Alasdair Stuart's Blog

Day 16 and another barrier smashed. I have now, after two days of writing something within sight, I suspect, of 5000 words of comics journalism, have discharged all my comic reviewing obligations for the year. Or to be more precise, all the ones I had hanging including all the books from Thought Bubble last year and the two Judge Anderson collections from 2000AD. I’m done, apart only from what I choose to write about now and that may mean some more pieces or it may not.

It’s a weird sensation, seeing this much clear deck. I’m fighting the urge to fill it with more jobs and, instead, will go on to closing out the work from GenCon. Lots more emails, lots more waiting but it’s worth it. Done, done, onto the next one.

The great clearing of outstanding jobs really hit today. Despite the morning being lost to a series of shatteringly frustrating phonecalls with EDF, a company that somehow manage to provide us electricity without actually having us on contract or conducting any form of inter-department communication, I’ve filed six reviews today. They’re all comics I picked up at Thought Bubble 2011 and I like the idea of getting them in just before Thought Bubble 2012. There’s a certain symmetry to that, plus it’s a good show, so anything I can do to promote it is done.

Tomorrow is…more reviews! There’s one more Thought Bubble piece and a pair of graphic novels then on to GenCon clean up. The plan is to have my decks cleared and take the back two weeks of December all the way off. Plenty to do between there and here though.

And then I spent a week writing 12,000 words on a project I’m going to err on the side of caution and assume I can’t talk about yet, prior to writing another 12,000 to finish it off this week. How have you been?

Blogbusters isn’t on the site yet this week but do go have a look at the archive, hyper-linked back there. Do people still say hyper-linked? Is that still a thing? Anyway, this week my piece on the 10(Ish) Best Sidekicks ever went up. I had a lot of fun doing this one, there are a couple of my all time favorites in there and some of the comments are fascinating. Admittedly some of the comments are exactly the same ‘“You kids reduce your decibels! I know your dad!’ curmudgeonly nonsense that you get from certain Doctor Who fans but most of them are great and show exactly how difficult it is to quantify what a sidekick is. Case in point; I didn’t include any characters from Buffy and Angel because they’re all either mentors or protagonists, and whilst several people seemed in favor of including Raj from The Big Bang Theory he’s a main character as far as others are concerned. It’s one of those areas which fascinates me because it shows how fractious geek culture is, albeit in a mostly good-natured way for once. Science fiction is whatever we’re pointing at when we say ‘That’s science fiction’ and a sidekick is apparently the same. It’s a fun piece anyway, go check it out.

I definitely bought comics this week. Did I mention Kelly Sue DeConnick‘s Captain Marvel is one of the best series in years? In one move she’s turned Carol from the owner of the stupidest costume in comics (Because let’s face it kids, thigh high boots, a leotard and a scarf just screams kickass USAF pilot now doesn’t it?)into a fascinating set of contradictions; a pilot who doesn’t need a plane anymore, a woman at the top of her profession who’s only just starting to realize she deserves to be there and a kind, compassionate, endlessly emotionally strong human being who can, if called upon, punch you in the face with a tank. It’s a brilliant book, totally worth your time. I look forward to having the time to read this month’s issue.

I did, however, have time to watch the new trailer for Jack Reacher, the first movie adaptation of the eponymous, six foot plus, drifter/former military policeman/bringer of doom books written by Lee Child. The books are fun, very modern pulp and the movie…stars Tom Cruise. Who you will note is not six foot plus of anything. I’ve had my doubts but the new trailer’s gone a long way to assuaging them as you’ll see.

The Last Reel, by Lynda E. Rucker is film horror in my favorite way. There’s something about celluloid and horror and this story is a beautiful, wide-eyed look at the things that move in the gate, and the things that move outside it too.

And that’s me for the week. Incoming this week is an interview, an afterword piece for one of the best writers, and finest people, I know and 12,000 more words. At least some of which will include exactly how to use the big fake whale the Natural History Museum have in an action sequence. Hopefully I’ll be able to talk about what the project is too.

See you soon.

