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Underground > Comic Books >

We3 #1

  
  

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FinderWolf
14:51 / 26.08.04
So amazing. Mind-blowing.

And that rabbit looks so intense, so driven & focused, almost sinister, as it watches the doctor decide about saving the restraint codes thingie. Love it.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
14:56 / 26.08.04
MILD SPOILERS


The first "single" monthly comic I have bought since 1999 I think, and apart from anything else, terrific value for money: I spent 10 minutes just reading through the security-camera pages (twice), working out the spatial layout of the building and following the action around it.

So many panels are just like a thump to your chest, they're so solidly beautiful and effective in the art, and/or intelligently daring in the writing -- the way Quitely draws the shoulderblades of men sitting back against an invisible truck door / the shapes of elongated leaves as the truck races past, as if the camera's jogged just slightly with the movement / the voice balloon lassooing the news headline, indicating what the conversation's about / the absurdly techno-cute GUD DOG dialog. And that's not mentioning the almost-3D effect of those bullets hurtling out of the first splash page.

That I'm writing all this from memory indicates how vivid a single reading of this comic was.
 
 
FinderWolf
15:12 / 26.08.04
The double-page spread of the little critters jumping to freedom reminded me of the "Hero sailing through the air full- or double-page shot, usually between rooftops" thing that Frank Miller made famous. I felt like it was an homage to Miller, as well as working beautifully within the context of the story.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
15:44 / 26.08.04
Yeah it's page 10 of Hunt the Dark Knight -- perhaps fitting that Morrison/Quitely paid parodic homage to the Dark Knight cover on the front of a Flex Mentallo.

Look, Ima ask and risk looking like a fool, because otherwise it will nag at me.

What exactly was the deal with Rosanne Berry and the security codes? Here is my plodding thinkin pattern. Please insert explanation.

------


We know that the animals are kept safe with restraints that are "locked".

Her screen says "Save Security Codes for Animal Restraint Locks?": CANCEL or SAVE.

She hesitates in front of the screen. SAVE is selected but I wasn't clear if that means it's activated -- like you can highlight "cancel" or "retry" on a window, but it doesn't actually mean you've carried out that action.
Moreover, I'm not clear what it would mean to "save" the codes for the locks. The story seems to be telling me that she's selected SAVE, which releases the animals. But that wording on the screen doesn't immediately convey the idea of "release restraint locks". Surely if you save the codes, you're keeping everything secure and preserving the status-q. If you cancelled the restraint codes, it would seem more likely that you'd set the animals free.

She's got three syringes, presumably to put each animal to sleep. Although it was Dr Trendle on the previous page who was instructed to do the job. She takes them from her pocket and leaves them next to the computer screen.

Tinker (I believe Tinker's the cat?) grins like everything's going to plan.

Rosanne changes to her street clothes but then goes back to the screen, hesitating once more as she puts on her coat.

Still the screen has SAVE highlighted.

The other scientists are meanwhile heading to the Animal Weapon 3 lab, picking up colleagues as they go. I'm not clear about why they're apparently rushing and why there's this increasing sense of crowd urgency... why do they suspect anything's wrong?

Tinker narrows its eyes. Scientists enter the lab.

A woman reaches Rosanne's screen. SAVE is still highlighted, as you can see it in yellow if you peer closely. (I've tried my best with this comic!) She's puzzled by this.

She picks up the syringes. All fucking holy hell breaks loose.

As Rosanne leaves, she hears the animals behind her and says to them, "Kill me. I deserve it." But they spare her.

Afterward, Dr Trendle says he "should have known" as he passed Rosanne, from "the way she was shaking."

Later yet, Rosanne is apparently being interviewed by troops and security. But she doesn't seem to be treated like the prime suspect in the liberation of three incredibly dangerous weapons and the loss of top-secret government equipment: she's not handcuffed, and she's cradling a cup of tea.

