[Fell] Awesome Sorcerer-esque comic

[Ron Edwards]

This is an unabashed fanboy post.

"Fell," a comic written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Ben Templeton, is my hands-down favorite comic of my current buy-batch. It's published by Image and the fourth issue hit the stores in the last couple of weeks.

It's about a cop who's been exiled to "Snowtown," a city, or part of a city, which has completely hit the skids to an even lower degree than Sin City. It is so good that I want to rub issues of it all over my body. (And I hope Warren Ellis reads this one day and goes, "Gross!" Ha. Vengeance is mine.)

I'm kind of a structual-thinker guy, so one appealing aspect of the book is that Ellis decided to make it 16 pages per issue, rather than the standard 22, and he also decided to go with a fixed 9-panel layout per page ... or rather, very slightly modified to work with fractions/multiples of that layout.

For those of you who know comics, this is way, way constrained by most of today's design standards. Based on mainly on wonderful innovators like Will Eisner, most of today's comics creators are big on "the page is my bitch, I can do anything with panel design or no-panel design, whenever I want." 1970s work by kooky dudes like Jim Starlin was considered medium-breaking at the time; now it's considered the rightfully-owned starting point.

But now here we have this comic which, not through habit and editorial standard, but through gut-based artistic need for constraint, is effectively not much more than a newspaper-strip on a comics page. And it's so short, per issue! Instead of wrinkling my nose at these "limitations," my reaction is pure, on-fire interest. This is the sort of thing that makes me hot. I realize that many of you disliked the incredibly spare design of my Trollbabe strip, and it sure made most of the artists squeal with frustration, but I like that kind of thing. Since I'm just me, and Warren Ellis is, you know, him, you can be assured that if anyone can make a story stronger through its spare presentation, he can do it with Fell.

As for the content, what's the Sorcerer stuff? Heh. All of it. "I guess I belong to Snowtown now." Read it yourselves.

Best,
Ron

[Brand_Robins]

Sold

[James_Nostack]

The only Ellis stuff I've read is mabe 20 issues of Transmetropolitan, which could have been a brilliant science-fiction series but somehow always turned me off.  But I'll certainly give it a look, if I can find it.  Ellis has always been fortunate with his artists, at least.

Does this new series still use the "Shouty Mary Sue Argues With Straw Men" technique?  I found that grew very tiresome very quickly. 

Ron, when you say the format is 9 panels, but it's like daily comic strips, are we talkin' 9 panels like the layout of Watchmen where it's all one story throughout, or three rows of individual comic strips like The Perry Bible Fellowship?

[Judd]

Does this new series still use the "Shouty Mary Sue Argues With Straw Men" technique?  I found that grew very tiresome very quickly. 

It is great single story Ellis but it doesn't have a Jenny Sparks clone yelling at people and being a bad-ass British chick.  In other words it doesn't feel like Ellis trying to out-Ellis himself.  Funny, I just wrote about this comic in my livejournal.  Yeah, its a winner.

[Ron Edwards]

Goddam comics geeks. Talk about one comic and they pop in with a bunch of blither about some other one. I'll prove it through self-demonstration - James, you mentioned The Watchmen? I just mentally wrestled with my own responsive-geek-comics system and resisted pounding out a diatribe about overrating Moore and how I bought the series issue by issue, wondering if it was cancelled between each one, not like you young pansies with your trade paperbacks.

So screw references to Ellis' other work and most especially to anything he wrote since becoming such a Name. In some ways, Fell reaches back into the days when he was a Thatcher-hatin' punk wannabe, pounding out stories for pennies, probably convinced that Michael Moorcock was a genius and that 2000AD was going to change the world ... naive? Yeah, sure. But Fell has a driving quality that suggests, to me, real writing, not filling issues and "being" a comics-man man. It reads as if Ellis is writing in order to create a story that he likes, period.

It's most especially interesting because he is deliberately rejecting the concept of story-arcs and master plans, instead trusting to raw aesthetic standards for what comes next. This is a topic which I think isn't going to fly well with an internet audience, because I am not suggesting that he is not writing/authoring a story. He is. But he's not doing it by setting it in amber prior to expressing it, either. Current geek-culture is enamored of predetermined story-arcs, mainly due to Whedon's work with B5 and Buffy and so on, and I think it's missing the trees for the forest (I chose that phrase carefully). Instead, Ellis is trusting to his own feel for the medium and letting his chosen constraints carry his decisions, issue by issue, in making a story. His text bits about the process, included in each issue, are pure gold.

I'm sure that many of you can see how this resonates with me, and with the issues/techniques I've promoted in RPG design over the last six years.

And I haven't even gone into how well he and Templeton seem to riff off one another, bringing out ideas and risks for both. With only a few issues in, I can only hope their interaction hits a quality-point that neither anticipated, rather than fizzling. Comics are pretty dodgy, high-labor things, and that "whizzz-bang!" between or among collaborators rarely hits, relative to the "whizzz- oh boy - uuhhh, zzzzz."

Oh, yeah. James, I was using the newspaper-strip concept mainly as analogy. No, a page in Fell is not a series of three-panel strips. Yes, it is more like The Watchmen, although Ellis is absolutely correct in issue #2 when he points out that he and Templeton are utilizing "flexibility" techniques within the constraints that you don't find in The Watchmen.

But why I'm bothering to clarify that, I don't know. Just buy the damn book and see.

