Captain Marvel Book 3: Alis Volat Propriis (#12-15)

"Let go" - Carol Danvers

Kelly Sue DeConnick rounds off her time with the redoubtable Captain with four issues that have the misfortune of having a wider Marvel crossover as part of them and the rushed nature of the concluding two-parter of her year representing the Avengers in space (co-authored by legendary UK writer Warren Ellis) makes me wonder if this was sprung on her at the last moment and was going to be spread across three issues.  Despite a somewhat abrupt send off for Tic, the alien from the planet Torfa who joined her in the first volume of the run, it's still fine stuff, the crossover stuff will be skimmed as I have no clue what it involved and the single issue showing her return to Earth and receiving some bad news is both sad and sweet at the same time ending her run on a high note.  A quick reintroduction then: Captain Marvel is Carol Danvers a super strong human with the power of flight and energy manipulation.  She's been doing a tour in space and picked up a companion the aforementioned Tic.  She also discovered that her bad tempered female cat Chewie is actually an alien called a Flerken, a creature able to create pockets to another dimension inside herself.  At the end of volume two a mutant called Lila who can travel the universe at the snap of a finger took her back to Earth where she met Santa and created an explosive display for a bedridden cancer stricken friend of hers.  The first two-parter then begins with Lila transporting Carol back to her highly intelligent ship and splitting leaving Carol alone.  Unfortunately it is immediately clear something is badly wrong.  Art for all four issues is by David Lopez, who has an appealing old skool style to his work.

Carol runs round the ship and finds neither Tic nor Chewie.  She tries to verbally interface with the ship's AI, Harrison but he is offline.  She pulls an emergency lever and this reboots him.  She asks him to report what happened, they were attacked by Haffensye pirates and Harrison shutdown to protect the systems when they were boarded.

"They have to have been after Chewie" says Carol.  She wonders why they didn't destroy the ship when they had her, instantly she realises this is a trap.  She calls for weapons and engines but both are offline.  She tries to leave via an airlock to take the fight outside, but the airlocks have all been sealed shut.  The Haff are going to burn the inside of the ship and salvage the shell and her death is a nice bonus for them (she tangled with them in book one).

Carol takes out the attacking ship with the force-shield.

The only thing Harrison can give her is the force-shield.  She activates the starboard side one and waits until the Haff ship gets close, then she has Harrison rotate the shield horizontally which cuts into the Haff ship and it blows up.  Given a breather, Carol starts all the self-repair systems up and checks the recordings of what happened.  Six hours later and she is repeatedly watching the footage of Tic and Chewie being taken.

Harrison: "With respect, Captain.  Statistical likelihood of analytical change after the fiftieth viewing is less than one percent."

Carol jokes that there is a chance then, but Harrison doesn't get it.  She says he doesn't appreciate her humour.  "Joke detection is enabled.  Perhaps I am not the problem he snarks".

Carol wonders why the Haff want Chewie, it is too much risk just to sell her on.  She decides to go to Haff space to find her and tells Harrison to aim for a shortcut, a subspace tunnel called the "Endless Envelope".  As they travel to it, she calls Gil and Jackie (see book one) on Torfa for help locating Tic.  They believe she is most likely on a disapora planet that is fully into the slave trade.  When Carol says she is travelling into the Endless Envelope they both yell "NOO!" Inside the envelope she loses comms and engines.

Into the Endless Envlope.

Harrison then tells her that the dimension they are in is a football field shoved into a matchbox and that it will actually take ten times longer now.  Then a huge space caterpillar appears with a couple of spaceships on it, which break off and come after Carol.

Carol: "Oh good.  Were going to try and outrun these guys powered solely by attitude thrusters through a giant subspace pocket."

Meanwhile, Tic is shackled to a post with some other prisoners on the Haff ship just outside the Haff end of the Endless Envelope.  The lead pirate holds up a muzzled Chewie and says she will be their secret weapon against a Mister Knife who has been encroaching on their territory.  Once she is of no use to them, they will destroy her.

Poor Chewie.

