Red

ProjectX2

Don't expect me to take you with me when I go to s
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Red is a three issue mini series by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner released as part of the Wildstorm Signature imprint. It's about an ex-CIA agent, Paul Moses, who is targeted by agents when the CIA elect a new Director. The new Director sees a mysterious video, which convinces him that Paul Moses has to die. Paul ends up hunting down his pursuers, and killing the new Director.

As I've got a whole lot of mini series on my computer that I need to read, you can expect a lot of these threads to be popping up in the next few days.

I thought it was quite good. It's got the typical Hollywood "spy has to fight his agency" plot, but Ellis adds a touch of mystery to it. The art is very good, and manages to bring both a violent and a cartoony vibe to the comic.

Anyone else read it?
 
The best part about this was the pace of the storytelling. There's a sense of palpable build-up that comes through.

It was a solid read, if somewhat forgettable. Worth reading once -- especially because I got all the single issues from a discount bin.

I didn't see a SPOILER label in the thread title so...

Ellis is not terribly subtle in the characterization, especially when emphasizing the differences in personality and approach, between the protagonist (the disenfranchised old school agent, who is both classicaly "manly" but maintains a bushido-like sense of ethics) and the current Director of the Agency (an office-softened little priss who doesn't think twice about threatening women and children as a means to get his way).
Still, this is not really a title about character development or complex inter-personal relations -- the primary concern here is assorted bad-assery, and we get plenty of that, at breakneck speed. Hamner's artwork really comes to life, and he's excellent at conveying movement *despite* the fact that he photo-references a lot of his work -- compare it with, say, Greg Land or (I hate to admit it) Tony Harris, and you see that there's much more vitality and motion in Hamner's work. (Harris mostly gets away with it, because he does less action-oriented books like Ex Machina and Starman.)

The resolution feels like it's reached a bit too quickly, though.


EDIT: I forgot to add that it seems like the contrast between Moses and the current Director is not just a conflict between people with two different individual codes of ethics; it also seems to be a clash between two kinds of espionage, with Moses representing the get-your-hands-dirty kind of operative that was predominant in the Cold War, whereas the new Director is more like a sly manipulator, pulling strings from the background unseen, the way the U.S. did, between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the start of the War on Terror. (I'm guessing the writing/story idea of this mini-series pre-dates 9/11, even if it was released long after it.)
 
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