I’ve recently started another read-through of Brian Wood & Ricciardo Burchielli’s graphic novel masterwerk, DMZ. Originally started around 2006, it was one of Vertigo’s longest-running comic series, generating a whopping 12-book library of trade paperback volumes.

This story centers around a news media intern sent in to sherpa for a well-known reporter that is going to be “embedded” into the DMZ between the two warring factions in a second U.S. civil war. Manhattan has become the DMZ between the Free States (the so called “rebels” or “insurgents”) and the United States (the “status quo”, as it were). About 400,000 “non-combatants” were left on the island, and DMZ is really about them — the people left behind who are just trying to survive while constantly being used as pawns and cannon fodder in the name of politics.

It’s still quite a compelling story even 20 years on now, made even more so in today’s current political climate and national upheaval as nazis and fascists are intending an end to the “Great Experiment” of American democracy as the world now knows it. The idea of a second civil war in America seems even more imminent now than it ever has been, which gives DMZ more of a sense of urgency and warning. However, it was written in a different global climate with different geopolitical ramifications than the ones that exist today and that has me thinking — if Wood were to write this story today, what people would make up the Free States, the United States, and the residents of any sort of DMZ analog?

A Different Time

DMZ was written in the aftermath of the Sept. 11th attacks on the U.S. in 2001. The “war on terror” was in full swing; the United States was over in Iraq and searching for WMDs; rumors and reports started surfacing about the Blackwater mercenary “security subcontractors” aiding in “reconstruction” of Iraq and Afghanistan; and the big fear was that all of those nutjob, home-grown militia groups from (primarily) the Midwest were going to finally get their shit together and unite to overthrow the government while they were distracted with being Team America: World Police everywhere but here.

For the vast majority of people alive at the time, this was really the first time that the realities of actual terrorism on American soil were ever experienced and so, as you might imagine, the population really wasn’t ready to face the harsh realities of it. They had likely never even heard or internalized what the term “insurgents” might even mean. For most it was something that literally didn’t compute and that they couldn’t make sense of because they had never had to deal with it in their own lives and their own homeland. DMZ was ripe for the fertile ground that was the American psyche because it brought the opportunity to expose some of that nastiness in shocking terms of but yeah, what if those ‘insurgents’ were YOUR neighbors?

The Free States in DMZ were supposed to be the gun-hoarding, red-necked, ignorant, hillbilly, possibly Nazi but definitely at least libertarian homegrown militia that believed that the gummint was hiding things from us and was in collusion with the Illuminati, space aliens, or (God forbid) progressives to keep (predominantly) “working-class” (white) men oppressed. They were couched as those people who had a bone to pick with the federal gummint and they were gonna finally become “free” (whatever their definition of ‘freedom’ meant to them, anyway) through violent overthrow. In the world of DMZ, it’s not entirely clear what the aims of the Free States actually are, just that they want power and not the existing federal gubmint.

The United States, on the other hand, was supposed to be the traditional, typical American government establishment — touting the “rule of law”, “civility”, and the Union above all costs with all the moral superiority that the actual U.S. government commanded at that time. DMZ is littered with back-handed statements about preserving the Union at all costs, and who is a “true” or “real” American and who is not. And, of course, the real truth of the fact that the Union itself takes priority over the citizens actually living in it is no more starkly revealed than in how the United States (and also the Free States) treat the residents of the DMZ. The people who were trapped there and left behind, who don’t want to have any part in war, all get treated as “insurgents” and “terrorists” merely for continuing to exist there.

And of course, the Trustwell corp is not even a thinly-veiled reference to Blackwater Security, Also somewhat predictably, the UN Peacekeepers are viewed as ineffectual and useless whom the U.S. doesn’t want there anyway to see how they really treat their own citizens in their hard-on for “preserving the Union at all costs”. Certainly can’t have foreigners watching and policing ‘Murican troops on ‘Murican soil now, can we?

What A Difference 20 Years Makes

Nowadays, I wonder how Brian Wood would write the Free States army. Who would be the leaders of those states? What would they be fighting for? While many citizens didn’t trust the government for all sorts of reasons, many of which Wood picked up on for DMZ, prior to 2016 I don’t think anyone could have imagined that fascists could make a successful run on the Presidency — not once, but twice — nor the transition to a nazi (and let’s be honest, Christian Nationalism is just Nazis with Jesus as “backing patron”) fascist government actually becoming a reality.

As a result of that, it seems like all the yokels and those lusting for violence that comprised the Free States in Wood’s vision are already being utilized by the United States’ corrupt government. The Proud Boys. The Oathkeepers. The January 6th rioters (those are actual insurgents right there). The shocker here is that a lot of those people have been given free reign to sign up WITH the government already turning on its own citizens in the form of ICE, Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, and various other 3-letter federal alphabet agencies. They don’t have to fight against the current government, because that government is welcoming them in with open arms and giving them guns and the authority to use them. Donald Trump was the perfect patsy for all those hidden nazis, fascists, and hatemongers (and likely Putin) to finally take over the government as they had been planning to do since the Reagan years.

