Red/Tokyo Storm Warning
May 25, 2004 | Trades
Red/Tokyo Storm Warning
Warren Ellis, Cully Hamner, James Raiz, Carlos D’Anda
Wildstorm/DC Comics
$22.95/$17.95 US (Paperback)
*** 1/2 (out of five)
Warren Ellis is one of the most innovative writers in comics.
The man behind such noted works as The Authority, Transmetropolitan, Planetary and Global Frequency, has earned the status most comic writers hope to reach — the point where people will buy books just because he wrote them. Readers may not know what a series is about, but they know they’re going to get a good read almost every time.
And Ellis has been producing. Take Red and Tokyo Storm Warning, for instance. These two totally unrelated three-issue limited series were on and off the racks in short order. Unless you were a die-hard Ellis fan, likely you didn’t rush out to grab them. So someone with big brains at Wildstorm/DC Comics decided to use the Ellis name by putting these series together in one collection and marketing them with an almost in-case-you-missed-this kind of feel.
Red, the story of a rogue agent of the CIA who snaps after an attempt on his life, is a dark tale that deserves the attention being in this collection affords it. On the surface, Tokyo Storm Warning (think Robotech meets Godzilla) seems a little more stereotypically comic bookish than readers may be used to from Ellis, but in the end the ‘what the. . .?’ factor is still strong.
While neither of these stories is Ellis’ greatest by a long shot, collections like this one, as well as another recently released collection of his work, Reloaded/Mek, are brilliant and readers can only hope these off-beat pairings continue.
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