Broken Frontier

Grant Morrison brings his story about mechanized killer house pets to its madcap conclusion with some unexpected twists, great action and the cutest cyborg killers you can find in comics.

Thus far, the reader has been introduced to the government-created killer team of WE3, which includes killer cyborg versions of the common house pets. They are a dog, cat and rabbit that refer to each other as 1, 2 and 3, respectively. They have escaped from the government facility where they were housed and created and they’ve murdered any military men that came after them, plus a horde of cybernetic mice, all in a search to find their home. However, not only has the rabbit been injured, this issue sees the government sending in the big guns, in the form of "We4", a giant cybernetic bulldog. The government has located the WE3 team and isolated that portion of the city in order to let We4 loose to kill them. The question then is: can WE3 succeed in killing the robotic We4, escape even more government military and finally make it home, where ever that may be?

Morrison’s stories run hot and cold for many people. No one will ever doubt he has a particular vision and can somehow always make it come to fruition. The only problem is sometimes it’s a little hard to understand what exactly his vision is. This is not one of those times. One of the reasons is his script is very streamlined. Not once in the story does he seem to get enthralled with the voices of his characters, which is easy when the main characters are cybernetic house pets who know few words (and none with more than 1 syllable). This being the penultimate issue of his miniseries, he gives the reader just enough exposition to move from action scene to action scene and while keeping the flow of the story swift.

To say that Frank Quitely perfectly compliments a Morrison script would be restating something that has been said for years. They have worked together enough times for the reader to understand that Quitely knows exactly how to handle Morrison’s writing, and in a world where the main characters speak very little, Quitely’s storytelling skills are given proper time to shine. His page layouts and panel design pace the book incredibly well and his action scenes are especially standout, as he seems to manipulate time and space to accentuate the movements of the characters. But perhaps his best achievement with the book is that the audience never doubts who the sympathetic characters are.

Morrison and Quitely bring this story to a nice conclusion. It is sometimes hard to recommend anything by Morrison to a casual reader (and hardcore Morrison fans never need a recommendation to pick up his stuff), but this miniseries is one of those stories where he doesn’t try to do too much and therefore never gives himself the chance to talk circles around his audience. The series provided a nice bit of humor, some incredibly inventive page designs by Quitely, explosive action and a fun, cuddly group of characters to root for.

-Sam Moyerman