Oh also? The hidden links are back. There are a few extra links in this piece which will give you some hints as to what I’m going to be writing about shortly. Click stuff, see what happens.

Want to talk to me about the article? Come see me on Twitter at @alasdairstuart or email me.

I love comics. I love them because, and often despite, of the fact that I worked as a comic retailer for seven years and still work as a comics journalist. In that time I’ve seen every side of the industry, from the boundless enthusiasm and talent of the small press to the very best and worst of comics journalism and the innumerable times politics and personality clashes have destroyed good books at the highest level. I’ve also, like all comic fans, got used to being disappointed.

A lot.

Sometimes a book has a great idea and is killed by the creative team not speaking (The Scott Lobdell run on Wild C.A.T.S.), sometimes a book has a great premise which falls apart when editorial realize just what it is they’re publishing (Jack Cross) and sometimes a book has the right concept, the right creative team, is genuinely brilliant and…no one but you cares (S.W.O.R.D.). You get used to disappointment and, if you’re a certain kind of comic fan, you live in the ever decreasing circles of the books you liked and still buy out of habit, still nursing grudges older than the decade. Ask the right people about whether it was a good thing Hal Jordan was replaced by Kyle Rayner as Green Lantern for example and you’ll still get snarled at. It’s like the Mods and the Rockers, just more bookish. You like what you like, and anything else can get stuffed.
I always tried not to approach things that way, and over the course of my time at the store I tried to read as wide a range as possible. I enjoyed a lot of manga, especially titles like >Parasyte and anything by Masamune Shirow, went through my thin people vogueing around the supernatural phase with Top Cow, read Grant Morrison’s Justice League and waded my way through the jungles of the never ending crossover DC seemed to run for ten straight years in the 1990s. You do the job, you read the books and if you read the books, you learn about different ways to tell stories and if you learn about different ways to tell stories then you can learn how to tell stories better yourself.

That last one isn’t so vital for me these days, as I continue to gambol (Or perhaps, gamble) merrily in the fields of Nonficitonia, but the rest remains good advice. Stay open, stay enthusiastic. You find great things if you do.

And sometimes, you’re disappointed, which brings me to Justice League Dark volume 1: In The Dark.

Let’s get the positive out of the way first, the central idea here is nothing short of brilliant. The book is designed to take a group of characters that have existed off to one side for years, in the adult/horror/crime/whatever we’re pointing at when we say Vertigo imprint Vertigo, and drag them kicking and screaming into the central DC universe. These are all supernatural characters in a superhero’s world and it’s a dead heat as to which is more uncomfortable about that. Madame Xanadu is a fortune teller, Shade the Changing Man is an alien capable of warping reality, Zatanna is a world famous stage magician who is actually a magician and John Constantine is a chancer, a mage with very few morals, a very dark past and precious little inclination to play well with others. They’re joined by Boston Brand, aka Deadman, a ghostly superhero who can possess the living and are called together to try and find out why murderous copies of the same woman are appearing all over the US. The Justice League have already tried and failed, Xanadu is tormented by visions of the dreadful future that will occur if they don’t pull together and so, reluctantly, they do. It’s an interesting central idea, and one which repositions these characters as neatly filling a niche that the DCU previously left open. Their heroes are vulnerable to magic, magic is what these characters do so by the end of this book they’re not only firmly ensconced in the universe but they have status and a reason to be there.

The other good news is Mikel Janin, who’s art is a nice combination of anatomically solid, some fantastic page layouts that mirror the chaos being unleashed and moments of flat out queasy horror. This is a book that doesn’t pull any punches, more on that in a moment, and the moments where it cuts loose really work. The swarm of poisoned teeth is a memorably horrific sequence as are the various scenes of the June Moones causing havoc as they wander across the planet. His composition’s good, his people look like people and that grounds the book in a way which is very much needed.
Unfortunately, that’s where the rot sets in. The costume design is a near-textbook example of the sexism encoded into a lot of contemporary comics. The men, with the notable exception of the cadaverous Brand, are incredibly fully clothed throughout. The female characters, with the exception of June herself, are an unending parade of basques and boob windows. This isn’t Jim Lee 1990s era bad, after all some of these women actually appear to have pelvises and many of them look like they could walk unaided, but it’s still a massive, glaring oversight in the design of the book, and one which bleeds over into the characters.
To be clear, this is a series starring a fortune teller, a magician, a dead man, a demented metaphysical alien, an occult chancer and an unbalanced assassin who kills people with his soul. This is not a cuddly group. This is not a group that can even see cuddly from where they are and almost all of them have enough back story to be folded neatly into the book. Constantine in particular has a decades long tradition of gathering a circle of friends around him and ensuring they’re all brutally sacrificed for the greater good. Putting these people together requires the minimum possible effort.

