GLOBAL FREQUENCY #1

By: Tony Whitt
Review Date: Sunday, October 27, 2002

I'm not entirely sure why I haven't been better exposed to the work of Warren Ellis. Perhaps it's an unfortunate tendency on my part to get him confused with PREACHER's Garth Ennis, even though their names are really nothing alike when you look at them in print, are they? Or perhaps it's all the press I'd heard about TRANSMETROPOLITAN being so violent - and if I was still conflating him with Ennis at the time, whose work is well-known for being so violent, then that would have been enough for me to avoid that book like the plague. Thus GLOBAL FREQUENCY is a pleasant surprise...though probably only to me and not to Ellis' many fans.

The series posits the question: what if you got a phone call and had only 30 minutes to save the world? If you're on the Global Frequency, like former special ops soldier John Stark or helicopter pilot Alison Fitzgerald, you do the best you can, even if it means sacrificing your life. This time, the heroes of this particular half-hour must track down a former Russian soldier named Janos Voydan, whose paranormal ability to transport small objects through space using his mind has been enhanced by scientists in the former USSR. The problem is a disc inside his head that would have allowed him to transport a nuclear weapon into the United States...but this plan is thirty years old, and so is the disc. Now that it's breaking down, Voydan is having seizures, seizures that could open a small black hole in the center of San Francisco.

At first the concept for GLOBAL FREQUENCY sounded too much like a cross between MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and any number of series and books focusing on everyday people tapped to do extraordinary things. But Ellis takes the idea and runs with it, giving us exposition in medias res and only as we need it. From this first issue, for example, we learn that the mysterious Miranda Zero has formed the Global Frequency to take care of the dangers facing our world as a result of our own stupidity; that a tech girl named Aleph coordinates the efforts of such "volunteers" as Stark and Fitzgerald; and that the Frequency is considered a myth by the general population, and not a well-respected one at that. The reaction of Fitzgerald's boyfriend to the news that she's "one of them" is particularly telling - they're in an interracial relationship, yet he takes the news of her "membership" in the same way that racists would react to the fact of their coupling. It's an interesting way for Ellis to show just how secretive this society of heroes is, and how the feelings of the people they protect are so ambivalent towards them. Originally I was a little perturbed by the idea of the Frequency's MIT professor dressed up in a fetish suit à la PULP FICTION, but even that little touch makes the series fresher and more interesting than similar concepts that have sprung up in the past.


It helps that Ellis scripts this first issue at a pace that never lets up, at a speed reminiscent of the television series 24. This is aided by the phenomenal artwork by Garry Leach - the images of the chase through San Francisco build the story to its climax beautifully, and the three-shot on the last page is so filmic in its composition that you can almost hear the end credits music playing over it. Maybe FOX is looking for another hit now that X-FILES is gone? If so, GLOBAL FREQUENCY is a prime candidate to make the move to the small (or the big) screen - with scripts and artwork like this, it's halfway there already.

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