We Stand on Guard: in 100 years, America seizes Canada for its water
When We Stand on Guard launched last summer, it made more news in Canada than it did in America, tickling the quintessentially Canadian anxiety about its southern neighbour, and noting with that very Canadian pride that Vaughan was married to a Canadian and that his storyboarder Steve Skroce (who also storyboards for the Wachowskis) was from Toronto.
As the series progressed -- and completed, it's a fully self-contained story now, collected in a single, handsome, hardcover volume -- the American media started to take notice, and wasn't always comfortable with what it saw.
The premise of We Stand on Guard is this: in 100 years, the President of the United States is assassinated by a Canadian drone. Canadians insist that it was a false flag operation, but the American retaliation is swift and bloody -- and convenient. As the missiles rain down on Canada, enormous machines called "hosers" are maneuvered into place around Canada's prodigious stores of fresh water, diverting them to a USA that has been turned into a dust-bowl by poor regulation and climate change.
The Canadian guerrilla fighters who remain are treated without mercy, and vanquished without risk. The American counterinsurgency uses drones -- including building-sized mechas -- to stamp out the underground. When leaders are captured, they're tortured in endless neural-interface VR sims, each crueller than the last, while their interrogators telecommute from comfortable offices in the Beltway.