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Fell Volume One: Feral City
Let it never be said that Warren Ellis doesn’t care about his fans. In the accompanying essay to the first issue of Fell he explained his motivation for doing the series; years of convention going brought him into contact with a unique and vaguely tragic section of the fanbase. People that asked him for his signature but didn’t have a comic of his to have signed, because they had only ever borrowed his comics from friends or the local library.  The thing about his writing though is that the amount of effort he puts into it is not relevant to the amount of money he’s being given to do it; it’s relevant to either how much he’s enjoying it or how much personal control he has over the series. Since Image is essentially happy to let Ellis run wild, he does so with gusto. Fell, despite its low key presentation is incomparable to his current Marvel work like The New Thunderbolts (Justice Like Lightning!) or Nextwave: Agents of HATE. History will remember Fell with the likes of Planetary and Transmetropolitan as being written by the Warren Ellis who has so few peers in terms of comparable talent that they could be counted on one hand with at least enough left over to give someone the finger; or fingers if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic. Fell also acted as the earthquake that heralded Image’s creative tsunami that reached it’s crest in 2006 with titles like Casanova, The Cross Bronx, and Phonogram. The key to their success was not in simply being good comics, but in bringing back one of the oldest and least elaborated upon comic devices; the prose piece. Back when Superman was still on it’s original creative team, publishing laws dictated that every magazine, the emergent bastard medium of comics inclusive, were required to dedicate a certain number of pages to prose; as in no pictures. Just words. You’d think that given the hilariously vehement, pitchfork wielding protest against the prose driven Batman #663, the idea of bringing prose back to comics and actually putting it to some actual use would fall on deaf ears. I can’t honestly speak to the specific success of Ellis’ essays in Fell as I’ve only read the first issue as a single (and the hardcover edition I’m reviewing today does not include them), but taking into account how many other new Image series have used the idea to great success, it’s likely here to stay.  For all I know, Ellis could have addressed it in one of the later essays, but his perspective on and apparent love of detective fiction is an interesting one, and it’s what fuels the incredible success of Fell far more than any literary or financial innovations. In Apparat, Ellis’ concept comic that endeavors to look at what kind of stories might be told today in comics if superheroes had never come about, the protagonist of his detective story rants about the fetishizing of evidence brought on by the success of CSI. His contention is that detective fiction (and in the comic, detective work) has become too focused on the finding and analysis of the evidence to create a gosh darn wow description of the cause and effect of the crime in a sterile, scientific manner which leaves the human drama as nothing but a chalk outline. Fell still gets his grandiose Penn and Teller speeches about what happened and why he’s smarter than everyone else on the face of the planet, but they’re just the period at the end of the sentence rather than the subject, the object, and the verb. Instead, this is the story of a city called Snowtown, a wretched scummy place psychologically segregated from the rest of the country and almost physically as well if it weren’t for the sole bridge leading back to civilization. The hero, and lens through which we see Snowtown is the title character Richard Fell, a disgraced big city cop sent out to pasture to Snowtown for some unpopular move he keeps close to his chest. Fell himself is an interesting metafictional mirror for Ellis himself. He’s in a backwater city so dirty and corrupt that no one cares and he’s expected to do the same. But like how Ellis handles his writing duties, Fell isn’t happy to slum it and waste away in apathy until he can return to normal society. He’s there to protect the people, solve cases, and if he has to beat the shit out of a few criminals along the way to do it, then he might as well enjoy it. But like I said earlier, the comic is more about Snowtown and Ellis peeling back the layers of it one case at a time as it is a comic about a man named Richard Fell. Snowtown is introduced to us by the locals as being more of an entity than a geographic location, and Ellis treats it as such. By the third issue, that’s how Fell comes around to treating it as well. There’s a palpable feeling of the arcane in Fell, not just in the way that the houses are all tagged by a sigil (the same sigil Fell himself is branded with his first night in the city), but in the atmosphere and reading experience itself.  Ellis goes to a lot of work to achieve this. One of the most notable elements of the writing after the first issue is how the characters interact. They don’t interact with each other in ways that they expect, and in turn ways that most readers expect fictional characters to act. This is detective fiction, and fiction full stop of course, practically any situation has been written hundreds of different times, with just the specific situational details changing each time. Thus your average reader expects that situation A will naturally lead into reaction 1, which produces situation B and so on. However, Ellis treats his dialogue and characterization in a far more organic, almost fractal way. You can’t predict Fell and you can’t let your guard down, because Warren Ellis is a tricky bastard and he knows how to account for you. In the essay that accompanied the first issue of the series, Ellis told a