Product Description: The future is bad for you. In a place where everyone has the technology to create brand-new, weird sciences ten times a day, there are policemen who will hunt you down for having a bad idea. They are the Silencers. And the investigation of a dead kid with a silicon pentagram on his neck opens up a whole box of bad ideas upon a city that only survives through silence... Plus: Special pin-up gallery featuring artwork by Chris Weston, Dougie Braithwaite, John McCrea, Andi Watson, Steve Pugh, Simon Fraser, Dom Regan, Kev Hopgood, Jon Haward, and Matt Greg.
The early work of a good author City of Silence is a three-issue mini series, collected here in one volume, which was originally written for Epic comics in the mid-nineties, though it wasn't actually published until 2000 by Image comics. So this work predates a lot of Warren Ellis' big successes and lets you see some of his development as a writer.
In the city called Stealth technology has grown and continues to grow at an exponential rate. People are addicted to technology. Junkies sit in alleys staring at palm-tops which strobe trance-inducing images and subsonic pulses that stimulate pleasure centers. Technology is getting dangerous and the Silencers, the secret police, are comissioned to stop bad ideas. Which they do in very painful ways. So when a corpse turns up with a silicon pentagram implanted in his neck, the Silencers investigate its origins and its purpose.
The narration and the dialogue are good, but they get a bit excessive. There are plenty of good lines like "You are under arrest for bleeding without a license," or "I've got a uranium-soaked anal interloper I've been dying to try." But the subtlety of saying much with very few words that Ellis demonstrates in Planetary and Global Frequency is something he hadn't developed yet when he wrote this story.
The artwork by Gary Erskine also has positives and negatives. His line is clean, his scenery detailed. But his women look like men. I honestly thought the two female leads were going to turn out to have be transsexuals. They have wide cheecks, strong chins, broad shoulders, weak hips. A modern version of Michaelangelo's men with breasts.
This is an okay piece but if you're familiar with Ellis' more recent more popular work, it just doesn't hold up quite as well.
Quirky, classic Ellis in the 'Neuromancer' style of sci-fi I felt the need to post this review specifically to offer a dissenting opinion about the worth of the artwork in "City Of Silence". I'm not saying that the 'two star' reviewer is a bad person or a commie sympathizer, or anything bad like that. I understand that reaction to an illustrator's style is highly personal and idiosyncratic. People know what they like, and can endlessly justify it.
For instance, at the time of this posting, Micheal Turner is considered a hot talent and star-on-the-rise by the comics industry. But I H-A-T-E his line, character designs and depictions of the human face and figure. Same for Ian Churchill, whose stuff seems stiff and lifeless to me. But other people loooove them.
So I would like to say, in Erskine's defense, that his line and design sense seem appealing quirky and energetic to me, and that some portions of "City Of Silence" are incredibly inventive and very appropriate to the jagged, nervey, caffeine-and-meth driven attitude of the characters. I am looking forward to his next collaboration with Ellis ("Jack Cross").
A Warren Ellis fan weighs in... Simply put, I love Warren Ellis, but this comic had some of the most atrocious artwork I've ever seen. If you care IN THE LEAST about the art quality, I'd say skip this one. The story is good, but the terrible illustration destroys it.
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