Injection #10 - Image Comics

INJECTION No. 10, June 2016

It probably wasn’t too hard for the majority of this comic’s 11,771 followers to read “Image Comics” post-publication announcement that Warren Ellis’ series concerning “five crazy people… [who] poisoned the 21^st Century” would not return until “later in the year”, as the unimaginative writing and woefully poor artwork contained within this concluding instalment of ‘Volume Two’ must genuinely have resonated with them as to just how fatigued “the acclaimed creative team of Moon Knight” had presumably become working on the series. Indeed it’s genuinely hard to take anything positive away from a twenty-page periodical whose narrative predominantly focusses upon a debate between Vivek Headland and some Rubedo operatives in Mister Van Der Zee’s sitting room…

Admittedly the Essex-born writer uses this frighteningly lengthy conversational piece to quite neatly tie-up all of the plot points his multi-issue story-arc has generated. But even so it shouldn’t take a multiple Eagle Award-winner over a dozen convoluted pages of wearisome wordiness to depict the “logician and Ethicist with an interest in security” informing his armed opponents that “the rogue artificial learning system” the terrorists “keep calling the Philosopher’s Stone” is actually The injection, and that it was actually responsible for the deaths of the financier’s wife and son; “Yeah. Traffic light failure did for her. Car’s onboard computer system failure caused his.” 

What isn’t explained however is just how the Manhattan-based detective miraculously managed to have all of the Rubedo assassins’ “guns unloaded hours ago.” It is quite clear that Ellis has endowed Headland with such an incredible “ability to think of all the possible outcomes” that Vivek ‘borders on the precognisant.’ Yet that still doesn’t explain the removal of the bullets, especially when one of the black-jacketed would-be killers expostulates that she checked her firearm before infiltrating Van Der Zee’s isolated mansion.

Such objectionable gobbledegook might though have been potentially palatable if it were not for Declan Shalvey’s amateurishly sketched and diabolically rushed pencils. Having “made his name with his first comic Hero Killers” it seems unacceptably strange that the Irishman’s breakdowns for so well publicised a title as “Injection” would, in the main, simple consist of numerous panels comprising of a single, awkwardly angular, facially disfigured form, with nothing in the background whatsoever apart from the occasional outline of a curtain or piece of furniture.

The regular cover art of "INJECTION" No. 10 by Declan Shalvey