Broken Frontier

An ex-spook turns private-eye in a city without boundaries for anyone but those of his kind.

Desolation Jones is the sole survivor of the Desolation Test administered by Britain’s MI-6. His new home, Los Angeles, is also home to others like him, and is an open prison for ex-members of the intelligence community. To get by, Jones occasionally takes detective work from an über-carnivore lawyer and ex-spook named Jeronimus, this one involving a rich but decrepit colonel and "the holy grail of cinematic filth"—the porn Hitler made in his Berlin bunker. Stolen from the colonel and then used to extort more and more cash from the colonel, it’s Jones’ job to find it. Leaving with job and retainer in hand, Jones runs into the colonel’s daughter Angela, who assumes that he’s been paid to find her missing sister. Jones brushes her off and makes his first call on Filthy Sanchez, owner of a sex shop. If anyone in the porn capital of the universe would know about triple-x Fuhrer flicks, she would, but she professes ignorance. But when the wheels in her filthy head start turning, she begins to think that no one could appreciate such a rarity as much as she.

We’ve seen it all before. The plot is one-part "The Big Sleep," one part "The Maltese Falcon." The hook evokes "The Prisoner," the setting any of the various near-future urban dystopias depicted on either paper or film over the last twenty years. The protagonist is one more variation on the half-brilliant, half-crazy, totally f***ed up lone wolf archetype that Warren Ellis has turned into an avatar of the crazy, mixed-up times we live in. We know the elements of the overall tone of Desolation Jones, as well—the neo-noir pulp detective story, the irreverent depravity of Burroughs and Morrison, the self-referential aspects of fiction that made Thomas Pynchon one of the coolest names to drop at a cocktail party. And don’t forget the Hitler porn.

Still, I was instantly hooked.

Warren Ellis’ script has the narrative vitality, the intellectual crackle and spark always on display on the pages of Planetary but less consistently seen in his other titles. The dialogue is both snappy and full-bodied, accentuating and defining character while also building the world Ellis has created with pithy exposition. The pacing is nimble, and the sense of humor Ellis brings to bare reminds us that he’s as at home with black comedy as he is with scientific arcana. And with meta-textual touches—specifically Jones’ rant on supermodernism—that resonate throughout the issue, and elegant turns of phrase like "the lost angels of Los Angeles," the writing is pure A-game. Though plot propels it forward, Desolation Jones stands out for its characters. True, every one of them is a well-known staple, yet Ellis succeeds in making each one unique.

Anyone who thought that co-creator J. H. Williams emptied his toolbox on Promethea has to plunk down three to check out what he’s up to in Desolation Jones. He’s shifted gears, gone from the baroque to the grotesque in twenty-two pages flat, and the result is just as artful. The first page sets the tone, the images distorted and nightmarish like an old black-and-white t.v. on the fritz. The colonel looks more exhausted by his adventures and exploits than by time. Williams connects the reader to Desolation Jones by rendering him exactly as he is—an experiment gone viciously wrong, something utterly more than, and sadly less than, human. And the three-page fight scene, a barrage of color, texture, and pop-art panel effects, sticks in the reader’s mind with the same power and force with which Jones sticks his finger in Wood’s eye.

Ellis and Williams make an extraordinary creative team. Already I’m hoping that Desolation Jones becomes a series, because, if the first issue is any indication, only five more won’t be enough.

-Dexter K. Flowers