Written by Warren Ellis
Art by Ben Templesmith
Published by Image Comics
Fell has won the comic of the week award more than any other title in our short history. Not only that, but it shows no signs of flagging quality and is, in fact, getting better. The dialogue could not be sharper, the plots could not be more compelling and the art--oh, the art. Although both Mr. Ellis and Mr. Templesmith have made the claim, in the back pages of this issue no less, that they plan to be with this book "for at least a few years" one wonders how long before the offers Templesmith seems to be ignoring become too attractive to pass us.
Fell, in the most basic terms, is a crime comic. Crime comics do not carry one of the more storied legacies in comics--after all, during the heyday of comics publishing, pulp crime books were readily available, and these filled the niche for anyone who wanted more beyond what EC Comics was publishing. These last few years have seen a resurgence in the genre, mostly led by writers and artists who crave using the serialized comics medium to tell stories that do not include Green Arrow or Hawkeye. Some of these new school efforts, like David Lapham's Stray Bullets or fellow COW winner 100 Bullets have done more to revitalize mainstream interest in the "comics as art" arguement than anything super-hero related in the last 20 years. Fell not only continues the trend, but has gone to war with the high prices comic books now carry as well. What has, luckily, not gone ignored is how incredibly good the book happens to be. It is a rare pleasure to see a really good comic that also sells well. With a sort of macabre take on the "ripped from the headlines" genre popularized by Law and Order, Ellis takes each issue of Fell, mixes his Detective Fell character with bits of reality and the weird and then Templesmith frames the story in short, clean panels, often finishing the book in less than 20 pages. Whether it's a demented father who shoots up his diabetic daughter with his own feces or a woman who murders her alcoholic husband with a brandy enema (both scenarios which depressingly come from actual cases; actual cases which, even more depressingly, were far worse than the comic version) the reader is squarely in the passenger seat with Fell as he tries to find some semblance of justice for victims while at the same time build respect for the law in a town which barely maintains a grip on civility. Hardboiled detective characters are a dime a dozen, especially if you go to the Strand, but Fell is growing into something far more interesting: a sensitive, funny man who maintains only the loosest persona of violence, and even then, only when it's demanded. Unlike the Vic Mackies and Jack Bauers of the world, or for that matter, any other character Warren Ellis writes, Detective Fell is most comfortable in a complicated situation, and Fell, for all it's brevity, never attempts to paint a black and white, good and evil veneer over the horrors it uncovers. At some point, Fell will be published in a trade paperback, and it will sell incredibly well for a long time. But for those who wish to read it in it's preferred format, with the flimsy pages all beat up and coffee spills on the corner, they are certainly going to be the lucky ones--because this is a comic book, through and through, and it's worth going to a dingy store to pick it up, once a month.
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