Planetary #27

It's been almost precisely three years since Planetary #26 and here - finally - is the conclusion to Warren Ellis and John Cassaday's classic postmodern superhero series.

The Planetary team made their first appearance in September 1998, in a short teaser episode that heralded the ongoing series. In the eight-page preview, three no-nonsense super-types break into a top-secret military base, rough up a few goons and menace a grizzled old general into revealing the specifics of a 1962 military cover-up. The incident in question is a clear reference to the secret origin of Marvel's Incredible Hulk, the notable divergence being that Wildstorm's analogue was overpowered and dropped five miles down a concrete nuclear test shaft, eventually expiring after two decades without food or water.

Introducing themselves as 'Mystery Archaeologists', the three members of the Planetary field team outline their mission to map the secret history of the twentieth century, uncovering fantastic secrets and righting age-old wrongs along the way. The leader is Elijah Snow, a sarcastic curmudgeon [the protagonists of Ellis's work are often grumpy, middle-aged men] whose clown-buttoned zoot suit matches his tousled mop of pure white hair; Jakita Wagner is the muscle, a stunningly attractive, latex-clad woman who can effortlessly punch holes through brick walls; support and intel is provided by The Drummer, a begoateed slacker apparently able to interface directly with any kind of information system.

Planetary was the understated flipside to the massively hyperbolic approach of The Authority, Ellis's parallel Wildstorm project of the time: an outrageous, over-the-top action series that saw the titular superteam punching jaws off, kicking opponents in half and summarily executing their defeated enemies. Ellis's controversial millennial rebranding of costumed superheroes in turn spawned the early-noughties concept of 'widescreen comics', which featured multiple outsized images of ultra-detailed action scenes. An early Authority episode called for a double-page spread of F-16 fighter jets taking on the invading aerial fleet of an alternate Earth in the skies above Los Angeles: Ellis's script apparently read 'The ships engage', which curt instruction subsequently took artist Bryan Hitch several days to fully illustrate.

Planetary undoubtedly has its moments, but even the large-scale violence is invariably brief and brutal, simply another contingent necessity factored into über-strategist Snow's meticulous pre-planning. The main attraction of the series stems from its neatly realized insinuation of existing fictional characters and concepts into a single universe, in much the same way as Moore and O'Neill's sublime League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series continues to do. The oddities unearthed by the Planetary organization are instantly recognizable to any pop culture connoisseur: Godzilla, James Bond, two-fisted pulp heroes, Hong Kong action and kung fu movies, Victorian sci-fi, '50s Cold War paranoia - the series can be read as Ellis's personal homage to many of the most influential landmarks in imaginative fiction.

With an eclectic set of superpowered characters and an almost inexhaustible pool of fictional subject matter to explore, the series was an immediate hit. A large part of its appeal lay in the fact that each issue was more of an experience than simply an individual episode in an ongoing story. The covers, for instance, conform to no particular format, instead uniquely summarizing each issue's theme in a complementary art style, right down to the era-specific logo designs. The series benefits from the instantly identifiable artwork of American artist John Cassaday, whose unique, ornate costume and environment design infuses the series with a palpable sense of strangeness and wonder. Equal praise has to go to Laura Martin for the rich vibrancy and subtle graduation of her digital colouring, which lends further weight to the impact of Cassaday's imaginative linework. It's additionally telling that, since their early collaborative work on this series, Laura Martin has been the exclusive colour artist for almost all of Cassaday's subsequent interior art.

This being a comic, there are naturally several nods to the mainstream institutional superheroes of the major US comic publishers. Planetary's quartet of nemeses, The Four, are twisted mirror images of Marvel's Fantastic Four, their physical forms mysteriously altered during an exploratory space voyage. Unlike the benevolent team that inspired them, Ellis's Four are truly evil individuals, bent on the acquisition of knowledge for their own sake, power-crazed and responsible for a catalogue of horrific crimes. Among many and varied transgressions, Snow uncovers evidence of The Four having murdered the entire population of one world simply to create the requisite storage space for their otherworldly arsenal; they're also responsible for the systematic extermination of a raft of recognizable DC heroes [Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, Superman], in a neat fictional re-enactment of the Marvel-dominated, flawed Silver Age superseding DC's clean-cut Golden Age. In much the same way, the first issue saw an analogue lineup of DC's Justice League engaging the foremost pulp heroes - Doc Savage, Tarzan, The Spider et al - in mortal combat, in the same way as those two genres had fought for supremacy of their era's cheap, disposable entertainment. The unflattering way that costumed superheroes are presented in the series has also been seen by many as a comment on Ellis's recorded distaste at the dominance of the genre in Western sequential art. This interpretation founders somewhat - or could at least be dismissed as a snapshot of Ellis's mindset some years ago - since he has of late embraced the hands-off editorial approach championed by Avatar Press, and has once again begun rattling out creator-owned titles such as Black Summer, No Hero and Supergod, all of which burst with exuberant, if cynical, contemplations on the notion of the superman.