------

I get the basics, I'm sure. But I don't see which bit of that sequence is telling me that she released the animals from their restraints.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
15:55 / 26.08.04
Oh man...this series is SO gonna make me cry. What can I say. Gobsmacking as expected, and alongside Seaguy a solid reminder of precisely why Morrison has the reputation he has.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
16:30 / 26.08.04
Um, Spoilers, possibly ?









Save is selected, but I wasn't clear if that means it's activated

No, me neither, though I'm guessing that it doesn't. If Roseanne had pressed Cancel, presumably the animals would have bolted immediately, as opposed to waiting until she was nearly out the building, so she was possibly taking advantage of some kind of feature in the programme whereby if neither Save nor Cancel's selected, the system shuts down by default. If so, that would a) conceivably give her a few minutes to escape, and b) allow her to claim that freeing the animals was an oversight on her part, not a deliberate decision.

Then again, maybe not.

But as far as Roseanne being " spared " goes, I don't think the animals actually deliberately kill anyone on their way out the building, do they ? The lab technician possibly excepted, ( shot perhaps because she was about to dose then, hence presnting a direct threat ? )they seem to more just steam through whoever's in the corridor, so the fact that Roseanne's unharmed looks to be more to do with where she's standing, rather than any kind of altruistic gesture on the part of Tinker, Pirate and Bandit.

At least that's my two quids worth.

Excellent stuff either way.

And this would make a fantastic movie...
 
 
miss wonderstarr
16:42 / 26.08.04
No, me neither, though I'm guessing that it doesn't. If Roseanne had pressed Cancel, presumably the animals would have bolted immediately, as opposed to waiting until she was nearly out the building, so she was possibly taking advantage of some kind of feature in the programme whereby if neither Save nor Cancel's selected, the system shuts down by default. If so, that would a) conceivably give her a few minutes to escape, and b) allow her to claim that freeing the animals was an oversight on her part, not a deliberate decision.


though I loved this comic, I am a bit troubled by the way we are having to go through elaborate NO-PRIZE hoops to rationalise what should surely have been made pretty clear: whether and how Rosanne deliberately let the animals out, and what the repeated SAVE instruction actually meant in terms of releasing the restraints.
 
 
LDones
16:44 / 26.08.04
Kovacs:
I think the point was that she neither saved nor cancelled the restriction codes. She didn't close out the system, and then didn't administer the euthanization. When the second female doctor & her three cohorts come to put them down, they get the picture & break out.

Roaseanne also doesn't go back to the lab - once she gets her coat it's all the way out of the building. That second-to-last panel of her and the animals in the doorway is them escaping past her. It took me a few times through to grab the spatial travel of certain characters. She's got coffee in that last panel she's in, but she also has armed US military around - they give coffee to murderers who confess as well.

The doctor-with-glasses says "If I hadn't stopped to talk to her, My God..." because if he hadn't been delayed he'd have been with the four others the animals kill on their way out, which I didn't completely grab the first time.

The level of design in this book exceeds most anything I've seen Quitely do. The animal suits in particular are just gorgeous to behold: From the enhanced filament whiskers out of the collar/legs/rear/head to keep spatial awareness for their big bulky exo-bodies to the crude, square, & functional brain-plug-in pieces. The razor cut on the front page news, the cutaway of the truck down the road, that glorious little panel of the woman discussing the headline with the clerk.

Love the thin-pallette color schemes for specific scenes. Love that growing, urgent, yellow-digital 'SAVE'.

Properly exhilarating. Will likely cry by end of series because me like animals, even/especially ones with insane firepower.
 
 
LDones
16:53 / 26.08.04
kovacs:
I misread something on my first try through your post, about Roseanne going back to the lab & the animals passing her on her way out. My mistake, you had it.

Oh, and the animals kill four people on their way out - the four in the lab (there's a single panel of their four corpses on the floor of the lab on that final many-panel-page). They just run past the rest.
 
