Zeb Larson reviews Injection #1…
Once upon a time, there were five crazy people, and they poisoned the 21st Century. Now they have to deal with the corrosion to try and save us all from a world becoming too weird to support human life. INJECTION is the new ongoing series created by the acclaimed creative team of Moon Knight. It is science fiction, tales of horror, strange crime fiction, techno-thriller, and ghost story all at the same time. A serialized sequence of graphic novels about how loud and strange the world is getting, about the wild future and the haunted past all crashing into the present day at once, and about five eccentric geniuses dealing with the paranormal and numinous as well as the growing weight of what they did to the planet with the Injection.
Injection is a book about chaos and the feeling of everything collapsing together. This is a chaotic story as well, and Ellis refuses to use his characters to expound upon the action and explain it for our benefit. At a first glance, this just feels willfully opaque, but the chaos is really a form of craftsmanship. So while this isn’t the easiest book to get into and doesn’t offer much as yet in character personalities, the thematic work here is intriguing. I will be discussing spoilers in this review, so be advised.
This issue takes place at two different points in time. In the future, Maria Kilbride is being held at Sawlung Hospital and is asked by an agent of The Cursus, of Force Projection International, about an “actionable” mess. Maria was a member of the “cross-cultural contamination unit.” In the past, the group consisted of five members: Robin Morel, Dr. Kilbride, Brigid Roth, Simeon Winters, and Vivek Headland. In the present, “acquisition failures” are becoming more frequent, and Maria asks Brigid to look into it. Morel refuses to assist the group today, while Kilbride gets a look at an anomalous rock found by FPI. Brigid finds some weirdness of her own in the IT lab.
This book is certainly going to feel chaotic to the reader, especially on a first pass reading through. The narrative is non-linear and appears to be moving back and forth in time between multiple characters, and we’re not given a whole lot of answers about what the injection is, or the research that FPI does. Because of FPI’s association with the Ministry of Time, it seems that this might be a time-travel story, but nobody has explicitly said that yet. Ellis has said that he wants this to be an apocalyptic kind of story, and it seems clear that whatever is going on will have dire repercussions.
To enhance that feeling of everything get meshed together, Ellis juxtaposes the old with the new continually throughout the book. Hence the constant references to ancient Britain: cursus (early Neolithic structures in Britain), sawlung (old English for dying), the Ridgeway (the oldest road in Britain). All of the characters in this book are involved and wrapped up in all of these: Dr. Robin Morel claims that he visits the Ridgeway to reinvigorate his sense of being English. Yet all of these characters are wrapped up in the technology of the present and the future. At best, the past and the future are coexisting uneasily.
There are also clever references to things becoming mashed together. Maria Kilbridge is the Townsend Brown Professor at Lowlands University, and Brown was supposedly involved in the Philadelphia Experiment which purportedly tried to create cloaking technology. Instead, as the story goes on, sailors became fused into the body of the USS Philadelphia. Obviously, a tale of technology backfiring, but also of things becoming quite literally stuck together.
Next issue, it would be nice to see how Simeon and Vivek figure into all of this, as they don’t get anything more than a hello in this issue. Still, once you start to parse the layers of this comic, it has some enjoyable depth to ponder. I’m looking forward to the next issue.
Zeb Larson
https://youtu.be/8HTiU_hrLms?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
Originally published May 13, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
