Broken Frontier

Richard Fell settles into the feral city of Snowtown and takes on a new nightmare case involving pregnant women and possibly a serial killer.

Fell has quite a bit going on in this issue as Detective Richard Fell starts out by adding another layer to his relationship with Mayko, the owner of the Idiot Bar. He is quickly assigned his first official case with the Snowtown police department and it is as strange as the city itself. A pregnant woman has been attacked; her stomach cut open, and the fetus removed. While the coroner admits this is not the first such case there is no way of knowing how many others there might have been since Snowtown tends to sweep its dead under the rug. As Richard follows the case we get our first good look at how he thinks and how he operates as a detective. We see the killer and the crime through the filter of Richard’s eyes as well. The solution to the case, however, may hinge on Richard’s relationship with Mayko.

This title is easily one of the best things Warren Ellis is currently writing. A 16 page comic, set up in 9 panel grid pages, with extras in the back, for $1.99 as an experiment to make comic books more affordable again. As part of this and to make Fell more accessible to casual readers, Ellis is making each issue a self-contained story. No multi-issue arcs here. Despite the 16 page limitation, Ellis gives the reader a dense story quite equal to twenty-two pages of a standard comic. The use of the nine panel grid insures extra space for the telling. In any other hands this might not work but the combination of Ellis’s fascinating dialogue and Templesmith’s effortless looking art make Fell a success.

There are a lot of words in this story but they are never useless or wasted. The reader’s eye hangs on every line of dialogue and one can really hear the characters’ voices. Templesmith also does a lot to make each panel a visual feast. The sequence in which Richard runs through the attack on the pregnant woman is amazing. The ghostly image of the victim surrounded by a warm, golden glow gives her a vibrancy of life and makes her tragic death weighty. Another good example is the scene in the city morgue; which is filled with black humor, as well as being one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen in a long time. Templemith’s color choices help to convey the moods and emotions of the scenes– cool blues, comfortable sepias, sickly greens, and putrid yellows.

This comic is set apart by its style– it is noir by way of a dream, or a nightmare. One is never quite certain how much is real and how much may be only in the mind of the protagonist. Certainly, when it comes to Mayko, Richard is either one of the most forgiving men ever, or else he carries his own scars in other places and so understands this strong but wounded woman.

In Fell the reader enters a world where reality is slightly bent and even the insane can have clarity. Pick this issue up and you’ll be happy you ‘fell’ in.