One of the central satirical premises of my ARMY@LOVE series is that the military, as a recruiting tool, would sanction wild orgies for the troops. Too wacky to be real, right? Then what’s going on with this real world study by UCSF Medical Center? Thanks to Kevin Church.

Add this to the growing list of strange real world coincidences that seem to crop up around the over the top satire of ARMY@LOVE. In the second issue, I had a character direct a bombing run with his electric guitar while playing Link Wray.

Thanks to Bryan Galatis for sending along Sgt. Solo, an actual toy soldier with a guitar that’s being used used to drum up awareness of Armed Forces Entertainment. The copy on the package reads: “Plug in your weapon, turn up the power and fire away.”

Remember my post a few months ago about a cola executive being hired to rebrand the military, both in my ARMY@LOVE comic and in the real world? Well, here’s another bleed through from the fictional world to the real. It concerns the “amnesia patches” I introduced as a plot device in ARMY@LOVE: THE ART OF WAR #1.

According to this article on Wired.com, “A team of scientists from the United States and China announced last week that, for the first time, they had found a means of selectively and safely erasing memories in mice, using the signaling molecule αCaMKII. It’s a big step forward, and one that will be of considerable interest to the military, which has devoted efforts to memory manipulation…”

If you’ve been reading ARMY@LOVE, you’re probably aware that one plotline has the military rebranding the war by hiring marketing executives from the “Polka Cola” company. Sounds like more wacky Veitch-like satire, right? Well check out this article in today’s NYTIMES, reporting that NATO is launching a marketing initiative to rebrand itself. And its hired a Coca Cola executive to lead the effort!

I thought I was making this stuff up, folks!

Also: I just received my comp copies of the second trade, ARMY@LOVE: GENERATION PWNED and it looks great! Not sure of the exact shipping schedule, but it should be hitting stores in the next week or two.

I haven’t been doing new dream comics for awhile, but whenever I have a powerful dream about a friend I’ll usually email them a description of it. Once in a while a dream really seems to hit the bullseye on something going on in their lives; a reminder perhaps that consciousness intersects reality in surprising ways.

Such was the case this week with a dream I had about reading a new comic book by Steve Bissette. When I sent Steve the dream, it turned out he really was working on a comic about dreams and intuitive connections for the upcoming SECRETS & LIES anthology at The Center For Cartoon Studies, and many of the images I’d seen in the dream were integral to what he was doing.

Steve ended up working me and the whole psychic event into the strip, which is where these two portraits will appear. You can read Steve’s post on how it all went down, along with directions on how to order a copy of SECRETS & LIES, over on his always entertaining blog.

I found this article about secret kill switches in computer chips pretty interesting. The concept is that defense suppliers are building backdoor on-off switches in the chips that run advanced weaponry, and anyone who has the secret code can shut those weapons down. I mention it here because I used the idea as a plot launcher for my early superhero deconstruction from Epic Comics, THE ONE back in 1985.

The comics are long out of print, but you can buy a signed copy of the King Hell trade paperback edition of THE ONE from my on-line store.