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.
A game of 2 halves!
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Yep! Would have liked to have seen the characters here involved in a better conceived story.
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10 years means you are probably never going to see any more of this I’m afraid to say.
I must say, who in their right mind doesn’t think the 21st century is already interesting enough? I mean, we’ve got the blogging world all atwitter about Xi Jinping humping goats for goodness sake. How much more interesting could it possibly get?
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Oddly enough, my next movie review will be about goats. Your man in China will be all over it, I’m sure.
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I started editing some of my old posts, where the chinabots were hitting the hardest. I put in a little ps paragraph with that disturbing pix of Jinping and my little blurb about his perverted proclivities and within 2 weeks, those posts weren’t being visited anymore. Now, that was only 2-3 posts (I think), so it’s not proof positive, but it does make me wonder.
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I don’t think that’s an image you’d want on your computer in China.
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Probably not. It would get you sent straight to the Re-Education camps, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 yen.
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Either that or they’ll harvest your kidneys and throw the rest of you in the disposal unit.
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The author, Warren Ellis, got into a lot of trouble with women complaining about his behaviour, so that’s one reason the project may have been put on ice. But I’ve heard he’s back working with Image Comics again so you never know.
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Stranger Things (trademarked!) have happened.
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Just as a point of reviewing etiquette, what are your thoughts on disclosing the fact that “Everyone Is Bi: At least four of our five protagonists are somewhere on the queer spectrum, as seen in issue #8.” (That’s from the TV Tropes page on Injection.)
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That didn’t really register with me. “Somewhere on the queer spectrum” is kind of vague. OK, Vivek fools around, or did in the past, but more out of intellectual curiosity and experimentation. I don’t think he’d like being identified as anything. I guess the hacker girl may be bi, but like I say it didn’t really register with me. She seems to have picked up a girlfriend at the end, but I thought of her more as a sidekick. With the others I may have missed that part.
I guess I’d have mentioned this if I thought it was that important to the characters or the story, but it didn’t seem that way to me. But maybe I wasn’t that interested or wasn’t paying close enough attention.
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Well, this is the page I’m referring to. It’s an eye-opener for those of us who do notice these things:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/Injection
It also says this:
Due to other commitments by the creators, Injection went on an extended hiatus in 2018 after the third arc was completed in issue #15. After that, in June 2020, Ellis was accused of sexual impropriety and withdrew from writing comics.
At this point Injection was widely considered to be cancelled and Cut Short. However, in September 2022, Ellis published a script excerpt from the fourth arc and confirmed that all three creators were still committed to finishing the series.
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Yeah I’d heard Ellis was in trouble but maybe making a comeback. Guess we’ll have to see.
I’m always amazed at sites like that, that pull apart things so minutely. Some good info. Some trivia. Some that seems like a stretch even to care about.
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