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When Animals Attack
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We3
Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely
DC/Vertigo, 2005
Rating: 3.4
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Posted:
June 18, 2005
By
Kevin Forest Moreau
Grant Morrison cleverly toys with a couple of very familiar templates with
We3, welding together your standard
killing-machine-gone-rogue-and-hunted-by-its-creators scenario with, of all
things, the story of three cute, lost animals who only want to find their way
home.
A government project has wired three domestic animals -- a dog, a cat and a
rabbit -- into cumbersome cybernetic contraptions, making them efficiently
lethal killers. A military overseer orders the animals' decommission to avoid
public outcry at the project's treatment of animals; turns out a slick
politician with presidential ambitions wants to use the project to his PR
advantage. Rather than kill her beloved subjects, an animal-loving scientist
sets them free, setting up three issues of visually impressive scenes involving
the threesome employing their arsenals to mindlessly massacre the humans sent to
collect them.
Frank Quitely, who draws animals (and large-scale action scenes) far better than
he does human beings (who always seem oddly pudgy), draws some inspiration here
from Geoff Darrow, circa that artist's Hard Boiled collaboration with
Frank Miller. Unfortunately, while this approach sometimes translates into an
arresting double-page, single-image spread of a flood of projectiles bearing
down on their target, it more often manifests itself in hard-to-follow action
scenes where cleverness of layout takes precedence over clarity of visual
information.
But as nice as it is to look at, for all the novelty of its premise We3
is a one-joke book. It's gratifying that it doesn't play its situation for
obvious laughs, but you can only read so many scenes of flying animals
unleashing explosives and deadly claw-type daggers, wreaking mass carnage,
before you realize that's all there is.
There's no real emotional involvement here: Morrison relies on our instinctive
reactions to cute animals (especially when the dog looks confused and sad,
looking to humans for approval) to establish a connection. But (as ridiculous as
this sounds), because we don't really grow to know these animals, their
plight never hits home as well as it does in your average Benji or
Milo & Otis-style critters-on-a-journey flick.
Moreover, if Morrison's attempting to make a statement here about our treatment
of animals, it's severely blunted by his own exploitation of them. True, no
actual animals are harmed in the making of this comic, but the scenes of
animal-on-man, man-on-animal and animal-on-animal violence (the humans
eventually dispatch a fourth killer-animal prototype, a giant, visually imposing
mastiff) are little more than means to an end -- that being the sheer uniqueness
of the spectacle.
As a man-vs.-nature or a Frankenstein-esque man-vs.-technology metaphor,
We3 is interesting and fun, if very much on the gruesome side for the
younger readers who might be lured by its cover. But it's carried along only by
the novelty of its conceit, and that wears off a ways before the story itself
comes to a close.
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