blog-every-day-this-week week: fell by ellis & templesmith
Taking a cue from 2muchexposition, I will be blogging every day this week. Nothing big, nothing profound, just a series of short entries to see if I can do it. With the amount of test and assignment marking I have to do over the next couple of weeks, this will indeed be a challenge. Tune in daily to see if I can keep it up, or if I royally fall on my face!
When I'm too distracted at school by all my other duties there, and I just need to get tests or assignments marked, I've lately taken the train to Gloria Jean's, an Australian-based cafe chain that has a shop in the basement of the Raffles City shopping mall. They got me hooked in February, when all their hot drinks were only S$2.00 (regular price is S$5.00-6.00), as I could take my coffee over to the seating area and work. When the nearby music store starts playing their music, it's usually enough to just don earphones and listen to my own music (although sometimes the store blasts their selections so loud that it's driven me away).
Last week, after my eyes had begun crossing after the 30th paper or so, I packed up my stuff and wandered around the mall a bit before heading home. On the third floor of Raffles City is a comics store that mostly sells collected trade paperbacks (although they do have a handful of single-issue books as well) in addition to Magic cards and other gaming stuff. I browsed around, and happened upon Fell: Feral City by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Ellis (who is authoring about 800 simultaneous comics scripts as I write this) made me a fan with Transmetropolitan and Crooked Little Vein, and I've lately come to appreciate Templesmith's artwork after the VanderMeers (rightfully) gushed about him (I've got the second Wormwood volume, and am waiting on another comics shop to call me about the first). I also noticed the price, S$21.00 (~US$14), which was actually cheaper than the cover price for the book, something that is frankly unheard of, since book prices here are hiked up to cover the cost of importing them.
So I paid the man, and into my bag the book went.
Last Sunday night, I figured I'd read a couple of chapters before bed (the book collects the first eight issues of the series), but dammit, I kept reading until I got to the end. Each short chapter is self-contained, a deliberate move on Ellis' part, so that anyone could enter the series at any time, but the main arc concerning protagonist police detective Richard Fell is compelling enough to carry you from one chapter to the next. The hard-boiled sensibility, along with Templesmith's almost hallucinogenic visuals, combine to produce something that made me not want to put the book down. I already want to re-read it.
Googling the book yesterday yielded this article by Ellis on the format and pricing of the book:
Fell is a 24-page single, that contains 16 pages of full color comics and several pages of what's called back matter -- text stuff, sketches, background material, perhaps even audience emails as we get going. And it retails for $1.99 American.
Further; each issue is a self-contained story. If you read them all, yeah, you'll see ideas and relationships develop. But there's nothing stopping anyone entering the series at any moment, understanding the set-up and getting a complete experience out of it. It's no harder to walk in on than any episode of Law and Order.
Self-contained, as densely packed as Ben and I can manage, with extra reading material in the back, for a buck less than most books of its type.
Why? Well, I don't know about you, but I remember being poor. I remember the difference between (the local equivalent of) a dollar ninety-nine and three bucks being the difference between buying a comic or missing a meal. And for that purchase price, I wanted value -- a complete experience that I'd want to replay again and again.
I write for an early-adopter audience who likes reading the chapters of serialized graphic novels as they're completed. But I also write for people who want to go into a store with pocket change and come out with a complete story, what Alan Moore once called "a real slab of culture". That's why I did Global Frequency and the Apparat books. And that's why I'm doing Fell. Give me your pocket change and I'll give you a full whack of story.
Awesome. (Like a hot dog? Yes.) I do wish that the back matter Ellis talks about was also included in Feral City, since it apparently makes up one-third of each individual issue, but I'm not complaining much.
Fell issue #1 (the first chapter of Feral City) is available online completely for free. If that first taste doesn't convince you to fork out your own bux for the trade paperback, nothing will.
When I'm too distracted at school by all my other duties there, and I just need to get tests or assignments marked, I've lately taken the train to Gloria Jean's, an Australian-based cafe chain that has a shop in the basement of the Raffles City shopping mall. They got me hooked in February, when all their hot drinks were only S$2.00 (regular price is S$5.00-6.00), as I could take my coffee over to the seating area and work. When the nearby music store starts playing their music, it's usually enough to just don earphones and listen to my own music (although sometimes the store blasts their selections so loud that it's driven me away).
Last week, after my eyes had begun crossing after the 30th paper or so, I packed up my stuff and wandered around the mall a bit before heading home. On the third floor of Raffles City is a comics store that mostly sells collected trade paperbacks (although they do have a handful of single-issue books as well) in addition to Magic cards and other gaming stuff. I browsed around, and happened upon Fell: Feral City by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith. Ellis (who is authoring about 800 simultaneous comics scripts as I write this) made me a fan with Transmetropolitan and Crooked Little Vein, and I've lately come to appreciate Templesmith's artwork after the VanderMeers (rightfully) gushed about him (I've got the second Wormwood volume, and am waiting on another comics shop to call me about the first). I also noticed the price, S$21.00 (~US$14), which was actually cheaper than the cover price for the book, something that is frankly unheard of, since book prices here are hiked up to cover the cost of importing them.
So I paid the man, and into my bag the book went.
Last Sunday night, I figured I'd read a couple of chapters before bed (the book collects the first eight issues of the series), but dammit, I kept reading until I got to the end. Each short chapter is self-contained, a deliberate move on Ellis' part, so that anyone could enter the series at any time, but the main arc concerning protagonist police detective Richard Fell is compelling enough to carry you from one chapter to the next. The hard-boiled sensibility, along with Templesmith's almost hallucinogenic visuals, combine to produce something that made me not want to put the book down. I already want to re-read it.
Googling the book yesterday yielded this article by Ellis on the format and pricing of the book:
Fell is a 24-page single, that contains 16 pages of full color comics and several pages of what's called back matter -- text stuff, sketches, background material, perhaps even audience emails as we get going. And it retails for $1.99 American.
Further; each issue is a self-contained story. If you read them all, yeah, you'll see ideas and relationships develop. But there's nothing stopping anyone entering the series at any moment, understanding the set-up and getting a complete experience out of it. It's no harder to walk in on than any episode of Law and Order.
Self-contained, as densely packed as Ben and I can manage, with extra reading material in the back, for a buck less than most books of its type.
Why? Well, I don't know about you, but I remember being poor. I remember the difference between (the local equivalent of) a dollar ninety-nine and three bucks being the difference between buying a comic or missing a meal. And for that purchase price, I wanted value -- a complete experience that I'd want to replay again and again.
I write for an early-adopter audience who likes reading the chapters of serialized graphic novels as they're completed. But I also write for people who want to go into a store with pocket change and come out with a complete story, what Alan Moore once called "a real slab of culture". That's why I did Global Frequency and the Apparat books. And that's why I'm doing Fell. Give me your pocket change and I'll give you a full whack of story.
Awesome. (Like a hot dog? Yes.) I do wish that the back matter Ellis talks about was also included in Feral City, since it apparently makes up one-third of each individual issue, but I'm not complaining much.
Fell issue #1 (the first chapter of Feral City) is available online completely for free. If that first taste doesn't convince you to fork out your own bux for the trade paperback, nothing will.