City Of Silence (#1-3) NSFW

WARNING:  CONTAINS IMAGES OF BOOBIES! DO NOT READ ON IF EASILY OFFENDED!

"The future is bad for you" - Narration.

Cyberpunk as a genre, can often seem more impenetrable than most popular science fiction is today.  I think it seems that way because the stories tend to take place "Twenty Minutes In The Future" as the trope would have it, making a world that is recognisably our own seem alienating and alarming.  This can make for good satire and examining the social impact of technology is one of cyberpunks defining traits, extrapolating current trends for good or bad (usually bad) and anticpating the results when these trends are taken to extremes.  However writers are not omniscient and this means that cyberpunk, with it's events generally due to happen within our own lifetimes date very badly when technology takes a leap in our world that was not forecast outside of geeky scientific circles (author William Gibson himself admits this is a flaw in Neuromancer the 1984 novel that kicked the genre off, where he did not foresee how huge computer memory would become for example).  There isn't anything wrong with this, but it can turn your average cyberpunk novel, comic, videogame or film into an "Unintentional Period Piece" to quote another trope.

And this is why I find Warren Ellis's three issue miniseries City Of Silence to be so very, very 90's, despite it being published in 2000.  Interestingly this was before I found out that it was actually written and drawn in the mid 1990's (cheers wikipedia) but the original publisher folded (Marvel's Epic imprint), leaving Image to pick it up for publication a few years later.  Because to me this tale of the future is as 1990's as dial-up internet, the Spice Girls and the Playstation One. And City Of Silence does fall into this hole a couple of times, although frankly the slang and terminology used here is so weird that it avoids some of the worst pitfalls simply by being so hard to understand.  But I'll do my best to tell it like it is for ya.

The Silencers: Litany, Gitane and Frost

Narration: "This is Stealth...the city that survives on silence.  here the exponential curve of techonological invention went straight up. The more new idea and tech appeared...the more the masses got a junkies lust for more, more, more... and stealth became a place where one alien idea.. could utterly lobotomise anyone who read it.  Stealth, unsafe from even the smallest invention of it's populace, revived the oldest profession... the secret police.  They called them silencers, and mandated them to quieten dangerous ideas.. and their owners".

That's a long quote, but it does set the scene well.  The three Silencers who are the stars of the book are two women called Litany and Gitane, and a man called Frost.  They are called in by the police chief of Stealth to investigate a Pentagram found on a dead teenagers body, the Pentagram in question being made up of circuitry and wired into the brain, which leads the policeman to think "satanic computer abuse" is afoot and that he wants them to find out who made it and "silence" them.

The Silencers are debriefed by the police.

They begin their investigation.  Frost goes and speaks to the police who dealt with the body.  He finds out the victim was called Static Joe Ramirez and he drank in a bar called the Blank Skull.  Litany is in a grotty alley filled with information junkies.

Narration: "They huddle with their fixes.  Their adulterated palm top games machines.  The screens strobe in trance inducing light patterns".

I knew Nintendo was bad for you!  Anyway, Litany questions one of them who says Joe was a "Shadowjack", who writes "computer code based on real magickal formulae".  Gitane is with a Native American who read coming events from the patterns in moving traffic.  He tells her to take a hard right next time he sees her.  They all then meet up to compare notes.

Frost: "This 'hired facist bastard' bit is getting old.

Litany: "D'you reckon we're going native?"

Gitane: "Maybe we're just pig-sick of offing folk just because they had an idea."

They go to a hotel and cuddle things out.

It's amazing how these relaxed, post-coital, entirely bare breasts are far less prurient than the almost bare, stripper tits featured in Voodoo.  Context people.  It's everything.

Thus refreshed they go to the bar Static Joe drank at.  By the smell of Snakebite they detect that the denizens are all virgins (bit harsh on Goths that). They find a Shadowjack who tells them they are writing code to summon Satan to "ignite a computerised holocaust".  Gitane then blows his head off, and the three of them lay an epic beatdown on the rest of the Shadowjacks in the bar.

They go to Static Joe Ramirez's place and find a pile of the electronic pentagrams and a box that allows electricity to be stolen and sold on the underground. The police chief they bring it to says this is the work of the "Voltage Monks" and that the Silencers should "find them, and bury them".

The panel just makes me happy for some reason.

The comics have text pages at the back of each issue that provide more flavour for the setting.  Issue one includes a profile of Litany, most notable for saying she listens to DAT's, a type of music format that never really caught on with the public and was made obselete when MP3 players came along. The second issue then begins with the Silencers going to visit the Riot Grrls (ah, that takes me back.  What a very nineties incarnation of popular feminism).  Frost can't come along though as they hate men.