Milligan provides the maximum and it fails spectacularly. It’s as though he’s taken every character and turned them dark to fit in with the book, even though they’re plenty dark already. Xanadu, a woman cursed with the ability to see the future is now addicted to the drugs that control her condition, Shade spends his days frantically building copies of his dead girlfriend and trying to reconcile with them before they realize they’re fakes, Constantine is a perennially grumpy sociopath who’s powers are boosted by physical pain and who solves the problem in the most dramatic, and at the same time flattest, way possible and Zatanna has been transformed from the authoritative, wry embodiment of magical power into a basque wearing, mentally unstable Trinity knock-off. Elegance and power traded for a cheap postmodern reference and a little more décolletage.

The most poorly served though is Deadman, who is transformed here from the amiable, sweet-natured character we’ve seen before into something closer to a libido in a bodystocking. His entire plot arc across the story is; possess man to try and get girlfriend to sleep with him, possess June to try and get girlfriend to sleep with her, get dumped, stick with June in a slightly sleazy manner, get June killed, mourn her and get angry. It’s a complete 180 degree turn from the character prior to this and the throwaway explanation for this, and all the other characters acting out; that Enchantress’ madness has infected them, feels tacked on, the frantic last minute hand of an editor, hand closing on the tiller. It’s a valiant attempt but all it does is shine a light on what appears to be a script dead set on taking naturally dark characters and turning them all the way up to 11.

Now, let’s talk about violence. I have no problem with violence in my fiction, provided it’s there to serve a purpose, just as I have no problem with violence in my reality, provided I’m either watching it take place in a ring or a cage or training in it myself. Comics are based on punch ups, they’re based on spectacle and action and that’s where some of the book’s strongest moments are. The Justice Leagues’ disastrous assault on the Enchantress is brutal and unsettling and Xanadu’s team’s own assault has an air of attrition and effort to it that more comic action scenes need. This isn’t the 1980s, these people are fighting for their lives and getting roughed up doing it.
But even here, the book overcooks. In six issues three main characters get roughed up to the point where their noses are bleeding, which is, on the one hand, a useful piece of visual shorthand and on the other, all three of them are female members of the cast and whatever the intentions, that sends a message that could be read one of two ways. The charitable way is that the female characters are at least the physical equals of the men, have no problem getting bloody and can more than hold their own in a fight. The uncharitable way of looking at is another layer of ‘darkness’, another pointless coat of matte black paint on something that was black to begin with. All of this piles on top of itself, stacking ludicrous posturing and emoting so high that the book feels like one of those six issue wonders that clogged the shelves in the early ‘90s, all edgy characters, snarls and tattered capes until it reaches a literal, and physical, crescendo. Characters argue for almost no reason, characters ignore other characters because otherwise the plot collapse and most egregiously, Constantine briefly forgets he isn’t a 1970s police officer and slaps Madame Xanadu. The moment would be deeply uncomfortable, especially after the nosebleedfest, if A)Xanadu didn’t immediately slap him back and B)It didn’t feel so forced. This is dark, mature storytelling in the same way the very worst episodes of Torchwood were, juvenile fiction wearing shoes two sizes too big for it. It’s clunky, predictable, over wrought and in places flat out bad. It even ends on a dark cliffhanger, as Xanadu collapses and proclaims a man called Andrew Bennett is dead and Cain, the sire of all the vampires is risen. Which is nice but for the fact we have no idea who that is and those events tie into >I, Vampire, another DC title that isn’t even referenced here. Which, to be fair, at least means editorial had as much trouble keeping the book under control as Milligan.

