By Robert Britt, Staff writer
Few will say that courage is in short supply in the Marine
Corps, and for Marine veteran Maximilian Uriarte, his display of courage came
in a strange form — a comic strip.
Uriarte is the creator of the Terminal Lance webcomic, which
candidly depicts military life as seen through the eyes of the lower-enlisted.
The comic lampoons military culture and fires well-aimed barbs to highlight the
day-to-day frustrations faced by many in uniform.
Named in homage of the many Marine infantrymen who never see
a promotion beyond the rank of lance corporal, Terminal Lance launched as
Uriarte’s pet project and has grown to be the unofficial Corps comic. In
addition to self-publishing on terminallance.com, where he attracts about 3
million page views a month and has nearly 63,000 “likes” on Facebook, Uriarte
writes exclusive strips for the Marine Corps Times newspaper. He also recently
began working on another webcomic, Into the Mangrove, with fellow artist Brad
Hock.
Originally from Corvallis and later moving to Portland,
Uriarte enlisted in 2006 as an infantryman, was trained as an infantry
assaultman and assigned to 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines in Hawaii. He served two
tours in Iraq, in 2007 and 2009, and launched the Terminal Lance webcomic in
January 2010 before getting out of the service later that year. Now he attends
the California College of the Arts in Oakland.
While in Portland over the holidays, the 26-year-old Uriarte
talked with Street Roots about his work, its success, and his life after the
Marine Corps.
Robert Britt: You were publishing Terminal
Lance while you were still in the Marine Corps? How was that, doing a strip
that lampoons a lot of military and Marine culture while you were still putting
on the uniform every day?
Maximilian Uriarte: It was really nerve-wracking
at first. I didn’t know if I was going to get in trouble because, you know how
the military is, you can get in trouble for anything. So I was always waiting
for that call to go talk to the battalion sergeant major. And I actually did, I
had to go talk to the regimental sergeant major one time, after probably about
strip 20 or so, I think it was right after the story broke in the Marine Corps
Times. It started getting more popular and the regimental sergeant major wanted
to talk to me, which is a huge, nerve-racking thing. But the sergeant major was actually really cool. He was a
fan of it, and he just wanted to kind of warn me and tell me to be careful. I guess it was cool doing it while I was still in. That only
went up to about strip 35, I think, before I got out. Now I’m up to 242 as of
Friday, plus another 100 exclusive strips in the Marine Corps Times.
R.B.: How is your relationship with the
Marine Times?
M.U.: They’re great. It’s fun working with them
because with my website I just do whatever I want. But then when I submit a
strip to them they might say, “Oh, this one isn’t going to work this week
because we have a cover story that’s conflicting with your strip and we don’t
want people to think we’re making fun of this.” So it’s a little more unpredictable
for me. Because with the webcomic, obviously I just put it out there and it
doesn’t matter what I do.
R.B.: How much censorship do you
experience doing it for the Marine Corps Times, whether it be internally or
from external influences?
M.U.: I wouldn’t call it censorship. Well, I
guess it is, but there are just some things I can’t do. I can’t use the f-word
or “shit” or whatever else — all the other words that are part of my everyday
vocabulary. It’s really not too bad. They kind of let me do pretty much
anything, it’s just if it conflicts with some cover story they’re doing or
something. I did one about gun control last week, which was a little too soon,
I think. I think we all kind of agreed that it was too soon for that, so they
wouldn’t publish it. But I agreed with them on that one. Yeah, it was a little
too soon.
R.B.: How would you describe your
success with Terminal Lance?
M.U.: I get between 50,000 to 100,000 hits a
day. It’s been good, I guess. It’s not so much that I make that much money off
of it, but it’s opened a lot of doors for me. Over the summer I worked on an
Arnold Schwarzenegger movie doing storyboarding. The director, David Ayer, just
came out with “End of Watch” and a couple other films in the last couple of
years. He’s former Navy, and after he saw Terminal Lance he asked if I wanted
to work on a movie with him and I said, of course! Why wouldn’t I? So I went to
Hollywood for a few weeks and they hooked me up with my own office and
everything. It was a lot of fun. I got to meet Arnold. I’ve got a photo with
him too, actually, and the director gave me this grand introduction. He talked
me up.
R.B.: So what’s next?
