It's a good time to be a Warren Ellis fan. The Apparat singles, my favorite recent work of his, will be collected in December, and in the meantime, he has launched three new series. Desolation Jones from Wildstorm is like a more sex-obsessed, trippy version of Transmetropolitan, Jack Cross from DC is a promising reinvention of the action hero genre, but Fell from Image is probably the best of the lot, and indeed, one of the best things Ellis has written in a fairly distinguished career. Ellis turns around the decompression technique that he embraced sometime ago and presents the complete opposite, a self-contained tale in 16 pages. Also doing career best work here is Ben Templesmith, who has always excelled at mood but not always been so clear with the storytelling specifics. In Fell, these two creators have embraced the strengths of their respective styles while stretching their talents to something different as well, and the result is a surprisingly dense read at 16 pages, full of Ellis's usual acid wit and an ideaspace that could be entertaining to watch for years to come.
Warren Ellis is a creator who is always pushing at the boundaries of the medium. In the '90s, he tried out the idea of "pop comics," he was one of the first to embrace manga-style decompression (and also one of the first to abuse it to the point of boredom) and everything from his reinvention of superheroes in Authority and Planetary to his "pulp singles" approach in Apparat speaks of someone who is trying something new. Fell, likewise, seems to have begun its life as an experiment in format as much as a story idea. In these days of six-part story arcs and $3 comics, Ellis decided to have a go at self-contained stories for $2. Truthfully, my expectation would have been that it wouldn't work, if only because a 16-page story almost always feels too short to be satisfying, but Fell is a dense and rewarding read and manages to be accessible, fun and self-contained. The true test will be whether Ellis can keep up this accessibility in future issues, but even pulling off a single satisfying story in 3/4 of the space usually allowed is an impressive achievement.
Fell has all the hallmarks of a "Warren Ellis joint." The hyper-intelligent protagonist, the quirky supporting cast, the sarcastic and hateful boss, the "ripped from the strange headlines" plot, it all has a lot of similarity to Ellis's other work. While that familiarity takes a little bit away from the freshness of Fell, certainly it's hard to fault Ellis for embracing his voice even if it leads to a certain predictability of character, and more importantly, the dialogue and characters are still sharp and entertaining. Within two panels, the distinctive patter of Ellis's dialogue is established, and it doesn't let up. And while all of the characters have a certain similarity of attitude, they're all also interesting on their own merits, most especially the strange and alluring Mayko and the pure-hearted, noble (by Ellis standards) protagonist Richard Fell.
If Fell re-opened my eyes to what Ellis can do with a more compressed narrative, it positively rocked me back when I realized the extent of Ben Templesmith's artistic talents. There's a much more finished line at work in his Fell work, and while he still does the more sketched-out background elements, it's a stylistic touch that works, placing those elements more clearly in the backdrop and emphasizing the characters. There's still a distressing tendency in his work to substitute splashes of color for any actual backgrounds, but he absolutely nails the weirdness vibe of Snowtown. The sprayed-on tag, the bizarre scene of a nun in a Richard Nixon mask smoking on the street, the deceptive calm of a manic believer in protective magic, these are just a few elements of the story that come to life in large part due to Templesmith's visual evocation of them.
Fell is an odd little book, neatly straddling any number of genres. One could call it horror, except that it's a bit more subtle than that. Crime/procedural fits the plot, but it's not so dry as most crime/procedural stories. Slice-of-life, even, except that it's rare to find a slice-of-life book where a woman complains that her husband left her for the family dog. This inability to be put into a genre box is one of the many elements that makes Fell such a promising project, and I'd definitely recommend it to fans of Ellis, Templesmith or just those who want to see that rarest of all creatures in the comics industry: an affordable, self-contained story.
