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What Morrison and Quitely’s We3 Had to Say about the Drone Strikes Before they ever Happened

“Just scientists, huh? How exactly do you think humans went from sticks to bombs?” -House of X #3 by Jonathan Hickman (Wolverine to Phoenix/Jean Grey)

“Liberalism, of course, was dead of anthrax, but all the same you couldn’t do things by force.” -Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

In the year 2004, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, alongside Jamie Grant as inker and Todd Klein as letter, released the masterpiece of a Vertigo series titled We3. It’s a singular piece of comic fiction like nothing else on the planet, from the already legendary pairing of Morrison and Quitely. It is one of the defining comic works of the early 9/11 era.

(note: Grant Morrison is genderqueer and uses they/them pronouns, but if you’re reading this blog you probably know that already. ‘Frank Quitely’ is a pen name but I’ll use that because that’s what he mainly goes by publicly and is known as in the comics world)

We3 is about a dog, cat, and rabbit who have been stolen from their owners and turned into mechanical killing machines for the US Air Force. We follow Bandit, Tinker, and Pirate, break out of captivity, trying to find safety as the USAF hunts them down, leaving destruction in the wake. It’s brutal both in terms of what is depicted and destructive to the emotional state of any soul who reads it. The owner of my local comic shop, Christina Blanch (a great comic writer in her own right), pitched it to me as a “must read”, but a comic she will never read again because it wrecked her so much. I had already read it, of course.

In 2009, President Obama and the US armed forces shifted tactics in the “War on Terror” that was leaving hundreds of thousands dead overseas and rotting our country from the inside. Obama was appalled at the brutality of the younger Bush administration, particularly offended at the use of torture, and railed against the idiocy of the Iraq War. But he was not an abolitionist, and far from the anti-war candidate many progressives saw him as. The Obama era of the forever war would be what Spencer Ackerman describes as the “Sustainable War on Terror” (see this blog post and his book), embracing the use of the deadly drone strikes over ground fighting and traditional bombing. These drone strikes were massively deadly, due to the high destructive capacity of the drones, and low standards for CIA intelligence that they would be killing any actual confirmed combatants. The Obama administration tried to civilize the brutality of war, but instead created an algorithm for obliterating lives.

The US drone strikes, once again, provided further technological advancements that separated warmongers from the destruction they wrought. The same thing has been happening forever. We replace rocks with sticks, then swords, then guns, then bombs, then missiles and drones. Instead of soldiers in planes dropping bombs below, we get someone thousands of miles away with a computer screen and a joystick. It’s almost like a videogame.

In the world of We3, its scientists create a way to distance humanity from war as well. They replace special operations soldiers (another emphasis of the sustainable war on terror) with cyborg-ified animals. At the beginning of the story, the protagonists assassinate someone named Guerrera at the beginning of the book with implied lives lost in collateral damage. We see the process of the assasination itself in gory detail, but the only aftermath we see is an explosion and a headline in the newspaper the next day.

When Bandit, Tinker, and Pirate escape their captivity and planned slaughter, a scientist named Roseanne Berry lets them free. The same scientist is treated like a traitor by the bad guys, placed into a blank room, then later put in the line of fire. There is another parallel to the way “traitors” like Edward Snowden and especially Chelsea Manning were treated, when they bravely sacrificed so much to shine a light on some of the worst of the US security state and armed forces crimes. The scientist in We3 dies. Manning was isolated and maltreated in a cell for years. Snowden had to flee to Russia.

Berry is not the only life lost in collateral damage. Many animals and humans are killed in the USAF pursuit of the animals. They didn’t matter to the soldiers, just like the hundreds of thousands non-combatant deaths inflicted by the United States in our War on Terror are hardly an input into our decision matrix. The project got out of control and wrecked havoc, just as the drones 

It is not lost to me that We3, released in 2004, obviously predated the Obama administration and the proliferation of military drone strikes. Morrison, along with other sci-fi writers like Suzanne Collins or Tony Gilroy, are often credited with predicting the dark turns our society will take next. This is not because of sage wisdom, or Morrison’s use of the Sekhmet Hypothesis (which ties human behavior to 22 year cycles in sunspots), but because they are well read and understand how the nature of the things they are talking about works. Tony Gilroy and Suzanne Collins studied how authoritarianism and rebel groups operate to write The Hunger Games and Andor. Aldous Huxley looked at the developments in WWI and the rampant eugenicists to write Brave New World. To predict that humanity will continue to invent ways to distance itself from its brutalization does not require a look into the future, it requires an understanding of humanity.

At risk of making this essay too long, I am largely skipping the plot of We3 and going to the end. As with all of Morrison’s work, there is hope. Their whole bibliography is based upon the idea that creation is more powerful than destruction, that hope will win. As they put in their pseudo-memoir Supergods, “the superheroes showed me how to overcome the bomb”. Their belief in the inherent goodness of humanity exceeds mine, but their works have brought me in the right direction.

The last thing we see in this story is hope. The other scientist character of the story testifies, sinking the evil senator’s campaign and hopefully putting an end to this. Manning and Snowden may have been vilified, but they irrevocably changed how many Americans saw the NSA as well as the acts of soldiers in the War on Terror. What they did mattered. Hope wins, at least a little.

the the extra:

There’s a lot to say about We3, most of it covered by others before. From the way it depicts time and perspective, to the ability to read the faces of the animals with no real anthropomorphication, to how we think of soldiers, to what it has to say about animal rights and the treatment of homeless people, to so much more. I might do a sequel to this post. I can’t speak to all of it, but this analysis came to mind because of what I’ve been reading about and because today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Much of the information and framework for understanding the War on Terror, as its harsh reality in the 21st century is the only world I’ve ever known, is thanks to Pulitzer Prize winning natsec reporter Spencer Ackerman. His blog www.forever-wars.com and his 2021 book REIGN OF TERROR: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump are must reads, with Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 of said book providing the vast majority of background information for this post.

This is dedicated to the thousands dead in the 9/11 attacks, as well as the over 800,000 my country has killed since in vengeance and prejudice. It’s been 25 years. We don’t have to forget, we don’t have to ever stop mourning, but we can say enough is enough and stop killing.