nixsight

This week, I took the opportunity to catch up on some of Warren Ellis’ work at Avatar. I’ve been terribly lax at reading the individual issues as they’ve mounted up, but I had some time, and found myself falling in love with “Freakangels” all over again, so it seemed like a good idea.

Ellis has had an apparently good working relationship with the publisher for a few years now, having found them receptive to his more excessive work, and he has produced a lot of creator-owned work through them.

I’m fairly certain that he was one of the first respected creators to work with the company, at a time when they almost exclusively published pornographic or explicitly gory comics, and they have certainly benefited from the collaboration. Since Ellis took the leap, Avatar have found themselves working with people like Garth Ennis and, by association Alan Moore, and have found themselves occupying shelf-space that previously they wouldn’t have been able to touch.

However, Ellis’ work for Avatar has always been a little hit and miss for me, never awful, but often falling shy of the other work I’ve read by him, or worse, only derivative of it. There have been high-points, like “Crecy”, but otherwise it’s felt like the writer had been allowing himself to indulge in the lack of restraint the publisher allowed.

“Freakangels” is beautiful, though.

It’s interesting… of all of the writer’s work at the moment, the one being released free to the public – start reading here – feels like the most personal, and is certainly the most indicative of a progression in his creativity.

A lot of it might have to do with Paul Duffield’s beautiful art. Superficially, it’s evocative of a manga aesthetic, with long limbed, wide-eyed and often androdgynous characters – the fashion-plate models of an Ai Yazawa or Momochi Reiko book clad in steampunk fashion.

(Should just apologise, actually, for how uninformed and out of date my manga references probably are – it isn’t an area I’m that conversant in…)

But there’s an inventiveness with form, a clarity of line and an affinity with empty space and the quiet panel that Duffield captures in the comic that sets him apart from other artists. Not afraid to pace out a conversation, or deliver static camera-angles, this is my favourite sort of comic art – it flows, it makes sense, and the line contrasts and confident colour mean that with the barest minimum of rendering, a depth of field emerges.

This sort of artist brings out the best in Ellis – and an artist like this allows Ellis’ scripts to bring out the best in them. And the rigid adherence to the four-panel format forces a discipline on the whole thing that just works beautifully. Without the possibility of “wow!” factoring the fuck out of each and every panel, both creators concentrate on delivering a clear story, and smart and realistic, individual characters.

Which is key, here, because this story could easily have become a mess of over-writing and artistic tics in lieu of characterisation. There’s a lot going on, in terms of character motivations, emotional and narrative themes, and there’s also one of the largest casts that I’ve seen in any recent Ellis stories – certainly more complexity than in any of Ellis other current Avatar books. However, in contrast to those less unusual narratives, the writer manages to avoid exposition and obvious writing shortcuts, and the artist lets us have a decent crack at working out what’s going on.

On a side note, the other great Ellis work of the last few years has to be “Fell”, and that also sticks to a rigid page layout, albeit a nine-panel one. So maybe that sort of physical restraint is good for the man.

Uh… just to clarify, I don’t mean that Warren Ellis should be put in restraints.

“No Hero” is a peculiar animal.

One of two books that Ellis has placed at Avatar in the last twelve months that professes to take a new look at the superhero – and thanks to the art of Juan Jose Ryp on each book, and the similar tones of the “voice” that Ellis uses in them, the books feel almost interchangeable.

What they don’t feel like is superhero books at all.

I’m not massively sentimental about the superhero genre, don’t get me wrong. But the unique selling point of each of these books was what they might have to say about that genre. “Black Summer”, the other series, started from the point of asking the question “what would happen if a superhero decided that fighting crime wasn’t enough, and went to the root of the country’s problems by assassinating the president?”

The thesis at work there isn’t all that far different from Ellis stellar and seminal work on “The Authority”, that with great power comes the ultimate responsibility, and in the context of pre-existing spandex heroes in a pre-existing comic universe, the argument really broke ground.

“No Hero” takes a more street-level view – though I’ve only read the first issue and the preview, the concept as shown in the promotional material and these issues is about how far a young and idealistic person will go to to become a superhero.

The problem with the book is that it suffers from the tonal flatness that sometimes affects Ellis writing when he’s clearly more enamoured of the ideas than he is the story or characters – it’s an issue that flows through “Black Summer” and his current “X-Men” work, and it makes you wonder what exactly it is you’re supposed to care about in this story.

Two of the main characters are Ellis cyphers, a model that he’s come to use a lot, and that I love, of the snide and smart anti-mentor and his dangerous female companion, but in this story they feel like one iteration too many, and the only real point where they caught my interest was when they appear in what I suspect is an unintentional homage to the scene where Spottiswoode entices Gary into his limousine in “Team America World Police”.

