"I didn't approach it from the point of view of anything other than story driven, so when I was writing about war veterans its, we've all absorbed what we've observed, we're not necessarily experts on mental health or PTSD. I now know a lot of Vietnam and Afghan war veterans, old people and young people. I've had letters from readers saying I understand PTSD, I don't but I have an inkling of it. I know that veterans are over medicated. I know that, all the guys I know suffer from bad dreams, medication doesn't necessarily make bad dreams go away sometimes it actually encourages them. You know I think anybody that is put through war is going to suffer. The story of a Yvette is a the transformation of an innocent who’s been exposed to war and had to do things she wouldn't have done had she not been fighting for her life, you know and put in a situation where you're fighting for her life. Where basically that becomes your reason for living and then they take that away and what kind of person you become. A lot of people who become killers, sit on roof tops, picking people off with guns, they've been in war and something gets broken. There are writers who have treated the subject of mental health very specifically in comics I don't think I specifically set out to touch on that issue but its inevitable when you're writing about warfare. You know the goal of training, boot camp is all about breaking the mental bearings of a young man or woman. The first goal is to break them and then rebuild them, and teach them that it is okay to kill, but its not okay to kill. But on the other hand we're taught to fight for king and country and we’re taught the concept of a just war. But a just war and what people see in warfare are two different things, both my grand fathers were in WW1 my mother’s father was a stretcher bearer, he refused to take lives, my father’s father was in cartography so he was in, behind the front, my grandfather who was a stretcher bearer was literally getting people who'd had there limbs blown off out of trenches and his wife was a nurse in WW1 so I come from a family of people hopefully saving lives in war time and that’s coloured my point of view having said that now that I've got to know people how have actually fought in wars, and a war like Vietnam that is not regarded as a just war, has been so damaging and I have more compassion for people who were actually put in the field of battle to kill people, you know so on the one hand I'm proud of my grandfather refused to kill however on the other hand you cant judge the people who took a job and didn't understand the consequences to their mental health, and you have a system that feeds that medication to keep them pacified and free of doubt, I don't know if you can be free of doubt, but you've got to have compassion for the people who went into that system and survived."
You can see this conversation at 10:58 to 15:30 in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUQ-W6sFFfA&feature=youtu.be
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