Warren Ellis is an ideas machine. He seems to be continually finding new ways of telling stories and as anyone who subscribes to his mailing list or visits his website can tell you he's both incredibly passionate about this medium and also desperately aware of his skills and failings as a writer.
Indeed one of his biggest failings is this overflowing of ideas. Some of his projects are great, some not so great.
But when Warren Ellis has a great idea, it's always worth reading. His greatest work so far has to be Planetary wiki & Transmetropolitan weblog review
Of course, Fell is completely different from his previous work.
The format is fantastic. To lower the price and make it a pocket change single Ellis is doing a comic with fewer pages than usual but with a 9 panel grid to compress more story into the fewer pages.
Each issue is a completely self contained story revolving around Richard Fell, a homicide detective sent to the hell hole city of Snowtown (Three and a half detectives to cover the whole precinct).
And because each issue is a self contained story Warren gets to have tremendous fun telling all the quick short stories and fragments he's had in his head for all these years - like the floater issue (#4) or the interrogation issue (#5).
It's a superb series that fairly belts along, playing with all the toys of the medium and milking every little trick in crime fiction writing.
And the artwork by Ben Templesmith is perfectly suited to the story, adding to the sense of dirt and decay of Snowtown.
Great stuff.
Go & buy it now. At Nostalgia & Comics obviously. Tell 'em I sent you.
Complete first issue online here, interview with Warren Ellis here
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