Like much of Ellis's work, Planetary is peppered with references to the latest thinking in brain-bending theoretical science, as made available for popular consumption in New Scientist and the books of Marcus Chown or Michio Kaku. These ideas form the solid basis for the Planetary continuum, where the nature of the multiverse of parallel realities is revealed very early on to be "a theoretical snowflake existing in 196,833-dimensional space". This is a reference to the Monster Group, a pure maths theory that apparently explores the nature of reality. Even the most basic explanation of this principle causes me instant brainlock, so I won't attempt to regurgitate it here. More understandably, The Drummer explains magic as being "the cheat codes of reality", a much more palatable videogames reference.

Structurally, the first few issues are self-contained episodes that see the team investigating some Fortean anomaly or other, with Snow spouting cynical Ellis-isms, Wagner smacking someone or something really hard in the chops and The Drummer tapping into a computer network, telemetry or some unfathomable alien data system to reveal startling truths about the nature of reality. Planetary documents the evidence and Snow wraps it all up with his trademark "It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way." The seeds of an overarching plot, however, are sown in #6, Strange Harbours, when Planetary make the link between the discovery of an interdimensional shiftship [Ellis's second, after The Authority's Carrier] and the nefarious machinations of The Four. This is the issue in which Snow gains his first cryptic hint that he might actually share a history with The Four - a history about which he has absolutely no recollection. From this point on, it becomes clear that The Four have been instrumental in suppressing pretty much everything Planetary are now making it their business to expose. This is where the team begins to gather its key allies, and where Snow begins to put together a long and patient plan to remove their ideological opposites from the equation, leaving the way clear to finally put an unfathomable wealth of hoarded knowledge to good use.

Without giving too much of the intervening plot away, that necessarily long and deliberately-paced storyline came to its natural end in #26: a fittingly bombastic denouement replete with massive explosions, witty one-liners, well-deserved come-uppances and heroic triumphs, the final few pages of which were sufficiently open-ended for it not to feel like The End. As such, this issue can't help but come across as something of an afterthought, albeit one that feels entirely appropriate for a series whose instalments have mostly been self-contained, and which has undergone lengthy hiatuses along the way.

The fold-out, wrap-around cover by Cassaday and Martin [a diminutive version of which can be found at the top of this post] amalgamates practically every notion explored throughout the series into one massive gatefold mosaic: the Planetary team occupy a circle at the centre, with the seven pulp heroes arrayed in a semi-circle beneath them and The Four glaring menacingly from each corner. This arresting graphic recalls both the more generic montage cover used for the first introductory episode and the more series-specific images that appear on the collection covers.

A year has passed since the events described in the previous issue and the Planetary organization has become a global public entity, issuing press releases about cancer cures and cheaply-fabricated aid stations. Against this triumphal backdrop, Ellis revisits the more readily accessible of the dangling plot threads from #9, Planet Fiction, which featured a Four-run experiment to bring a character out of a fictional world and into their reality, and which saw the apparent demise of Ambrose Chase, Planetary's erstwhile 'third man'. Snow is still obsessing over Chase's disappearance and believes the key to his salvation might be found in The Four's labyrinthine archives. The Drummer outlines one useful entry he has unearthed - the basic method for and limitations of time travel - and there, in its essence, is the binding theme for the final issue. Given the cutting-edge physics involved in time travel theory, the first half of the issue understandably contains a lot of expository dialogue. Ellis has made an effort to understand the theory and tie it into the Planetary framework in terms that even a simpleton like me can understand, and while it could be argued that this is evidence of Ellis's self-absorption, it also contributes to the sense that this instalment is an added extra - a special edition bonus feature for all the diehards.

