Red/Tokyo Storm Warning

    (WildStorm, 2004)
™ and © 2004 WildStorm, and imprint of DC Comics

In case anyone ever questions Warren Ellis’s versatility as a writer, this trade paperback flipbook collection of two wildly different miniseries provides a definitive answer. In Red, former CIA assassin Paul Moses only wants to quietly disappear, and hopes that in retirement he can find peace for his tormented soul. That peace is denied him when a new agency director decides that a man with such a history of violence at the behest of the United States must not be allowed to live. This grim espionage tale is drawn by Cully Hamner and showcases Ellis’s crisp dialogue at its coldest.

Tokyo Storm Warning, meanwhile, touches on Ellis’s love for science fiction. In 1945, two Japanese cities disappeared in the mushroom cloud of a nuclear strike. In this miniseries, one of those cities is Tokyo, and the impact on the modern day world is striking. Now Tokyo is overrun by giant monsters and protected, more or less, by technology barely comprehensible to those who wield it. This series may remind some of Ellis’s work on Planetary, and is drawn dynamically by James Raiz.

— Andy Richardson
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