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Black Summer (2004)

by Warren Ellis(Favorite Author)

3.71 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

1592910521 (ISBN13: 9781592910526)

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

Avatar Press

review 1: Excellent surprise. I hadn't even heard of this, and having recently read all of Planetary, I've been eager for more of Ellis at his best. Though Ellis and Garth Ennis often get lumped in with the more dubious Mark Millar, much of their work has for more resonance and in between the arguably gratuitous bouts of ultraviolence, they are often asking larger questions that they aren't afraid to address head on, about the nature of violence, about the corrupting influence of power, about what the little guy can and will do when faced with situations that seem beyond any of our abilities to confront or control. This is one of those books. While not as far-reaching or literary as "Watchmen" it certainly addresses some similar themes in an original and arresting way. If I have one... more quibble, it's that I would have liked to see the Seven Guns in action in their heyday, if only for a taste of how they operated as a team before everything went to hell (and that's hardly a spoiler--it's Ellis, so of course everything goes to hell).
review 2: i'm kind of surprised people enjoy the artwork in this one - i regularly spent pages at a time wondering WTF was happening because juan jose ryp's style devolved into massive bloody squiggles that obscured the action and clouded the story. the action scenes are just terrible visually. the writing's not ellis's best either; the female characters are largely indistinguishable in voice and none of the characters in the book ever reach the point of being people you care about. mind you, that's not a crime or anything; ellis himself takes this same subject matter, throws out all pretense of needing a "team of heroes" in the center, and delivers the book "SUPERGOD" (a book with no central protagonist at all, just a doomed narrator who describes the downfall of humanity) which is far more effective and creepy and pushes this premise a lot further. less

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