“Run Rabbit Run!”
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Frank Quitely
Publisher: Vertigo
Plot:
1, 2 and 3 flee an all-out military attack, but they’re quite capable of returning fire when pressed. Meanwhile, various military officials and Dr. Trendle fret over what Roseanne has done by releasing them. Plan one: robo-rats!
What’s interesting:
In an issue even better than the first, Morrison deepens our appreciation of these enhanced animals as living entities, as beings created by madmen who barely understood them, and as victims of a science driven by machine-models but woefully under-prepared to cope with or even acknowledge deep-seated emotional motivations and animal needs.
It’s also a bloody action movie, rivaling various zombie tales for sheer gore. In fact, Quitely seems to delight in kaleidoscopic sprees of ultra-violence, using them as punctuation marks along the trail of a coming of age story that simple house pets shouldn’t ever have had to face.
Morrison should take heart that this series succeeds in all the ways Seaguy didn’t (by offering a realistic if hyper-corrupt world rather than a mysterious collection of unrelated symbols and inscrutable vignettes). His dog, cat and rabbit have more personality than a score of generic heroes I can think of, and they accomplish deep pathos and even wide-screen epic tragedy this issue with a vocabulary that at best can be labeled “low-functioning.”
Still interesting:
This story also succeeds in the ways that Seaguy did, too, as Quitely equals Cameron Stewart for all-over conceptual design and gung-ho willingness to leap off the cliffs of Morrison’s big-budget ideas. Quitely goes even further, engaging in innovative narrative presentations that challenge the norm of comics framing and storytelling. When bad things happen, he gives us a patchwork of tiny frames, each a time-collapsed fragment in events that otherwise would be over before we knew what hit us.
Most interesting:
Sadly, we learn that even our samurai-armored Cyborg friends are just as vulnerable as the hapless soldiers Morrison shreds organ by organ in several brutal encounters. This story, the last moments of a doomed experiment gone awry only slightly decompressed for the audience, continues to build. Nothing in it promises a happy ending; but, then, considering the nature of the crimes committed, perhaps a final ending is the best any of the players can hope for.
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