The Comics
The strength of the comics is the exciting concept of the Frequency organization itself, the weird shit it tackles, and the breakneck pacing (the world is always an hour or less from ending). Each issue is an entirely self-contained story, to the degree that you could read the twelve stories in almost any order and not notice a difference. Gee, that would make a great and easily syndicated television show …. New experts every issue, facing new challenges. Incredible violence, incredible tension.
The weakness is that there’s almost no character development. Miranda Zero is always a tough-as-nails cypher. We learn that she’s an ex-spy who created the Frequency partly to atone for the bad stuff she’s done in her life. We don’t learn much more. Aleph … we eventually get an origin story for Aleph, and a chance to see her do more than sit around directing online traffic, but still. Every issue is a sprint. There is a problem, there is a solution, and possibly a complication on the way. It’s Law and Order rather than Hill Street Blues, if you will.
The art is another great factor: Every issue is drawn by a different artist or artists. There’s no one with the star magnitude of a Frank Miller or Jim Lee, but there are some terrific and highly individualized artists working here, each producing a great story that Ellis seems to have pitched to his collaborators’ strengths.
To thoroughly review each story would pretty much spoil the hell out of everything. Instead, a rundown of the issue’s premise should serve to illustrate the range of stories. Then go out and read them yourself.
Global Frequency Vol 1: Planet Ablaze
Bombheadart by Garry Leach
San Francisco: We opens with a man being hit by a car. He is a time bomb, literally: a leftover Soviet sleeper agent with the ability to open a wormhole to a primed nuke in Russia. The chip in his head has gone bad over the decades, and inside of an hour, it’s gonna fritz out and open the door to the warhead. B’bye, San Francisco. Aleph tasks an ex-soldier, a physicist and a chopper pilot to tackle the crisis.
Big Wheelart by Glenn Fabry
The military refuses to let Miranda’s group into a secret Nevada base where a horrible “bionic man” has gone insane with the pain and horror. But they have no choice, and Zero’s strike team enters the base, where they find a creature that’s not even recognizably human, who’s had it a lot rougher than Steve Austin did: “They took away my genitals … There’s a wire in my brain that simulates sexual pleasure when I kill people. That’s all I have now.” Moody and hyper-violent, well-suited to Fabry’s skills.
Invasiveart by Steve Dillon
A Seti@Home volunteer accidentally downloads an alien life form — a computer virus that “rewrites” human brains to make them part of a soulless collective. A neighborhood in New York must be freed — or destroyed. A strike team goes in, and the answer to defeating the superior alien idea that is overwriting human brains is Ellis’ most sentimental moment, yet it’s handled so lightly and sincerely that it works, and works well. Steve Dillon, known for Preacher and a run on Hellblazer, has a way of handling the unnatural in a very mundane world that delivers what the story needs: A setting and characters that are so ordinary they’re almost boring, offsetting the bizarre tension of the alien menace and making it more believable.
Hundredart by Roy A. Martinez
A suicide cult in Sydney is killing itself with poison — and its hostages with a bomb. We see Aleph taking a more aggressive role, and she’s clearly not one to mess with. It’s the first GF story to stick with a real-world idea, and the idea is terrorism. The story seems a bit of a failure, in that the cultists are generic and their leader is dull – we never really learn what their motivations are. Then you realize that this is Ellis’ point: These idiots are just idiots, sad losers who shouldn’t be presented as anything else. Martinez brings a realistic, cinematic style to this cop thriller that’s reminiscent of John Cassaday’s work on Planetary or Bryan Hitch’s on The Authority.
Big Skyart by Jon J. Muth
This may be the issue where you realize Ellis isn’t just pulling artists’ names out of a hat. This is one of the best pairings of art to story in the series, with a sketchy horror-comic look that’s perfect for this supernatural premise. In Norway, a mass hallucination has driven a remote town mad: They’ve seen an angel. The pursuit for a cure is also the pursuit for an explanation to an apparently divine phenomenon. The denouement, the final question lingering when it’s all over, is a bit trite and rings false. But Ellis plays with magic theory and some wacky audio science, and it is intriguing to contemplate how weird the world can get when the right (or wrong) elements come together.
The Runart by David Lloyd
Another great pairing: The artist from V for Vendetta takes off on a wild race through London. What could be better? With a cannister of weaponized ebola virus set to explode, the only person on the Frequency who can get there in time is a le parkour runner. She races over rooftops and past all urban obstacles to get to the device in time — but then what?
Global Frequency Vol. 2: Detonation Radio
Detonationart by Simon Bisley
Miranda Zero herself saves the heads of several Western intelligence agencies from a terrorist attack. She’s in Berlin coordinating a powerful response to the attack, which pits a Chinese spy against the terrorist in a brutal shootout. No one does distorted, fetishistic super-violence like Bisley.
