A fond Farewell to Cemetery Beach

I shall miss Cemetery Beach by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard which has just finished its short seven issue run. It was heralded as a rollicking adventure story and this is exactly what it was. For most of the story the baddies chased the goodies and the pace of the action was relentless.

This two page spread in the printed version (copied from my iPad screen) sums up much of what I loved about the series. The action is obvious and exuberant, the art work by Jason Howard is delicious and Warren Ellis provided both the story and the space for the art.

This dynamic due will be returning to Trees soon and I am really looking forward to that.

Cemetery Beach is delicious

Any new Warren Ellis comic book is something to look forward to and one with Jason Howard even more so given their illustrious collaboration on Trees. Cemetery Beach issue #1 arrived on my iPad this week and was the first comic that I read in bed with my first cup of tea on Saturday morning.

It comfortably lived up to expectations. This double-page spread starts to explain why.

Obviously the art work is lovely and the scene is futuristic and interesting. Also, like the five pages after it, it has no words.

It's early days but I am already deep into an exciting adventure that is steeped in mystery. I love the story, I love the action, I love the exhilarating pace of it. I love this comic already.

Karnak by Warren Ellis is sweetly dark and moody

I do not want to say that Warren Ellis is on a roll at the moment and that implies that the current form is unusual whereas he has become my favourite write of comic books by being consistently brilliant. However, his current crop of titles is right up there with anything that he has done.

Trees, which I wrote about earlier this year, is drawing towards the end of its second story arc and is still mightily impressive, not least because I do not have the slightest idea where it is going.

Injection, also published by Image Comics, also has a science fiction edge to it but here magic and folklore are the main ingredients. It is all terribly English (that's a compliment) and could have come from the pages of 2000AD. Obviously other people love it too and it is also coming back for a second series.

And now I have Karnak to enjoy too.

Karnak is/was a decidedly minor character in the Marvel Universe. He is one of the Inhumans who have generally only been a support act to people like the Fantastic Four and Karnak has generally been a support act to characters like Black Bolt and Medusa, even the Inhuman's dog Lockjaw has had bigger storylines.

Warren Ellis has taken Karnak away from the other Inhumans but left him in the main Marvel Universe, as the appearance by SHIELD's Agent Coulson quickly showed. He has also been elevated from a simple breaker of things seemingly unbreakable to a philosopher.

Karnak lives and studies in the Tower of Wisdom. It looks like this.

That opening page of the story, drawn by Gerardo Zaffino, sets the tone for the comic. It is dark, moody and mysterious, in much the same way that Ellis' run on Moon Knight was. The moods may be similar but the stories are very different, not least because the Moon Knight run was six single stories and Karnak #1 ends with "to be continued". It also ends with Karnak killing two people (violently) and disarming another all at the same time. He is still very good at breaking things.

In the middle we start to peer into a few mysteries about Karnak's mission and his philosophy which sees smiling as an insult and stones as more important than people. This is still an action comic, as the ending shows, but there is much more to it than that, as you would expect from Ellis.

Karnak is a mighty fine comic from a mighty fine writer.

Supreme: Blue Rose is another great read from Warren Ellis

I knew nothing of the history of Supreme before latching on to Supreme: Blue Rose, though I probably should.

Supreme was an the Extreme Studios/Image Comics/Awesome Comics character created by Rob Liefeld and for whom Alan Moore wrote a run in the mid-1990s, and anything with Moore's name attached I should have picked up on.

The name that made me pick up on the new Supreme: Blue Rose series was that of Warren Ellis, a serious contender for my favourite comics writer and an even more serious one for those still writing comics.

The next part of the story is increasingly familiar; Supreme: Blue Rose was published by Image Comics and I bought it digitally to read on my iPad (which I bought three years ago primarily to read comics on).

Also as is becoming the custom, I binge read the seven part series in one sitting. To be honest, I did read issue #1 when it first came out in July 14 but it was a complex story and I was sure to forget some of it so I left it alone to reread it when I had the whole series.

