Cover to Fell #1, illustrated by Ben Templesmith, published by Image Comics.

Fell is a comic book written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. It is published by Image Comics. Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (500x770, 38 KB) Cover of issue #1 of Fell The image is being linked here; though the picture is originally copyright I (OwenBlacker) feel it is covered by fair use because: it is a low resolution copy of a comic book... Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (500x770, 38 KB) Cover of issue #1 of Fell The image is being linked here; though the picture is originally copyright I (OwenBlacker) feel it is covered by fair use because: it is a low resolution copy of a comic book... Cover to the 30 Days of Night trade paperback by Ben Templesmith. ... Image Comics Logo Image Comics is an American comic book publisher. ... A comic book is a magazine or book containing the art form of comics. ... Warren Ellis Warren Girade Ellis (born February 16, 1968) is a British author of comic books and graphic novels, well known for his acerbic personality and sociocultural commentaries, both through his online presence and his writing. ... Cover to the 30 Days of Night trade paperback by Ben Templesmith. ... Image Comics Logo Image Comics is an American comic book publisher. ...

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 scene 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.

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"-es 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. As one of "three and a half detectives" [1] in the entirety of Snowtown (one being unable to walk), Fell is determined to do all he can to better the city by fighting crime.

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."[2] Also unclear are the reasons for Fell's transfer thought 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. Distribution of Inuit language variants across the Arctic. ...

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. Branding persons refers to the use of the same physical techniques as in livestock branding on a consenting or constrained human, a form of body modification (see that article for general considerations) similar to scarification (see that article for technical details). ...

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, and apparently robbing a begger. Richard's thought on his first sighting of the nun: "I don't even know you and I don't like you." 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. Nun in cloister, 1930; photograph by Doris Ulmann A nun is a woman who has taken special vows committing her to a religious life. ... The term pupil can also mean student. ...

Collections

Issues are being collected in trade paperbacks as the series continues with the first out in April [3]: In comics, a trade paperback (TPB) specifically refers to the periodic collections, published in book format, of stories published in comic books, usually capturing one story arc in the series. ...

• Fell, Feral City (152 pages, April 2007, ISBN 1582406936)

External links

• Fell #1 — The entire issue is available online for free
• Fell #6 preview