Justice League Dark: In The Dark is the prettiest bad comic book I’ve read this year. Janin’s art is beautiful, the structure of the central concept is beautiful and there are flashes of the old Milligan in the script, even in amongst the ridiculous cheap sensationalism. It’s almost the worst possible start for a book like this and I’d be fascinated to see what the arrival of Jeff Lemire on script duties, starting from issue 9, does for it. By all accounts there’s a massive increase in quality and frankly, it needs it because I can’t remember the last time I read a comic with ideas and creative talent this strong, that was this difficult to love.

John Constantine has been around. A former punk rocker turned street magician, Constantine has faced down every ruler of hell, defeated the thing that lives behind the world, survived time in an insane asylum and a Maximum Security prison and become involved time and again with the London underworld.

John Constantine has been around. Created by Alan Moore during his acclaimed run on Saga of the Swamp Thing, Constantine was originally modelled on Sting; a cocky, slightly alien occult wide boy with an eye for the main chance and a ruthless streak a mile long. As the lead character in Hellblazer, he’s become one of the great anti-heroes of the last twenty years and very nearly every major comic writer working today has worked on the title at one time or another. Constantine is, literally, a constant, a Chandler-esque figure with none of the romance and a lot more cynicism, a man who endures in both senses of the word.

John Constantine has been around. Over the years he’s travelled the length and breadth of England, has spent time in the US, done time in the US and lived in Australia. One of the very places he’s never been is out in the spotlight, in the glare of publicity that only reality TV can provide.

Until now. Ian Rankin, one of the greatest crime writers of his generation has produced the first in a new series of Vertigo Crime graphic novels. Dark Entries is the story of what happens when John Constantine and reality TV collide. It’s also a fascinating examination of the difference between compressed and decompressed storytelling.

Rankin is the master of the quiet character touch and his Rebus novels are full of the sort of unconscious character tics that make people unique. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see not only how he moves across to comic work but what he leaves behind to get there. Rankin’s eye for description is still there but he’s been able to move that aspect of the work across to the art, giving both elements equal weight. Produced with quiet authority by Weather Delle’dera the black and white art manages to be tense without being scratchy and Delle’dera manages to give each character unique mannerisms. Jude the football hooligan slouches his way around the house just as Ishmael, the cautious, quiet, oldest housemate is always looking around the room, always making sure everyone else is there. Alice, her arms covered with scars almost never makes eye contact whilst Tom the amiable American geek makes far too much despite his eyes being concealed behind the blank white discs of his glasses. Akiko, the Japanese girl is quiet, reserved and desperate whilst Steph is aware, upright, awake. Each one is unique, each one is well rounded and each one is doomed.

Rankin shares a certain wilful contrariness with his most famous creation and for the first one hundred and seventeen pages, Dark Entries is a slow burn, a murder mystery without a murder. We follow Constantine as he’s approached by Mr Keene, the producer of a reality TV show called Haunted Mansion whose mansion is a little too haunted, we see Keene feed him information, see Constantine enter the house and see what’s begun to terrify the contestants. We also see a lot of the traditional elements of reality TV, from circular conversations to complaints about the lack of alcohol, diary room confessions and the constant struggle for dominance in the pecking order that has been the cornerstone of Big Brother in particular for years. Its typically impressive work from Rankin, putting six people together in an odd environment, and putting the perennial outsider, the detective, in the middle of them. It’s a murder mystery without a murder, And Then There Were None where everyone’s still upright and the result is a low key but constant rise in tension.

Then, on page one hundred and eighteen, Rankin shows us the truth and everything changes. The true nature of the house and the contestants is revealed as it’s placed in a much larger, much more unsettling concept. The story is no longer John Constantine in the world of reality TV but reality TV in the world of John Constantine, a change so dramatic the page colour even shifts from black to white.