And that tells you the first thing about the story, this was a single story spread over seven issues. One of the things that I like about Ellis is the way he does both single-issue story comics, e.g. Moon Knight, Nextwave: Agents Of H.A.T.E. and Transmetropolitan, and also comics with long story arcs, the best example being FreakAngels.

My lack of knowledge of Supreme before reading this series did not seem to be a problem either, much as having read Moon Knight before did little to enhance my reading of that series. There may well have been references to previous plots, events or characters but I did not pick them up and that did not matter.

The story itself was a little weird, which is what was hardly unexpected for an Ellis story (think Planetary) but was also grounded in the real-world (possibly!) which gave it touch-points into normality.

Adding to the weirdness was the wistful, almost ephemeral, art work by Tula Lotay, a new name to me.

The art was coloured subtly which both matched the mood of the piece and also made it very clear that this was not a superhero comic.

The heart of the story was simple enough in that the world needs to be reset from time-to-time and normally this happens without any of us noticing but this time there was a little problem and it needed to be fixed. Trying to fix it, or trying to stop the fixers, was a large cast of characters who spawned their own little stories and who gave their own perspective on events. Not everything seen or heard could be believed, though the car ride to the Moon was real enough.

Reading the comic was like swimming in some goo made by mixing elements of science and magic and it was that swimming experience that I enjoyed so much rather than the path that I swam along. It was more like reading poetry than prose and it had an unusually high word-count for an Ellis book (despite me choosing to show a page that has no words!). In an action comic often pictures are all you need but in the subtle space of Supreme; Blue Rose it was the words that carry the message and the tone.

I would not claim to have understood every detail of the story, and as I said earlier I am sure that I missed some references, and that did nothing to diminish my enjoyment. This was Warren Ellis doing one of the things that he does very well.

There is much to admire about Ellis and one of them is the way that he will take on fringe books like Supreme: Blue Rose when he has also written for the likes of X-Men and Iron Man. And it is comics like Supreme; Blue Rose, and several other Image titles, that have got me so interested in comics again.

Trees by Warren Ellis is as strange as it is beautiful

It does not take much to get me to buy a Warren Ellis comic and I jumped in to Trees with issue #1 in May 2014 and I was hooked immediately. Now the first arc has just concluded with issue #8.

Warren's name may have been the main reason for reading Trees but Jason Howard's name helped. The two first worked together in 2013 on Scatterlands, an experiment in producing a weekly comic in the style of a newspaper strip. That experiment may have been inconclusive but it brought Warren and Howard together, so that part worked.

The other bit of good news is that Trees is published by Image Comics, currently my favourite publisher thanks to their diverse range of top-quality comics. As with all Image Comics, I bought Trees in digital format.

The idea behind Trees is simple enough, the Trees, as we called them, are an alien life-form that arrived on Earth, planted themselves across the globe and stood there doing nothing for ten years. That's when the comic starts.

The people of Earth reacted to the Trees differently, some studied them while other ignored them. The comic tells the story of some of these groups of people. These include a test community created by the Chinese around the base of a couple of trees, an Arctic science station and a retired secret service agent in Italy.

Dramatic things happen to each group thanks to the indirect influence of the Trees that just stand there motionless throughout the story.

I like Warren's writing style as he is economical with words and lets the pictures tell the story when they are all that is needed to do so. In issue #8 their is a four page section that just has one word and that is a person's name. The lack of words gives more space to the art and that is a good thing as Jason's art is beautiful. It has a gritty, linear style that is entirely suited to the story and helps to make it stand out from the usual.

This early scene shows the arrival of the Trees in Rio.

The first story-arc ends on a dramatic point and while that may be where the story was going to end I am delighted to say that other people like Trees as much as I do and so a second story is on the way. This will be called Two Forests, which sounds somewhat ominous. I'll be there to find out.

Getting into Image comics digitally

Digital has gradually become my preferred method of reading and buying comics, and this is one of the main reasons that I bought my iPad with Retina display a couple of years ago.