Back with Carol, she tells Harrison to work on getting her a weapon.  The force shield is almost depleted so she can't use it again.  Then one of the huge caterpillar things disappears, much to Carol's confusion.  Harrison postulates that the beings must be able to travel through the twisted space and time of the Envelope which "doesn't conform to established physics."

She steers the ship close to a mining rig on another creature and lets off some flares that temporarily fend off their pursuers.  Harrison says the mining rig is extracting an high energy fluid from the creature which he calls a "Warp Bear."  The fluid has "rare quantumn properties", it is "Warp Bear Juice".  The weapons are now online and Carol dispenses with their pursuers and flies up close to the rig.  Harrison says the culture must use "Warp Bear Juice to commit it's own warp events."

Carol: "You might have something with 'Warp Bear', but 'Warp Bear Juice' is never, ever going to be a thing people say".

Then we return to the Haff pirate holding Chewie.  He rants that they can hide an arsenal and armies inside her, take her into Mister Knife's territory and deploy from within, sort of like a feline Trojan Horse.  Tic is down below being put to work with the other slaves.  But she reassures them that "I have a friend on the way."

Carol tells Harrison to target the rig and get it off the Warp Bear.  Blasting it off releases a lot of Juice, and she flies the ship right through it, which accelerates the ship to an incredibly fast speed.

Warp Bear Juice.

Carol goes down to the engine room to divert some of the energy into a laser beam.  There is an ominous noise from the hull.  Harrison says the structural integrity has never been tested at such speed before.

Carol: "These last few months have tested both of us more than we anticipated, Harrison.  Maybe complacency can't survive in a vaccuum either."

Harrison makes a cheesy joke and Carol says she regrets engaging his humour protocols. The ship barrels out of the Envelope and bounces off the Haff ship there.

She then uses the highly precise laser to lance into the Haff ship, demanding they hand over Chewie and free Tic.  She is able to cut Tic's restraints and Tic immediately commendeers the ship, while the Haff flee. 

Carol links up to the ship back on Torfa, and Tic hands her Chewie and says with a crew made up of fellow prisoners, she'll go and battle the Haff slavers who are preying on the Torfan's disapora.  As Carol turns to go back to her ship, Tic says "I'm going to miss you".  And Carol smiles back at her safe in the knowledge Tic is going on to be a fine captain herself.

Tic's new ship.

The next issue is chapter eleven of a crossover event called "The Black Vortex".  The thing in question is a mirror that unlocks the true potential of those who look in it.  Thane, son of Thanos, looked in it and has joined up with Knife and the Slaughter Squad to cause havoc.  Captain Marvel swooped down into Knife's fortress and grabbed the mirror now everyone is after her.

She flies through space, taking the mirror to Spartax which has been encased in amber, so she can use it to save the planet.  She comes under heavy attack and ends up being knocked down onto an asteroid along with the mirror.

Carol looks in the Mirror.

She is tempted to look in it and sees herself at top potential, a being of almost pure energy.  "Is this what you want to be?" she thinks to herself.  But she resists, thinking that more power was not something she ever wanted.

The baddies have an disagreement about what to do with her, and a fight breaks out.  Carol uses this opportunity to take off with the mirror again to go save Spartax.  To be continued somewhere else.

Her tour of duty in space over, Carol arrives back on Earth.  She wonders if she needs to make herself up for the welcome home party.  Chewie is just her usual grumpy self and the ship lands at Avengers HQ.

Carol and Chewie back on Earth.

But when she disembarks, no one is there to greet her.  She goes inside and everyone is looking sad.  She realises this means Tracey, the sick woman from book two has died, about a week ago says one of her friends.  She left a letter and some things for Carol, who asks if someone else can read the letter.  We then see Tracy's ghost narrate things for us.  She leaves her a cane which she once whacked an Ultron with.

Tracy: "It's good for leaning on.  If you should find yourself in need of something to lean on from time to time."

Then the story flashes back to Tracey sulking at home with her leg in plaster, brooding over the death of her female lover Teddy.  Carol came to see her and gave her the cane.  She says Teddy wouldn't have wanted Tracey to isolate herself like this.

