Graphic novel wins readers as it captures lives of Marines in Iraq

On a road somewhere in Iraq, a Marine Corps convoy grinds to a halt – not because of a roadside bomb or an ambush, but because in the middle of the road walks a white donkey, and it refuses to budge. In one of the vehicles, a Marine gunner laughs, caught up in the absurdity of the situation.

That’s the scene that gives “The White Donkey” its name. A graphic novel – a genre of illustrated storytelling that gained wide appeal in the 1980s – “The White Donkey” is the first of its kind about the Iraq War and tells the story of two Marines’ emotional, at times surreal, journey through Iraq and their return home.

“It’s not a war story in the same way that a war movie usually is, with an epic gunfight and things exploding,” says its author, Marine Corps veteran Maximilian Uriarte. “It’s really more of a war story in the sense that I’m getting at the heart and soul of being in the Marine Corps, enlisting during a time of war, and really figuring out what that means to the person.”

When he first got the idea for “The White Donkey,” Uriarte didn’t have a graphic novel in mind. Now it sits near the top of several bestseller lists.

“I wanted to make a movie,” Uriarte says. “But I can’t do that by myself. I can make a graphic novel by myself, and I wanted to do it the way I think a graphic novel should be made.”

That meant starting slow, and working on a related project – a webcomic, slightly more forgiving artistically than the more-detailed graphic novel format.

Uriarte, who’s from Corvallis, Oregon, and now lives in Los Angeles, was still on active duty when he began drawing “Terminal Lance” in 2010.

Initially a gag-a-day strip poking fun at the more absurd aspects of military service, the strip soon introduced some continuing characters: lance corporals Abe and Garcia, the enlisted protagonists of “The White Donkey.”

Uriarte says he’d already started writing “The White Donkey” and used the strip as a starting point.

“I put the characters in the strip so people could become familiar with them,” Uriarte says.

Marines loved Abe and Garcia’s tongue-in-cheek banter and the strip, enough so that The Marine Corps Times picked up “Terminal Lance” as a featured comic. Uriarte’s audience grew rapidly – from about 80,000 page views in 2010 to several million in 2015.

The whole time, he worked on “The White Donkey” quietly in the background.

In 2013, Uriarte knew he couldn’t finish the project on his own. After some hesitation, he put together a Kickstarter campaign, aiming to raise $20,000 for production costs.

“I felt like a hack asking for money, but I also knew that this book was never going to get done unless I had the money and resources to get it done,” Uriarte says “I had one of two scenarios in my head: Either it’s going to be terrible or it’s going to raise so much money and be so successful that I’d have no idea what to do and have to make the book.”

The campaign raised more than $162,000.

“The idea that somebody trusted me with that much money, and trusted that I’d be able to pull this off, was really flattering,” Uriarte says. “I was very humbled knowing I had that much support and that much love from the readers of ‘Terminal Lance,’ who really made it happen.”

Weighing in at 288 pages, “The White Donkey” is less a traditional comic book and more a feature film that happens to be presented in graphic novel format. Released in February to Uriarte’s Kickstarter backers, it was picked up by Little, Brown and Co. and released commercially in April after widespread positive response from readers.

It’s a serious piece in the same category as graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a story about the Holocaust told with talking animals, and Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” which talks about growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution (the latter was Amazon’s top seller in the category until “The White Donkey” surpassed it in May).

“I’ve read ‘Persepolis;’ I know it’s a very ubiquitous, literary graphic novel,” Uriarte says. “I’m happy ‘The White Donkey’ is well received in that category, because those are a higher tier of graphic novels that I really respect personally. I’m not really interested in trying to compete with ‘Batman,’ even though ‘Batman’ is beating me on The New York Times bestseller list right now.”

Currently, “The White Donkey” is No. 5 on the hardcover graphic novel list, where it’s had a place for five weeks; “Batman: The Killing Joke,” the current No. 1, has been on the list for nearly four years; it was originally written in 1988.

While “Batman” is written for a wider audience, “The White Donkey” is intended, first and foremost, for Marines.

“That’s who I create for,” Uriarte says. “The webcomic itself really is for Marines.” But Uriarte also thinks it’s valuable for civilians who want to understand Marines as people.

“You don’t need to be a Marine to read it and appreciate it,” Uriarte says. “I think civilian readers can get a better understanding of what it means to be a Marine, to go to Iraq, to come home from that – and a better perspective on what veterans go through when they come home.”

Uriarte says the story is ultimately about what it means to be human, and how war changes us and the way we view ourselves. “It’s about the quest for personal enlightenment, it’s about love, it’s about depression.”

And it doesn’t shy from tackling difficult topics, from loss and post-traumatic stress to depression and suicide – topics Uriarte said he wanted to get right because of personal experience, both firsthand and secondhand.

“I’ve personally lost four Marines to suicide since I left the Marine Corps, and I wanted to tell the story of how a Marine might get to that point,” Uriarte said. “I think that can help people get a better understanding, and maybe inspire other veterans struggling to get help.”

This story was originally published June 1, 2016 at 10:38 AM with the headline "Graphic novel wins readers as it captures lives of Marines in Iraq."