This is where Rankin may lose some readers. What began as a relatively straight haunted house story becomes outright supernatural horror with the turn of a page and Delle’edera’s rendition of hell and its denizens must surely rank with John Ridgway and Steve Dillon’s versions as definitive. Like his predecessors, Delle’dera’s hell is spacious, open and one step to the left of normal and, just like his predecessors, Delle’dera uses that to lull us into a false sense of security. Hell really is other people here, as Haunted Mansion is revealed to be a long term ratings hit amongst the damned. Every aspect of reality TV culture is transposed across, from the endless discussion of the housemate’s actions to Eviction Night and the constant scrabble to keep the viewers happy. At first it’s a jarring change, but as the novel goes on it becomes clear that this really is the only way the story could go, running the supernatural world of John Constantine together with the barely natural world of reality television.

Even here, Rankin cheerfully refuses to increase the pace. The tension continues to build, the crowds continue to get raucous but they also keep watching.
Because that’s what you do. Reality TV is, like any entertainment, an investment of time for the viewer, albeit with an added social element. You keep watching through the bad bits so you’ll see the good bits when they happen but you also keep watching because that’s what everyone else does. The contestants are alienated so you don’t have to be.
This is the true genius of the book as Rankin, the novelist who excels at long form storytelling, uses reality TV as a bridge into comics, a medium traditionally associated with short form stories. Rankin keeps every element of his style and marries them to the standard tropes of a Hellblazer story: a very English inferno, suburban horror and personal sacrifice. He even willingly sacrifices his favoured location, with the only reference to Edinburgh seeing Constantine confront Brian McArthur, a former friend who became obsessed with Sawney Bean. Brian’s descent into insanity, cannibalism, murder and death plays like what it is, the big finish of a smaller story. In that story, Brian and the question of whether he was possessed by or obsessed with Bean would be the centre of attention but here, it and Brian, are pushed to the sidelines. He becomes a rejected housemate, a demented fan, someone who knows they’re important and takes desperate measures to get near the star of the show. Which is, as ever, Constantine.

The end result is a novel that feels expansive but not padded, something that wears the clothes of a reality TV show but takes it to some unimaginably dark places. It marries the human touch and deliberate pace of Rankin’s novels with the immediacy of comics, creating a graphic novel in the most literal sense of the phrase. The final quarter, where everything comes to head, has that sickening tension that comes after the fall but before the impact, a sense that no one, not the housemates, not Constantine, not even Mr Keene is safe. It’s the moment after the crowd turns but before the crowd riots, and it’s a credit to Rankin that this is the most unsettling aspect of the story. It’s also a pitch-perfect examination of why John Constantine remains such a successful character; he’s a dark, metaphysical lens that we can view the world through and be horrified and fascinated before we turn away. He has no such luxury but at least, with Rankin, he’s in very safe hands.

This is Sherlock Holmes’ year, we’re just living in it. No less than three new versions of Conan Doyle’s classic detective are launching this year across three different media and three very different approaches. The obvious question of course is why? The less obvious question is which, if any, will succeed?

It seems oddly fitting to start with the version of which we know least. Sherlock filmed in January, a sixty minute pilot designed to update the character to modern London. Superficially it’s the least interesting of the three until, that is, you examine the cast and crew.
Created by Stephen Moffat, about to take over the reins of Doctor Who and co-created by Moffat and Mark Gatiss, Sherlock appears to have taken great pains to maintain the basic tenets of the characters and stories. Holmes is still brilliant but socially inept, Watson is still compassionate, slightly dogged and his closest friend. They even live at the same address.
But Moffat and Gatiss both have a reputation for surprising decisions and the fact that Moriarty is mentioned in the press release is I suspect, very deliberate. This has the potential to be one of the most interesting takes on the character in decades and with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Watson, the central cast are certainly about as strong as it’s possible for them to be. Sherlock looks set to air later this year and it’ll be interesting to see how it fares.

