen of an ant, moving the whole image toward the ant-like. Dressed in its heavy-metal clothing, and more so in a space suit, the Tauran combines a mammal-like alien with the mechanical and insectoid.

As decorated with Flying-Tiger-like bows, the super-Soldier-Boy fighting units of the Terrans look like a combination of shark, ant, and over-armed, huge, highly inelegant battle-tank.[4]

A substantial Tauran land-battle weapon combines elements of dragon, tarantula, and tank, with articulated legs of complex mechanism but that suggest those of Taurans.

A ship ironically-named "Mercury. The messenger of the gods" — and shown in classical art as a smooth-bodied youth — looks like the clunky, windowless combination of giant machine (which it is), manatee, and embryonic Alien from ALIEN (film).

RDE, Title, 15Aug19 RDE, Initial Compiler, 6Dec18