I think I liked the stuff collected in the first book better, maybe because the earlier stuff was less directly ripped from the headlines allegory. Trying to allegorize the Iraq War with a fictional U.S. Civil War won't always work, because the moral terrain of the Iraq War doesn't really map onto that of the Civil War portrayed in DMZ. The U.S. soldiers in DMZ can't really cleanly match up to the real U.S. soldiers in Iraq, because the DMZ soldiers are not in Iraq, they're in the U.S. The setting of the war at home instead of somewhere we invaded on the flimsiest of pretexts changes everything. 

I also didn't really like how the Kelly comic unceremoniously killed her off in the first panel, then tried to fill out more of her story through flashbacks. Maybe I would have liked a “final day in the life of” story better. I'll probably still read the next one.