Tracey remembers back to when she first met Teddy.  She was a young woman and dropped her wallet.  Tracey bought it back to her and invited Tracey to dinner.  Teddy's ghost then appears saying Tracey had "fallen in love with me before the appetiser made it to the table."

Tracey and Teddy's ghosts.

However when they were older, Teddy died of heart failure.  This caused Tracy to lash out and kick the door, breaking her foot in the process.  Carol was there for her when Teddy died.

Tracey: "They let us have the room for a while.  To work it through, to say goodbye.  I would have stayed with her forever if you'd let me."

She and Carol took Teddy's ashes to the sea.  Traecy can't let go at first saying she can't imagine life without her.  But in the end she sprinkles the ashes.

With Tracey's urn Carol and friends go to the same place, but the urn turns out to be empty bar a note from Tracy:

Tracey: "Gotcha sucker.  Our last gift to you..."

Teddy: "... a day at the beach with your friends."

Teddy donated her body to medical science, as her and Teddy's ghosts depart, Tracy tells Carol "I love you kid.  Have fun.  Be happy and don't look back."  And Carol and her friends splash about in the water, laughing their heads off.  Which brings this run of Captain Marvel to an end.

The End...

What a fun series.  Moving effortlessly from high tech space opera to dealing with bereavement and loss, DeConnick really gets Carol, she is extremely relatable.  Hyper competant at the things she puts her mind to, able to plan effortlessly on the fly, she is everything that is good about the superhero archetype.  It's a shame that saving Chewie and Tic was over so quickly, it feels like there was room for a whole issue dealing with the Haff as a more fearsome threat than they ended up being.  Considering how important Tic has been across this run as a secondary protagonist, having one page chronicling her departure feels more abrupt than it possibly was meant to.  The art as I said in the intro is superb, especially when it comes to facial expressions, alhough the kersplosions look great as well.  This ends this run of Captain Marvel, with Tracey's farewell coming across as DeConnick's farewell and well wishes for the character she's helped redefine.  It has restarted at issue one again with a new creative team, Marvel seems to be really pushing the "seasonal" approach to their properties.  Lots more number ones for collectors if I am being cynical about it.  But for now lets hail Marvel's best female superhero and the subject of Marvel studio's first (now delayed) female superhero led film. 

Nextwave: Agents Of H.A.T.E (#1-12)

"Monsters to beat up! Things to blow up!  It's the best job in America! Nextwave go!" - Monica Rambeau

It wasn't until a friend of mine pointed it out that I suddenly realised I have done no original Marvel US comics at all so far in this blog's lifetime.  This I assure you, was purely an oversight on my part helped along by the fact that of the Big Two, I mostly collect DC because DC was the company my favourite UK artists and writers moved on to from 2000AD and also the fact that my local newsagent only stocked DC comics when I was in my initial phase of reading anything comicwise I could get my hands on.  I do have Marvel US stuff in my bookcase but it's mostly pretty well known things like Grant Morrisons New X-Men which has already been discussed ad infinitum. But I feel there is a Marvel shaped gap I need to fill, so it's time to look at the greatest team in the Marvel Universe, no not The Avengers, pshaw, I'm talking about NextWave: Agents of H.A.T.E.

Nextwave in fact turned out to be the comicbook that rid me of my last vestiges of snobbery towards the superhero genre.  Linkara, of Atop The Fourth Wall fame gave it a glowing review and he's someone who's opinion I trust so I picked up the trade paperback and loved it.  It boils the superhero narrative down to it's very essence - superheroes locate threat, superheroes beat threat, lots of things explode, but thanks to Warren Ellis's hilarious script and Stuart Immonen's wonderful artwork this simple structure proves a sound base to hang lots of silliness from making the act of reading it a pure guilty pleasure.