Some critics have cited Ellis's clearly decreasing interest in the series, apparent from lazy plotting and a dwindling sense of excitement, but I have to disagree with that interpretation. As the series nears its conclusion, closer adherence to a coherent plot and the need to resolve the central conflict necessarily narrows the broad scope of those earlier episodes, changing the focal point from the wild, fun concepts to the major players themselves. However interesting they are, we saw them doing pretty much the same stuff in the previous issue and they still look and sound the same. That doesn't really equate to the series having lost its spark - all the crazy, big stuff is still there, but rather than taking centre stage it now forms the scenery for the developing story. That's actually rather a neat trick - along with the team, the more we have seen of the strangeness, the more we have become inured to it.

There has also been some suggestion that the protagonists have unknowingly supplanted The Four, continuing to use their hoarded knowledge and technology to further personal ambition. In some ways this is true, but that level of overwhelming power does ultimately demand some degree of control, which will be unavoidably and arbitrarily decided by its custodian, and the marked distinction between the villainy of The Four and the bad-tempered altruism of Elijah Snow remains resolutely in place.

This issue is noticeably more introspective than previous episodes, from small in-jokes such as a restless Jakita Wagner bemoaning the fact that, now things have settled down, there's nothing left for her to hit [although Ellis does throw her a bone towards the end], right down to the big reveal being the appearance of tweaked future incarnations of the Planetary team itself. Given the number of external ideas that have been showcased throughout the series, and given the generally contemplative nature of this final chapter, it's only fitting that the big final concept should be entirely autoreferential.

So, in summary: not the most essential episode of the series, but definitely a neat restating of the aims and tone of the title. Heavy on the dialogue and high-concept science, light on the action, possibly slightly self-indulgent but not in the least bit incongruous when read in sequence. The second oversized, slipcased, hardback volume of Absolute Planetary is already listed on Amazon, but personally I'm looking forward to the fourth trade paperback, at which point I'll probably re-read the whole thing in one go, doubtless experiencing a shivery fanboy frisson as I do so.

I fought the law and...

Given the fact that the firm I work for assists the wheels of justice in their deliberate rotations, it may disturb my employers to learn that one among their number is a wanted felon.

After a frankly psychedelic drive home last Thursday - a pitch black fever dream of nose-to-tail jostling and wildly veering red lights that could easily have convinced me I'd been sucked into Tron - I staggered through my front door to find a letter from Sussex Police waiting for me. It is alleged that 'at APPROX. 16:00HRS on 09/10/2009 at [my road], [my car] was involved in a road traffic accident, where the requirements of Section 170 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 were not complied with'. It then goes on to get smugly officious in that peculiarly irritating manner perfected by our fine constabulary, and to add stylistic horror to injury the last couple of paragraphs consist exclusively of upper case letters.

Sussex Police, please note: IN THIS, THE DIGITAL AGE, USING ALL CAPS IN ANY CORRESPONDENCE IS LIKELY TO BE INTERPRETED BY THE RECIPIENT AS SHOUTING, AND IF THERE'S ONE THING THAT'S PRACTICALLY GUARANTEED NOT TO GET THE CITIZENRY ONSIDE, IT'S BEING SHOUTED AT BY YOU.

While I've probably been responsible for several of what I like to call 'nudging incidents' over the years [if you never bump anything they aren't bumpers, duh] , I'm at a loss to recall an occurrence of such gravity that someone would see fit to involve the rozzers. I live in Hanover in Brighton, also known as Muesli Mountain on account of the large numbers of left-leaning Guardian readers living there. It's a warren of inch-wide streets with little in the way of parking restrictions, and accidents invariably happen: I've accidentally broken the headlamp on a yellow VW van before, and some weeks later had a tail light cover of mine smashed in karmic return. The decent thing to do in such circumstances is to sort it out between yourselves - get a quote for the damage and I'll gladly give you a cheque. Apparently this view is not universally shared by my neighbours. Apparently some snidey little net curtain-twitchers think it entirely proper to crouch, seething, by the window sill while you allegedly vandalize their prize automotive possession [which, I hasten to add, I most assuredly didn't], then rat you out to the filth even as you struggle to coax your grumpy two-year-old out of the insistent drizzle, all the time hoping against hope you can summon up some mild diversion to keep him entertained while you make his dinner, and which hopefully, once you've done that, he'll like. Apparently that's entirely appropriate behaviour for the well-educated, neighbourly middle classes in the wildly futuristic year of 2009.

