Over at WildStorm, Desolation Jones is a new ongoing title from Warren Ellis and J H Williams III.

Ellis is an odd writer these days.  Enormously talented, of course, but with an increasing tendency to produce comics which verge on self-parody - Angel Stomp Future being a particularly grating example.  He's hardly the only writer who has a schtick that he falls back on regularly, but it has to be said that Ellis' schtick can be remarkably specific. 

The stereotypical Warren Ellis comic stars a chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, drug-blitzed Brit whose hard cynical exterior conceals a passionate underlying idealism.  His villains will be genuine out-and-out cynics whose self-centred schemes frustrate those ideals.  Ideally, there will be grotesque body modification, grotesque sexual perversion, underground sub-cultures and a pervasive air of scabrous black humour, combined with a starry-eyed enthusiasm for new technology, particularly if it involves the anarchic free flow of information, or an excuse to talk about mobile phones.  This stuff crops up, to one degree of another, in a remarkable amount of his work.

At first glance, Desolation Jones looks like an absolutely standard example of the formula.  Looking closer, it ticks slightly fewer of the boxes than it might first seem.  But there's no doubt that this comic is Very Ellis Indeed.

Michael Jones used to be in MI6, but he was kicked out for excessive drinking and dereliction of duty.  Instead he was assigned to something called the Desolation Test, which seems to have tortured him for a year and done rather unpleasant things to him.  Now he lives in Los Angeles - not because he wants to, but because Los Angeles doubles as an open prison for ex-spooks.  In between bouts of eccentric self-pity, Jones works as a detective investigating his own community.  In this opening arc (which bears some similarity to The Big Sleep), he's hired to find a stolen Hitler porn video.  Don't ask.

Plenty of the standard devices are present and correct - lots of perverts, lots of weird body modification, underground subcultures, and dialogue like "But now, Mr Jones, my pleasures are simple, and my penis is somewhere in Bombay."  But on the other hand, Jones himself isn't such a typical Ellis protagonist.  He used to be when he was in MI6, but since he gets kicked out on page 1, that's not particularly relevant.  Jones is eccentric, and somewhat damaged and apathetic, but he's not the supercool hedonist cynic that we're used to seeing in that role.  He comes across more of an exhausted walking corpse who's filling in the time waiting to die by keeping an eye out for other ruined ex-spooks.

J H Williams III comes straight from Promethea, which must have been a bit of a gear change.  I've always loved his work - hell, this guy managed to make fill-in issues of X-Man look good, back in the nineties.  This is typically impressive stuff, particularly the set pieces - the swirling dream images on page one, and a fantastic moment of Shocking Violence near the end where, instead of just showing the damn thing in a single double splash page, he breaks it down across a double page spread.  Much more effective.  Jose Villarrubia's colours are also up to their usual high standard.  He's obviously gone to great lengths to make sure that nothing else in the book is the same colour as Jones' awful trenchcoat, and it's things like that that mark out the top quality colourists from the competent herd.

This is a very Warren Ellis book, with all that that implies, and I imagine 99% of people reading this will already know whether that's an enticing prospect for them or not.  Some of it, frankly, does seem overfamiliar.  But if Ellis does this stuff a lot, he undeniably does it well. 

Rating: B+

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