The amazingly prolific Warren Ellis does it again with Mek, a three-part miniseries that came out earlier this year. This time it’s about extreme body modification: the step beyond tattooing, and even beyond the usual fantasies of cyborgization. “Mek” is short for biomechanical implants. Everything from a laser pointer in your eye, to claws that emerge from your nails during sex–if you and your partner like it rough–to all sorts of bizarre weapons, concealed in your tongue or in the palm of your hand. The protagonist, Sarissa Leon, was one of the founders of the Mek movement. But in the years she has been out of town, the subcultre has developed in directions she doesn’t like, or even recognize. Now she’s returned to “save” the Mek movement–that is, her original vision of it as a kind of freaky avant-garde artists’ scene–even if she has to destroy it in order to do so. High-tech bloodbaths ensue, ironically enough since the violence that Sarissa unleashes is motivated by her not wanting to see the Mek scene degenerate into something that is more about lethal weaponry than anything else. All in all, Mek is a twisted and ambiguous tale about subcultural creativity, and the battle over who controls the meanings of these subcultures and their creations. There are no easy answers, but Ellis and his team of artists (most notably Steve Rolston and Al Gordon) create a vision of posthumanity that is neither utopian (like the Transhumanist movement) nor dystopian (in the manner of all too many moralizing ecologists), but rather something much more disconcertingly–dare I say–human.
Mek
The amazingly prolific Warren Ellis does it again with Mek, a three-part miniseries that came out earlier this year. This time it’s about extreme body modification: the step beyond tattooing, and even beyond the usual fantasies of cyborgization. “Mek” is short for biomechanical implants. Everything from a laser pointer in your eye, to claws that emerge from your nails during sex–if you and your partner like it rough–to all sorts of bizarre weapons, concealed in your tongue or in the palm of your hand. The protagonist, Sarissa Leon, was one of the founders of the Mek movement. But in the years she has been out of town, the subcultre has developed in directions she doesn’t like, or even recognize. Now she’s returned to “save” the Mek movement–that is, her original vision of it as a kind of freaky avant-garde artists’ scene–even if she has to destroy it in order to do so. High-tech bloodbaths ensue, ironically enough since the violence that Sarissa unleashes is motivated by her not wanting to see the Mek scene degenerate into something that is more about lethal weaponry than anything else. All in all, Mek is a twisted and ambiguous tale about subcultural creativity, and the battle over who controls the meanings of these subcultures and their creations. There are no easy answers, but Ellis and his team of artists (most notably Steve Rolston and Al Gordon) create a vision of posthumanity that is neither utopian (like the Transhumanist movement) nor dystopian (in the manner of all too many moralizing ecologists), but rather something much more disconcertingly–dare I say–human.