This isn't my first tangle with the Babylon. Two days into a six-month stint in Amiens in northern France, I was snatched from the late-night streets by three plain-clothes thugs in a souped-up Peugeot. Apparently they were after someone with long hair and a leather jacket who was wanted for violent assault; the design I'd painted on the back of my well-worn biker jacket can't have helped much, depicting as it did a two-tone drug capsule flying into an open mouth. Needless to say, I was somewhat concerned for my own well-being - the only thing identifying their profession was a single 'Police' armband they could have made themselves in true Pierre Bleu fashion, and for all I knew I was in for nothing less than a proper shoeing. They drove me to l'hôpital and shone a torch in my face while some bruised, limping mec confirmed that I wasn't the party responsible for his comprehensive drubbing. Then they drove me back to town and ejected me unceremoniously from the car.

That's how they do it in France, sunshine - none of this 'ere-what's-this-all-about-then letters-through-the-post bollocks.

I need an intervention

As my partner - or any keen-eyed visitor to our house - will attest, I've got a bit of a book problem. I just can't get enough of them and, despite making a game go of it, our cheap shelving can but sag under the weight of vast quantities of printed matter.

The majority of this is paperback fiction in various genres, a sizeable portion of which stems from our leaner times spent scouring second-hand shops [there were a lot of duplicates in evidence when we moved in, particularly Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams], but there's healthy representation from comic collections [trade paperbacks, to those in the know], a comprehensive selection of reference books, travel guides, factual histories and biographies, and a handful of other entertainments that seek to defy neat categorization [The KGB Handbook, for instance, doesn't exactly fit the bill of a reference guide, unless you're planning a serious interrogation].

In an effort to keep the burgeoning mass under some semblance of control, routine culls have been undertaken, wherein dozens of books - usually fairly ratty paperbacks with which one or other of us has no sentimental attachment - are judged, found wanting and summarily loaded into carrier bags for a one-way trip to the old books' home. This has not proven a particularly profitable enterprise, and the boat was missed by a truly tantalizing margin when we finally relented and cleared out the Vonnegut doubles - mere days before the great man bid us adieu. Not that I would ever have wanted to profit on the death of that towering Goliath of both American literature and common sense; indeed the irony of that insignificant event was so perfectly in keeping with the minor unfairnesses that permeate his work that it could even be interpreted, albeit everso loosely, as our own small tribute.

But - and not wanting to purposefully quote Ronnie Corbett - I digress.

There are some titles that I've felt duty-bound to read, eventually forcing myself to tackle them once sufficient motivation has been scraped together. Stoker's Dracula falls into this category. As a big horror-head, I've long felt obliged to absorb the grandaddy of all vampire fiction - after all, what other works have so decisively spawned an entire sub-genre? And I must confess to some disappointment on finally reading it: Van Helsing came across as massively obsequious and I found his interest in Mina Harker rather inappropriate. In addition to which it was as dull as ditchwater. This is particularly galling since the time I spend reading has suffered the twin setbacks of a] my no longer getting the train to work, and b] the birth of my son, meaning that I generally have to pack a few pages into the narrow window between getting into bed and falling asleep, whereupon I am invariably awoken by a sound that could for all the world be a book falling to the floor. Allow me, at this point, to draw a discreet veil over the finer detail of my bedroom activities.

I haven't even read all of the books I've made a point of gathering over the years. A quick scan of the shelves reveals numerous tomes that I most assuredly needed to possess, but apparently not to digest. To this day, I diligently maintain a physical hit-list of desirable items [not all of them books], about which I've learnt just enough to know that they belong in my collection. Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius series and - um - Ice-T's The Ice Opinion all remain as pristine as the day I acquired them. I've only idly dipped into my copy of The Marquis de Sade's One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, but that's the sort of book that lends itself to inconstant scrutiny: to subject oneself, without respite, to the onslaught of filth and degradation described therein would surely necessitate purification of the 'scalding bleach and wire wool' variety.

