Global Frequency

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.