There’s an episode of Futurama where Fry and Bender are sent off to a far away planet to battle a species of alien ball things (they joined the Army for the discounts, but “war were declared”). The dramatic pivot – if such a thing could exist in an episode that included Zapp Brannigan, the disembodied heads of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and a running gag about M*A*S*H – is when Fry learns that the planet wasn’t just a rock, but the home planet of the aliens. In other words, we were the invaders, the bad guys.

That, largely, is the big idea behind We Stand On Guard, in which a small band of guerillas in the Canadian wilderness fight back against marauding invaders from . . . the United States. It’s an interesting idea and in the hands of Bryan K. Vaughn – of Saga, The Private Eye, and many others fame – you’d think it would be more interesting. As it is, the six-issue run is too short to do anything all that original and, in the end, it turns into a better executed version of Red Dawn. With, you know, Canadians.

You see, in 2112 (a Rush reference, surely?), somebody bombs the White House. In response, we blow the ever loving shit out of Canada. You may think what happened in the South Park Movie was bad, but that’s just peanuts to what we do in We Stand On Guard. Fairly quickly thereafter we’re thrown into the story of Amber who, along with her brother, survived the initial onslaught and lived to fight another day. The story flips back and forth between the present (2124) and the past as Amber and her brother escape advancing American forces.

Why does any of this happen? It’s not really clear, even by the end of things. Sure, some Canadian general confesses to the White House thing, but it’s clear he’s been beaten (at least) and so I suspect this isn’t supposed to be the final word on things. Why we freaked the fuck out and razed our long-time peaceful neighbor doesn’t even get a cursory explanation. We’re out for Canadian water, but whether that’s a happy accident of the invasion or the goal of it is never clear.

Which is a shame, because beyond the initial setup the story plays out like any where the main character joins a plucky band of resistance fighters. It’s bloodier than most, but in the end the good guys win (at least for now) because, you know, they have to. As my brother is fond of saying, “because it’s in the script.” The brief run time doesn’t allow for any of the characters to get defined beyond archetypes or for any kind of interesting world building that doesn’t directly relate to the story We Stand On Guard is rushing to tell.

We Stand On Guard has a lot going for it, anyway. The art’s quite good, clean and vivid. And Vaughn has come up with some really awful ways to get people to talk. Let’s just say that in a hundred years we’ve become even more fluid with our “enhanced interrogation techniques.” And, say what you will about the short nature of the book, that means it doesn’t drag at all. It’s fast paced pretty much from the get go.

Which is precisely the problem. It’s an odd thing to say, but this would have been better had there been more of it. The Private Eye got ten “issues” (since it was originally released in digital format only I’m not sure how they compare to regular comic issues) and that seems about the minimum needed to tell a story set in a new world populated by new people. Maybe there’s a comics equivalent to a director’s cut out there, somewhere, that would fill in some of the blanks.

Ready an older book can be tricky – and I’m not even talking about Chaucer or Voltaire here. On the one hand, a recognition of the fact that the book arose from a different time, a different social context, is necessary to give it a benefit of the doubt sometimes, to explain why it doesn’t quite fit with modern expectations. On the other hand, sometimes you can defer too much and paper over that a book just isn’t very good with the explanation that, at one time, people must have thought it was.

Wasp, which was first published in 1957, has a brilliant idea at its core – a single operative is dropped behind enemy lines with instructions to wreak havoc among the populace, drawing resources and attention away from the front lines. The analogy the title makes is to when a wasp gets into a car, freaks out the driver, and kills all on board in an accident. It could have easily been written as a Cold War thriller, a James Bond kind of thing, but one side in Wasp is on Earth and the other on Jaimec, near Sirius, and the war is an interstellar one.

The wasp in this case is James Mowry, who had the good fortune to have been born on the enemy planet and raised there until he was a teenager. As a result he gets drafted for this dangerous assignment (he’s not a career spy). After some montage-like training, he’s dumped on an outlying planet, given lots of resources, and let loose. He does precisely what he’s supposed to do, with the expected results.

Which is the biggest problem with Wasp, something that doesn’t really have anything to do with when it was written. Mowry is just too good at what he does, particularly considering his lack of espionage background. Yes, he gets into scrapes with the secret police, but there’s never really much danger. There’s no real antagonist, no dogged cop trying to hunt Mowry down that makes it seem like he’s really at risk.

Nothing goes wrong until almost the very end when his cache of goods is found and he’s effectively cut off from communicating with Earth (don’t whine about spoilers – did I mention 1957?). Had this happened in the middle of the book, throwing Mowry out of his comfort zone and forcing him to deal with some serious problems, it would have been a welcome twist. As it is, he survives what’s left of the book in quick fashion before he’s picked up (in an admittedly twisted coda) by Earth forces.

That wouldn’t be too problematic if there was something interesting going on inside Mowry. Given his background, one might think he would have some sympathy from the Sirians. In spite of their secret police, they don’t seem all that different from what we know of the Terrans (Mowry, after all, is impressed against his will and sent to indiscriminately blow up stuff – hardly noble) and surely Mowry made a friend while he was growing up? More immediate, he doesn’t forge any kind of connection with the people he uses in his scheme. Everybody is a pawn being moved around the board, even Mowry.

The lack of depth draws sharper focus to the anachronisms of the story. For one thing, there are no women involved. I don’t mean there are no notable female characters, I mean there are no women anywhere at all (As Jo Walton put it, “[t]his is an old fashioned book, written before women were invented.”). Par for the course in 1957, but glaringly unrealistic to modern eyes. For another, there isn’t any attempt to extrapolate future tech, aside from space travel and communications, such that Jaimec looks and sounds almost exactly like 1950s America. A typewriter features prominently at one point. With a better story and deeper, more interesting characters, it would be easy to overlook.

Lots of people make a lot of Mowry being a “terrorist.” No less a luminary than Terry Pratchet said of Wasp he “can’t imagine a funnier terrorists’ handbook.” Neil Gaiman, at one point, owned the film rights. He was working on a script when 9/11 happened and he abandoned it because audiences wouldn’t be ready for a movie where the terrorist is the good guy (although, given his lack of depth, he functions more as a psychopath than a good guy).

I’m not sure that’s an accurate characterization of Mowry and what he does. For one thing, he’s an agent of a state at war inflicting damage on the other state with which is at war (presumably openly declared). That’s straight up warfare, even if carried out in a slightly unconventional way. For another, most of Mowry’s targets are military or government related, even if there’s some collateral damage. Compared to carpet bombing, lacing the countryside with landmines, and atomic weapons, however, it’s damned precise. If Mowry had  brain in his head I’d think that perhaps the author was trying to make a larger point.

There’s something to be said for quick dumb fun. Wasp is certainly quick and, in spots, it’s kind of un in a subversive kind of way. But it’s pretty dumb and doesn’t think very highly of its characters. It’s intriguing central idea deserved a better execution.