Another Ellis Masterpiece

Monk insisted that I drop everything and put Warren Ellis's Fell trade at the top of my ever-growing reading pile.

That was almost a month ago.

I finished my last book almost two weeks ago (The Myth of Monogamy, if you care) and since I wasn't about to dig further into my current read (Time Management for System Administrators) during the Memorial Day weekend, I picked up Fell to relax.

Hoo boy, big mistake there.

I actually like Warren Ellis's stories a whole hell of a lot, but I know there are plenty of people who would not be able to unwind reading typical Ellis plots: a drug-addled reporter firing a bowel disruptor gun at the U.S. president, an ex-secret agent who will put his finger into the eye socket of anyone who tries to keep him from retrieving Hitler's own personal sex tapes, or a strangely malevolent doktor who wishes nothing more than to imminentize the eschaton (That means "end the world" for those of us who aren't Robert Anton Wilson fans.).

Ellis is not on the same level of comic book storytelling as Stan Lee, Neil Gaiman, or Peter David. These guys tell amazing stories no doubt, but they tend to shy away from topics that touch upon chemical dependency, pedophilia, and mayhem. By "mayhem", I mean the legel term for criminally charging someone for human physical dismemberment. Warren Ellis, by comparison, considers all of these bitter subjects to be so much Lego-brand building blocks upon which he can build some pretty fucking sick characters, and Fell is no exception.

The only way I can describe Ellis's writing is to say he's like Frank Miller, but without all of those Puritan American sensibilities to restrain him. If you can picture the events that occur in Miller's Sin City, you can imagine Snowtown, the urban backdrop for Fell, as being one or two steps below that. Basin City at least has a proper police department, even if they're almost all on the take. Basin City is corrupt, but it is complete. Ellis's Snowtown is also corrupt, true, but it is missing critical components that it needs to make it a working society. Entire sections of the city have no working utilities, forcing people to rely on well water. The police department has three and a half detectives on duty and dredging three dead bodies out of the water per week is considered "the norm". There are a lot of adjectives used to describe Snowtown: broken, cold, empty, feral. Reading it, I could not put the thought of Cleveland out of my mind.

The story of Fell is the story of Richard Fell, a police detective from a better place who has been exiled to work in Snowtown for reasons never specified. He carries a digital camera and watches people. Intently. Fell starts the night he moves into his new apartment in Snowtown, where his landlord warns him that if he's going to shoot porn in his new digs he shouldn't clog the drains. He then proceeds over the course of eight issues to befriend the local bartender who runs her dad's pub, solve some seriously fucked-up homicides, get cut by crazies (twice), be held at gunpoint more times than I can count, and get one of Ellis's signature body modifications. Every one of Warren Ellis's protagonists always has a tattoo or seven.

Fell gets branded by a drunk girl doped on Diazepam in issue one. So there. See? Ellis is finally branching out.

In an ill-fitting black suit and tie, Fell traipses around a city that maliciously wants him dead solving crimes that would make an inexperienced person downright nauseous. The writing in Fell is superb, and the stories as unnerving as Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which is appropriate considering that the artwork in Fell is very similar: muddy, murky, and with plenty of lines, none distinct. Any given page of Fell is likely to be a three-by-three grid of rectangular panels, an amazingly constrictive way of doing a comic that is nonetheless clean and consistent. The tone of the story is not set with zany tricks like putting panels inside panels or trying to give you one fistfight in a single two-page centerfold spread. Everything in Snowtown happens inside a tiny, constricted little box. It's up to you the reader to figure out what's happened in-between boxes. The subtlety of some of the deltas will surprise you. In others it can be clearly distinct: a scene set entirely in blue hues will be punctuated by a single image set in goldenrod: a memory, a flashback, the briefest of clues to what sick, perverse goings on Fell has found himself stumbling upon, then back to blue for the rest of the conversation. Fell's narrative is self-explanatory and easy to get into. After getting acclimated with the first issue, the other seven are a stone groove.

My only real complaint about Fell is that it's too short. Fell is more formally described as Fell Volume 1: Feral City, implying that there will eventually be a volume 2, and maybe 3. God, I hope so. Fell is a character who is not a laundry list of character flaws stubbornly motivated to spend his unlimited resources being a reluctant vigilante with a strong-willed femme fatale sidekick.

Richard Fell isn't rich. And he's too new for us to know his bad habits. Other than that, he's a another cookie cutter Ellis protagonist. Though it's refreshing to know that in Snowtown, Detective Fell is an actual, factual good guy and not just the typical Ellis scenario of our hero simply being the lesser of two evils.