Doctrine Man!! Bites Dogma, Produces Dead-Tree Book

In a web comic posted most weekdays on Facebook, the anonymous writer of Doctrine Man!! has collected a motley assortment of olde word-warriors, mil-spec intellectuals, and would-be policy-shifters. And those are just his characters, not just his 20,000 or so devoted readers and commenters ...

The strip is billed as "two minutes of hate, with a side plate of snark." Recently, it was recognized in our own 2013 Military Humor Awards for "Best Comic Strip or Cartoon on a Specific Military Topic."

Earlier this summer, Doctrine Man!! published a 164-page, full-color collection of his first year's work. Formatted at 8.5 by 11 inches, the soft-cover dead-tree edition is practically camouflaged, and will blend in nicely among the less-subversive hardcopy field manuals in your military reference library. Locally, we've even taken to referring to it as "DM!! 100-5."

According to a statement of intent buried in the back pages of the book, this may be the first of other annual compendia. You heard it here first: "Collect them all, trade with your friends."

So, here's the bottom line up front: Buy this book. You'll have more fun than a goat-hair happy sock at a reflective-belt rodeo. With such concepts alone, Doctrine Man!! has obviously already made the world a better place.

Able to leap useless acronyms with a single bound, faster than a lumbering field manual, more powerful than a cheese enchilada in a staff huddle ... Look, up in the air!! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's some moron's stick figure attempt at humor. Yes, it's Doctrine Man!! ... your favorite comic anti-hero!

With the turn of every cutting page, the snipes and insights into the military mindset fly fast and fly furious. For example:

• On career management: "Hardworking guys like you set the bar so high, they need sloths like me to lower the bar for everyone else ..."

• On effective communication: "If you had any more fluff in that brief, we'd be calling it 'Microsoft PowerPuff.'"

• On professional conclaves: "Strategist conference? Hell, no ... I just watched 'Rise of the Planet of the Apes.'"

"The Further Adventures of Doctrine Man!!: America's Comic Anti-Hero (Volume 1)" is available via Amazon and directly from Doctrine Man!!. Purchasers can also request signed or personalized editions via the latter link.