WE3 (Grant Morrison)

WE3
The We3 series, Issues 1 - 3
Grant Morrison, illustrations by Frank Quitely
Vertigo
Fiction, Graphic Novel/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: It was a program meant to end human death on the battlefield, replacing soldiers with cybernetically modified animals. But now that funding has been secured, the prototype We3 unit - the dog 1, the cat 2, and the rabbit 3 - is to be terminated like any obsolete technology. Only nobody asked their lead scientist/trainer... or the animals themselves, who have a rudimentary grasp of English thanks to their enhancements. The three former housepets escape, fleeing across the countryside in search of a place, a concept they but dimly recall: somewhere there is no need to run or to kill, called "home."

REVIEW: Though a bit jumbled at times, this is a quick-reading, if often gory, story in the vein of Richard Adams's Plague Dogs. The animals leave a red trail in their wake, often at least as much because of extreme measures used to hunt them down as their own actions, though they aren't overly burdened with human senses of morality; the dog 1 knows he should protect people, but does not hesitate to kill to keep his "pack" safe. After a while the gore becomes numbing and some of the action sequences are a bit hard to follow, and if you think too much about the premise things get shaky (why use stolen housepets when the shelters are overflowing with animals nobody would miss?), but there are moments of true emotional resonance. Overall, it's a dark examination of how inhuman the human species can be.

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