 
Yotsuba & Benjamin!
17:22 / 26.08.04
Plus, the lovely detail that the woman from the newstand has purchased the cut paper, as you can see when she reads it on the street.

I did actually have to read the Security pages more than once to get the gist of everything (I completely missed that there were two female doctors and had also assumed that the "Gud" doctor had returned to the animals, I also confused the fat doctor with the glasses who gets knocked over along with the woman with the folder of papers with the the main doctor with the glasses who's lucky to be alive), but I doubt I've ever had as much fun clearing up my confusion.

And how could anyone possibly have beef with that sequence when it adds so much power and emotion to that two page spread of escape. That was literally breathtaking, the closest I've ever seen comics come to a cinematic, Jurassic Park/ET esque, swell-music-for-emotive-high-note moment.

I also love the way you can hear the helicoptors in the distance as you read the last page. At least, I did. Subtle and very well done.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
17:52 / 26.08.04
I don't mean to stir beef with the sequence... but the discussion above surely supports my point that a key plot issue is left ambiguous or unclear. It doesn't matter overall, I know, and yeah, it's a lot of fun trying to work it out.

It struck me between posts that the screen-as-panel device, here as in The Filth, is arguably indebted to Dark Knight, so a tribute is even more fitting. I'm assuming Miller was the first to do TV screens as panels like that? I don't know how widely-used it has been since then, but in a way it would be surprising if it was only Morrison picking up on that concept, and 18 years after Dark Knight.
 
 
FinderWolf
18:00 / 26.08.04
>> Moreover, I'm not clear what it would mean to "save" the codes for the locks. The story seems to be telling me that she's selected SAVE, which releases the animals. But that wording on the screen doesn't immediately convey the idea of "release restraint locks". Surely if you save the codes, you're keeping everything secure and preserving the status-q. If you cancelled the restraint codes, it would seem more likely that you'd set the animals free.

I thought the exact same thing.

I kept wondering, am I dummy here?
 
 
FinderWolf
18:09 / 26.08.04
>> though I loved this comic, I am a bit troubled by the way we are having to go through elaborate NO-PRIZE hoops to rationalise what should surely have been made pretty clear: whether and how Rosanne deliberately let the animals out, and what the repeated SAVE instruction actually meant in terms of releasing the restraints.

I feel the same way -- and part of me feels like we shouldn't overlook a very unclear major plot point just cause we all love Grant. This kinda feels like explaining away New X-Men stuff, with one-half of the posters saying 'it's vague to make US think and connect the dots, you lazy comic-reading sods, this shows yet again that Morrison is a genius!!' and the other half saying 'sorry, that doesn't explain lazy writing and plot holes, we shouldn't have to write thesis papers to explain this shit away.'

Nevertheless, We3 is still a great comic.
 
 
Ganesh
18:10 / 26.08.04
The only reason I could think of to use the ambiguous 'SAVE' was to illustrate that Dr Berry has literally chosen to save the animals from being destroyed (or CANCELled). Which is, I agree, a little bit clunky.
 
 
Yotsuba & Benjamin!
18:27 / 26.08.04
I didn't mean to imply that you inferred that there was beef. I was just commenting on the inevitable problems with it that would surface.

I also, to continue on this hyper-contradicting wave, feel that it's just as bad to dismiss those arguments, that it is a more interactive way to describe the scene and that it requires more thought by the reader. That's the great thing about comics, it's literally ALL there, some of it just might be smaller or harder to see.

Quitely did not leave anything out in those pages. In fact, he took care to give everyone a distinguishing characteristic(folder, tea, etc) so it would be easier to follow. The only deliberately ambiguous thing in the sequenece is the "Save"/"Cancel" screen, and I believe that the hunch that letting it sit there without making a choice messes up the system is the correct one.
 
 
Jack Fear
18:53 / 26.08.04
. I'm assuming Miller was the first to do TV screens as panels like that?