The team is made up of five characters, four of whom are well established C-listers (Monica "Captain Marvel", "Photon" Rambeau, Elsa Bloodstone, Aaron "Machine Man" Stack and Tabitha "Boom Boom", "Boomer", "Meltdown" Smith) and one who was made up for the series (The Captain).  Inititally is seems that more Marvel faces were due to officially appear in the storyline, their former boss Dirk Anger and his organisation H.A.T.E are pretty obviously parodying Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D, while plenty of other minor Marvel villains get a parodic outing. Because I don't follow the Marvelverse as closely as the DCU I admit some jokes were lost on me, luckily the thing Ellis does best which is write witty, sharp dialogue and jokes carries me along instead while giving Immonen plenty of daft situations to bring to life so pleasingly.

Left to right: Elsa, Monica, Aaron, Dirk, Tabitha and The Captain

Interestingly, our heroes are actually renegade Agents of H.A.T.E (Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort).  The light fingered Tabby stole the "marketing plan" of the parent company the Beyond Corporation and found they had were actually part of a terrorist group who planned on using UWMD's (Unusual Weapons Of Mass Destruction) upon the general population to extort money from the government.  Using that Marketing Plan they steal a state of the art airship and go to where the UWMD's are being unleashed and fighting them.  The director of H.A.T.E Dirk Anger is dead set on stopping them, while also in the throes of a nervous breakdown.  Hilarity as they say, ensues. The Nextwave team are another one who prefer to use real names rather than codenames.  Monica, their leader is a little reluctant because they used codenames in The Avengers (who she led for a time, you know). 

Monica: "The Captain kept his codename."

Aaron: "The Captain can't remember his real name. Ellie Bloodstone never had a codename. Tabitha has had about nine."

Tabitha: "And they ALL sucked!"

The first two issues serve mainly to introduce the concept and show us what powers each of the team has.  A giant dinosaur monster called Fin Fang Foom is excavated in "Abcess, North Dakota" and because he was born with no genitals but the burning desire to mate, he starts destroying buildings and eating the crunchy and delicious inhabitants out of frustrated irritation.  Tabitha is first to attack with her ability to cause explosions, but Fin Fang Foom grabs her and goes to put her in his pants.  Luckily The Captain can fly and is super-strong and he rescues her.

Noooo not the pants!

On the ground, the super strong and invulnerable Elsa (who is also English) takes on the Beyond Coporation's attacking cloned broccoli henchmen (known as the Human Resources) by kicking their arses.  Monica, who can turn herself into any energy on the electromagnetic spectrum tries zapping Fin Fang Foom but he is too big and his hide can't be penetrated.  So she commands Aaron to jump inside him and use his array of robotic things to attack Fin Fang Foom from the inside.  Reluctantly he does so, and the first UWMD is destroyed.

Swiss Army Aaron

The next UWMD is to be found in "Sink City, Illinois".  A corrupt policeman who is due to retire does the rounds of the various people he is extorting money from, including drug dealers and a brothel.. He finds a black cat-like thing and it jumps at him and buries itself in his chest. Tabby out chatting on the phone comes across him hunched across a car which he throws at her.  She makes it explode, then she is attacked by Human Resources which she also makes explode.

When more attack the rest of the team come to her rescue. Elsa goes after the policeman and finds him heading for the "Sink City Very Small School With Lovely Children Inside" to feed his change.  She rams him with a car and it explodes but the smoke clears to reveal him, now part machine standing there.  The Captain arrives and punches him far away, but he lands on a scrap heap. We then get a brief flashback to how The Captain got his powers - he was drunk one night and aliens bestowed them upon him.

The policeman uses the scrap to grow into a large Transformers like being with a huge gun which he fires at The Captain who decides to wait this one out under the huge bullet he was hit with.  But the bullet explodes knocking Monica out.

Aaron: "She's not moving"

Tabby: "Monica! Quick! Captain America just called to invite you back to the Avengers!"

Aaron: "...nothing"

Tabby: "She must be unconcious."

Tabby versus Robocop.

Tabby then confronts the robot and uses her powers to set off several explosions on his body which causes it to come apart and reveal the original policeman and the cat like thing that "infected" him.  Tabby incinerates the cat thing and the Nextwave team leave the policeman in the care of the local community... which just so happens to include all the people he was ripping off.

