It seems like a month can't go by without a new Warren Ellis project. 

Fell is his latest new launch.  It's an attempt to get back to the single issue format, with 16 pages of story and a $1.99 price tag that tries to keep the book in impulse-buy territory.  The low price tag certainly ought to be one of the big selling points of the book, which makes it a little unfortunate that design considerations seem to have led to the price being completely de-emphasised on the cover.

Anyhow, Fell is a series of single-issue detective stories.  Homicide detective Richard Fell arrives in the thoroughly miserable backwater precinct of Snowtown, which is hopelessly understaffed, utterly desolate, but might at least allow a good detective to shine.  It's not a million miles from the Frank Ironwine one-shot that Ellis produced under his Apparat imprint, particularly with Fell's observational techniques.

But where Ironwine was Ellis's standard hard-drinking lead character, Fell reverses that.  Fell himself is a fundamentally normal man, who's inadvertantly stumbled into an entire town of Warren Ellis characters.  Even the seemingly normal ones have unfortunate views on magical symbols.  The murders, in typical Ellis style, are based around grotesque stories from the papers.  After all, humanity's grotesque enough already, without having to make anything up.

The 16-page format requires Ellis and his artist Ben Templesmith to be concise.  With a nine-panel grid format as the basis for each page, there's not much space to screw around.  It's not completely novel for Ellis to cut himself down to a single issue - he did it in Global Frequency - but his longer-form stories have shown a worrying tendency to meander of late.  Quite aside from its other advantages, the discipline of a single-issue format does him good.  Templesmith, meanwhile, makes effective use of cartooning and strong character designs to get the most out of each panel.

It's far from subtle, and the themes aren't exactly new ground for Ellis.  But it's a reinvigorated take on them, and some of his strongest recent work.

Rating: A

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