Runo Knows...Desolation Jones

Nov 30, 2007 13:25

Hey it's a 2-for-1 Warren Ellis party today!

Desolation Jones, illustrated by J.H. Williams III, is an interesting story.  The trade paperback is a collection of six issues of the comic.

The main character, Desolation Jones, is a former British intelligence agent who survived the "Desolation" test.  He only sleeps one hour a night, is very vulnerable to sunlight, and claims to not care about anyone or anything.  He's imprisoned in Los Angeles, a prison of sorts for ex-intelligence agents.

He's hired by an old colonel to recover Hitler porn.  Cross the porn and weird body modification postings of Ellis' BAD SIGNAL mailing list and his LJ with a hardboiled detective story and you've about got it.  You've got other people cast off from the intelligence community - a man who only eats once a year, but it needs to be large amounts of raw (read: live) protein, a woman who was intended to be a non-resistable sexpot but ended up emitting pheromones which disgust everybody (but Jones), and others.

Through violence and run-ins with porn producers, wayward daughters, and other types, Jones eventually figures out what's going on just in time for the story to end on a bleak note.

You end up liking Jones, despite him being a wanker.  He claims not to care about anybody or anything, but his reactions to the failed sexpot woman (whose name is completely escaping me right now) or his driver shows that it's not really true.

The art is very stylistic.  Unlike complaints I've had about other artists (see, uh, right below here) the only thing I can complain about in here is that occasionally it can be hard to tell which order to read the panels in.  But it works out well for the story, and meshes right into the feel that Ellis and Williams want to give you.

Hopefully there will be more of these.

j.h. williams iii, comics, social, runo knows, crime, warren ellis, technothriller, alternative history

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