Injection
Some graphic novels you read for their story, others for the characters. Injection, at least for me, falls pretty squarely into the latter category.
There are five main characters, members of a team tasked with the mission of making the twenty-first century more interesting. Not kidding; that was the mission. They did so by creating something they call The Injection, then they went their separate ways. Sometime later, The Injection is back and the brainy avengers have to re-assemble.
Author Warren Ellis saw each of the team members as being an archetype. There’s team leader Maria Kilbride as the slightly mad scientist. There’s Brigid Roth as the hacker. There’s Vivek Headland as the detective (Sherlock Holmes as played by an Indian Benedict Cumberbatch). There’s Simeon Winters as the agent (“James Bond. Of course.”). And finally Robin Morel, the magician, or “cunning man.” He’s an expert on English mysticism and folklore, which is something that comes in handy.
It’s an interesting group and each character is given room to develop. So much so that none of them individually takes over the story. Where I thought the series broke down though is in the presentation of The Injection. This is described, I don’t know how accurately, as a “non-biological artificial consciousness emulator” (we’d just say AI) that was, as I mentioned above, designed by the team in order “to make the 21st century more interesting.” But this isn’t just any AI but a “haunted AI”: “a strongly tactical, problem-solving, inductive and object-oriented machine learning system” that came to be inhabited, somehow, by something one of the team members “can only describe as the Other.” Or maybe it always was the Other. I wasn’t sure. Anyway, it can open a gateway to the Other World, which leads to the release of supernatural forces from that world, based on myth and folklore, that proceed to rip people to shreds.
Why does it do this? It isn’t clear. As Brigid tries to explain “they hate us like we’re spiders. Because we’re alien. Or they’re just pricks.” She hasn’t decided yet. And I’m not sure if we can even speak of them in the plural. Are they perhaps all just facets of The Injection? Or are they an independent, third force that The Injection has released? I didn’t feel like Ellis had fully thought this out. Or maybe he had ideas for where it was all going but never got around to explaining them. It seems clear that he intended the series to go on, but this collected edition takes us through issues #1-15, ending in 2017, and I don’t think there have been any new developments since.
So the story is frankly mush. And it wraps up with a straight steal from the end of the 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit. I mean, I don’t mind a bit of borrowing or homage, but this is just cut and paste. However I did like following the different characters around as things got going and I actually would be interested in reading more if they ever continue the run.
