You are on the global frequency.
Global Frequency is a short
Graphic Novel series by
Warren Ellis, drawn by several different artists. It's built around a single idea: if
The World Is Always Doomed, then why
Hold Out For A Hero? What's stopping us from saving ourselves? Answer: not a damn thing.
Our main character is Miranda Zero. She's got a
Mysterious,
Dark and Troubled Past she's not at all proud of. She knows that
modern politics have built a
Crapsack World and decided to do something about it.
That something is the Global Frequency. Miranda has found and signed on 1001 unique talents from around the world, ranging from athletes to scientists and from cops to hackers. They're called on when the world needs saving, connected to Miranda's home base through a computer genius girl nicknamed "Aleph" who guides them through the mission. The story is fast-paced, with minimum backstory, and Miranda and Aleph are the series' only recurring characters.
They Fight Crime,
Help The Helpless and
Save The World with
New Media. It's like a wiki. With guns. Some chapters focus on technology, others on politics, and still others on the supernatural. And
Anyone Can Die.
Malfunctioning
Forgotten Superweapon? They can track him, identify the tech, locate and interrogate the designer and
Shoot the Dog if necessary. While the
M.I.B. are still getting dressed. Runaway
Psycho Prototype? They can be on the scene with geeks,
Badasses and even an inside informant while
The Government is
still arguing whether or not to just
Nuke 'Em.
Alien Invasion via
The Virus?
Terrorists Without a Cause?
The Plague? The talent is out there to make it go away. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things with the right technology and a
fair chance. Agent,
You Are On The Global Frequency.A pilot episode was produced and completed and the show was scheduled to premiere in the Spring of 2005 on the WB television network. The series was executive produced and had a pilot written by John Rogers (
The Core,
Catwoman,
Transformers,
Leverage), with many high-profile names attached on the production staff, including
J. Michael Straczynski (
Babylon 5), Diego Gutierrez (
Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Ben Edlund (
Angel,
The Tick), and David Slack (
Teen Titans). Nelson McCormick (
Alias) directed the series pilot. Everything about the pilot rocked every bit as hard as the graphic novel.
It never made it to the air,
sadly. The long and short of it was the initial pilot made it onto torrent networks and the sheer speed at which the geeks of the world acquired it
pissed off the network, so they refused to pick it up. In a sense, it died because it really was too good; the sheer brilliance of the pilot prompted too many people to tell the network that they'd seen it and loved it, despite it not being released yet.
In 2009,
The CW ordered another pilot, to be written by
Pushing Daisies and
Tales from the Crypt veteran Scott Nimerfro. Unfortunately, nothing actually happened, and according to an interview with Ellis in late 2010, the project had once again stalled.
This comic presents examples of:
- And This Is for...: Grushko's last words to the body of Detonation's main antagonist.
- Anyone Can Die: Because aside from Miranda Zero and Aleph, there are no recurring main characters; each issue revolves around a different agent / team.
- Artificial Limbs: Subverted in Big Wheel. One of the protagonists with a cybernetic arm talks about how she can feel metal grinding against her bones and how she had to have her shoulders and spine reinforced to stop her arm from ripping itself out of her body. The fully-converted cyborg has an even worse time of things.
- Apocalypse How: The military's 'die-back' method in Harpoon is a Class 1.
- Badass Normals: Every single person in the field teams.
- Badass Bookworm: Aleph, as demonstrated in the eponymous #11.
- Beyond the Impossible: The Frenchman finished off Lionel Welfare by ripping off his arm and shoving it down his throat. They were both supposed to be Badass Normals.
- Body Horror: An early issue features a man who has been engineered into a killing machine. Literally. His body is half gone. He has live orgasms when he kills people.
- The ninth issue deals with surgeons building flesh altars out of people. Who are still alive.
- Borrowed Biometric Bypass
- Brains and Bondage: The top MIT physicist and expert in wormholes and exotic matter is wearing a gimp mask when he's interrupted by the call of duty.
- Brown Note: The alien memetic virus that takes over people's minds.
- Charles Atlas Superpower:
- Crazy Prepared:
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:
- Cyborg: See Artificial Limbs above.