Recently, my book problem has become more acute, in terms both of load and available shelf space, since I thought it was a good idea to start collecting hardbacks. How could I possibly resist their durability, their tactility? The saddle-stitched binding, metallic spine lettering and superior dust jacket design? They're just so damned covetable.

I'm also collecting Somerfield bags. I think it's time we had a clearout.

London to Brighton

Another Sunday, another motoring rally.

On the third Sunday in May, (or the first Sunday in October, or the first Sunday in November), conspicuously high numbers of a particular vehicle will make their collective way in fragmented convoy from our preeminent city to its coastal satellite.

Assuming the chosen mode of transport hasn't succumbed to fatigue along the way, participants speed the length of the M23, merging neatly into the A23 and slowing to a disarmingly sedate pace along London Road. Suddenly forced into a sharp left at the southern tip of Preston Park, they're flung unsuspecting into a succession of hard and fast chicanes (at which point, if the Model T Ford's wingnuts haven't spun off in protest, they can at least be reassured that the old chugbox is a robust example of its kind). Passing under Rastrick's frankly oppressive brick viaduct and jostling for position along various dual-carriageways, the route straightens and calms along a succession of Places and Parades - and at least one Steine - until, finally, a slight left inclination across Grand Junction will lead them to their destination: Madeira Drive, where crowds of onlookers wait to cheer them over the Finish line.

And, naturally, to gawp at whatever bizarro contraption they've elected to make the journey on.

Part frathouse road-trip, part instinctive flocking action, a motor rally is more obviously cathartic reassurance that one's obsessive interest in a particular configuration of mechanical parts (and sometimes even a particular configuration of mechanical parts assembled within a specific timespan) isn't entirely unhealthy: a unique, mobile form of group therapy.

The run from capital to coast has been a social fixture since 1896, when the Emancipation Run celebrated the end of the notorious 'Red Flag Act'. Motor vehicles had been required to travel no faster than 4mph, with a man walking in front and holding a red flag (sensing the derisive hoots of a high-octane modern readership, I can only add that I was once run over by a milk float, and I can assure you that 4mph is perfectly fast enough to ruin your day). The flag men were out, the speed limit was upped to a blistering 14mph and accelerators were floored up and down the country in jubilatory clouds of lead.

Rallies haven't always conducted in quite such a genteel manner, of course. The mods and rockers infamously arranged similar, separate excursions in May 1964, with spirited consequences. Battle was enthusiastically joined on Brighton seafront, travelling down the coast to Hastings and back in some kind of cartoon brawl cloud, through which leather jackets and RAF target parkas could no doubt be glimpsed. These days, of course, the Daily Mail would have you believe that you can conveniently indulge, if disposed, in that same degree of violence on any given Saturday night within a hundred yards of a Yates's Wine Bar, negating the need to travel 60-odd miles beforehand.

Nevertheless, the weekend high street's loss is the rally enthusiast's gain, and these days Brighton plays host to hundreds of Minis, Land Rovers, VW vans, choppers and hogs, bicycles and even an 'ultra-marathon' arranged by the Road Runners Club.

Mee-meep!

Dedication

What you always read:

'I'd particularly like to thank my editor, [insert name here], without whose sage advice, incisive correction and gentle admonishment this work might never have been finished.'

What you never read:

'The fact that you're holding this book in your hands is no thanks to my worthless fuck of an editor, [insert name here], who is nothing less than a vampiric leech. I would have been better off submitting my manuscript to a butternut squash with a face drawn on it than to that epic waste of the Earth's resources, without whom history would remain entirely unchanged.'

From which we can draw one of two conclusions. Either:

a] All editors are absolutely sublime masters of their craft, truly altruistic types, whose sole purpose in life is to shepherd their naive, uncertain wards through the fraught and trap-bestrewn world of publishing,

Or:

b] Writers are in the same position as any other jobbing schmucko, and calling their boss a pointless streak of shit to their faces, however well-intentioned, will elicit precisely the same brisk hauling over the same energetically glowing coals.

Thus is forged Sheersy's First Law of Humanity, which states that massaging the right egos will get you everywhere.

Comic review - JLA: Earth 2

The second review I wrote for the aforementioned comic shop.

