Written by Grant Morrison
Illustrated by Frank QuitelyWith nervous systems amplified to match their terrifying exoskeletons, the members of Animal Weapon 3 (WE3) have the firepower of a battalion. But as prototypes, they’re slated to be permanently “decommissioned” after their testing is complete, causing them to make a desperate run for freedom. Relentlessly pursued by their makers, WE3 must navigate a frightening world where their heightened abilities make them as much a threat as those hunting them — but a world in which they must find a home.
Ten new pages get added to the most important comic of the decade we just left behind. Is it more of a good thing, or as cheap and hollow as a rock reunion tour? Find out after the jump.
We3 isn’t a new comic. In fact, it’s eight years old now, if memory serves, which is honestly a little depressing because in eight years there’s very little that’s even come close to challenging it. The buzzword since 1986 has been “Watchmen” — “such-and-such, the next Watchmen, this creator’s Watchmen, a Watchmen for our generation, the post-Watchmen answer to Watchmen” — but half the time the point is totally missed. Watchmen wasn’t a work of genius because of its plot, which was honestly a faintly more immersive than usual superhero yarn with some added dead dogs for flavor. What was genius was the way that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons controlled the form of the comics page perfectly.
The idea of “time” is irrelevant in comics, for the most part; you see a film at the rate that the film’s frames pass through the projector, but with a comic, you can spend weeks between panels 3 and 4 of a single page if you so choose. Watchmen‘s metronomic gridwork and carefully chosen dialogue imposes a sense of pacing. It’s like Charlie Watts behind the Stones — everyone’s thinking about Keith’s open-G tuning or Mick’s indestructible throat but what they’re really feeling in their hips is Charlie’s wham and thump. Watchmen is both groundbreaking and unrepeated in that regard, in pushing that particular frontier. The point here, though, is that We3 pushed in an even more challenging direction, to staggering, mind-shattering success. What Watchmen is for time, We3 is for space — and then some.
I mean, yes, We3 has a nice little story to it. It’s touching, but it’s a bit cheaply touching — there’s no more sure way to tug at the human heartstrings than by removing humans from the equation. The roboticized animal soldiers that run through the story are anthropomorphized just enough for us to relate to them, but are so simplistic that we can interpret them as any combination. (I recall reading that Grant Morrison researched actual animal psychology when constructing the animals’ personalities, and while this is almost certainly true, We3 does not lead us to any deeper understanding of the dog condition than it does the human one.)
Even beyond the broadness of emotional content (home good, matron good, killing for the government bad, being killed by the government bad), anyone who’s ever owned a cat or a dog or a rabbit need only look at the covers of the original issues and wonder “What if I never saw my pet again? What if this is what could happen?” These are all primal buttons, gleefully whack-a-moled. Its success is in its restraint — dialogue is sparse, there’s no narrative caption thread running throughout, and there’s no weeping 8-year-old ginger boy wondering if Bandit will ever come home. This is a story that could have easily come soaped up in schlock, and we respond to it because it isn’t, the same way we respond to a small portion of a gourmet meal more than we would to two Mars Bars (unless you just really, really love Mars Bars, I guess). We3 doesn’t just crudely yank the heartstrings, it plucks a rhythm on them, and there’s a world of difference.
Continued below“Yes, yes,” you say, “get to the extra pages.”
Most artists wouldn’t be able to seamlessly integrate new pages into a story they illustrated 8 years ago. Frank Quitely manages it, but why he’s able to do it is one of We3‘s most powerful aspects. Prior to We3, Quitely had been on The Authority and New X-Men, where for the most part his work was inked by other artists, like Tim Townsend. Towards the end of New X-Men he abandoned inkers and began using ‘digital inks’ that involved manipulating the tone of his extremely fine pencil lines. (To compare, Mike Deodato generally uses the same practice, but manually shades in every dark spot on the page, resulting in his now-signature ultra-shadowy, kinda menacing style. A Quitely page from “Riot at Xavier’s” is barely drawn on, next to something like that; his trust in his colorists must be profound.) The move is not unlike a director firing their DP and grabbing the camera himself; the effect on Quitely’s art was astonishing. Inkers had only been holding him back.
“The extra pages,” you say, wriggling in your seat a bit.
In the backmatter of We3: The Deluxe Edition, Quitely breaks down the process he used for drawing the CCTV sequence of We3’s escape. He did roughs for each panel on a series of cards, coding them so that they remained consistent from camera to camera. Laid out in the correct order, they’d form a huge grid, upon which the escape could be followed both sequentially and spatially. And then he played around with them, positioning different moments in time, unraveling the idea of Watchmen-esque precision timing while editing it into something even sharper. This approach is why Quitely can go home again, so to speak: in building We3, he gave himself such an arsenal of creative tools and ideas that he could coast on them for the rest of his career and never once sink below the level of genius. Panels assemble themselves into polygonal shapes on the pages, and images spin on axes so that characters can crash through them like glass panes. We3 isn’t about the time it takes these animals, it’s about the places they go. These are places that no other mainstream comic artist has yet figured out how to access properly. We3 is probably the single most important piece of comics history the 2000s produced, and the reasons why won’t even be properly accounted for until decades from now, when Quitely’s influence pulses through the bloodstream of the medium like Kirby’s does now.
“The extra pages!” you shout, sharply, throwing a copy of Daredevil #2 at me for effect.
Oh. They’re good. They add a little bit of schmaltz to things, but not a dangerous amount. We learn about We3’s caretaker a bit, the bulldog-rabbit fight gets drawn out a bit, and the dog and the cat take their clothes off. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all good stuff, but I can see why it was cut. If you’ve never read the original, you’d never notice. And if you’ve never read the original, go get it now, and remember that it’s not just a cute, hyperviolent animal story. It’s a medium having its strongest wall broken, in a way that might never be duplicated but certainly can never be undone.
Final Verdict: 10 / No question. Not even close.
