Product Description: - "Strange Kiss is best described by Ellis himself: "A horrific murder-suicide in the middle of a busy city street at midday; an old man rotting and bloating in a hospital bed, something sick gestating inside him; in a darkened place close by, people screaming, impregnated, doomed. Something beautiful and awful is trying to reproduce, and its strange kiss is only to be feared..."
Graphic SF Reader Strange Kiss is indeed a bit strange, in almost a Lovecraft sort of way. William Gravel is a SAS hard man, but that is not all. He is some sort of magic user as well, or as he calls himself, a combat magician. Not your average job.
He is marking time, having annoyed one boss too many, and trying mostly to stay alive. When a friend gets sick, he investigates and finds some truly horrific, disturbing, and alien that he must try and eradicate.
Not for the squeamish or prudish is this series.
RATHER THIN AND REPULSIVE STORY Well let me see, how do I describe "Strange Kiss" by Warren Ellis? Abhorrent? Disgusting? Distasteful? It's certainly all of those and I've only begun to find adjectives that fit this trade paperback. It's certainly a more far more blunt Ellis than most of us are familiar with from past works. He comes at you hard and fast and slams you over the head with an anvil in the opening pages. Strange Kiss begins with an out of control car chase through city streets, with no regard for pedestrians an unfortunate elderly man is cut in half literally by one of the speeding vehicles. The gorgeous, dark-haired woman doing the chasing shoots her quarry dead and then proceeds to cut off her own face and slit her throat. And that may be the tamest part of the story.
William Gravel is a S.A.S. agent, and combat magician doing some deep cover work in the states and visits an old friend, his only friend, in the hospital. Seems that his friend, Bull, contracted a STD that makes Syphilis look like a common cold, causing his genitals to rot off. Worse yet something is growing inside his stomach...something that's crawling around and soon tears its way out in the form of hundreds of baby lizards. Gravel makes a promise to Bull to find out who did this him and take care of him...to put it nicely. Gravel, along with a hospital pathologist, Leigh Hunt, who examined the bodies from the earlier crash soon find themselves thrown together an uncover a plot that has a primeval, elder god type being, using Pseudo pods in human skin suits to impregnate humans to carry its young. Gravel has to destroy the hosts and then come face-to-face with the monstrous being.
I guess Ellis was going after a somewhat Lovecraftian angle here although I'm sure ol' H.P. would not have approved of the gratuitous nudity and sex that Ellis has on display in Strange Kiss. My biggest problem with the story is that we have this lengthy buildup with Gravel and Hunt uncovering all of this repulsive evidence about the creatures through 90% of the book and then Gravel basically takes out the creature in a matter of a couple of pages. Elder Gods have apparently fallen quite a few rungs down the ladder. My other problem was that there wasn't much of anything given to the reader on the background of this creature. We know he's very ancient but that's about it. Some backstory would have been nice. This seems like a story that Ellis just sort of tossed out there too make people cringe. The art by Mike Wolfer is competent but not outstanding. Okay, but not Ellis' best work.
One of Ellis' Very Best! This is amazing storytelling, wholely original, terrifying, and entertaining. I have never read another comic more disturbing, disgusting, surprising, overwhelming, amazing, and downright brilliant. This is not for the lighthearted, as it contains many disturbing incidents. It takes an awful lot to terrify me, and I was literally clutching my face in terror while reading the end of the opening sequence. The black and white illustrations match the world of death and mayhem. This is the introduction(wow!) of William Gravel, combat magician, a character who is relentless, violent, charming, and a complete pr**k-- a great character. A must-read for anyone interested in horror/crime comics and/or Warren Ellis' writing. His additional Strange Killing series' involving William Gravel are highly recommended as well.
Not even close to Ellis's best I'm a huge Warren Ellis fan. Just thought you should know that right off the bat. This, however, was quite possibly his worst offering to date. I haven't read any of the sequels, mostly on the strength of this one being so horrendous. The bland, sometimes unintelligible, artwork by Mike Wolfer didn't help. It had some promising moments of horror early on. However, if anything, it moved a little too fast, and didn't go nearly as in-depth about the "mystery" as it should have. The ending was a complete train wreck, with the mystery "solved" and the enemy tidied up in a page or two. It felt like it should've had at least one more issue to fully flesh the whole thing out. Stay away from this one.
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