Josh Carver, another blank slate of a character that takes the role of neophyte hero, is impossible to get a read on in this first issue, and at this point he could go either way. Still, it’s difficult to say whether Ellis has done this so that he can form Carver in later issues – it feels more like it doesn’t really matter to the writer what his personality is.

There’s potentially a message in that – that Ellis may be drawing comparisons between Carver and the idealistic and barely formed personalities that the US and UK armed forces rely on to stock their numbers – but if that’s the intention, it’s one that you have to go looking for with a too-forgiving approach to the work.

For someone who is so good at building worlds or settings in his work, Ellis is in too much of a hurry, here, and both issue one and issue zero are almost half full of exposition, with the rest of the pages all deconstructed storytelling. This is a model that Ellis was at the forefront of, and has normally been an exemplar of, but in “No Hero”, the pace and balance of the two styles is all askew.

There are some really nifty pieces of Ryp artwork in the book, and his art is certainly detailed – as in previous work, notably “Black Summer”, he borrows heavily from Geoff Darrow’s toolkit, and he’s a good example of the style. I think, actually, he’s got a slightly softer touch in “No Hero” than the previous book.

However, it’s often a little too much, especially with the hyperactive colouring style that we’re still cursed with since the 90s, and there are times – especially when he tries to carry off a Miller-esque acrobatic sequence across four panels with the same still background – that you lose some of his figures entirely against the detail-static that his style throws up.

The main problem with the book thus far, though, is that the characters at it’s core aren’t recognisable at all as superheroes, despite the main concept of the book relying on the reader buying this as a dark and insightful take on the genre. What Ellis has done here instead is world-build from the ground up, creating a history from scratch for his characters that requires a science-fictional oversight of the costumes he’s created, as well as a world that is not only utterly unfamiliar through the actions of those characters now, but always has been.

Millar’s “Kick Ass” – and you probably know how I feel about him – explores the idea of real-world young heroes by at least trying to give the reader something that they recognise, which he can then subvert. What Ellis is doing, and I guess it makes him the braver writer, is running an experiment in writing.

I think “Black Summer” had the same flaws, for what it’s worth. Once again, anything intriguing about the question being asked at it’s core is diluted and confused by Ellis’ desire to scenario-build, and though the scheme or scientific impetus behind the super-team at the centre of the plot is different than in “No Hero”, and their ideology is only barely the same, they are almost interchangeable, and not recognisable as four-colour proxies.

None of that should matter. The idea of a super-powered attempt at a coup should be plenty of fodder for bloody awesome storytelling, regardless of the context in which those powers exist. The world-building gets in the way, though – too much of the book is about establishing the histories and relationships of the supers, of “Guns” in this book, and giving them origins and modes of working that went to such pains to distance them from the spandex world that the promoted concept becomes redundant.

In the end, there’s quite a cool story here, of intrigue, conspiracy, loyalty and betrayal, and what happens to a team when some of it’s members go so far off message that they become a liability. But when you start a story off with a man marching into the White House and assassinating the president, it feels like you’re asking for the rest of the story to be about the consequences mushrooming out and forward from that point, for both the man and the country, not looking further inward and backward like this book does.

“Black Gas” goes almost too far the other way, from the over-scripting and exposition of “No Hero” and “Black Summer” to super-decompressed storytelling and a breakneck rush to finish.

Now, “Black Gas” is a thinly disguised zombie outbreak story, with the twist being that the infected aren’t actually dead, they just might as well be, so inhuman have they become. They aren’t, in fact, even as changed as in something like “28 Days Later”, where the infection is otherwise unnervingly similar. These victims, in a perhaps unsurprising Ellis-esque wrinkle, aren’t undead as such – instead, the infection makes their base urges and hidden darkness come to the surface.

They are evil fuckers, basically.

Throw in the young couple, stranded on the island where the outbreak starts, and you’ve got a fairly hardcore set up for some survival horror. And Ellis knows what he’s doing with horror. Where the book is strongest is when the pair come slam up against the infection, most notably when it is only just starting to turn the infected. When they recognise the people as they change.

If it falls, it’s when the reader feels like Ellis is uncomfortable with his page-count – that rush to finish that I was just talking about – where even the best survival horror would take a beat to let the full horror sink in.

This isn’t helped by the often great, but sometimes undisciplined art of Max Fiumara. In fact, I recently reviewed the first issue of Fiumara’s work on new book “Four Eyes”, and that is a huge step up, especially when it comes to being brave enough to choose less hectic camera angles, and let the art communicate the emotions without the trickery. There are a few places where the moments and beats taht Fiumara chooses to put down on paper hobble the storytelling, but it’s good to see him improving so quickly.

I read the last few issues of the first book of “Doktor Sleepless” at the weekend, too, but it left me feeling I need to go back and read the whole lot again before commenting, so maybe next week.

And man, that’s late. I need to write up this week’s films, now, too. Sheesh. The things I do for my two readers.