Stepping across to comics for a moment, Leah Moore and John Reppion are currently writing a Sherlock Holmes series for Dynamite Entertainment. Moore and Reppion have been quietly carving a name for themselves in the industry for some time now and their Albion series was simultaneously a celebration and a particularly nasty subversion of some classic English comic characters. They get the peculiar combination of courtesy and violence, tea and blood-soaked shirts that lie at the heart of this sort of English fiction and it’s this sensibility that they bring to Sherlock Holmes. The idea behind the series is simple; these are the stories Conan Doyle didn’t get to tell, stories set in the Victorian London we know so well, starring Holmes, Watson, Lestrade and the rest but in comic form.
The end result is impressive. The debate about whether comics are better telling decompressed serials or compressed stand alones is rendered moot here as the script, along with Aaron Campbell’s art imitates the erudite language of Conan Doyle’s work through pacing rather than dialogue. The first story, ‘The Trial of Sherlock Holmes’ is currently two issues in and in that time we’ve seen Holmes arrested for a murder he seemingly cannot be innocent of, Watson and Lestrade united against a curiously unhelpful Chief of Police, Holmes remarkably relaxed to be in prison and something terrible moving in the shadows of London High Society. These two issues are packed with incident and information, filled with exactly the sort of dense, informative plotting Conan Doyle excelled at but unfold at a unique, deliberate pace. This is prose storytelling in comic form, done not just right but exceptionally. The principles of the character have rarely been more honoured without it once seeming like slavish adherence to the text.

At the other end of the spectrum, the trailer for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes film arrived a couple of weeks ago and caused a minor stir in fan circles. The film casts Robert Downey Junior as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson and judging by the trailer sets them against the beginnings of the occultist and spiritualist movement that Conan Doyle himself would become so infamously drawn to.
The trailer is just over two and a half minutes long, gives both Downey Jr and Law a chance to shine and drives home one point over and over again; this is not your father’s Sherlock Holmes. It shows Holmes engaged in a bare knuckle boxing match, a singularly inept fight with a villain in a shipyard, diving out of the House of Commons into the Thames, failing to pick a lock and being knocked out by Irene Adler. There’s gunplay, explosions and the sort of rapid fire deadpan humour that Downey Jr excels at.
It looks, in short, marvellous. This is the other road to take with Sherlock Holmes, eschewing purism for a format where the characters are rendered down to their barest essentials (Brilliant, eccentric detective, compassionate, long suffering friend, charming, wily female criminal) and then something entirely new is built on top of them. It will, and has I’m sure, enrage purists as the character appears to be rendered down to nothing more than Indiana Jones in period London, the Doctor without his TARDIS.
But that’s not the point. The point is, Holmes CAN be rendered down in this fashion, can be altered, changed as the author requires. He’s very nearly a perfect character, unique but mutable, an ideal that stands a little outside the norm and able to reflect whatever an author brings to it. Holmes is a mirror held up not just to the crimes he investigates and the society within which they occur but also the authors who stand behind him.

This is the central point of Paul Cornell’s magnificent ‘The Deer Stalker’. Available for free on the BBC website it’s a dizzying story that begins with Watson in hiding as mysterious soldiers stalk London and culminates in a moment of post-modern surrealism that not only explains every different incarnation of the character but puts each on an equal footing. He’s an elemental, pure figure and as a result is oddly mutable, a figure adept at disguise be it textual or meta-textual.

