Snowtown, the name reminds me of those pretty plastic snowglobes with floating white glitter. Snowtown is like that but it's shit, blood and spunk that's floating in the air and falling on you. Yet, its easy to sink into these sicko stories and bruised images, and into the skin of the surprisingly compassionate Fell.

"None of you are nothing to me", detective Fell ( )

Not for the faint of heart.

Warren Ellis's writing is often full of everything that lurks in the shadows and goes bump in the night. He explores the underbelly from the underbelly's point of view. That's what Snowtown is, from the perspective of detective Fell. Everyone is hiding something, even our savant Detective who is akin to TV's "The Mentalist" or "Psych" with his powers of observation, common sense. But he also has the ability to imagine the worst, and the TV characters would never find themselves in Snowtown, a secluded community the world chose to forget about. It's dark and dismal, and a nightly beat covers more murders than a whole week over the bridge.

Ben Templesmith's art is like a really great horror film. It lends itself perfectly to the words and images created by the twisted imagination of Warren Ellis. A perfect pairing of two of my favorite people. So far, I believe FELL only goes up to 9 issues (the trade is issues 1-8). Both contributors are incredibly busy, but I hope they finish it some day. ( )

It is difficult to tell from the cover image but Fell vol. 1 Feral City is a graphic novel collecting the first eight issues of Fell. If you are a reader of graphic novels you certainly recognize the name, Warren; Ellis, a British author "well known for sociocultural commentary."

Fell: Feral City is a hard-core noir graphic novel. Richard Fell (Rich) is a police detective recently transferred "across the bridge" to Snowtown from an unspecified city. We don't learn the reason for his transfer in this volume but apparently it was a matter of accept the transfer or be fired. From what we learn about Fell here it is easy to surmise that he did something out of a sense of justice rather than what was politically expedient.

Snowtown is a feral city, blighted, decaying, randomly violent, inhabited by people with nowhere else to go or who don't care to go anywhere else. There is one police precinct with three and a half detectives to take care of all of Snowtown. One detective has no legs which accounts for the half.

Soon after arriving in Snowtown, Fell finds Idiot's Bar, run by a Vietnamese woman named Mayko. Mayko and Rich talk and she starts to fill him in on Snowtown. Like the meaning of the tag painted on buildings all over Snowtown, an S with X over it. Mayko tells Rich, "You put it up, you belong to Snowtown. If Snowtown knows who you are, it won't come and get you."

The chapters are short, perhaps 26 pages of mostly seven or nine panels. The eight chapters show Rich acclimating to Snowtown, working cases, and developing a relationship with Mayko. By the end of volume one we know the kind of detective Fell is. He cares. Snowtown is now where he lives and he intends to look after the other people who live there.

I would like to say a few words about graphic novels, particularly to those of you who haven't looked at one. I'm not a hardcore reader of graphic novels but I picked this one up because I read about it on Will Wheaton's blog, WWdN: In Exile - you might remember Will as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The New Generation - and he wrote good things about it. I really like the crime genre, particularly noir, and my local comic shop, Comic Cubicle, had it in stock. Graphic novels are interesting on several levels. There is the collaboration needed. You have the writer, the illustrator, and the letterer. All contribute significantly to the work. Obviously you need a good story to begin with and from what I see in Fell, Warren Ellis can write a cracking good one. The illustrations provide the descriptive elements that would otherwise have to be put down in words. A single page of nine panels would take several pages of text to describe. But it isn't just the pictures, the uses of different color washes can do an amazing job setting a mood. Take the panel where Rich first sees Idiot's Bar, the street is in shades of grey but Idiot's Bar is lit in warm sepia tones. There is a small box of text that looks a bit like a post-it note that reads "Oh thank God." There is a tremendous amount detail and feeling in that one panel. You get Rich's state of mind and the likelihood that Idiot's Bar is going to become a place of refuge for Rich. The letterer not only has to provide the text but let us know who is taking and the sequence in which each character speaks. Skillfully done, you get the impression of rapid back and forth dialog like you see often in cop shows such as Law and Order.

If you are a fan of gritty noir police stories and are curious about graphic novels, I recommend Fell. Actually, I would recommend Fell as a terrific graphic novel under any circumstances and would like to buy Will Wheaton a beer for bringing it to my attention.

Warren Ellis, surely working himself into the grave one nine-panelled page at a time, has done it a-goddamn-gain. I'm not sure that Ellis is ever better than when writing at street level; the grime, the bleeding, the routine, the situations you might find in the news. His superheroes are usually delightful (see Nextwave and Planetary), but his dirty cities are better.

In Fell you'll find humanity but not sweetness, empathy but not forgiveness. Rarely have I seen so much poverty in a graphic novel - and here it's not a "social issue", but the setting for every scene. There's also real horror here, and it left me unsettled.

Of course, this being Ellis, it's also hilariously funny. If that's not a combination you're comfortable with, you should probably steer clear.

At the heart of all this is the enigmatic protagonist, Detective Richard Fell. Disgraced, exiled to grotty Snowtown, Fell is a strangely mild hero: no cowboy, certainly no saint, but perhaps a good citizen. I was affected by his final assertion that, in the awful purgatory of Snowtown "none of you are nothing to me." He has secrets in his past that will no doubt be teased out in future instalments.

Ben Templesmith's brilliant art is perfectly suited to the story, by turns gritty, glowing, grotesque, painterly, and very atmospheric. I will have nightmares for years about the way he draws teeth.

The first 1/6 of this book is available free at the following link: http://www.newsarama.com/ImageComics/... ( )

What can I say, this is really really good. The art is constrained to 3x3 panels, and is gorgeous. The story is dark and the art fits this mood very well. ( )