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The more i write about this book, the more i applaud the choices Morrison and Quitely made. A solid 3.5 stars.

Story
The US Air Force’s secret weapons program transforms three family pets into living weaponry. They appear to pass their first assignment. A US senator and general(?) get a walk-through of the program afterward and the general freaks out because they have rudimentary language skills (ie, that they can talk at all makes them problematic): this 3rd generation must be decommissioned so that the program can move forward with the 4th generation. The trio escape (not really a spoiler) and struggle to remain free. Ultraviolence ensues. Any resemblance you might’ve expected to are destroyed very early.

Don’t expect The Message to break your heart or catalyze your protest instincts. The bad guys aren’t quite caricatures, but they also don’t have enough room to display much depth. Our 3 heroes also are limited: they are not only not anthropomorphized but they’re also robotized. Even though WE3 can speak, their language is limited to something to I. M. Gud Dog? and Want. Eat. Now. Maybe this works: they haven’t become something drastically different from normal pets so we still root for the lost doggie/kitty/bunny inside the armor and behind the weapons and underneath the illuminated antennae.

Art
Quite frankly *groan*, i like Frank Quitely’s artistic vision. (the following generalization is based on a statistically insignificant sample) As seems to be the norm, comics art strives to be “Real� Art when it extends to full-page and 2-page spreads. True in this little book also, but then there’s the really cool 6-page spread of 16-panels per page as though seen from various security cameras.
Each of these 96 stamp-sized images delicately used limited visual information in conjunction with the others to tell a mostly wordless tense tale. Quitely cheats a little bit in the security camera footage by letting us hear some dialog and monologue. Plus he zooms in and out in what presumably are meant to be the same camera but at different times. Anyway, the overall sequence is effective.

Quitely likes to change camera angles. The opening shots make that perfectly clear. He’s not afraid to risk confusion. At times i think he embraces the likelihood of reader confusion: he expects you to go back and re-view.

The first 2-page spread of the comic appears to be at least partially computer generated.
If it’s not, then i give Quitely even more praise for rendering this storm of bullets. It’s disgusting, but visually appropriate. The 2-page spread of an instant of FREEDOM is what comic book superhero beauty should look like. I wish they’d put it on the cover. Though that would’ve promised more uplift than this melancholy tale has to offer.