hilarious anecdote about the competition between Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz to create the strangest and most elaborate Judge Dredd cover, culminating in “…Sienkiewicz, in some kind of fugue state, created and shipped a thing that was the size of a coffee table, electrified, with flashing lights built into it...” in which he remarked that Ben Templesmith, the artist on Fell, recalled those heady days when computer assisted illustration was in it’s infancy and that kind of wild multimedia work was de rigeur. Having only been familiar with Templesmith from his beautifully haunting work on the indy smash hit 30 Days of Night (if you haven’t read it, you’re dead to me) and a brief encounter with him at the San Diego con in which he barked his request for a photograph of me in a curious Scottish brogue, I had my doubts that he could live up to such heady praise. When I told him I think what he’s doing on Fell is great (from the perspective of the price point), he shrugged and responded that it was a chance to work with Warren Ellis. Either he said Warren Fucking Ellis or he said it in such a way that it was crystal clear that was his sentiment. Thus either I badly underestimated him or that self same sentiment propelled him to the top of his craft. (He’s said in interview that much of his time spent on Fell is “trying to keep up to Warren, because the scripts are brilliant,” so I feel some slight vindication on that point.) Templesmith’s art on Fell is everything that Ellis says it is and more. For everything I’ve said about Ellis’ writing on this comic, it would be doing Templesmith a massive disservice to say that he’s anything less than essential to the full success of the comic. It’s amusingly ironic that an artist with such stripped down and minimalistic pencils could be essentially the best at drawing action sequences in the industry. It doesn’t take bombast and lens flares to make a fight scene crunch, grind, and maim viscerally. It takes the pure communication of visual immediacy and the raw physical aftermath of it. To Templesmith, advanced software isn’t a crutch or a time saving device, it’s a toolbox, a vehicle to create brilliant compositions and use tone and value to communicate emotion and pain. “I use computers to do things I can’t do in real life,” he says. So do the people at Furcadia, but I don’t think that’s what he meant. For instance when Fell breaks someone’s finger, the breaking joint is drawn white hot to express the brutality and intensity of the pain. It’s art as metaphor for the visually inexpressible, it’s pure art. The more I learned about the real nuts and bolts of art in the number of classes I’ve taken and talented artists that I’ve shot the shit with, the more I recognize just how much of a paucity there is of professionalism and wisdom in comic book illustration. Jim Lee might command the longest lines out of anyone at a convention and he might draw a pretty grim Batman, but he can’t evoke anything that isn’t strictly visual in the most obvious sense. The same goes for the vast majority of comic book artists. Imagine using a baseball bat to cut down a tree. Imagine beating someone to death with a fully loaded and functioning handgun. Welcome to the philosophy of comic book illustration in the twenty first century. Design sense in comic book illustration is a freak mutation like having a sixth finger, and Ben Templesmith probably has the equivalent of seven fingers on his left hand. I didn’t think to stop and look at the time to see for sure. The point is that he’s got it in spades and it’s on full display here. Templesmith is incredibly deliberate in every one of his panels; he knows when to keep someone’s face loose and fast, and he knows when to go in for the kill with a startlingly lucid portrayal. Ethereal sounds appropriate, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. There’s tacky paperweights that you get in places like Jamaica that are plastic cubes filled with some liquid that’s a bit more dense than water and there’s some island backdrop stuck to the back of it and a stupid slogan like “Welcome to Jamaica, Mon” written under it, so it’s refracted by the light and looks kind of distorted. So if we take the word ethereal to mean having the quality of ether, the kind of feeling that Templesmith evokes in his art is more like every page was like one of those tacky paperweights, only it’d be ether (in more of the metaphorical sense than the literal medical one) in the plastic casing with the comic page stuck to the back. So the reading experience seems like peering through this dream-like haze into Snowtown and these vivid moments of clarity in the art are when the haze parts and everything seems so much more real, immediate, and visceral before the haze closes in again and we’re back to this strange disconnected world of violence and petty mysticism. So basically, if you’re still sitting here reading this review and you haven’t taken a break to go buy the comic (and it’s not some ungodly hour of the night), there’s something seriously fucking wrong with you and the only way to fix it is by buying the comic. It now comes in three flavors; single, trade paperback, and hardcover. The former includes all of Ellis’ back page ramblings while the latter two are just the comic pages. I picked up the hardcover because it’s gorgeous. Image is beginning to distinguish themselves as having a damn good hardcover/trade program. Granted this is the first hardcover I’ve ever bought from them, but it’s already scads better than the vast majority of what Marvel puts out. It’s not a floppy so-so dustcover and a blank, ugly hardcover. It’s a lovely glossy affair with full quality graphics on it with brand new art just for the collected editions. Mark Osborne, Editor in Chief of Binary Culture, is not a motherfucking happy kitten. |
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