The change has also allowed me to try new comics out, which I had been meaning to do for years.

This is much easier to do digitally as all issues are always available and teaser sales are quite common. I got in to comics like Umbral and Saga because the first issues are free.

The change in the type of comic that I read has, unintentionally, changed the publishers that I read. DC Comics have all but gone (because their digital strategy is all but missing) and Image comics now features prominently.

Despite being an American publisher Image has some high-profile titles by established British writers and my library has Trees and Supreme Blue Rose by Warren Ellis and Umbral and The Fuse by Antony Johnston. These are also the first comics that I read when they come in.

Marvel retains a sizable footprint on my iPad thanks to its enlightened digital strategy which means that on almost all of their titles buying the paper copy also gets you the digital version.

This costs slightly more than the digital only version would cost, but not any more than the paper only copies were so it is a good deal. I read the digital copies and file the paper ones away.

By "file away" I obviously mean leave in tall piles in my study but I have now bought boxes and individual plastic bags to store a thousand of them and five hundred have been bagged and boxed already. I'm going to need more bags and boxes.

Finding time to read comics is a perennial problem and I have severely curtailed the number that I buy and that means that the core of my Marvel purchasing is Avengers and X-Men titles, spiced with a couple of oddities like Daredevil and Moon Knight (by that man Warren Ellis again).

The future of comics is decidedly digital and I see that as more of an opportunity than a threat, though I do worry about the impact on the specialist shops that help new people get in to comics in the first place.

Warren Ellis resurrects Moon Knight

A Warren Ellis comic is always something to look forward to and Moon Knight is no exception.

Moon Knight has been a fringe character in the Marvel Universe since 1975. Born by Egyptian magic his tales have always veered towards mystery and horror and that has kept him out of the mainstream, with the exception of a few cameo appearances. His has been the world shared with the likes of Ghost Rider, Iron Fist, Werewolf by Night, Moebius and Man-Thing.

The new incarnation of Moon Knight by Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey goes back to the basics, which is something of a cross between Batman (rich crime-fighter with expensive gadgets), Punisher (fighting ordinary criminals) and Dr. Strange (magic).

The page above shows Moon Knight confronting ghosts and using special Egyptian tokens to do so. It also shows Warren's trade-marked low word-count that makes space for the pictures, space that Declan expertly fills.

Moon Knight is the right sort of comic for Warren as I think that he is at his best when doing single issue stories on a quirky book, previous examples include Transmetropolitan, Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. and Planetary.

And that means that Moon Knight is a mighty fine comic.

Nextwave: Agents Of H.A.T.E. Ultimate Collection

This Christmas I decided not to add to my read-pile, on the grounds that it was already embarrassingly large, but to use the holiday to make a serious dent in it. The first book that I tackled was Nextwave: Agents Of H.A.T.E. by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen.

Nextwave is firmly seated on the edges of the Marvel Universe and it reuses characters from Machine Man to the Mindless Ones and from Boom Boom to Devil Dinosaur.

It is part parody with S.H.I.E.L.D. becoming H.A.T.E. and Nick Fury becoming Dirk Anger.

The comic is a action-fest with a thick vein of humour. It is almost a lighter version of Global Frequency which Ellis wrote for DC Comics a couple of years earlier. Or it is Transmetropolitan (written for DC just before H.A.T.E.) with more action.

It also has several pages with no written words so this is definitely a Warren Ellis book.

Nextwave is constructed as six story arcs, each of two comics originally, that combine to make one bigger story. This contrasts with, for example, Global Frequency and Transmetropolitan both of which are a series of single issues.

Stuart Immonen, a long-time regular for Marvel, is the artist and he does a good job of combining the action and the humour, which is the point of the book. Having one artist reinforces the single story aspect of the book.

I like the book though I suspect that you need a good knowledge of the Marvel Universe to appreciate it properly. I have read both Machine Man and Devil Dinosaur but I suspect that not many people can say that.