Monica:  "You'll be fine with these people.  The nightmare is over officer."

Policeman: "pppplease, nnnnno."

The two-parter ends with a nearly naked Captain rejoining them, with Monica saying she should make him walk around like that all the time because he looks stupid and then she hears a gunshot coming from where they left the policeman.

The next two-parter sees our erstwhile heroes finally get into a scrap with Dirk Anger's ship when they travel to the fields the cloned broccoli "Human Resources" are being grown and start destroying them.

Tabby: "Sorry broccoli murder dudes. You grow up to be, like, too harsh you know."

Elsa: "I swear to God, nowhere on Earth do they talk the way you do, Tabby."

As you can tell, this is a very silly comic.

Then Dirk Anger's ship arrives and the rest of the two-parter is him releasing increasingly ludicrous forms of attacking monsters, starting with the "Drop Bears" or "widdle, cuddily  bears of death?" as Tabby puts it.  Next are the Combat Pterodactyls who take on Monica in the air, but she fries them with an electro-magnetic explosion when one of them injures her. Dirk then drops the "Samuroids" on the ground which the Elsa, Tabby and The Captain start fighting.

The Captain then blasts his way through the ships engines, which results in him falling unconcious to the ground.  Monica bathes the ship in low level radiation which she says next time will be strong enough to render everyone on board sterile. 

Monica: "Back Off Dirk"

Dirk: "Like Hell!  Homicide Crabs!"

Aaron meanwhile has figured out how to stop this battle, he sneaks aboard and steals a dress from Dirk Anger's quarters.  Hovering outside the ship he says he will set the dress on fire if Dirk doesn't stop attacking them.  Dirk, in great distress orders his crew to stand down.  He gets the dress back, but Aaron rejoins the rest of the team wearing a bra and bloomers which he also stole.  The two-parter ends with a full page shot of Dirk wearing the dress mumbling "It's all right mother. It's all right."

Dirk's dark secret.

The next issue begins with The Captain, somewhat despondant at being knocked out in the last two fights explaining to Aaron that the reason he is only called "The Captain" is that all the other Captains are taken.  Meanwhile Monica and Elsa try to figure out what the reference to "magic" means on the stolen Marketing Plan they have.  In fact one of the broccoli henchmen uses a dark magic ritual to summon Rorkannu, who unleashes his "Mindless Ones" minions on the town of Shotcreek Colarado.  The gang arrive to find the local police trying to fend them off. They start to get stuck in themselves.

Elsa: "Oh my God.  They explode!  My life has taken on new meaning".

Elsa, who in her normal existence is a monster hunter, recognises what they are and says there wil be a magic circle somewhere that if broken will get rid of them. The Mindless Ones overseen by Rorkannu keep coming through the magic circle.  Meanwhile on Dirk Anger's ship he is about to hang himself.  When he hears The Beyond Corporation want to call in "The New Paramounts" he changes his mind but falls off the stool and hangs himself.

Rorkannu is summoned.

The Captain finds Rorkannu and beats him into the ground with various implements he finds in the public toilets they are in, including a toilet brush.  He proudly states that he beat it like a regular hero to the others when they come looking for him. With the rest of the Mindless Ones defeated and the town cleared the team return to their ship.

The next issue kicks off a four parter that ends the series.  The Nextwave team following the Marketing Plan find themselves in a deserted city.  Meanwhile the issue keeps cutting to various characters being offered a chance to become superheroes by a mysterious off-screen voice.  Then an upside castle in the sky appears where our heroes are, and a being that looks like a broccoli henchmen declares himself The Chief Executive of the Beyond Coporation, Number None and that he has lured them into a trap.

Yes, they are meant to be upsidedown.

He then releases several super-teams at them, who also turn out to be broccoli.  But the four people he offered a chance to become heroes too aren't.  They are "The New Paramounts" - Charlie America, Giant Sam, Bulk and Forbush Man - all created to match the Marvel parodies in the comic Not Brand Ecch, which he has copies of.  Our heroes start battling all the weird and wonderful heroes attacking them, broccoli and human. 