Litany and Gitane accuse the Grrl's of being a "psychorunic revolutionary cell" who use stolen electricity.  The Grrl's say the monks give them the electricity for free as they are searching for information.  They need to find the porn obssessed Father Tungsten.  Discussing this turn of events in a bar later, the Silencers come to the following conclusion:

Frost: "So where does a porn obssessed priest go to buy his filth supply?"

Gitane: "Harry Phosphordots.  No one beats off in this city without Harry owning a part of their fist."

Ahhh, this takes me back...

You can definitely tell this was written before the internet made porn availiable to the masses anonomously and for free via the internet. So anyway, they rent a swish car and find Harry, but he won't play ball and a car chase ensues. Gitane suddenly sees the Native American and they take a hard right.  Harry crashes into an "arrest portal" that has suddenly opened, apparently the doman of "necrolux" and is taken away by two shadowy figures.

The Silencers follow and Frost observes that time moves faster inside the portals and Harry might be dead now.  He isn't, though he is being hung over a fire and tortured.  They rescue him and take him to hospital.  Obviously he agrees to help them because the action jumps to the Silencers in Father Tungstens flat.  They torture him.

Narration: "He tells them about the Voltage Monastry.  Its location in the ancient mining tunnels under Stealth.  All he wanted was to exist gently, within the quiet love of his God.  They light their cigarettes on his burning lungs as they leave."

The Silencers mount an all-out attack on the Monastry, using cannons that fire off poisonous radioactive material. With only one man left alive, called Father Anthracite, they demand to know about the knowledge they stole electricity for.

Silencers vs. The Voltage Monks

Father Anthracite: "We possess an incomplete set of plans for a fax line to Heaven. We freely gave our liberated voltage to anyone who might provide data useful to our task."

A "fax line" eh?  Well, I guess the Church might be a bit behind the times when it comes to technology.  Anyway, the Silencers want to know who their biggest customer is, and it turns out to be the mysterious "Metal Ghost" a person sitting on the biggest store of information in Stealth City.

The final part begins with a fairly graphic sex scene between Metalghost and Fausta, leader of the Riot Grrls.  He describes the sensations of making love in unessecary detail, then the Silencers appear and rate his performance.

Gitane: "No technique, no style, barely competant even as basic hows-your-father. We are not impressed."

Passion killers!

They question him about the murder of Static Joe and Metalghost says he killed him, because Joe was going to blab his secret.  He then breaks a drug capsule filled with a drug that messes with perception.  When it clears, Fausta is dead and Metalghost is on the run. He races off on a motorbike, but the Silencers catch up to him in a helicopter. They don't shoot him though and Metalghost surmises they want him alive.  He arrives at a warehouse where his mainframe is stored.

Metalghost: "My machine. Every banned and hidden thing I know encoded in it.  My machine, speaking Enochian into occult modems, poised to drag every last secret from the base of the world to the light of the day."

If this was written now he'd totally be doing it via wi-fi

The Silencers and the army burst in to find him hooked up via plugs in his body, to one hundered wires.  He plans on overinding Stealth City's one hundred Tv channels (only one hundred?) with information.

Metalghost: "Information wants to be free.  I am arranging it."

The rush of ideas starts killing everyone who isn't the Silencers.   They rather graphically unplug Metalghost using axes, chisels, a drill and a chainsaw.  As he dies he asks why they weren't affected by the flood of new ideas.

Litany: "Because we knew it already!"

Our "heroes" after a job well done.

City Of Silence is a strange beast. It's genuinely amusing, even if the humour is a little on the sour side. But strip away all the jokes and invented future-speak and what you have is the story of three psychopathic secret police waging a war on a city's various counter-cultures and repressing the spread of ideas ostensibly for the people's own good.  And because they look cool, snarky and awesome doing it, the script seems to be on the side of Litany, Frost and Gitane. And because they are so cool, snarky and awesome and know everything anyway, the flood of information doesn't affect them like it does the average peon who are best left ignorant for their own safety. Hmmmm. And some of it does feel like the comic equivalent of a grouchy old man shaking his fist at those damn young people and their newfangled technology.  Still there are some great ideas at work though when the story isn't pulling you up short with a badly dated reference and it goes without saying that Gary Erskine's art is fantastic, it really captures the freaky nature of the city and it's denizens.  The sickly colour palette of greens, pinks and yellows adds a lot to the atmosphere as well.  Shame they went with the archaic looking CGI models on the TPB cover instead of one of the original covers.  In summary then, weird and imaginative but with an oddly conservative message especially when viewed twenty years later in the light of our own information rich online computerised world.