Untitledart by Chris Sprouse
Miranda Zero has been off the Frequency for ten minutes. That can’t be good, so Aleph mobilizes a rescue effort. Zero is being held by a terrorist from a white supremacist group who intends to torture Zero to get the identities of everyone on the Global Frequency — so he can kill them. Aleph’s team has an hour to track down Miranda’s location, somewhere in Hollywood. It’s the first time we see Zero’s agency as the object of an attack, but not the last. It points to the potential for greater plot arcs in a sequel series or, I dunno, a goddamned television show — A group like Global Frequency is going to make a lot of powerful enemies. Sprouse’s clean, bright art is not particularly like Ray Martinez’, but as in “Hundred,” we get a clean, tight, bright style suited to a rather straighforward story of guns and the bastards who use them.
Untitledart by Lee Bermejo
Everyone is eager to be on the Frequency — except Takashi Sato. He’s bitter about past missions for Zero, and we get our first taste of a true dark side to working on the Frequency. Sato seems despondent to the point of suicide, but Aleph drafts him to handle a crisis outside Osaka. An incident in a bio-research lad has driven the responding cops mad at the very site of it. Sato infiltrates and finds scenes of utter horror, exceeding even what Ellis offered in “Big Wheel.” Bermejo brings the goods here: He has a very realistic style, with something in his inks that reminds me of Paul Gulacy. That makes the images of mangled and mutilated bodies all the more shocking, without which, the story would fail.
Superviolenceart by Tomm Coker
It’s a rematch, we’re told: a combat-trained Frequency agent called “the Frenchman” against a violent cannibalistic killer named Lionel Wellfare. Wellfare is trying to infiltrate a research center in Texas, where he’ll kill everyone on site to steal the research for his unnamed client. The issue becomes a vicious fight sequence between the Frenchman and Wellfare, more than living up to the issue’s title. Bit of a spy thriller, with good art, but overall … who cares? We don’t really know what’s at stake, and don’t have any reason to care about the combatants. It’s like a great action sequence detached from a decent context. But hell, that describes half of Hollywood’s output these days, so why complain?
Alephart by Jason Pearson
We go back five years to see Zero recruit Aleph. This sets up the second direct attack against the Global Frequency organization, as attackers infiltrate Aleph’s command center, leaving her alone and, contrary to protocol, forced to take direct action. Pearson’s cartoony good-girl art gives us a very sexy Aleph, and the story offers the most characterization and texture of the group itself to date. Likely to be many a reader’s favorite piece.
Harpoonart by Gene Ha
Here we return to the theme found in the first two issues: The military invents much, much scarier stuff than we know about, and then manages to screw it all up so that the doomsday weapon can’t be stopped. Here, particularly, Ellis underscores the stupid malice and Strangelove-level paranoia of this world. The macguffin? Kinetic harpoons — the idea is that if you put tungsten rods into orbit, you could catapult them down onto the earth and they’d be so heated through reentry that their impact would destroy cities. Such as Chicago, unless Miranda’s ad-hoc team can launch itself into space to disable the harpoon satellite.
GlobalFrequency.org - Official site of the comic.
Global Frequency (IMDB)
Global Frequency (Wikipedia)
Kung Fu Monkey - The Official Blog of John Rogers
FrequencySite.org - Fan site for unaired pilot






































July 6th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Skywalker? Tattooine? X-Men?
You really don’t get out much.
Do you have any other take on life beside what Kevin Smith talks about at the Comic/Wonder/Loser cons you attend?
“…And how do “16 Blocks” and “Must Love Dogs” get the exact same comment from completely different bloggers? Is this guy beefing up his very own reviews!? What a complete loser.”
September 29th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
I set up the ringtone from the pilot and a wallpaper with the symbol on my cell phone.
The pilot and the comic rocked.
November 21st, 2006 at 7:58 am
February 1st, 2007 at 3:48 am
April 20th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
info isuzu repair trooper…
2005 dodge ram accessory - capital car ford raleigh used - 2005 ford mustang coupe…
May 4th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
August 26th, 2007 at 11:38 pm
[...] choice but to throw in the towel and finally try something new. Badmouth sang his praises when we wrote about Global Frequency, a brilliant 12-issue miniseries that was also a tragically failed (and widely bootlegged) TV [...]
September 28th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
October 10th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
November 4th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
December 12th, 2007 at 8:02 am
April 8th, 2008 at 8:56 pm