Big Bunny Boom

we3: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant (2004, collected 2005): Bandit the dog, Tinker the cat, Pirate the rabbit: 1, 2, and 3 of we3. They were pets. They were stolen. A secret American military project turned them into super-soldiers -- heavily armed, heavily armoured, trained to work as a team, and with a boost in intelligence from the machines grafted to them.

But after a final test run, they're to be 'put down.' The next phase of the program will involve larger animals specially bred and trained to replace soldiers on the battlefield. Weapon 4 already waits in its pen, too dreadful to be deployed anywhere near non-hostile civilians. there are kinks to work out.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely riff in unusual ways on things like the Jason Bourne books, 'lost-animal' novels that include The Incredible Journey, Japanese manga, and funny-animal comics with their talking animals. We cut between the humans and the animals for much of the narrative. The animals have developed a rudimentary language derived from English. They've also maintained their survival instincts: once they hear they're about to be killed, they escape in search of a nebulous and mostly forgotten 'Home.' They don't remember their names, but one sympathetic scientist does.

Funny, affecting, and not completely improbable, we3 also pointedly comments on both our mistreatment of animals and our dehumanization of soldiers in a quest for the perfect killing machine. The animals, already gifted by nature with reflexes and senses superior to human beings, make human super-soldiers like Captain America or Jason Bourne look like amateurs. With a dog as a tank, a cat as a fast-striking assassin, and a rabbit as a mine- and poison-gas-laying version of the Cadbury Easter Rabbit, we3 stages a battle that escalates until the powers that be deploy the terrible fourth weapon.

It's a thrilling ride, beautifully illustrated by Quitely and movingly written by Morrison. Moments of humour erupt throughout the carnage, as do moments of sadness. The dog still wants to be a good dog in relation to people. The cat just wants to get the Hell out of there. And the rabbit, the rabbit keeps saying, 'Uh oh' and blowing stuff up. Highly recommended.

Truth and Continuity

Captain America: Truth: written by Robert Morales; illustrated by Kyle Baker (2004): A jeremiad turned superhero comic book, Truth reminds me a lot of Spike Lee's Bamboozled in its audaciousness, its fierce satire, and its often distracting flaws. It's not a great graphic novel, but I read it in one sitting and it left me wishing for more both in terms of length and, more pressingly, depth and context.

Basically, everything we know about the origin of Marvel's Captain America is a lie because before there was (white) super-soldier Steve Rogers, there were a number of African-Americans experimented upon so as to perfect the super-soldier formula. Morales bases this idea in part (as he notes in the Appendix) on the Tuskegee Experiments, an infamous U.S. Public Health Service study in which several hundred African-Americans with syphillis were studied for 40 years without ever being treated for the disease. Eugenics programs throughout Europe and North America are also folded into the super-soldier ethos.

In short, the first Captain America ultimately turns out to be an African-American who has been erased from the white history books, though African-Americans all know about him. We follow several African-American men through the horrific program and on to Europe. They're a secret, even as the 'real' Captain America becomes famous.

There's a large-scale problem with the idea of creating African-American super-soldiers that somewhat undercuts the plausibility of the events. Many, many terrible things were done to people in the name of 'science' by Nazis and others, but I don't recall any experiments which could have turned a despised Other into a superhero. It seems awfully counter-intuitive, as there's a qualitative difference between letting someone suffer from untreated syphillis (or, for that matter, injecting gasoline into someone's veins to see what happens) and potentially turning someone who hates you into an unstoppable killing machine. It's really, really Mad Science, even for superhero comics. The satiric point may be that the U.S. government is arrogantly confident that its 'Negroes' would never rebel, but that satire isn't even borne out by moments of African-American civil defiance referenced in the story itself.

Morales keeps things moving at a blistering pace, so much so that character development and historical context often get skimmed over. I'd like more before, during, and after, but as with a lot of Marvel comics, telling detail gets repressed in order to show more battle sequences. I don't know how much editorial interference there was here -- the book did get painfully shoehorned into official Marvel continuity at some point after it had been started.

Still, though, this is a fascinating book. Kyle Baker's art is marvelous, cartoony and exaggerated when it needs to be, realistic and detailed when it seeks to place the reader in a real place and time. It's not 'normal' 21st century Marvel superhero art at all, as Baker's influences are as much cartoonists and animators as they are Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko. Well, really moreso. The contrast between the nominally realistic and the outlandishly caricatured can be jarring at times, but it serves the story well, especially with the recurring character of one racist soldier who looks like a debased, flop-sweating Elmer Fudd.

Is this a great book? No, but it's certainly more interesting than most Marvel product and, for all its flaws, possessed of surprising and rewarding strengths. Recommended.