Seriously, someone read Red and wanted to option it for a movie? I just finished reading it and I want to burn the memory from my mind. Ellis gives the comic some big Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid ending like anyone cares. I’d forgotten how much I loathe this hipster comic books.

This issue has a lot more dialogue. It still generally takes place in about five minutes, but it’s a dialogue heavy five minutes. The protagonist gets to ramble on about real men and so on and so forth. The second issue reminded me a little of Rambo; this third one made me wish Ellis could write dialogue as well as a Rambo movie. He’s so self-indulgent and bad it boggles the mind.

It’s one of those comics one could easily laugh about but I cannot. I read the entire thing and so the joke is on me.

CREDITS

Writer, Warren Ellis; artist, Cully Hamner; colorist, David Self; letterer, John Costanza; editor, Ben Abernathy; publisher, Homage Comics.

Did Ellis really spend an entire issue on quickly killing four assassins and a couple conversations? Now I remember why I avoid most of Ellis’s work–his pacing is absolutely atrocious.

He has an idea here with Red–what if the CIA reactivated their best assassin and he came after them. But Ellis doesn’t have any more story following that idea. The first issue had a vague Bush looks like a chimp joke, but nothing else as far as a point.

Hammer’s art is getting really boring. The idea of cartoonish spies being really violent–it’s like Queen and Country in color and not good. The lengthy talking heads scene is just painful.

I’m trying to think if there’s anything I liked about the issue–I didn’t even like the end because it’s got a stupid cliffhanger. Red might be the perfect example of why three issue limited series are a really bad idea.

CREDITS

Writer, Warren Ellis; artist, Cully Hamner; colorist, David Self; letterer, John Costanza; editor, Ben Abernathy; publisher, Homage Comics.

I’m curious what Warren Ellis’s script for this issue looks like… it must be really short. Maybe he draws on the pages, thumbnails, sketches, something. Because he can’t be writing much on them. This issue has almost no dialogue after the first five or six pages.

So it’s all up to Cully Hammer and he does a decent job of it. He’s got to infuse the story with humor but also with horrific violence. He gets the humor part down, the horrific violence not so much. In fact, the action sequence closing the issue is a bit of a bore. The one or two panel emphases on protagonist killing someone–three in this issue’s present action–are supposed to mean something. There are similar flashback panels to show how the protagonist is devastated after being a CIA assassin. It doesn’t work.

But it’s nearly okay. Maybe if the exposition weren’t so forced.

CREDITS

Writer, Warren Ellis; artist, Cully Hamner; colorist, David Self; letterer, John Costanza; editors, John Layman and Ben Abernathy; publisher, Homage Comics.