I don't know for certain, but 'd bet good money that Will Eisner did it first.

Eisner did everything first.
 
 
FinderWolf
19:17 / 26.08.04
>> That's the great thing about comics, it's literally ALL there, some of it just might be smaller or harder to see.

Unless they're bad comics.

But I'm not saying this is a bad comic.

re: this comic, I do wish the SAVE/CANCEL bit was more clear, but I can live with it, given how terrific the book is.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
20:00 / 26.08.04
Jesus wept tears of sexual thunder! Is this an X-men thread? Did it really bother you all that much?
 
 
Mr Tricks
20:01 / 26.08.04
I assumed the SAVE function was similar to how web browsers will offer to SAVE your password allowing someone to log-on with-out having to actually know the security code/pass word.

By saving the password and not loggin out she left it available to be hacked or exploited by someone else. Who would that be?

Well who was watching that monitor and is also considered the top of the line in stealth technology?
 
 
LDones
20:26 / 26.08.04
Jack Fear:
It's funny, I was thinking the same thing after posting about the woman-talking-about-headline-bubble panel. It excited me to all hell to see that kind of device used so casually, but whilst enjoying a proper bowel-movement-and-comic-read today I thought "You know, Will Eisner probably already tackled that one, now that I think about it."

O Uncultured Soul of Mine.
 
 
FinderWolf
20:35 / 26.08.04
>> Jesus wept tears of sexual thunder! Is this an X-men thread? Did it really bother you all that much?

Well, I kind of expect a professional comic to not have unclear major plot points where multiple readings leave you only with a theory of what you think the writer meant but failed to communicate clearly. This would seem to be the kind of thing that an editor should point out at some stage of production and say 'this is unclear.'

I said I wasn't that annoyed by it, but I feel like I have a right to be a bit annoyed by it without someone accusing me of being a hysterical fanboy. Anyway, I've already said the jist of this above, so this will be my final word on it. I just don't feel like I should have to defend having a reasonable critique of something in this comic when it's clear that others found it vague as well and had a similar critique. And I did say I loved the book regardless, several times.

Anyway.

Mr. Tricks' point about leaving it open to be hacked is interesting -- since I got the impression that one possible reading is that the rabbit was hacking it somehow. I went back to read if the rabbit's "stealth" skills involved computer hacking, but that wasn't really mentioned. But it's a very viable (and cool) theory.
 
 
Haus of Mystery
21:09 / 26.08.04
It wasn't a direct attack on you Wolfie, I'm just spleening at the way the thread has suddenly got bogged down in a niggly critique of something that really didn't bother me. I was just so smitten by the comic, and all of the fun the boys are having telling the story that it peeved me. I know you're not a drooling fanboy - you have plenty of interesting articulate posts that say otherwise.
 
 
Jack Fear
21:35 / 26.08.04
It's called resonance, people. It's about Grant Morrison finding the poetry in the language of computer commands and being so intoxicated with its implications that he's using the terms without regard for the actual functionality of real computers. SAVE : CANCEL :: preservation : negation. Will the she SAVE the beastie-borgs or CANCEL their very existence? DO YOU SEE?!?
 
 
Spyder Todd 2008
21:49 / 26.08.04
I know this comes accross as unthinkable to all of us, but maybe the scene is ambiguous now because it's going to be explained later? I mean, it's a three issue story. Not every bloody detail about everything has to be explained in the first issue.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:55 / 26.08.04
Why would you take a great deal of trouble to design evocative, plausible-looking animal exosuits ... instruct your artist to show a craft knife slicing the top pages of a newspaper, to show two pills next to a blister pack, to show loose laces flying off a treadmill sneaker...
to plot out the layout of a USAF building and make sure the reader can follow the routes that various workers are taking down a defined set of corridors... and then base a crucial plot point on the "resonance" of the word SAVE, rather than what any reader with a basic level of computer literacy would assume it to mean?

NO-PRIZE on its way to you.