JLA: Earth 2
DC Comics
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

The Justice League responds to a routine distress call, but soon discovers that all passengers on board a crashing plane are dead of indeterminate cause, with their hearts on the right-hand side of their bodies and banknotes bearing the face of Benedict Arnold in their wallets. If that wasn't enough, the aeroplane tailfin bears the burning cross insignia of 'KKK Southern' airlines. "Anybody else hearing that little 'X-Files' whistle on this one?", as The Flash puts it.

Yes, it's a classic alternate Earth tale, not seen in official DC continuity since the seminal mid-'80s crossover [and company housekeeping] event Crisis On Infinite Earths. The theme of alternate universes has been consistent in Morrison's costumed superhero work since early in his career, notably in the 2000AD superhero series, Zenith, but his fascination with the cluttered pre-Crisis DC Universe is clearly demonstrated in the Doom Patrol spin-off mini-series Flex Mentallo, wherein superheroes escape a world-destroying catastrophe by becoming fictional comic characters in our - real - universe. The Crisis itself featured in the closing chapters of his 26-issue run on Animal Man, featuring cameo appearances from some of DC's more forgettable pre-Crisis characters, now languishing in a limbo world that exists outside official continuity, and an honourable mention ought also to go to Sunburst, a third-rate Crisis casualty that Morrison surreptitiously resurrected to appear briefly in Doom Patrol #26, being soundly thrashed by a typically wacky DP adversary.

The original Crime Syndicate first appeared in the pages of Justice League Of America in 1964, an evil mirror image of the League from the alternate Earth-3 [this is precisely why DC instigated the Crisis in the first place], who used their superpowers to commit crime rather than to prevent it. They intermittently returned to plague the League over the next two decades, until their abrupt collective demise in the first issue of Crisis On Infinite Earths.

Morrison's updated Crime Syndicate of Amerika - Ultraman, Superwoman, Owlman, Johnny Quick and Power Ring - come from a parallel anti-matter universe, where the overriding morality tends towards evil, corruption is lauded and personal advancement is always obtained at the expense of others. This Syndicate is far more menacing than their somewhat goofy Silver Age forebears, its members apt to maim or kill without compunction. They drink, take drugs, argue, threaten each other and exploit their godlike powers for personal gain. The Latin motto inscribed on their meeting table, 'CUI BONO' - literally 'who profits' - is a phrase employed in criminal investigations to determine probable cause of a crime; the answer, of course, is that they invariably do. This alternate Earth's only good superbeing - and constant thorn in the Syndicate's side - is Alexander Luthor. While his pre-Crisis precursor sported a skintight gold bodysuit and pillar-box red curly mullet, Morrison does away with such dubious mid-'80s stylings and has a thankfully bald Luthor, replete with classic purple-and-green battle suit. In a neat twist on parallel Earth naming conventions, it's also worth noting that "Earth 2" is only ever referred to by the anti-matter Luthor, to describe the matter world of the Justice League.

The League itself is the seven-strong line-up of DC's heavyweights that Grant Morrison had previously worked on for the monthly JLA relaunch in the late 1990s - Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter and Aquaman. By holding the core League members up against their polar opposites, he further elaborates on their powerful iconic appeal, as well as ensuring that they question their self-appointed roles as mankind's guardians within the framework of the story. Batman, in particular, voices doubts over the moral implications of interfering in the affairs of another world, but once he has embarked on his anti-matter sojourn, he invests himself more personally in the adventure than his teammates, and undergoes a significant cathartic experience as a result.

Frank Quitely provides his usual stratospheric standard of intricate linework, depicting a wealth of neo-Silver Age Morrisonian concepts - an army of Brainiac drones, the Crime Syndicate's suitably furnished trophy room and a giant Kryptonite ape, to name but a few - and this self-contained story benefits from the continuity of a single talented artist in the way that Morrison's patchy JLA run couldn't. Laura DePuy's vibrant digital colours perfectly complement Quitely's precise illustrations and make this an unbeatable package for fans of the costumed hero tale.

Comic review - We3

Bulking up the content of this blog a bit: here's an ages-old review of Morrison and Quitely's We3 that I wrote for a Brighton comic shop. It never made it online. Maybe I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, but I'm happy to labour under the possibly self-deluded misapprehension that they filed it and forgot about it.

