Quarter Bin #28 "We3 demonstrates my 2012 dilemma"

WE3 (Vertigo)
From October & December 2004, March 2005:
The launching pad for this column is Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s tale of a trio of animals (a dog, a cat, and a rabbit) who are conscripted into military service via robotic enhancements that allow them to become precision killing machines. If you need a Grant Morrison project that demonstrates his ability to transcend whatever stereotype you may have of his work, this is it, a kind of grownup’s picture book, as it were (akin to Brian K. Vaughn’s PRIDE OF BAGHDAD), a fable about identity and determination that allows you to enter the minds of unusual protagonists. As you can see from the publication dates (and overlooking for the moment the erratic nature of the release schedule), this one’s more than five years old, and yet I didn’t read it for the first time until last year. My biggest excuse for this is that I was in the midst of my transition back into reading comics following my original millennium break (the summer of 1999, actually), and for some reason kept avoiding Morrison, first with NEW X-MEN and then BATMAN, even though I had thoroughly enjoyed his JLA. Perhaps it was because I’d never read INVISIBLES, which was at the time his most relevant work (and was the subject of rumors at the time suggesting that it could become a TV series), and so didn’t feel that I was big enough a fan to jump into projects that seemed geared toward his true admirers. Again, I was just making my way back into comics. I was even skipping ROBIN, even though I used to read that book religiously.

Long story short, not so long after WE3, I began to have a lot of reasons to care about Morrison, chief among them being SEVEN SOLDIERS OF VICTORY, and so eventually started delving back into his canon of work, and of course WE3 was one of the crown jewels. I was certainly aware that there was a trade collection available, but it wasn’t until I saw a bundle of the original issues conveniently collected together at Escape Velocity in Colorado Springs that I was finally motivated to read the story for myself. That’s what this column will be about, actually.

2012 is still only a few weeks old, and as regular readers of this blog know, I kept stating throughout last year that I had once again quit reading new comics, not because I fell out of love with them but for financial reasons, it’s a good idea. (Fortunately, that doesn’t mean that I can no longer write about comics!) I spent the entirety of 2011 cheating on that decision; though at least from my end it was obvious that I had drastically cut back from the habits I’d developed in the last few years. That leaves me with the decision I may end up making this year, which is to become the dreaded paperback reader, the one who waits for the trades, a division I have always kind of frowned upon, not just because I have always read the majority of my new comics in single issue form, but because that was always my preference, to be reading the new stuff as it was being published, rather than waiting months and months. Collections are certainly convenient, but in a certain sense, they can also be somewhat artificial. Writers don’t always write in story arcs, and in fact sometimes they write the random issue that really can’t be included in a collection that otherwise focuses on that arc; perhaps the collections from that series will eventually feature every issue, but they might become nonsequential, which technically violates the original intentions of the writer. Maybe that only really matters in a purely intellectual capacity (Morrison’s SEVEN SOLDIERS was a particularly tricky one, consisting of seven mini-series that could be read individually, or in the specific sequence in which they were released, which is the way they’ve been collected), I don’t know.

Reading individual issues does allow you to feel as if you’re a part of something, while collections can have the connotation that you’ve merely joined up with something that’s already happened. You might as well call it the present versus past tense dilemma, and like I’ve said, maybe it doesn’t really matter, and that’s what I’ll discover this year. This blog spends time writing about “new” comics (which I’ll put in quotation marks for the moment, strictly for argument’s sake) as well as older ones, and that’s why I’ve got the Quarter Bin column clearly distinguished. Another thing I need to recognize is that I enjoy writing this column, which sometimes serves as a way (or an excuse) to rummage through back issues bins in search of comics from 1999-2004, from when I hadn’t properly (or couldn’t have, because honestly, it’s become easier) chosen a substitute method to continue semi-actively following comics while trying to maintain a more financially solid lifestyle. (At the time, there was also WIZARD, but reading about comics and actually reading them is not always the same thing.)

As for WE3, I’m now actually wondering if the trade collection isn’t, after all, the best possible way to read this one. I can only imagine what it was like to be reading this story as it was actually published, waiting issue to issue (probably somewhat similar to JOE THE BARBARIAN), because it’s definitely not your usual comic, whether you’re talking superheroes or what most people think of when they hear “graphic novel.” That’s why I called it a grownup picture book, because at their best, that’s probably what comic books really are, whether or not you consider the dominant superhero genre. People might tend to consider comics to almost be juvenile literature with pictures, but the best of them are far more sophisticated than the average book for that reading level. WE3 is proof of that.

Hopefully I’ll get to read stuff like that this year.