Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Comic Books >

Global Frequency number 1

09:33 / 25.10.02

Anyone pick up this new Wildstorm title from Warren Ellis this week?

Global network of individuals with special talents who are called out to deal with weird and wonderful threats to the planet... not sure if this is in the Wildstorm universe or not.

First issue is fast-paced, mildly intriguing and it's nice to see Garry Leach back.

But nothing we've not seen before, eh? Kind of comes over as a cross between the Authority and Planetary. Which makes you wonder why Ellis doesn't just finish Planetary.

09:57 / 25.10.02

flicked through it in the shop and was filled with apathy. This is not going to be a bad comic. But I don't think its going to be great either. A new comic should do more than inspire apathy.

11:09 / 25.10.02

The art was nice, and I think the concept for this series is great but the first issue just left me cold.

There were a couple of stylish moments and I enjoyed the fast pace, but on the whole it felt more like a phone advert than a story to me. There just wasn't enough meat to it.

It could get better though, and I'll be sticking around for a couple of issues at least.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

14:07 / 25.10.02

'The Filth' without the silly costumes or the filth? The headsup I saw in one of the recent issues of 'Automatic Kafka'suggested that Warren Ellis' idea of comics writers doing new things is to copy existing ideas but with new characters so you can say they're your own. The X-Men without the mutant powers and big puffy jackets?

hypersimulation

18:36 / 25.10.02

Snoozefest.

Felt to me like Ellis trying wayway too hard while concurrently
not putting in any effort whatsoever.

Torn on whether or not to pick up the later issues of this with Gene Ha, Phil Jimenez, other top-notch artists.

22:42 / 25.10.02

Yeah, I thought the whole thing was very mediocre. I really liked the art and the pace but didn't get overly excited about the story which is, for me at least, the most important factor.
That said, it's not fair to make toomuch of a judgement after just 1 issue so I'll definitely stay with it for a while.

13:01 / 27.10.02

It's like ellis doesn't ever bother to read the second paragraph of the web article that he's cribbed his latest bit of supratech from. But, good art. Rather just see the end of planetary and MOSpace tho.

13:09 / 27.10.02

Agree with the most views here. Can't see how Wildstorm would have gone with this if it hadn't been for the name of Warren Ellis. It was a relly flimsy read, and cretainly made me wish for more of the Planetary. Reckon Grant could have polished off this whole issue in about three panels.
I think Mr Ellis is being a tad lazy here or maybe working too much on the appearance of a comic and forgetting about the story.
Anyone heard what Mekk will be like?
And what do people think of Strange Kisses?

yawn - thing's buddy

08:45 / 28.10.02

yawn.

good freaky slow mo leach art tho:

anyone remember his rendition of ringer being hung upside down by the geeks and visciously tortured while Smith looks on, impassive, disguised in a geek suit? (2000AD circa prog 170 or therabouts)

wow.

Leach seems to accesss a 'treacle time' kinda lense for his panels.

'Pounding' as well, is an adjective which comes to mind. He always draws people pounding the floor - or people being blown explosively towards the panel frame, their hands almost reaching out of the page.

Also Leach is probably responsible for the finest and most influential super-scrap....ever! mind o' miracleman and kid miracleman knocking fuck out in eachother in Warrior? (no, of course I didn't buy Warrior at the time!)

anyway - Ellis: piss poor. 'The litter of our lives' ? - Pah!

CLunk. CLunk. CLunk. CLunk. CLunk. CLunk.

17:32 / 28.10.02

Ellis by numbers.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

18:06 / 28.10.02

I'd just like to point out I thought Ellis was humdrum long before it became fashionable...

18:46 / 28.10.02

Wow! The return of Gary Leach. I have to admit, I'm not that familiar with Ellis' work, but even if Garth Ennis wrote this, I'd want to check it out.

GL's work on Miracleman was most excellent. The question is, where has he been all these years? I'm sure some of the regulars will have the answers...

Imaginary Mongoose Solutions

21:23 / 28.10.02

*shrug*

I liked it. Leach is, as always, a great artist and an interesting choice for a book like this, where the pacing is so fast, yet his own style seems to emphasize the slo-mo.

Otherwise, it was a fun little action book. I missed the part where it was supposed to be something other than that.

But then again, I like Ellis even when it's non-fashionable.

(And will people please stop asking "when will Planetary be finished?" Christ, it'll hopefully be finished when the artist for the project is done illustrating the vile Captain America book for Marvel.)

However, I've got to admit that I'm not looking forward to Mek that much. When Eric Canate was on the art, it sounded glorious, but Steve "Pounded" Rolston just dosen't have me drooling with anticipation. I could be wrong though.

06:53 / 29.10.02

just to set the record straight - Cassaday went to work on captain America when the planetary scripts stopped coming from Ellis - artists have to eat too and to do that they have to work - so he went and got himself work to cover the gap in his schedule left by the lack of Ellis scripts. Laura Dupuy did the same, so did chris weston...

Regrettable Juvenilia

11:00 / 29.10.02

Well, I liked it too. Sort of.

Let's take care of the bits I didn't like first though: first of all, Warren Ellis really needs to stop recycling his own dialogue if he wants people to stop accusing him of recycling characters and ideas. If the Global Frequency peeps are the *antithesis* of The Authority, as stated in an Ellis interview (because human beings have to take care of their own problems, not be looked after by godlike beings, yada yada), then it would help to have Miranda Zero *not* paraphrase Jenny Sparks (in fact in general it would be nice if she had a personality of her own at all...).

The pseudo-hard-science also irritated me, although that probably has to do with an intractable resistance on my part to a certain strand of science fiction - I'm no fan of Bruce Sterling either, although I know Ellis is - basically I just don't like getting the impression that I'm reading bits of New Scientist articles that have been cut-n-pasted into speech balloons. Especially when the art just represents all these 'Hawking fields' etc as just another big glowy thing - it's Star Trek syndrome, hey look, a sub-space anomaly! Blah.

The latter fault is partially the responsibility of the artist however, and in general Leach didn't impress me too much here. The car chase sequence is clearly there because it's San Francisco - Bullit, etc - but it didn't look *enough* like San Francisco for this to work, I thought. This despite the Brian Wood cover, which I love, and which I only recently noticed actually works as three panels leading in to where the interior picks up (a city > street > car zoom sequence).

Oops, will have to now have a bit of a think about what I *did* like about it...

11:48 / 29.10.02

The jackets. Quite like the jackets. And the mobile phones. Nice bit of branding for the GF.

17:00 / 29.10.02

yawn splain the ringer and smith ref to us kids please [prog 170? that was back in like the fifties or something]. like the treacle time thing, does leach do the bit where the miracledog's hunting them through the forest and cream's severed head does the narration v e r y s l o w l y ? i love that bit i do.