Injection #12 - Image Comics

INJECTION No. 12, April 2017

Bedevilled by overly-long, drawn-out sequences and enough needless dialogue to make even the head of a romantic poet like William Wordsworth spin, Warren Ellis’ narrative for Issue Twelve of “Injection” doubtless made many of this title’s 8,615 fans wish that they’d just simply stuck to reading “Image Comics” brief publication promotion blurb rather than the twenty-page periodical itself. In fact, the publisher’s one-liner “Brigid Roth uncovers the death box known as the Cold House” pretty much sums up the entire contents of the English novelist’s storyline without necessitating the need to peruse endless panels pressed full of colourful metaphors, unnecessary expletives, and poorly penned conversational pieces concerning Emma Louise Beaufort’s “brief and surprisingly fun career as a getaway driver.”

Sadly, this apparent obsession by the Eagle Award-winner with anything that doesn’t seemingly progress the book’s plot, yet painstakingly pads out the tale, runs rampant throughout this comic, and resultantly numerous pages are seemingly squandered depicting Professor Derwa Kernick’s identification of “an old Cornish spirit”, Roth’s tedious banter with her new driver en route “to the local police station”, and a disconcertingly bizarre telephone conversation featuring Maria Kilbride and the “supposedly sorcerous” penis of Rasputin. Indeed, Just why Brigid even needed to ‘recruit’ a criminally-inclined female chauffeur, or later contact the Cross Culture-Contamination Unit founder “now it’s got interesting” is far from apparent, and thereby makes the Essex-born writer’s inclusion of the former Lowlands University professor talking whilst looking at the Mad Monk’s pickled sexual organ all the more gratuitous and gravely grotesque; “I will hunt you down and skin you and believe me I have done that before --”  

Unfortunately, all these pointless detours and meaningless side-missions, badly detract from the magazine’s cliff-hanger conclusion, and ruin what otherwise would have been a seriously sinister story involving the Force Projection International not only discovering the skeletal remains of numerous people who had presumably been buried alive by “wee spriggan fellas”, but a chillingly menacing stone monument, known as the “Cold House”, which reeks of “the space between here” and “all the folk of the Other World.” As it is however, this particular instalment of Ellis and penciler Declan Shalvey’s supposed “techno-thriller” appears to lurch from inconsequential instance to aimless act, disastrously diluting any of the “horror” its creative team originally promised when the series was first advertised.

Writer: Warren Ellis, Artist: Declan Shalvey, and Color: Jordie Bellaire