Shooting War is a webcomic and graphic novel by writer Anthony Lappé and artist Dan Goldman. It originated on SMITH Magazine, a web magazine about storytelling in all its forms. The story is set in the year 2011 with John McCain as the American president. It tells the story of a video-blogger named Jimmy Burns. Burns films a terrorist suicide bombing attack on a Starbucks in Brooklyn and becomes an overnight media star. Shortly after, he is sent to cover the still-raging war in Iraq for the fictional Global News Network.

The webcomic received recognition from magazines, newspapers and websites such as Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Wired Magazine and Publishers Weekly's The Beat blog, and was nominated for the 2007 Eisner Awards as "best digital comic". The online comic was acquired by Warner Books (now called Grand Central Publishing) for publication as a graphic novel. The 192-page full-color hardcover book was released in the U.S. in mid-November 2007, and was published in the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in early November. USA Today chose it as their "big fall graphic novel", calling it "a subversively buzz-worthy online comic."

The Mexican Drug War is an ongoing armed conflict between rival drug cartels fighting each other for regional control, and Mexican government forces. The government's principal goal has been to put down the drug-related violence that was raging between different drug cartels before any military intervention was made. In addition, the Mexican government has claimed that their primary focus is on dismantling the powerful drug cartels, rather than on drug trafficking prevention, which is left to U.S. functionaries.

Although Mexican drug cartels, or drug trafficking organizations, have existed for several decades, they have become more powerful since the demise of Colombia's Cali and Medellín cartels in the 1990s. Mexican drug cartels now dominate the wholesale illicit drug market by controlling 90% of the drugs that enter the United States. Arrests of key cartel leaders, particularly in the Tijuana and Gulf cartels, have led to increasing drug violence as cartels fight for control of the trafficking routes into the United States.