Comic Reviewed by Will Cooling
Story Title: Love Will Get You Killed
Written by Warren Ellis
Art by Gary Erskine
Lettered by Rob Leigh
Coloured by Brian Reber
Editor: Joey Cavalieri
What do you get from a Warren Ellis story if you take out all the drinking, drug-taking, anarchistic and OTT violence, black humour, swearing, and tough talking busty women with Y chromosomes to spare?
That’s right, a liberal power fantasy.
A sort of misty-eyed wish that just for once the uniforms who guard us in our sleep would turn out to be nice people who smoke cannabis, march for gay pride, and read The Guardian has often been present in Ellis’s work. With Stormwatch/The Authority it was a yearning for superheroes to stop supporting the status quo and tackling low-level bad guys, and instead go after corporate America and the G7. Spider Jerusalem was Bob Woodward on steroids and again a plea for ass-kickers to be liberal. Planetary seems a multi-national conspiracy to collect all known inventions and concepts made heroes because they wanna do it for the world, man.
And so we come to Jack Cross, which with almost all the other quirks in his writing absent, allows this liberal power fantasy to take centre stage. Jack Cross is a super-agent who has fought and killed for his country numerous times. He’s respected by the top brass and is given carte blanche to carry out his investigations as he sees fit. And yet, he’s a bleeding heart liberal who organizes anti-war demonstrations. Now there’s nothing wrong with that per se, as such juxtapostion is always useful for developing an attention-grabbing character. However, Ellis may be accused of taking this juxtapostion waaay to far, to the point it goes from being counter-intuitive to downright inconsistent. The problem is that both sides of Cross’ personality are overstated, as his liberalism and his super-agent toughness being slightly OTT. Now I could imagine someone who’s to the left and a little bit hung up about killing people doing the things Jack Cross does with regret. I could also imagine someone who works for the Government only when it’s really important and achieves his mission with the minimum of violence, being a far out liberal who remembers each of his victims. What I can’t quite buy at this stage is the idea that someone who is so starkly brutal, vindictive and duplicitous can also be the bleeding heart nice guy.
Take the previous issue; Jack Cross doesn’t just interrogate the suspect; he blows one of the guy’s fingers off to make him talk. Sure he was shown to be shaking and sobbing in the Gents afterwards, but why the f*ck did he act like that in the beginning? It’s not like he’s been ordered to behave like that, indeed across the two issues there are a few cases of him being ordered not to behave like that. What’s more, is it really believable that anyone would have the authorization to go round shooting federal agent’s fingers off? In a Government building? It’s not like that’s even the most extreme thing he does. In many ways the writing seems to be aping the Dirty Harry films, where Harry acts like a bastard but deep down is a nice guy. The problem is that whereas the humane elements of Harry motivated him to act like a bastard, the humane elements of Jack’s personality should do the opposite. The fact is that if you’re going to present the super-agent as a human person, there still has to be something in them that motivates them to be the super-agent, and at the moment I just ain’t seeing it. Now Ellis is writer who likes to reveal his characters over a period of time (for example Elijah Snow) and he does give hints as to not only the extent of Jack Cross’s service but also his shaky mental state, but it still rankles. Depending on how Ellis develops the series, Jack Cross could be a superb piece of characterization or a rather messy example of self-indulgent wish-fulfillment.
Thankfully, Ellis’s writing across the board is more evidence of the recent upswing in his form since his non-Marvel projects have been hitting the shelves. As I’ve already mentioned, his writing has been shorn of many of the quirks that were becoming clichés-here the women talk like human beings and not Stone Cold Steve Austin. Whilst Jack Cross may have a contradiction at the heart of his character, he is mercifully free of Ellis’s stock character traits such as heavy drinking and smoking. Whilst he is portrayed as something of a loose cannon, we don’t get the full-on anti-authority figure stereotype that’s infected his characters since Stormwatch. Now don’t get me wrong, I enjoy Ellis’ writing with these quirks, but it’s nice to see him stretch out beyond his comfort zone (he must think so too, as none of his three C/O projects utilize them). What’s more he seems to be at home with the murky world of intelligence as he develops a fiendishly fiendish plot concerning love, Iraq, Camp X-Ray, turf wars, and super-dupa weaponry. The writing of all this is sound, with sound dialogue and exposition whilst the action scene is well executed if a tad OTT. Another bonus is that it doesn’t feel anywhere near as decompressed as later issues of Transmetropolitan or his recent Marvel work. Whilst not a fantastic deal happens in terms of plot, it fills the issue nicely and there is some plot progression and character development. Which is a million miles from Ultimate Nightmare/Secret.
Gary Erskine is on art duties and proves to be a good choice for this story. His naturalist and unflashy artwork captures the “24” tone of the story extremely well. His sound grasp of characterisation and anatomy produce a good-looking comic. It also further separates this from some of Ellis’s earlier work, with the anarchistic energy and spirit that Robertson and D’Israeli brought to Ellis’s story absent in this story. And that’s a good thing, because such an iconoclastic approach would’ve been inappropriate for the story. What you could say is that the art is a tad stiff in places and so lacks dynamism. Now that’s alright for the interrogation scenes, but Erskine seems to struggle with the action scene, although that could be the fault of the slightly ludicrous choreography from Ellis. That aside, he produces some good work that compliments Ellis’s script well.
Overall this is a good, readable spy comic that just slightly suffers from a few key flaws, notably the strangely unreal characterisation of the lead character. Still almost everything else is perfectly sound and the problems with characterisation may well be solved as the series develops. Certainly worth a look if you’re a spy-thriller fan or a Warren Ellis fan boy.