Best,
Ron

[James_Nostack]

Goddam comics geeks. Talk about one comic and they pop in with a bunch of blither about some other one.

It could have been worse.  I could have mentioned Micronauts.  Which, for some reason I cannot comprehend, is apparently been published again.  Or Brother Power.

he is deliberately rejecting the concept of story-arcs and master plans

Good.  The whole "story-arc" concept is so lame.  I noticed that a few years ago, Ultimate Spider-Man took 180 pages to tell the same origin story that took 15 for Lee at Ditko.  Scene-framing is important, no matter what medium you're using. 

[Eric J-D]

Okay, so after reading this thread I went down to the local comic book store and--partly because I trusted Ron's claim that there wasn't a grand story-arc in sight, partly out of my own perversity with respect to anything that comes out in serialized form, but mostly because it was the only issue they had on the shelf--when out and bought issue #4 of Fell.

It's odd how much it conformed to the image of it I had already formed in my head based on Ron's description.  Even the art looked much as I had imagined it would.

And it is really good.  Very spare and simple compared to a lot of the stuff with which I am familiar, but deeply involving for the reader (at least it was for me).

So thanks, Ron, for the recommendation.  I think it's a beauty of a comic.  Now all I need to do is track down issues #1-3.

Cheers,

Eric


P.S. Rustin, if you read this thread, run (don't walk) and lay your hands on this sucker.  I think it would be a perfect source of visual inspiration for your LA-based Sorcerer game.

[Eric J-D]

This post might strike many of you as having little to do with the purpose of this forum.  I trust that Ron will let me know if that's the case, but I felt I had to say this to someone and no one is home at my house at the moment.

So today was one of those utterly blissful days.  You know the type--the days that Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" was designed to accompany.  I was in a city I love (that's NYC) with people I love (my wife, daughter, and my wife's M & P) and we're just haven't a great time taking them around town.  They decide to head back out to New Jersey to catch a concert at the university my wife teaches at, and they encourage me to stay and enjoy the city some more (which they know I love to do).  I knock around Chelsea, the Village and the Bowery for a while and, after checking several shops, what do I finally find but issues 1-3 of Fell.

Now these are pretty hard to find already, especially 1 and 2, so I am thrilled to find that "Forbidden Planet" has the last of their copies on the shelf.  Even better is that for a little more than $5.00 I can get all three issues (thank you Warren Ellis!).  On the train home I read them and am knocked out. They are wonderful!  If you love Sorcerer you should go out and get them.

Here are some of the things I love about the series:

1) Like Ron, I love that there is no story-arc. I know I could have lived without getting issues 1-3 because each issue is satisfyingly complete on its own, but its so damn good I wanted to track the first three down.

2) Ellis has pared the dialogue down to the bone and that self-imposed restriction creates a more eloquent and expressive story in ways that become more apprent on re-reading. 

3) It is a perfect marriage of visuals and text.  Both are incredibly eloquent.

4) I love that each issue so far has included at least one image of Richard Fell's reflection somewhere in the story.  I hope that this motif continues.

Okay, so to at least make a half-assed effort to bring this around to Sorcerer: if this thing had existed when Ron first published the game, I know it would have been listed in the bibliography.  It exudes Sorcerer on every glorious panel.  For visual inspiration alone it is worth owning.  But the story itself is also brimming with the kinds of issues that Sorcerer is designed to take on.  I love the way that Ellis handles Snowtown's progressive efforts to possess Richard Fell.  The tearing/damaging of Fell's suits (a kind of last vestige of his "Over the Bridge" identity) and their replacement (in issue #3) with a suit from Snowtown's past is a wonderful visual metaphor for this process.  I think any [i}Sorcerer[/i] GM wanting to think about how to create nice visual motifs to express things like Humanity checks/loss would be well-served by this comic.

Okay, that's enough gushing.  Go out and get it.

Eric

[Larry L.]

The clerk at Dreamhaven told me I was the second person to ask for all four issues in the last hour. I see my issues #1 and #2 are 3rd printing, so I'm glad to see it's doing well.

Good stuff, and my thin wallet could afford it. Damned if I don't wanna know what's up with the "nun."

[Mister Six]

Issue #1 of Fell is online here:

http://www.newsarama.com/ImageComics/Fell/Fell01Issue.htm

[Eric J-D]

Mister Six,

I'll leave it up to Ron to say whether or not your post was inappropriate thread necromancy or not, and instead take the opportunity to add that in addition to receiving five Eisner Award nominations (Best Continuing Series, Best New Series, Best Writer, Best Painter/Multimedia Artist and Best Lettering), issues #1, 3, and 4 of Fell are all receiving reprints.  So if anyone's been interested in reading the series but has found it to be sold out where you are, you should be able to pick them up soon.

Sadly, Image has announced that #5 will not be out until late May.

And to bring this 'round to something distinctly Sorcerer related, you all might want to check out the IC thread that Paka (Judd), TonyLB, and Ben Lehman have set up over at rpg.net for their Fell-inspired (at least it seems so to me) play-by-post game "Blood Simple."  It sounds like it will be great fun, and I for one look forward to hearing how the play-by-post medium works for Sorcerer.

Here's the link:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=258414

Cheers,

Eric

[Lisa Padol]

I found and read issues #1 and #2 of Fell. Oh yes. Haunting. Thanks for the recommendation, Ron.

-Lisa