We3
DC Comics
Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant

Three domestic pets, a dog, a cat and a rabbit, are abducted by a shadowy wing of the U.S. military and transformed into state-of-the-art cyborg assassins, complete with armoured robot suits and an extensive arsenal of devastating weaponry. Just prior to being "decommissioned", they seize their opportunity to escape and head for home, their erstwhile masters in close pursuit...

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's high-concept mini-series successfully manages to subvert the classic animal adventure story - the most obvious example being Disney's The Incredible Journey - with the speed lines, unique design and graphic ultraviolence of manga. While it's hardly unusual to see a story whose central characters are sentient animals, it is refreshing to see them tackled in a way that tries to avoid over-sentimental anthropomorphism. The story is undoubtedly moving, but Morrison elicits strong emotions from his readers without resorting to Disney's saccharine sentimentality, relying instead on the natural ingenuousness of the protagonists and the overwhelming, manufactured unfairness of their situation.

The canine leader of the group, Bandit [codenamed '1'], bears a tangible weight of responsibility for his comrades at the same time as seeking recognition and praise from the humans that they encounter along the way; the cat, Tinker ['2'], constantly threatens mutinous independence from the group and is untroubled by gratuitous killing; and Pirate ['3'], the rabbit, in keeping with his natural instincts, is the least antagonistic of the three and often attempts to placate his more bellicose team-mates when they clash. The weapons built into their cyborg suits are similarly tailored to each species' natural traits: the cat is equipped with razor-sharp, claw-like projectiles in her forepaws, while the rabbit ejects small round landmines from the rear end of his suit as he flees - much like droppings. The animals have been modified to such an extent that they can talk in a form of txt spk, employing simple phrases to communicate with humans and with each other.

The humans that they encounter are often shown only by their feet or legs, with their eyes rarely depicted inside the panel. This not only works on a literal level, in that an animal's perception is much closer to ground-level, but also represents the emotional detachment, and in some cases downright cruel treatment, with which many people treat animals. To further emphasise the gulf between species, the main human characters represent different attitudes that people have towards animals, from the hard-nosed army general who clearly delights in the grotesque transfigurations wrought by his bioweapons department, through to the kindly derelict who attempts to help them in their direst hour of need. The most constant human figure throughout the story is Dr. Roseanne Berry, a troubled figure seeking atonement for her morally suspect involvement in the We3 project. It is her need for redemption that first enables the creatures to escape their confinement, but her actions are also fundamental to their later development from dangerous tools of an uncaring government back to the harmless domestic pets they once were.

The sense of dynamic animation within Frank Quitely's still images comes not only from digital blurring effects and frozen action poses, but also from playing with accepted comic art conventions. The first of several double-page spreads is a breathtaking - and graphic - depiction of a man being cut vertically in half by chaingun fire, shown from within the hail of bullets. In another standout panel, Tinker engages a small group of infantrymen in hand-to-hand combat, fragments of which grisly assault are depicted in non-human time perception. These arresting images inject a new and distinctive style of storytelling into an otherwise fairly straightforward tale.

This book also marks the full transition of Frank Quitely's artwork into the digital arena; his detailed pencils were digitally inked and coloured by Jamie Grant, the co-owner and publisher of Glaswegian adult humour anthology Northern Lightz, in which some of Quitely's earliest published work also appeared. The effect is extremely polished, and could mark a change in Quitely's notoriously slow output when the same creators embark on their follow-up project for DC Comics, All-Star Superman. On the strength of the standards set by We3, that promises to be yet another outstanding project by a creative team who currently stand head and shoulders above most of their mainstream peers.

OK, so I seem to have got myself a blog

Now what do I do with it?

Right.

Well.

The aim of the exercise, in its essence, is to force me into the habit of writing, so let's start with that. I need to fire up and coordinate my ill-used and disparate faculties, enabling my lazy brain, eyes and fingers to work in hitherto unheard-of concert and assuring myself [and, possibly, others] that I can be relied upon to write words down about stuff, that, at any given point, I'll have the keenness of mind and dextrous command of the English language to seize on a topic, quickly formulate some sort of coherent opinion about the whole thing and neatly dissect it in a entertaining fashion.

Whether or not I manage to do that, either wholly, partially or entirely un- successfully, remains to be seen, but hey - it's a start. If nothing else, it's unarguably that.