W
We3
Do you remember that old Disney movie The Incredible Journey? The one with the 3 household pets who get lost in the wilderness and have to trek 200-odd miles to get back to their owners? It was a pretty good story for kids, although as I grew up I realised that it was a bit lacking in x-rated combat violence and human decapitations. Thank goodness that writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely were able to spin their hi-tech twist on the tale in the 2004 miniseries We3.
It's a straightforward tale, plotted succinctly over 3 issues, which concerns 3 top-secret bleeding-edge experimental bio-weapons escaping from a military development facility and going on the run. Piloting each of these potential WMD's are a dog named Bandit, a cat named Tinker and a rabbit named Pirate; although through their enhanced intelligence and self-awareness they only know themselves as respectively '1', '2' and '3'. So the concept of the comic alone contains a bewitching dichotomy - the pathos and poignancy of an 'animals in peril' storyline, meshed with the high-octane action of a Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster. It's almost genetically designed to appeal to the man-child genre-fan who refuses to grow up (and yes, I'm including myself in that demographic). In fact, I'm quite surprised that Grant Morrison would dream up a story which manipulates it's audience so blatantly, and which doesn't really contain a subtext beyond the anti-war/ anti-animal testing messages that have been rolled out dozens of times before by less ambitious writers. He's normally to be seen writing sprawling epics, multi-stranded meta-physical mind-benders along the lines of The Filth, Final Crisis or 7 Soldiers of Victory . It's pretty clear that with this effective little series, Morrison was trying something a wee bit different.
Morrison had wrapped up his ground-breaking and controversial run on New X-Men for Marvel only a year or so before We3 saw publication, and the popularity of the Morrison/Quitely creative team was on the ascension. The influence of their work together on the Marvel title is apparent here; with a preference for Matrix style cinematic action, and a near-wordless storytelling style which keeps expository dialogue to an absolute minimum. But it almost seems like an attempt by the creators to distil their craft down, to produce a potent reading experience which can reach as wide an audience as possible, and will entertain as efficiently and as thoroughly as possible before anyone has time to realise the ridiculousness of what they're actually reading. The plot itself is largely stripped down; and the mechanisms of the three-acts are clearly apparent. Human characters are also given a bit of a short-shrift, with none of them being particularly fleshed out, or even amounting to anything more than plot-devices. One of Morrison's more successful techniques was to give the animals a limited synthesised vocabulary - it quickly gives insight into the creatures' characteristics and motivations, without being so implausible as to scupper suspension of disbelief. One of the best bits of the series is a sequence which juxtaposes Disney-style cheezy schmaltz with nasty natural-world horror; when Bandit, assuming the leadership role of the team while they are on the run, raises morale with the stilted yet stirring motivational speech "HOME IS. RUN. NO. MORE.", while in the foreground a seagull feasts on the intestines of a train crash victim which the dog had just failed to save.
I remember hearing at the time that Quitely was attempting to develop an art-style akin to 'westernised manga'; although I don't really see much evidence of that here. What he has employed is a heady mix of storytelling techniques, from the extended escape sequence related only through surveillance camera footage, to the fractured panel lay-outs which make the action-sequences seem to explode in the reader's hands. To be honest, his depictions of the anthropomorphic protagonists (seen only from the neck up for most of the story) are not particularly nuanced or convincing, although the bio-tech armour designs for each of them are fantastic, and more than make up for the animalistic mis-steps. Basically; Quitely's off-the-wall storytelling is firing on all cylinders here; and his sometimes overly-clinical penmanship and slightly frosty characterisation actually help to temper the sentimentality of the plot.
All of this adds up to self-contained comic-book story which stretches the conventions of the medium without breaking them, while being completely accessible to a readership beyond the core super-hero fanbase. If you're a comics-fan who hasn't read We3; I strongly recommend getting a copy of the TPB from Vertigo. Read it, enjoy it, and then buy a few more copies for your non-comics-fan friends. This is gud comics.