M.U.: The immediate goal is to put out my
Terminal Lance graphic novel, which is a full-length narrative story of Abe and
Garcia, the two main characters. I’m hoping to get that published through Image
Comics or somebody else. Image does “The Walking Dead” and some other pretty
big names. So I’m hoping to get it published through them, and if not them then
some other label at least around the same size. And if that brings in enough
money, I want to ultimately start my own animation studio and do my own animations.
I have a couple other websites in mind and some little things that are boiling
in my head.
R.B.: What was your inspiration for
staring Terminal Lance and what was your initial goal with it?
M.U.: When I came back from Iraq the first
time, I tried to laterally move over to a combat photographer job, but my
battalion commander wouldn’t let me because he didn’t want to let go of an
assaultman, a senior one at that point. So I didn’t get to, but part of my deal
with the combat camera shop in Hawaii was that I was going to make this comic
for the base newspaper and it would just kind of be something I’d do for them.
So I thought of Terminal Lance. The actual layout was going to be a full-size
comic page layout. But that didn’t happen, at all. That totally fell through. I
went to Iraq again and still had the idea in my head and I really wanted to do
it. I knew there was no official way I was going to be able to do it, so I just
put together a website and I decided to make it a three-panel comic and I launched
it on my own.
Nobody knew about it back when it launched, so I was
printing fliers and business cards. We had card readers on the barracks doors,
so I’d put the business cards in the card readers and just leave them there.
I’d go to the barracks and plaster up all these posters and stuff. That was way
back when I first started, just to get people to look at it. And once people
started looking at it, it started catching on. And then once it caught on
enough, the Marine Corps Times did a story on it.
R.B.: How quickly did your readership
grow after that story in Marine Times?
M.U.: It went crazy. As soon as they ran the
story, my server crashed and I had to get better hosting. Yeah, once that story
hit the paper the whole Marine Corps kind of knew about it, which was the best
thing that could have possibly happened for me. Then after that story broke out
and once everybody realized that they all kind of liked it, and nobody was
offended by it or angry at it — which was good for me — then they offered to put
it in the newspaper.
R.B.: What’s been the feedback from
your fellow Marines?
M.U.: It’s been good, actually. I’ve gotten
some angry e-mails a couple of times, but it’s always for really specific
things. I did one about women in the infantry a couple of months ago; I got
some angry e-mails about that one.
R.B.: Some could describe you as a
modern equivalent to Bill Mauldin, the combat cartoonist of WWII whose comic
“Willie and Joe” depicted life on the battlefield. How would you react to that
comparison?
M.U.: I’ve gotten that a lot, actually, and I
think it’s an honor to be considered that. I guess the difference is that I
didn’t even know who Bill Mauldin was before I started making Terminal Lance.
It wasn’t until somebody pointed it out to me that I realized he was doing the
same kind of thing during World War II with “Willie and Joe”
I think he and I tried to do the same type of thing. Before
I did Terminal Lance, there wasn’t really anything like it. There was
SemperToons, which was really the only Marine Corps comic.
R.B.: But SemperToons is a lot tamer
than Terminal Lance.
M.U.: Yeah, it’s very family friendly, with
G-rated Marine Corps humor. So I looked at that and it didn’t represent the
modern Marine Corps that I know, that I was in for four years. It doesn’t
represent the guys that have been to Iraq and Afghanistan — I haven’t been to
Afghanistan, but I have that perspective at least, having been to Iraq — and I
just felt like I could do it better. I could represent that voice better.
That’s what I was trying to do really, to put a new comic
out there from the lance corporal, lower-enlisted perspective and kind of point
out problems or absurdities in the military.
R.B.: Do you feel you hit the mark with
that?
M.U.: I think I did a pretty good job. It’s one
of those things where everybody was afraid to talk about it because everybody
was afraid of getting in trouble. But if you can make people laugh about it and
do it in a way where everybody can laugh about it, not just lance corporals and
below, which I think I’ve been able to do. At the very least I bring things up
for discussion so people can look at it and go, “Oh, this is stupid. Why don’t
we see if we can figure out a way to fix this.” And a lot of times I’ll pick on
something, and then I’ll say that I don’t have a solution, but if somebody else
does, then by all means, you should fix it. So I don’t offer solutions, I just
point things out.
R.B.: How would you describe the
progression of Terminal Lance?
M.U.: When I first started, I guess it didn’t
have the parameters that it has now. It didn’t have characters, and also I
didn’t keep a standard style of drawing. It wasn’t until about strip 150 that I
started really falling into a set way of drawing the characters. So now there’s
a certain look to Terminal Lance that I don’t think was there in the beginning.