- Death from Above:
- Determinator: Lau
- Disproportionate Retribution: The Frenchman on Wellfare. The Frenchman was just told to stop Wellfare, it didn't matter how. Eventually, The Frenchman rips off Wellfare's arm and shoves it down his throat to kill him, all for stealing his girlfriend's book on biofeedback.
- Electric Instant Gratification: The cyborg from above would receive orgasms when he killed people.
- Everything is Online: Aleph plays it straight to some degree, but it's subverted by the cult intending to blow up building in Sydney - as they're all geeks, they put their demands on their website and no-one has seen them, except for Aleph digging for trouble.
- Feel No Pain: Wellfare and the Frenchman, thanks to biofeedback.
- Gondor Calls for Aid: Harpoon unites the series' biggest badasses into one team, including Grushko and Alice April.
- Hacker Cave: Aleph's den, from where she runs the Global Frequency.
- Hannibal Lecture:
- Have I Mentioned I Am Sexually Active Today?: In the unaired pilot, after the female lead reels off a very lengthy list of her academic qualifications, all acquired at a very young age (she's no older than thirty), the male lead makes a joke about how she mustn't have found much time for a life in the process. She gets surprisingly touchy and insists at length that she did, ending with the unconvincing and unsolicited information that she "had boyfriends". The clear implication is that she's still a virgin.
- Heroes Unlimited:
- Heroic Sacrifice: Member 436 in "Big Wheel".
- Hypocritical Humor: One episode brings in Alan Crowe who claims to be a magician — as in, a real one. He asserts that magic is "a psychological discipline." One of the other characters makes a sneering comment. Alan, amused, points out she's a parapsychologist, and as such can't exactly claim to be part of the rational orthodoxy herself. She's less amused by this.
- I'm a Humanitarian: Wellfare's mentioned as eating the fingers and an ear of an operative he killed, though "he couldn't keep the fingers down".
- Kill Sat:
- Le Parkour: One issue entirely focused around a Parkour run.
- Mad Doctor: The surgeons in issue 9.
- Master of Your Domain: the biofeedback techniques used by Welfare and The Frenchman to beat the pulp out of each other. The Frenchman turns out to be better at it in a Beyond the Impossible sort of way.
- Mission Control: Aleph.
- Mysterious Employer: Miranda Zero.
- Mysterious Past: Most people on the Frequency to some degree, but Miranda Zero especially.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: A mutual one between the Frenchman and Wellfare that lasts pretty much an entire issue.
- Noodle Incident: In the unaired pilot, something happened involving the U.S Secretary of Defense in Tacumseh, Ohio that he does not want anyone to know about. Miranda Zero, of course, knows what it was.
- Mr. Grushko also seems to have a few of these in his past. Witnesses are still traumatized. In one case, Grushko's descriptions give one a hint of the flavour of the noodles, as it were.
- Psychic Powers: Janos Voydan in #1 of the comic was a psychic "apport" who had his powers boosted by Soviet Super Science.
- Psycho for Hire: Wellfare.
- Red Right Hand: Used as a symbol by the terrorists in issue 7.
- Soviet Superscience: Way out in Siberia, a nuclear warhead is ready to drop though a wormhole and land in San Francisco if a sleeper agent opens that hole with his brain. After years in his head, the mechanism is starting to corrode. This may not end well.
- Super Soldier: The cyborg from "The Big Wheel". Not a success.
- Tears of Blood: People under the influence of the alien memetic virus display this.
- Telecom Tree: The Global Frequency, a network of people specialising in all sorts of things that could, and do, save the world - or at least millions of lives.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Takashi Sato.
- The Power of Love: The alien memetic virus that overwrites people is defeated when the symbology expert manages to encode her love for her partner (another woman) in its language.
- The Worm Guy: In a sense, a whole network of them, though they all get the proper respect for their expertise.
- Torture Technician: Appears to be Mr. Grushko's speciality.
- Twenty Minutes into the Future: The biofeedback technology that The Frenchman and Wellfare are said to use is based on very real technology with similar applications. (That is, increasing strength and blocking out pain, not ripping off people's arms)
- This is more or less the point of most of the series, really: scary but largely plausible science.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Aleph's job.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity
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