Tokyo Storm Warning is a song by Elvis Costello, and if you ask me, it's not one of his better ones.  Goes on for bloody ever, and it's way too repetitive.  It's also the name of the latest Cliffhanger miniseries, which writer Warren Ellis describes as "a gentle piss-take of the giant robot genre played straight."

Not a genre I really follow, to be honest.  Which leaves me uncertain whether Ellis has undershot on the "piss-take" part of it and just produced a straight pastiche, or whether there's something going on here on a subtle level I don't get.  Whichever one it is, the book really just reads to me like a straight giant robot book.  Sure, it's got a sense of its own ridiculousness, but doesn't the real thing?

Of course, as we saw in Authority, Ellis does great dumb action scenes when he wants to, so three issues of giant robots in faintly over the top action sequences is still a perfectly readable proposition.  It depends on whether the artist can run with it and produce something sufficiently absurd.

The problem with James Raiz' art is that it lacks scale.  The big reveal panels tend to show Great Big Thingies filling most of the panel, against a background of high-tech buildings that don't really convey a sense of scale.  Just how giant are the giant robots?  How many storeys high?  Honestly, after re-reading the last five pages of it in action, I'm still not sure.  Raiz has redesigned the whole of Tokyo in sci-fi mode, which is fair enough, but means that I don't honestly know how big any of this stuff is meant to be.  The art makes it look as though the robots are the normal size and everything around them is small, when it ought to be the other way round.

It's certainly a pleasant-looking issue, and the three-headed dragon creature is a lovely piece of design.  When he's dealing with real people, Raiz turns in some lovely work.  But he doesn't give a blow-away sense of lunatic scale, which is what this issue needed in order to work.

Rating: B-

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