Mark Scribner is your typical hard-bitten journalist and war correspondent. Egged on early by his reporter father, he enters the newspaper business to follow in his footsteps and valiantly search for and uncover the truth wherever that may be. The only problem is, when he does so, newspapers are cutting back right and left, feeling the disruptive effects of the internet.

He manages one way or another as a freelance war correspondent until even that becomes a very cheap commodity. His innate reporter cynicism takes over. He sees what is happening through technology. Truths can now be fabricated, pictures ‘deep faked’. It doesn’t take long for him to realize how much can be made from this new reality. Hey, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right? Now in the war business, it’s not much of a jump, after aiding conflict for a good story, to get into the weapons business…

Beautifully painted by Pablo Callejo and written by Ted Rall, The Stringer is a thriller with a timely message that sticks with you. Through the travails and deeply flawed decisions Scribner takes to get to success, any success, we get to see how the present-day situation with news has become very seriously compromised and what the consequences can be.

We’re seeing this unfortunately right now in our own country in a most dramatic way. Imagine such forces wielded internationally as Scribner engineers.

The Stringer is out in April 2021 from NBM.