Anna Mercury #5 is an argument FOR decompression.
(Oh, and incidentally, at some point I'm going to split the "comic industry will eat itself" conversation off into a new thread. I'm behind on dishes and all kinds of other shit too; still adjusting to having a job.)
Anyway. Anna Mercury #5 is an argument FOR decompression.
It's an all-out action issue where nothing much happens -- but it's done in such a neat way that it doesn't matter. There's a big explosion on four of the first five pages -- yes, a single explosion; it's two panels spread across four pages.
I think that's pretty frickin' neat. Sure, those are pages that could instead be used for more sci-fi musings Warren wrote down on a scrap of paper while high, but you know what, let's play with the medium a little instead.
I'm curious as to how much of the layout stuff was Ellis and how much was Percio -- the backmatter I've seen in books like Fell and AXM: Ghost Boxes suggests Warren's pretty heavy on the panel-for-panel descriptions, but this may not be one of those occasions.
I actually thought Percio's art on this one wasn't as good as on the earlier issues, but he was doing such neat things with it that it didn't much matter.
In summary: comics is a visual medium, and there are times when it's perfectly all right, even preferable, for writing to take a backseat to art and for an issue to just show a bunch of pretty shit rather than actually develop a story any.
And of course so much of what Ellis does is look at other people's work and go "See that? I could do that better." (I think he's actually explicitly stated that he did Wolfskin and Blackgas on a bet with the publisher on whether he could pull off fantasy and zombie books.) Anna Mercury is his take on The Matrix -- some silly but semi-plausible science fiction as a jumping-off point for an action movie where a character goes to other worlds, performs physically impossible feats, and ultimately blows shit up. If it got too caught-up in self-important philosophizing, well, that wouldn't be an improvement over The Matrix, it would be what fucking killed The Matrix. Instead, we're left with a book that plays to the strengths of its premise.
All in all, a pretty good read, but if I were recommending Warren Ellis books to people, I don't think it would fall anywhere on the list. And if you're already a Warren Ellis fan, you've probably already bought it, and the eighty-three other Warren Ellis comics that came out this week.
...Which reminds me, there's one last Mark Millar book from last week that I haven't gotten into yet. Maybe later.