So who would comprise the “Free States” if DMZ were written today? I honestly don’t have a good answer to that question, because at this point I don’t believe that there’s enough people who are fed up with the current fascism AND are willing to return violence for violence in order to make it stop. My feeling that the sample size of gun nuts and fighters who are also pro-LGBTQIA+, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, pro-equality, and whatever else is vanishingly small. Are there enough of those people to organize operations and actions and do the dirty work of bloodying the nose of the bully with their ideals and goals intact, all without succumbing to the inevitable infighting that the power which violence brings with it will engender? Are there enough strategists, planners, leaders, and commanders out there that could organize an actual army or bring a bunch of “insurgent cells” or militias together? I doubt it, at least at this point.

And I think that is one of the main warnings from DMZ that stands the test of time: either the population acquiesces to the bully and lives with it, or they resist and get the holy hell knocked out of them on a daily basis, over and over again, because war is ugly and it will always get worse before it gets better — and who really knows how long that “worse” bit will last when one side’s overarching goal is the preservation of an ideal over the lives of its citizens?

The second warning that I hear is that like it or not, when it comes to war, one has to pick a side and those that don’t become just like the residents of the DMZ: trapped in the middle and ground under the heels of all sides in the conflict. The harsh reality is that brokenness of a scale that leads to war requires one to pick a side early and for those that don’t, they’re going to find that it’s too late to pick one and they live or die at the whims of the winner on any given day. What’s even scarier is that most times when one is asked to pick a side, they don’t really know all the ramifications of which side they choose and just like not choosing, choosing the wrong side can suck just as bad.

Here in 2026, while the war hasn’t started yet, it’s already too late to pick a side. Either you have already or you haven’t and if you haven’t, you’re just gonna be cannon fodder in the middle until the shooting stops and the bombs quit falling. Yes, it sucks to only have two sides to choose from here; but a bunch of people didn’t make that choice in 2016 and they still didn’t make it in 2024, and look where that has gotten us. Thing is, it isn’t about choosing sides for what happens today; it’s about choosing sides for what will happen tomorrow, or next week, or next year.

And I get it, sometimes that can be a really, really hard choice to make in the moment.

That’s A Mighty Big DMZ Ya Got There

The thing is, the vast majority of citizens just want to be left alone to live their lives with their own agency. Their government should be there to support ALL citizens in their personal pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. It’s not supposed to be the government’s job to police them, to control them, and to rule them. Most people just want to be left the fuck alone to live how they want and in the manner that works best for them, as long as it doesn’t interfere with the pursuits of others in ways that can’t be remedied without external intervention.

Eventually, the only way to stop a bully is to stand one’s ground or fight back and when that bully is a government with a massive army and a whole mess of guns and “legality” on their side, the only way to fight back is to have a critical mass of resistors that will reflect that violence back onto the bully. I just don’t think we’ve reached that point yet; our “progressive” or “liberal” politicians won’t even fight back politically — they don’t fight hard, they don’t play dirty, they don’t play hardball, they just respect “the process” that nobody else respects while the other side is actively trying to set it on fire. So if our leaders won’t even fight their peers to protect us — as proxies for the people who voted them to do that specific job — how can the every day masses be expected to pick up arms and fight back against those leaders with violence when so many of them don’t want to fight, they just want to live peaceful and equitable lives?

It’s going to take revolutionaries, and a lot of them — and they’ll have to be people that are fed up to the point of taking up arms. It’s going to take disenfranchised military or National Guard people “defecting” and not only refusing to participate in actions against citizens but also actively preventing the current armed forces from being able to carry out those actions. Refusing orders. “Defecting” to the “other side” (whatever that looks like). My deep-down fear is that it’s going to take violent protests and sustained violence to push them back. My feeling is that the Free States would be primarily everyone who’s sick of the fascism, the capitalism, and the nationalism AND with a critical mass of members who are willing to return violence for violence.

But they won’t be contiguous states, I don’t think. A second civil war would be a true fracturing of the Union into bits and pieces which would be hard to manage unless the populations of either side are willing to abandon their current homes to consolidate with their peers. That will be messy, messy, messy. I don’t even have a concept about what a DMZ would look like in that case, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be something as small as Manhattan.

Anyway, I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Maybe I’ll get back to it, but for now I’ve sort of lost the thread of what I was thinking because I didn’t publish it before moving on to other comics and some of the righteous indignation and thought-provoking notions have ebbed away. But at least I put down what I was thinking at the time and I don’t think that anything as messy as a civil war has any “good” solutions anyway. I certainly don’t know what they would be.