Last weekend found me in the crosshairs of a conversation between my comics-obsessed boyfriend and my comics-obsessed former roommate. As they talked my attention wandered. After taking a course on comics/graphic novels (I’m indifferent when it comes to the terminology--life is too short for such battles) last spring semester and a good deal of persuasion from Tyler (my boyfriend), I’ve become a fan of the medium, but on this particular evening I was more engrossed in my beer after the long car ride up to Athens earlier that day. I might have mentally wandered back in on any number of topics, but what I did happen to catch was their brief exchange about Grant Morrison. Tyler is a pretty big fan of his work, but my one time roomie was less impressed by him, claiming him to be “too weird,” or something along those lines.
I’m not totally sure how this was meant to be received--as my roommate finding Morrison to simply be too weird for his personal tastes, or as his feeling Morrison made too much of a deliberate effort to be weird in his work (in an attempt to establish his own quirky trademark, essentially). He also could have been suggesting something else. Language leaves frustratingly ample room for interpretation.
Whatever he meant, Grant Morrison is just the kind of “too weird” I like. Today I read We3, and for all of its brevity and compactness, it was one hell of a read.
The plot follows three pets that have been put on the frontlines of science and war by a highly classified government project. The dog, cat, and rabbit (“1”, “2”, and “3”, respectively) roost within the confines of robotic machinery that visually conjures up images of both insectoid exoskeletons and, strangely, Easter eggs. Bright, cherry-like bulbs tip the ends of antennas that run down the central strip of their heads and necks like an alien’s mohawk. The end result of all this metal and fur is a trio of cyborgs that are part animal, part machine, and entirely deadly. They talk, they shoot missiles, they can spew a shower of poison gas when necessary. The problem: We3 are up for decommissioning, and their ultra fine-tuned fight-or-flight instincts are kicking into high gear.
Aside from being an engaging tale, We3 takes a magnifying glass to a number of ethical issues. Not only does it deal metaphorically (yet quite clearly) with questions of animal treatment, it also touches on more general notions of the basic necessities for survival, which become more heartbreakingly obvious with the animals’ limited vocabulary: “danger”, “run”, “sick”, “hungry”, etc. Perhaps the most woeful and telling word in the entire graphic novel is the repeating question/statement/lament/fuzzy memory, “home”. If science paves a path toward displacement and indifference, Morrison provides a remedy with this empathy-inducing tale.
The storytelling would have been superb either way, but Frank Quitely’s artwork takes We3 to a level of excellence that is located somewhere outside of Earth’s atmosphere. He manages to contrast extreme violence with images of natural beauty and tranquility, which subtly evokes the empathetic response in the reader that Morrison is looking for while heightening the sense of disgust at the cruel and needless acts being perpetrated.
In terms of page design, Quitely has here produced some extremely original and innovative work. Numerous pages are top to bottom populated with the small square boxes of security camera feeds, which paints a large and complex picture of events through disjointed glimpses of particular places and particular persons over a finite period of time. There are also a number of full-page bleeds that take things into epic realms: this could be a myth of our present's future, our distant future's past.
The most impressive pages are those in which larger images are overlaid with smaller boxes presenting fragments of what is happening in the larger context of things. These pages are invariably violent, and the smaller boxes serve to visually convey chaos, speed, and simultaneity of destruction.
Overall, Morrison’s writing and Quitely’s art combine to create an ingenious and disturbing graphic story that can be read in thirty minutes or poured over for hours as desired. Yes, it’s weird. But I ain’t complaining.
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