Forbush Man turns out to be the most powerful one of the lot when he uses his mental powers to trap The Captain, Monica, Elsa and Aaron in nightmarish alternate existences.  Unfortunately for him, Tabby doesn't have much of a mind to work with and she blows him up freeing the others.

Monica: ".. the hell was that?"

Tabby: "The little guy did something to you heads.  I gave him the explodo because I am clever."

An enraged Monica blasts a good chunk out of the floating castle and when it starts to beat a hasty retreat, she tells the rest of the team they are going to follow it and take the fight to the heart of the Beyond Corporation.

Tabby saves the day.

They follow it to Nevada and find a huge floating mobile base.  Back with Dirk Anger who is now a zombie, he tries to ram their ship, but they fly it down a maintenance tunnel and escape, although their ship explodes in the process.  They find themselves in the bowels of the floating base and come under heavy attack which in a wonderfully cheeky way is rendered across seven wordless double page spreads!

Caption: "NEXTWAVE: Blatantly wasting your money since 2006"

But it's forgivable because the spreads are so well drawn and filled with such wonderful amounts of detail that you end up looking at them for as long as it would take to read a normal page anyway. The penultimate issue ends with Aaron being impaled by Number None.

Stuart Immonen is an amazing artist.

Aaron points out that you can't kill a robot by stabbing it through the chest and punches Number None's head off. Then they rip open it's chest to find a baby M.O.D.O.K (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing) inside controlling the body.  The M.O.D.O.K squeaks that he was responsible for developing the Beyond Coporation and that he'll be noticed now.  before teleporting away.

MODOK revealed.

Aaron can read the trail it left and follow it into a large, spherical part of the ship.  The M.O.D.O.K is shot to death by a figure obscured by clouds, until he reveals himself as none other than Devil Dinosaur to the Nextwave Squad.  He goes into a long rant about restoring the world to how it was before humanity fouled it up, while our heroes subtley start to plan on how to take him down.  Monica steps up and asks the real reason he is so angry with humans. After strenuously denying it, he finally breaks down and shows her a comic with him in it being ridden by the monkey like Moon-Boy and how humiliated it made him feel in retrospect.

Devil Dinosaur: "Moon -Boy hated me.  Moon-Boy had to die. Moon-Boy tasted bad and gave me some considerable rectal distress. I do hope you and your friends aren't so hard on my guts."

The Mastermind behind it all.

But he is attacked in turn by each of the team after Aaron has checked the structure for weaknesses.  Monica lets out a blast of energy, Elsa shoots his gun hand.  Then they run outside while Tabby lays down a curtain of fire and The Captain  gives the sphere and almighty kick and it rolls off the floating base and plummets two miles before exploding with Devil Dinosaur still inside.  Triumphant, the team ponder their next move.

Monica: "What do you do with a vast invisible floating base full of God knows what technology and supplies?"

The Captain: "I give.  What do you do you do with a vast floating invisible base-thing"

Monica: "Anything we want."

Only fitting I end this with an explosion.

And on that note, Nextwave ends.  It was too beautiful to live.  Literally.  Although it sold decently and attracted a loyal fanbase, Marvel wanted artist Stuart Immonen on a higher profile book because his art is so good.  Rather than continue with another artist, Warren Ellis chose to end the book there.  And maybe that's a good thing, with comedy it's always a danger you can hammer a joke into the ground and perhaps twelve issues was enough to leave people wanting more without exhausting the concept.  Even though it's not official Marvel canon, many writers have incorporated elements of Nextwave's characterisations into their versions of the characters, most notably the beer fueled antics of "Machine Man" Aaron Stack. Even if you're not a dedicated Marvelite you can still enjoy this collection, speaking as a DC woman myself I absolutely love it even if I am aware of missing some of the jokes and references. It's daft, it's silly, it has it's tongue rammed firmly in it's cheek, but it's always nice to see a team with a majority of women in it and Monica manages to be portrayed as a smart, capable leader despite all the chaos going on around her.  If you have even the slightest interest in superhero comics, check it out. NOW.  Go on, off you go.  No excuses. Read it.

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.