In London, just across the street from Hyde Park, there is a memorial. It is dedicated to ‘Animals In Warfare’, and it consists of several life-size bronze statues of dogs, birds and other animals. The centrepiece is a Clydesdale pulling an artillery piece. Above the statues, a sign reads: ‘THEY HAD NO CHOICE’.

The memory of that memorial is how I feel reading Grant Morrison’s WE-3 (illustrated by Frank Quitely, published by DC/Vertigo). Originally a three-issue miniseries, WE-3 is now collected in a trade paperback. If you only buy one comic this year, this should be it.

The premise is pretty simple: A secret military research program kidnaps three ordinary household pets, grafts high-tech equipment and weaponry onto them and trains them to kill. They escape from the lab and try to find their way home. It’s Homeward Bound meets robo-death armour.

Interestingly, the writing represents Morrison at his most readable and lucid; it stands in stark contrast to his usual brand of psychedelic, genre-defying, cosmic chaos.

(And here I must digress. I recently learned that some people dislike Morrison’s tendency to include ‘throw-away’ setting details that jar the reader and cause them to reinterpret the entire story part-way through. These critics call it ‘hyper-compression’.

An example: In Doom Patrol Morrison has a character explain that a fallen angel created an alien world. But then she changes her mind and admits that, “Well, it’s either that or the psychic projection of a woman called Ilse Krauss, who’s lying on a hospital bed in Bremen, dying of brain cancer. It’s hard to be sure”.

How fucking brilliant is that? That’s not ‘hyper-compression’. That’s virtuosity. Here endeth the digression.)

If you liken Morrison’s trademark ultra-detailed stories to intricate mosaics, then WE-3 is by comparison a simple, flawless diamond. The book is astonishingly visual – there is no dialogue at all for the first thirteen pages, and not a single panel description in the entire book – and consequently the act of reading it is almost Zen-like. Quitely’s art lays out the story so broadly and effectively that just about anyone can enjoy it, no matter their comics reading experience.

And here’s the brilliant part. This story could only have been told as a comic book. As prose it would have lost all the immediate savagery, sweat and fear. On film it would have been laughable, or worse, far too confrontingly violent.

Because this book bears an angry, confronting message: animals are not like us. It’s as if Morrison started with the concept of anthropomorphic animals and then took a goddamn sledgehammer to it. I’m serious; he demolishes it. After reading this book, the very idea of talking animals will fill you with an odd feeling of revulsion and shame. In the end, the triumph of WE-3 lies in its lack of humanity. Human speech may be surgically implanted, but human hate, fear and greed are inherent.

The verdict? Genius. You should probably go buy it as soon as possible. And if you’re an animal lover, prepare to cry a lot.

That’s all for today. Tune in tomorrow to hear me ramble on about superheroes!