Fell

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Fell
Cover to Fell #1, illustrated by Ben Templesmith, published by Image Comics
Publication information
Publisher	Image Comics
Schedule	Irregular
Format	Ongoing series
Genre	Crime
Publication date	September 2006 –
Number of issues	9 (as of 2009[update])
Creative team
Writer(s)	Warren Ellis
Artist(s)	Ben Templesmith

Fell is a comic book written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. It is published by Image Comics.

The comic is an experiment by Ellis in order to create a more affordable comic by producing a lower page count than normal. This is balanced by a nine panel grid format for each page, in order to compress the story into the smaller size. Ben Templesmith's artwork creates a hazy outline that accompanies the immoral haze of a decaying noir style city.

Each issue is also a self-contained story, supplemented with behind-the-scenes shots of unfinished artwork, a text section where the author expands the story's background, provides excerpts from the script, and (tentatively) answers reader e-mail. The series suffers from scheduling issues due to the artist's and writer's other commitments^{[citation needed]}. For example issue 9 was published nearly a year after issue 8 and, despite promises in issue 9, issue 10 has failed to yet meet its scheduled release date.

Story

The story is about Richard Fell, a homicide detective who has been reassigned to the city of Snowtown. Snowtown, whose location is never specified, is a city whose conditions are somewhere between the urban decay of America's worst inner cities and the poverty of a third-world country. Described at one point as a "feral city", its denizens are generally desperate, hostile, or both. Violence is commonplace, and whole chunks of the city are without proper utilities. Conditions are so bad, in fact, that the citizenry have taken to spraypainting giant S's that have been crossed out as a form of protective magic, in the hopes that Snowtown will not harm what has been labelled as its own. Having joined the "three and a half detectives"^[1] in the entirety of Snowtown (one having no legs), Fell is determined to do all he can to better the city in many ways. He takes calls on his time off, he ignores a lack of a warrant for the sake of a little girl and he pushes through efforts to hire more precinct employees. He is noted by his powers of observation and deduction (a salute to Sherlock Holmes) and his ever-present digital camera.

Snowtown is not without its share of mysteries, including its location, which is near a body of water somewhere. According to Lt. Beard, it is "miles from anywhere, [and] colder than Eskimo nipples."^[1] Also unclear are the reasons for Fell's transfer though it involves an injured partner with recurring memory loss. Fell's city setting is anonymous with Snowtown obviously being a mixture of many downtown areas.

Richard meets the owner of a bar, Mayko, who is a young woman of Vietnamese descent. While Richard is spending an evening at her apartment, Mayko brands him while she is drunk and under the influence of painkillers, burning the Snowtown emblem into his neck. Later she and Richard make up and start spending more time together.

An interesting minor character seen in passing throughout the series is the nun. She appears as a short, somewhat heavyset nun in a habit, wearing a Richard Nixon mask and having black eyes with tiny white pupils. Thus far, the nun has been seen buying ice cream, purchasing a handgun, hiring the services of a prostitute, and apparently robbing a beggar. Richard's thought on his second sighting of the nun: "I need to think of something to arrest her for^[2]." Ellis has yet to indicate the nun's place in the grand scheme of Snowtown, but indicates she is getting "more dangerous" at the end of an issue, referring to her purchasing a gun in the next issue.

Collections

Issues are being collected in trade paperbacks as the series continues with the first out in April 2007 ^[3] :

• Fell, Feral City - collects issues 1-8 (152 pages, April 2007, ISBN 1-582-40693-6)

References

External links

• Review of Fell on KvltSite
• Fell #6 preview
• Fell, Feral City, reviewed at PopImage.com
• Warren Ellis on Fell, Newsarama, June 29, 2005