Mike Krahulik, he’s a great artist, and Penny Arcade was kind of the template
for Terminal Lance when I started doing it.
R.B.: Terminal Lance was at one time
described by Marine Corps Times as “caustic” in its genuine depiction of
day-to-day military life. How do you react to that?
M.U.: I don’t know if caustic is the right
word, but I would say that it was definitely controversial at first. I think
people are used to it now, but like I said, nobody was really doing anything
like it before. I think Duffel Blog [a satirical military news site] creator
Paul Szoldra, he mentioned in an interview that Terminal Lance was an
inspiration for Duffel Blog because it was the first thing in the military to
put it out there and point out problems and have this public voice of what’s
wrong with the military on some level, and being able to criticize it without
it being, well, caustic. I think what the people really like about Terminal
Lance is that my perspective was never about hating the Marine Corps or just
being angry. It was about genuine problems and being honest about it. And I’ve
said that a bunch of times with my comic, I don’t hate the Marine Corps, but
there are some of these things that are just hard not to make fun of.
R.B.: It is funny because Terminal
Lance is Marine Corps specific, but even from my experience in the Army, so
many of those jokes and problems that you highlight are easily applied to the
other branches.
M.U.: I get that a lot from people from the
other branches. Even Australians. A lot of Australian military guys; it’s taken
off over there. And some Royal Marines have e-mailed me. It’s interesting.
R.B.: In addition to Terminal Lance and
your work on the graphic novel, what else do you have working?
M.U.: I’m still working on the screenplay. I’m
writing it as a screenplay because I plan on turning it into a movie at some
point. So I’m in the process of writing that. The goal is to have the whole
book done by the end of the summer.
I’m also working on an animated short called “A Dog and His
Boy,” which is a really depressing story about a Marine that goes to
Afghanistan and dies, and it’s told from the point of view of his dog at home.
I’m hoping to have that done by May. It’s about five minutes long. I wanted to
do something military-themed so I could still put it up on the Terminal Lance
site.
R.B.: Switching gears to your
experiences now as a veteran, how would you describe your reintegration — your
transfer from the Marine Corps into regular life again?
M.U.: I think it’s hard to adjust to certain
things. I think it’s hard because, say you’re like me and you go back to school
on the GI Bill, which is the natural course. You go back to school and you’re
around a bunch of 18 and 19 year olds, and you’re this old dude and you’ve been
to Iraq or whatever, and it’s just like, I don’t fit in. It was funny, because
my first day at school, it’s an art school, so one of the things we did was we
had a white sheet of butcher paper on a table and the teacher had these bowls
of food dye with soap mixed in them. So what we did was we took straws and we
were blowing bubbles onto the paper to make designs. And I remember taking a
step back and thinking I was in Iraq not even a year ago and here I am blowing
bubbles on a sheet of paper. It was a weird realization. I think that it’s hard
to adjust to that difference of lifestyle.
R.B.: I’ve recently talked to some
other veterans who are using the arts as a means to deal with their
reintegration. Have you found that focusing on your art helps you?
M.U.: Yeah, I guess Terminal Lance itself is a
little cathartic in the way that it lets me talk about my problems — really,
everybody’s problems — but my problems from my perspective and put it into a
joke and laugh about it and hopefully other people laugh at it too. So I think
it helps me come to terms with a lot of stuff from the military in a way that
other people might not be able to.
R.B.: What are your thoughts on how
veterans are being portrayed in the media versus your experiences and what you
see among your veteran friends?
M.U.: I did a comic about it, how like anytime
a veteran does anything bad, like shoot someone — that’s bad no matter who you
are — the headline’s always “Ex Marine shot this guy.” It’s like, no, he was
just an asshole. Being a Marine has nothing to do with it. I think that it’s
really easy for people to get that stereotype of Marines or ex-military as
being fucked up in the head. These are people who are dealing with problems,
but at the same time I think the media should try to focus more on what good
the veterans are doing, like going back to the workplace and being more
professional and better at what they do than most people because they have life
experience and doing some crazy stuff around the world a couple of times. I
think it gives guys like us a better perspective on the world, and when we do
get out and go back in the workplace, we tend to be better employees at what we
do, at least ideally, from what I know from my veteran friends. I don’t think
it’s necessary to point out if somebody was an Iraq veteran or something
anytime they rob a bank, because it has nothing to do with it. It really
doesn’t.
This article appears in 2013-01-04.