Switchblade Honey

Are you getting tired of all this Star Trek talk yet? Are you not a fan? Do you find Star Trek dull, pompous and ridiculously self-important? Are you happy that Enterprise got canned and there's no new Trek show clogging up the airwaves? Mate, has Warren Ellis got a comic for you!

According to this book's introduction, Ellis was subjected to entirely too much Trek while his girlfriend was convalescing after childbirth and came up with the idea for this graphic novel as a result. It occurred to him that, more than anyone in the world, he would want to see British character actor Ray Winstone as the captain of a Federation starship. As he ruminated on the idea "all my loathing of that profoundly ordinary, polite, self-important and bland future presented by TV science fiction came surging up. All yellow, and with bits in."

In this "mental puke", Ellis stacks the deck a bit by presenting us with a sort of evil twin to the Federation. Rather than using a thinly-disguised noble and well-meaning UFP to fulfill the role of straight-man, he stacks the deck by making the Earth alliance a bunch of right bastards. Far from following a Prime Directive, humanity in this future lands wherever they want to, and rape the land and the locals however they see fit. This comes back to bite them on the ass when they make a mess of the Chasta's homeworld. What no one realized was that the Chasta only choose to present themselves as simple and primitive for aesthetic reasons; they are actually packed with implanted technology, telepathically connected via hive mind, and consider the invading humans to be "ebola with shoes."

The war with the Chasta has gone so poorly that Earth is a month away from being occupied by the enemy. The situation is so desperate that one maverick general decides to spring some incarcerated officers and turn them loose on the Chasta. Of course, since the military are a bunch of assholes, it turns out that most of the characters are in prison for bogus reasons. The anti-hero of the tale, John Ryder, is being detained for disobeying orders to destroy a friendly vessel in order to wipe out the Chasta attackers in its wake. His new gunner is in prison for refusing to fire on civilians, and his electronics expert is being punished for figuring out a way to kill Chasta by blowing out all the airlocks on their ship-- thus depriving the gunner, a rear admiral's son, a chance at a medal. John's new first officer, Susan Nile, castrated her captain when she caught him raping a junior officer. So these people are all "criminals", but ones that you actively root for.

Many stories have a macguffin to get the action going; in the case of Switchblade Honey just about everything in the book: the setting, the mission, the plot, are all one big macguffin in service of getting these colorful characters together, bouncing off each other and doing their thing. And basically their thing is smoking, drinking and swearing. Ellis calls this book anti-Star Trek, "an extended gag at the colourless, clean SF of the big media." Simply put, it's an excuse to get Winstone on the bridge of a Federation starship, bouncing a cigarette butt off the back of his straight-arrow pilot's head and calling him a "twat". Notice how the titular spaceship has a cheshire grin on the cover of the book?

This story might be pretty lightweight, but they sure didn't skimp on the artwork. Brandon McKinney is a polished penciller who takes the project seriously, regardless of the actual content. I see hints of Dave Gibbons and Alan Davis here, but McKinney most closely resembles Mark Bagley. If you ask me, that's pretty good company to be in. It's a testament to Warren Ellis as a force in this industry that no matter which publisher he's writing for or how much of a lark the project is, he always attracts first-rate artists to work with.

I'm not entirely clear on the publishing history of Switchblade Honey; I guess it was originally published in 2003, although it was recently resolicited in Previews, which is when I ordered it. Perhaps this is a new printing. At any rate, this book gets most of its mileage out of enjoyment of the kind of rough, sarcastic, borderline misanthropic characters Ellis (not to mention Garth Ennis and Mark Millar) likes to use. At this point, though, this archetype has sort of lost its attraction for me due to extreme overuse, meaning this book may primarily be of interest to diehard Ellis fans and fervent Star Trek haters.

Rating: 7/10

Aetheric Mechanics

Boiled down to its essence, Aetheric Mechanics is a steampunk Sherlock Holmes mystery, but there is more to it than that. For starters, Warren Ellis has slightly changed all the familiar Holmesian tropes to make them his own. His detective is called “Sax Raker” and his physician sidekick is called "Richard Watcham". There are also thinly-disguised incarnations of Inspector Lestrade, Irene Adler, and Mrs. Hudson at hand, while characters sounding suspiciously like Moriarty and Mycroft Holmes are also mentioned in passing. Ellis hasn’t simply resorted to homage because he couldn’t or didn’t want to gain the permission of the Conan Doyle estate to use the real characters. There’s a very specific reason why everyone s not quite the way we remember them, but the truth behind that is just one of the many delights to be found in this most excellent one-shot from Avatar Press.

The year is 1907 and conflict between Britain and Ruritania (yes, that’s the fictional country from The Prisoner of Zenda) has broken out into open war across Europe. In this alternate world, the study of aetheric mechanics allows the flight of launches and spacefaring battleships via apergy engines and cavorite (yes, that's the antigravitic metal from The First Men in the Moon. Are we sensing a theme here?) rotors, among other technological marvels. As our tale opens, Dr. Watcham has been sent back to London from the front due to an injury. Having fulfilled his duty, he finds himself back to his familiar rooms -- we’re not actually told they’re at 221B Baker Street, but it’s fairly evident. Watcham finds Raker brooding in his study as usual, willfully oblivious to the political machinations of the greater world and instead focused like a laser on the latest sensational crime to hit London.

It seems that an invisible assailant who keeps popping in an out of existence has been accosting and even slaying prominent local scientists and engineers, and Watcham hasn’t even time to unpack his bags before the game is afoot once more. Like Sherlock Holmes, Raker is equally proficient at the solving of perplexing mysteries, but the answer at the root of this one is so mind-boggling that neither the characters nor the readers will ever see it coming.

The black and white artwork by Gianluca Pagliarani is mostly fantastic. He clearly takes pride in his craft and lavishes every page with a breathtaking amount of detail. His cityscapes and steampunkian contraptions are first-rate and one can literally spend five minutes taking in meticulous renderings of Raker’s study or the Disappearing Man’s underground lab. I have one nitpick about this book, however, and it’s a pretty big sticking point for me: I can’t stand how Pagliarani draws faces. Everyone in this story has a bulbous nose and slit reptilian eyes. If an artist has a weakness in any other area- say he can’t draw hands, or feet, or horses- I could overlook it to some extent, but as humans we identify so strongly with people’s faces and especially their eyes that’s it’s very disconcerting when every face has creepy eyes with tiny pinprick pupils. I almost feel like I’m reading about a race of snake people rather than human beings, which is a real disappointment because in every other way the art is first rate. I actually find myself resisting the impulse to white out all the eyes in this book and draw in wider, more reflective, more human-looking ones!

You have to admire the imagination and work ethic of Warren Ellis, an extremely prolific writer who seems to produce something like five different titles each and every month. Some of his books have weight to them, others seem like an idea he tossed off during a subway ride, but his comics are consistently entertaining. With Aetheric Mechanics, he is able to balance a fun adventure with some really dizzying existential conundrums that may lead to a shark-jumping moment for some readers, but I totally went with it and loved every zig and zag. Also, perhaps because this is a period piece, the overbearing sarcasm and cynicism which is a staple of Ellis characters is toned way down, which is to the story’s benefit. All told, this is one of the best books I’ve read all year, and well worth the purchase if you can find a copy.

Rating: 9.5/10