Which brings us to the definitive Holmes variation; Gregory House. He’s an irascible, bitter, sarcastic junkie with a dogged, overly compassionate best friend, an establishment figure who is as irritated by him as they are awed and a group of young, eager hopefuls who want to prove themselves. He even lives at 221B.
The medical detective show is in its fifth season and, for all the changes made to cast and plotting, for all the focussing in on the lives of individual characters and the quietly dark hearts of the Princeton Plainsboro staff, the stories remain basically the same; a patient with impossible symptoms is admitted, House tries something and it works a little then fails, tries something else that fails and makes it worse then tries something else and nine times out of ten, cures the patient. Not everyone goes home whole but by and large, everyone goes home. More often than not, House wins and more often than not, he takes no satisfaction from that at all, constantly turning to the next puzzle, the next case. He’s a constant, both in the hospital and the series and that has itself become a plot point. Recent episodes have begun to explore the concept that House is terrified of change, that his constant bullying and cajoling of patients and staff is to hold them in line, to keep them from breaking ranks, breaking the pattern.
This is the genius of the show, taking the format of the original stories and hanging a lantern on them, using that repetition as a character beat in and of itself. House is a constant and he’s trapped by that constant, his genius a fragile structure based on a single friendship and the total control he exerts over his staff.
House is Holmes taken to the nth degree, a snarling, sarcastic figure with a horrific childhood that tortures as much as it enables him. The last half season alone has seen him attempt suicide in the name of clinical information, risk permenant brain damage in a desperate attempt to save the love of his best friend’s life and hire a private detective to keep tracks on his friend and his staff. He’s a disaster, a barely functional human being who uses his constant humour to hide the very intellect, the very concern he’s desperate to prove he doesn’t have. House is a far darker, far more driven figure than Holmes and when the time comes for his Reichenbach Falls it’s very difficult to imagine him returning.

But for all the vicodin and motorcycles, the prostitutes and the lewd comments, at his core, Gregory House is Sherlock Holmes. He’s the same driven, brilliant, slightly doomed figure updated to the present day and placed in an entirely unique context that not only allows him to stand out but also throws a blinding light on Sherlock Holmes and the lives the two men all but share.

When it comes down to it, Holmes is Holmes, regardless of whether his name is Sherlock or Greg, whether he’s in print or on the screen, in 19th Century London or 21st Century America. He’s both unique and uniquely mutable and that means he can be whatever is required of him, however impossible, or improbable, it may seem.

Raymond Chandler once wrote ‘Down these mean streets a lonely man must walk, who s not himself mean.’ It’s a concept that a lot of crime fiction, whether focussed on the policemen or the criminals still revolves around, the idea that a wrong will be righted whether by an arrest or desperate, last minute and blood soaked retribution. It’s a starting point, a catalyst and also an immense constraint. Because the sum must be balanced, there must be men in white hats and black hats, something must be done, everything must be paid for.

In Snowtown, the maths works differently

Fell, written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Ben Templesmith is a series where the architecture, both of the stories and the city, is as much a character as Richard Fell himself. Told in one-off, sixteen page issues each dealing with a single case, it throws away the traditional serialised storytelling of comics to embrace something a lot closer to television. Crime fiction has flourished on TV with the CSI universe now incorporating five TV shows and series like Criminal Minds and Dexter exploring the perspectives of the victims and killers in equal detail. It’s a smart move, giving the series a familiar structure which not only appeals to comic readers but shares common ground with some of the most successful TV shows on the planet. As a result, there’s at least some closure every issue, as Richard either finds the person he’s looking for or finds someone who has done something else as bad and who deserves to be punished. You get what closure you can in Snowtown and that’s a lesson that Fell and the reader both learn very quickly.

