Advance Comic Review – Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #4 (of 4)

Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead is a four-part sci-fi mini series from Radical Comics. The series written, illustrated, and lettered by Steve Pugh. The story is actually attributed to both Steve Pugh and Warren Ellis, but by Warren’s own admission, “[the] concept, character and setting is (his), all else is Steve’s”.

Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead follows the adventures of our eponymous heroine, Alice Hotwire, the Detective Exorcist. The series is set in the near future, a time when the living and the dead share the same space. The dead in the story take the form of the ghost-like ‘Blue-Lights’, which according to Alice are electromagnetic personifications of the dead. Everyone else just refers to them as ghosts, which tends to get her riled up. Normally the Blue-Lights are pretty well behaved, and just wander the city streets, as harmless echos of their former selves. Sometime though, the Blue-Lights want more than this, some seek after revenge for former transgressions, some want power, and some want to bring the living over into their World. This is when Detective Alice Hotwire gets called in, to exorcise the malignant Blue-Light manifestations.

Lately, Alice’s job has become a lot harder, as the Blue-Lights have started to penetrate the Suppressor-Fields in the cities, and are possessing the living. The living are being turned into “Ghost-Bombs”, capable of enormous damage. Concurrently, a citywide riot is diverting all police resources to peacekeeping duties, leaving Alice and her unwilling partner, Mobey, to handle the problem that no-one else wants to acknowledge.

Being the fourth issue of a four-part miniseries, this issue is probably not the best place to start to start reading. You may very well be able to pick up the back issues at your local store, but at this point you might be better off waiting for the trade, which Radical will be releasing in November. As such, the following review may contain quite a few series spoilers, but I shall try to remain as spoiler free as I possibly can.

Issue #3 of Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead closed on a huge cliffhanger, as we were left with an image of our protagonist trapped in an underground tunnel, and about to be crushed by thousands of litres of rushing water. How did she escape this fate, you ask? Well, if you’ve read this far, I guess you don’t mind a couple of light spoilers… Alice gets saved at the final moment by Yasim Malik, the last of the ghost bombs. Malik saves Alice because he is essentially a kind soul, an innocent man buried in a communal grave with the ghosts of a thousand monsters, brought back to life as a Blue-Light, and forced to become a Ghost Bomb by a mad scientist.

However, like most innocents who have been wrongly accused, Malik plans vengence on the world for hell that he has been through (literally in this case!) When Glenn and his team of engineers were building Malik into a Ghost Bomb, Malik got inside their heads and forced them to give him ten times the enhancements that they gave the other Ghost Bombs. Now Malik is headed to Police Central to take revenge on the authorities for the unjust torture and execution that he suffered at the hands of police interrogators.

Meanwhile, public protests over the brutal beating of a child by detectives Kellog & Marlow have reached fever pitch, and the streets outside Police Central are packed with civilians who, no longer satisfied with traditional justice systems, have turned into an old fashion lynch mob!

Then, as if things weren’t hard enough already, the dreaded Department of Homeland Enforcement moves into the city and decides to take a very different approach to quelling the riots – clearing the streets by aiming their ordnance at anybody seen carrying a placard.

Now, with the the DFE having cut all communications, Alice has to get to Police Central before Malik does, in order to stop a major catastrophe that could see hundreds of innocents dead… can she make it in time… and has she got what it takes to destroy the most powerful Blue Light that has ever existed?

This issue also reveals a bit of Alice’s back-story, and we get to see some of her upbringing in an exclusive science/tech community, and we also get to see exactly why she hates the DFE so damn much!

Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #4 is the best issue yet of this wonderful series, and is the perfect conclusion to what has been an action packed thrill-fest!

As I mentioned at the start of this review, while the initial concept of the story is by Warren Ellis, the entire series was written completely by Steve Pugh. Pugh is primarily an artist, and this is his first proper writing experience. Steve Pugh mentioned to me after my review of Hotwire #3 that he was quite worried that reviewers would say, “nice art, but shame about the writing!” I think that his fears are incredibly unfounded though, as the script, dialogue and pacing of Hotwire have been next to none throughout the entire series. I think the series has actually benefited from being written and illustrated by the same person, because it really destroys that disconnect between story and art, and lets the art speak for itself. There is no clunky exposition going on here, because Pugh lets the art do a lot of the storytelling, making for a much smoother reading experience.

Oh, and the art… gods below… what can you say… take a look at the images I have posted in this interview, and just bask in the glory of it all! In Hotwire, Pugh has created some of the most amazing artwork of his entire career, and issue #4 probably contains the best art of the entire series, every page is just phenomenal! Pugh’s art on this book is all fully painted, and I would assume that it was digitally painted, because there are some effects here that I couldn’t imagine that anyone could produce with traditional techniques. I have heard that each page of Hotwire takes 15 hours to produce, and Pugh himself told me that he only only slept 20 minutes every 4 hours while he was wrapping up work on this book. Now that is dedication!

Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #4 is an amazing comic that deserves to be bought by every self-respecting comic and sci-fi fan on the planet. Everyone knows how much I love 2000 AD, and this comic gives even the best thrills from the Galaxy’s Greatest a good run for their money. Steve Pugh has made this project his baby, pouring a lot of blood, sweat and tears into every single page of this comic, and his efforts really shine though to make this one of the very best comics on the shelf. If you buy one comic this week, make it Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #4

To see my review of Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #3, please click here.
To see a 7 page preview of Hotwire: Requiem for the Dead #4, please click here.