Nextwave describe itself as being about things blowing up and people being kicked, and it is. So if you like films like The Expendables then Nextwave could be for you. Personally I found it just a little too light for my taste, especially when compared to the brilliant Global Frequency.

Ministry of Space by Warren Ellis and Chris Weston

I'll come to the comic in a moment but I want to start with the technology that made it all happen.

I treated myself to an iPad a couple of months ago (it's the so-called new iPad that followed the iPad2) and one of the things that I wanted to use it for was reading comics. The main reason for this is that it is easy to carry one iPad around with me but rather hard to carry the few dozen comics that are in my read pile.

The secondary reason is that it is easy to get complete series and back issues so missing issues ceases to be a problem. Digital comics are also cheaper that paper ones but that is a lesser reason for buying them that way.

I've read a few Warren Ellis comics over the years and I like his style and the subjects that he writes about.

I follow him on Twitter and was catching up with things after a busy day touristing in Amsterdam when he tweeted that his Ministry of Space, previously unknown to me, was now available digitally, and for the ridiculous price of £3.99.

It took but a couple of minutes to find and download it. This is frictionless commerce at its best. Previously I would have had to email my comic shop and ask them to get a copy for me and then go to the shop to collect it. Easy enough but that would have taken weeks rather than days.

Warren's own afterword explains the story's relationship to Dan Dare, to which it clearly pays homage.

Essentially it is a prequel to the Dan Dare we all know and love and it explains how Great Britain came to be the dominant space power in the 1950s.

Of course this is Warren Ellis so the story does rather more than that and it ventures in to dark places where power and gold play their part.

As does some decidedly unfriendly fire.

Then the last panel knocks you sideways with an unexpected ending to a story that you did not know was there.

Warren is his economical safe and words and their attendant balloons are few and far between.

This leaves plenty of space for the art which is a good thing.

Chris Weston was a new name for me and that's my fault. The artwork is clean, very detailed and very evocative of the original Dan Dare without in anyway being a copy of it. Here the monorail has some Frank Hampson curves and colours and the flying boys are a direct lift.

Ministry of Space is a delightful little comic (it was originally issued in three chapters) that takes you back to a different future and shows you the good and the bad of what might have been.

RED

RED is a triumphant addition to the rapidly growing list of films based on comics.

And it comes with some serious pedigree, the original comic was written by Warren Ellis and the film's stars include Bruce Willis and John Malkovich.

Last Saturday I helped myself to a double-dose of RED by watching the film then reading the comic. It was not a strategic decision to do things in that order it's just that I was not able to buy the comic any earlier.

About fifty of us crammed into one of the small theatres in the Odeon Studio in Richmond and quite an odd group we were too ranging from small boys (under ten) to grannies (over seventy) with a smattering of young women. I was expecting just lads of all ages.

RED hits the ground running and never stops. Within the first minutes Bruce has single-handedly taken out a SWAT team who fired even more bullets than were used in The Matrix.

The film continues in much the same rich vein of action laced with clever humour. There's a good plot too and some wonderful acting by people who are obviously playing their roles more for the fun than the money. It really was a lot of fun.

The comic came as bit of a surprise having seen the film as the only element common to both is the hardly original theme of an ex-CIA agent been chased by his former colleagues. Perhaps they paid Warren Ellis just for the name RED.

The comic is more about a killer coming to terms with what he has done and, as such, brings to mind Joe Haldeman's All My Sins Remembered. It's a short comic, only three issues in the collected edition, so there is less to get your teeth in to than the film and so, while the comic has undoubted merit, it's hard to recommend it to a casual reader.

The same is true of Kick Ass and Wanted, both of which are reasonable comics but much better films.

Fabulous FreakAngels

My two very favourite comics at the moment are both (very) English and part of that means that they come out every week. How good is that?!

I heaped well deserved praise on 2000AD recently and now it's the time to return to the truly magnificent FreakAngels from the truly magnificent Warren Ellis.

