Outstanding cartoon journalist Joe Sacco, who has previously produced comics about the first Gulf War, Palestine, and the war in Bosnia, embedded with a unit of Marines based at the Haditha Dam in 2004. His short comic about the experience, Complacency Kills (collected in The Best American Comics 2006), expertly captures some vivid details of life during wartime. In these panels, a Marine—frustrated by his inability to catch insurgents—overanalyzes one encounter.

Still, Complacency Kills isn't up to the standards of Sacco's previous work—in part because he was given only two weeks with the unit, and thus received few of the close confidences he's gotten in the past from people in war zones. "Only when you become part of the furniture," Sacco has said, "do people speak their minds in front of you."