I don't actually care about this as much as it may seem. But it's an interesting debate about how much we should excuse.

I'll tell you another genuine justification that occurred to me at the time, just so I can also get a shot at the NO-PRIZE.

We see a lot of shots of the animals' faces, intently watching, like they're fully aware of what Roseanne's deciding. SAVE is lit up in yellow on her screen. SAVE is exactly the kind of language they can understand. You're saved... save yourselves. It's a message to them.

PROBLEM: unfortunately they're at the wrong angle to see that screen.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
21:58 / 26.08.04
And as I started this, I dispute the idea that my debating it makes me a fanboy who can't craft an articulate post. It's a tribute to the comic that I want to study it that carefully, and that there's so much detail I can try to make sense of. It's because I know Morrison as a writer of at least occasional genius and consistent stellar quality that I'm prepared to insert myself into his fictional world and make an effort to interpret it.

If this was John Byrne's DOOM PATROL, and in some lapse of intelligence I'd paid money to take it home, do you think I'd even be bothering trying to rationalise why SAVE released three robo-animals?
 
 
The Natural Way
22:05 / 26.08.04
Thanks Jack.

It's obvious. Get over it.

SAVE seems like such a gorgeous word right now. SAVE... Mmmmm.

Right -

This is definitely the best comic I've brought in forfuckingever, and a good example, if ever one was needed, of why Grant should stay in touch with his artists. Everything from the cover to the X-rayed truck to the animals racing down the corridor formula 1-style to 2's laser targeted dinner/plaything. Amazing.

And, yes, the way that splash page forces its way out of the claustrophobic confines of security space.... I can feel the air on my face.

ROCK!
 
 
The Natural Way
22:10 / 26.08.04
Kovacs, it's not a big thing - you essentially understand what's going on anyway (the animals are being given an opportunity to escape) - so I don't understand what yr so hung up about. We're in danger of making a dogma out of moaning every time Grant loses us a bit.

But, anyway, no more. Please. Boring now.
 
 
Triplets
22:26 / 26.08.04
I thought it was resonance too. It's about time Graham used some symbolism in his comics, innit?
 
 
miss wonderstarr
22:53 / 26.08.04
Alright, well we've got a month's wait... what else are we going to talk about now SAVE is nixed. I mean this well-meaningly.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
05:50 / 27.08.04
I think we should discuss the possibility that G***** deliberately creates these plot ambiguities in a lot of his work purely and simply so us guys on Barbelith will have something to talk about.

In all seriousness though, etc, is there any other artiste working today in whatever medium, whose material is under anything like this level of scrutiny ?

And who so plays to the crowd.
 
 
Imaginary Mongoose Solutions
07:24 / 27.08.04
Perhaps I'm a bit slow, but I didn't think there was a plot ambiguity until Barbelith told me there was.

*shrug*
 
 
Alex's Grandma
07:36 / 27.08.04
Now you're Invisible, though, now you're Invisible.
 
 
wicker woman
07:54 / 27.08.04
what else are we going to talk about now SAVE is nixed.

"IS GUD DOG?", maybe? If a dog has an intelligence enhancer jabbed into its brainpan, does it start thinking theological thoughts? Did they already, and were just waiting for the USAF to turn them into killing machines before they could articulate it?
Am I reading too much into that line? I'd almost think so, if it wasn't Grant writing it and there wasn't an entirely seperate panel devoted to it.

Two panels back from that, what would be a normally innocent gesture by a dog seems very... creepy. And sad, somehow.
 
 
Spaniel
08:39 / 27.08.04
900, He's asking whether Washington is a "gud" guy. Not whether God is a dog.

Absolutely loved this, but I too was a little confused by the save business. In the end I settled for the resonance explanation - very Grant Morrison.

And yes, Varrriage, I could feel the night air on my face.

Oh, yes there is another comic writer who gets scrutinized as much, and as often. He's called Alan Moore.
 
  

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