When I last wrote about FreakAngels, back in October, we were approaching the dramatic end of Volume 3. That situation has yet to fully resolve itself (I'm trying not to any spoilers here) but Volume 4 breaks the chronology and takes us back not quite to the beginning of the beginning but but certainly to the end of beginning and possibly to the beginning of the end.

FreakAngels is a post apocalyptic story and this picture shows some of the apocalypse in motion. Once again Paul Duffield's art is allowed to tell the story unsullied by spurious word balloons or unnecessary narrative. This is a story telling team working brilliantly together when they are already rather good individually. This is what makes FreakAngels work.

And the counter-intuitive marketing still seems to be working. You can, and I do, read FreakAngels for free every week, but I also but the collected volumes as soon as they come out for easier rereading.

I am not sure where Warren Ellis is going with the story, at the very least we have all those loose ends from Volume 3 to tidy-up but I hope that there is a lot more to come than just that. But, wherever the story goes from here, I'm along for the ride as it continues to surprise, delight, confound and entertain.

FreakAngels steps up a gear

My favourite comic at the moment is FreakAngels, and it's free!

New episodes come out every Friday lunchtime and Warren is good enough to tweet it's publication so I am reminded of my regular treat.

Freakangels is now on episode 71 (each is six pages long) and in it's third story arc.

This is coming to a dramatic climax and Warren is controlling the pace of the story superbly. There has not been that much action in recent weeks (though the action that has happened has been momentous for the story) but the story zips along at a hectic pace and the tension and drama are building towards what promises to be a stunning end to this party of the Freakangels story.

One of Warren's great skills is to tell stories without many words, no baddies explaining at length what their plans are, and this full page shows how to write a story to be told in pictures.

I said at the top that Freakangels is free, but that is only half true. I do read it for free on the internet but I am also buying the collected volumes to reread the stories.

Freakangels shows what comics can be like and is highly highly recommended.

Ocean by Warren Ellis

The kindly postman brought me Ocean by Warren Ellis and Chris Sprouse yesterday morning and I read it today. Given that I read most comics around six months after I buy them, that is quite some testament to my enthusiasm. And my enthusiasm was justly rewarded.

At it's heart this is a simple sci-fi romp. It's set a hundred years in the future when man has mastered space travel enough to have spread through our solar system. The main action is on Europa, the sixth moon of Jupiter, which is covered in ice. Underneath the ice there is a dark and ancient threat.

There is a hero, who looks and behaves a little too like Nick Fury, and some baddies who just may be the descendents of Microsoft.

The supporting cast is small and light in terms of the role they play and their characterisation but that is not a problem. The story is all about Nathan Kane, agent of the United Nations, and how he deals with the threat and neutralises the enemy.

Chris Sprouse's artwork is uncluttered and sharp which suits Warren Ellis' minimal writing style (just as Paul Duffield's does on FreakAngels).

Ocean was originally published as a six part comic by Wildstorm, way back in 2004, but collected as a graphic novel it still reads well. The story is well paced, a compelling page turner and ends satisfactorily. It's a good but simple story well told.

Anna Mercury: The Cutter

I made a decision a few years ago to buy fewer monthly comics and to buy collected editions (TPBs) instead, and this plan is gradually coming to fruition.

The thing I like about TPBs is that you get the whole story in one book, you buy the book once the whole story has been published and reviewed, and it is easy to get hold of old stories.

At the moment I am addressing some serious Warren Ellis gaps (and that's not because Warren is so cute on Twitter!) and I have just read Anna Mercury: The Cutter which collects issues #1 to #5 of the comic.

Anna Mercury uses some themes common to other Warren Ellis and other English writers' works. From Warren we get aspects of Planetary and Ghost Boxes (e.g. parallel worlds and mysterious agencies) and from the wider canon we get reflections of Luther Arkwright, Oswald Bastable, Tom Strong and a host of other characters who inhabit worlds where old architecture is mixed with more modern technologies (airships are common). This means that the story has a familiar context and is easily approachable.

