Warren Ellis's Global Frequency May Not Air

ajs writes "According to Ain't It Cool News, the WB network has cancelled Warren Ellis's Global Frequency, a wonderfully twisted modern-day SF TV series which may yet air, but the company that owns the series will now have to shop it around to other networks. If you're a fan of the comic series or you have just been starving for good non-space SF since the X-Files went away, you might want to send words of support to your favorite non-WB network. Slashdot has previously interviewed Ellis."

Comments

Nice.

[Adouma]

if you're interested, check out Bad Signal. The upshot was that in his column, he had said something along the lines that one of the critical things that changed after he stopped writing "The Authority" was that Apollo and Midnighter were "outed" as it were as a gay couple. That then lead to a number of plot indulgences where opponents had to "react" to their homosexuality and various "issues" of hate crime had to be addressed.

Early in the series when Ellis was writing it, such topics as rape camps, drug abuse, and all manner of other "difficult topics" were covered, so doing stories that involved hate crimes was tame by the series' standards. However, to DWELL on any of these topics was certainly not The Authority's style, and it slowed the book down and turned it into something that was far from its core story.

That said, I felt that the book took a nose-dive after Ellis left. It went from being the story of what happens when the super heros are several orders of magnitude more powerful than the rest of the planet to being the tale of thier humanity and flaws. Nice idea, wrong take on that book, IMHO. These heros were much more than just human. The story was interesting because the issues that they dealt with were on a whole other scope.

To give you an example, let me SPOIL a bit of the early story. Our heros get embroiled into a combat with an alternate earth where the world is ruled by a half-breed alien whose corrupt family has litterally been raping the planet for resources, breeding stock and slave labor since they were marooned here several hundred years ago.

In the end, our heros are suck with a decision: they've beaten them back and killed the leader, but if they leave now, the planet will still be enslaved and the half-breeds will still be in power. They struggle for a beat and then one of them holds the Italian peninsula still for a second. That doesn't seem like a big deal until you think about how fast the planet is spinning and how fast it's orbiting the sun.... From our vantage in space, the only change is that Italy gets a little thinner... on the surface, of course, no one could have lived through the devistation.

In most books you could not walk away from such wholesale carnage thinking of these people as heroes, but that was the point to The Authority. They weren't above the law, they simply represented a very different law... one that acted on a the scale of nations and of worlds and realities. When dealing with individual people, The Authority simply treated them as representitives of larger systems.

This made The Authority interesting (though not always morally defensible), and IMHO, that was lost when Ellis went away because the people who took it over didn't understand that that's what made it different from Stormwatch or The JLA or any number of other super-team books.

The "fetish gear" didn't really do anything for me ;-)