Richard Fell himself, at least initially, is Chandler’s hero, a man who volunteers to walk down these mean streets and make them a little better. He’s a quiet, almost studious figure, contained and articulate and just a little distant. It’s not the distance of the intellectual, of Holmes or more recently House but rather the distance of a man who knows the power of information, can read people like a book and lives in perpetual terror of others reading him. He’s smart, competent and all too aware of how much danger that can put him in as well as the power it gives him in a place like Snowtown.
The more time he spends in the city though, the more that begins to change. Snowtown is so relentlessly violent, so cheerfully nihilistic that buildings are tagged with the Snowtown mark, a sigil that’s supposed to protect those inside from harm. Richard himself is branded with it by Mayko, the bar owner he begins a gentle, tentative romance with and it’s this marking and Fell’s acceptance of the urban tribal magic it represents that signals the beginning of his evolution. The man who solves his first couple of cases simply by noticing what others don’t is framing a violent mugger for an unsolvable crime and breaking and entering by the end of the first collection. He’s still a good man but he’s a good man being changed, literally wearing Snowtown’s clothes following an encounter with a suicide bomber and a nice old lady who gives weapons to the increasingly terrified pensioners of the city
The moment where Richard receives his new suit is particularly interesting, as it not only evokes the traditional ‘suiting up’ moment of superhero comics but is also a very deliberate harking back to older heroes, older archetypes. Richard is a nice, polite boy who wants the best for the good people around him and frequently violent but always fair justice for the bad. He owes as much to Black Mask, one of his childhood heroes as he does to Homicide‘s Tim Baylis or The Wire‘s Jimmy Macnulty. He’s a man out of time and place and fully prepared to use that to get what he wants.
Richard is, fundamentally, a genius and his natural deductive ability are where the creative team really shine. An early issue sees him tracking the final steps of a woman whose foetus was cut from her, her after image tracing it’s final steps across the page and across Fell’s mind. It’s a quietly impressive, moving sequence, made all the more so by the fact Richard is smart enough to go this far and no further. He’s good just not quite good enough and it’s only after talking to Mayko and learning about the repulsive practice of ‘smoke babies’ that he’s able to return to the street, discharge his weapon and note the windows that don’t light up, the people that feel protected by a different type of magic that’s repulsive even in Snowtown. The panels, showing Richard firing, the windows lighting up and him making notes are a perfect marriage of art and script and mark out a style unique to the series. It’s further developed by both the pictures Richard takes and post it notes, used by both the character and the creative team to tremendous effect. One, in the second issue, is attached to the belongings of a murder victim and reads simply ‘All she had left’.

For all his intelligence, decency and compassion though Richard Fell may not be as good a man as he’s perceived to be. Several flashbacks in the series show him visiting his partner, who cheerfully admits to having no memory of who he is and reveal that far from volunteering for Snowtown, he was banished there for two years following an undisclosed incident in the city. That incident has yet to be revealed but the implication seems to be that Richard is more at home in Snowtown than even he would like to admit.
Fell’s supporting cast, oddly, owe more to contemporary crime fiction than he does. Lt. Beard, Ri chard’s shift commander, is superficially the standard tough lieutenant of crime fiction whilst his colleagues include Bromwich, a young, inexperienced detective and Owlsley, an experienced veteran. Even Mayko, at first, is a tough but compassionate bartender, a woman who has seen it all happen before more than once.
But Lt. Beard can barely make it through the day, Owlsley has come back to service despite losing his legs and Mayko, just dumped by her fiance, needs anti-depressants to work in a bar her father won in a card game. The only people in control in Snowtown are the criminals, ranging from the polite old lady who gives guns to her friends to the ‘Nixon Nun’, a ghastly figure dressed in a nun’s habit and a Nixon mask whose actions become progressively more intimidating and seems to embody Snowtown itself, a tangible force that Richard can push against, can see but never quite touch.
None of them are simple, none of them have it easy and all of them are more than they appear, complex characters let loose in a city where the meat trucks are regularly stopped by snipers and packs of domestic dogs have gone feral. Each one struggles to hang on as Snowtown bucks and shifts beneath them, in most cases wanting nothing but to get to the end of the day alive. These may be mean streets but they’re mean streets that must be lived on and everyone but Richard Fell knows this. He’s Chandler’s man wandering Snowtown’s streets and not only changing them, but being changed by them, becoming a feral policeman in a feral city.

Fell, like Snowtown itself, takes the standard sum of crime fiction and comes up with a different result. This is a city where the best detective on the force has been exiled there, where criminals are so all pervasive if you can’t find the right one then anyone will do. It’s a city choking on it’s own violence and it’s own waste, Chandler’s mean streets collapsing in on themselves as the cycle of violence and depravity accelerates.
But for all this, Fell is a series about people not at their best but doing their best. Lt. Beard may be border line insane and Owlsley may not have legs but they both show up for work. Mayko’s life has collapsed and she works in the wreckage of her father’s past but she’s still there and at the heart of it all, so is Richard Fell. A quiet genius with a violent streak and a dark past, a man who cares for the people everyone else doesn’t and who finds himself on the line between corruption and evolution. He may not be a good man, but he’s good enough.

Fell:Feral City collects the first eight issues of the series and is available now.