Also familiar is Warren Ellis' writing style and this is straight out of his action box. We get pages with no words, short sentences, a fair amount of swearing and little in the way of humour or emotion, which is OK for a action story.

Facundo Percio's artwork is sprightly and we are treated to lots of vibrant action shots of Anna Mercury and lots of exciting cityscapes. The example above shows off both of these.

The story itself bounces along nicely without particularly achieving too much or being too surprising. It it does introduce the character and her world nicely and so promises more for the future but overall it comes across as a lesser project and there are much better Warren Ellis books out there - such as the two volumes of the superb Freakangels.

FreakAngels is stunning

As an avid reader of comics and a lover of leading edge technology it is a little odd that I have not done much with online comics before. That is now changing.

I am starting to play with the ClickWheel application on my iPod touch which looks promising but has a limited catalogue of comics available.

I think that the iPod/iPhone is the platform of choice for the future but for the moment the content is mostly aimed at the PC.

One of my Twitter friends pointed me to FreakAngels, a free weekly comic by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield, and I love it!

You could call it a post-apocalyptic story because, er, it takes places after an apocalypse, but that would be to miss the point.

It's a story about a group of 23 year olds who happen to have caused the apocalyptic event and who are now trying to save part of what's left, i.e. London's Whitechapel.


I spoke warmly of Warren Ellis' writing recently and he is an established writer so it is no surprise that the stories are good.

Paul Duffield was not an artist that I knew before but he has quickly impressed. There are 40 episodes of FreakAngels so far, each of 6 pages, and each page is wonderful.

I could have picked any number of pages to show the quality of the artwork but I managed to limit my selection to just three.

The top image is actually the last page of the first arc of the story and shows post-apocalyptic London (OK, so the apocalypse is fairly important to the comic) where a large part of the city is flooded.

This flooding is dramatically shown in the second image of the London Eye, Guildhall and Shell Tower. This is a very recognisable rendition of these London landmarks made suitably bleak by the colouring.

This is simply beautiful artwork and I would look at this even if the story was poor or in a foreign language.

The story makes a lot of being set in London and this adds to the interest to me.

I am not sure what the Whitechapel connection is yet (I need to read the FreakAngels Whitechapel Forum to find out) but I like the fact that the story is set there. I worked around there for a couple of years not that long ago and am familiar with its streets, architecture and atmosphere.

I chose the final picture to show both what Whitechapel looks like and, for those who already knew that, how well the character of the place is captured.

I read all 40 issues of FreakAngels today and am only disappointed that I have to wait until Friday for the next episode.

Catching up with the X-Men

I am taking advantage of the Winter holiday to seriously tackle my comics backlog and may even get it down to something like manageable proportions before I have to make my regular pilgrimage to They Walk Among Us for my next fix.

Having caught up with Secret Invasion I am now addressing the various X-Men titles and have come across a couple of real gems.

Cable, a new title by Duane Swierczynski and Ken Lashley, tells the story of Cable's attempt to protect the new mutant baby from Bishop who wants to kill her to stop the future world that he comes from (where mutants are treated as slaves) from coming about. Dr Who fans will be familiar with such plots and such paradoxes!

The essence of the story is a chase through time between two very experienced soldiers who can set and detect complex traps.

Time travel is used very effectively in the story as Cable jumps forward in time to escape from Bishop and then spends years preparing for Bishop to catch up with him.

I am sure that I have not given the story justice but I hope that I have given you enough of a clue as to why I am enjoying this sage immensely.

But you do not have to rely on my words to explain the quality of the art work. This extract from King-Size Cable Spectacular #1 shows the fantastic futurescape and the dramatic use of layout to tell the story.

To be honest, I was not sure what to expect from Cable and was not initially impressed by the premise behind the story but it proved to be a compelling and very rewarding read.


The other title that has made its mark on me recently was Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes by Warren Ellis, Alan Davis and Adi Granov. This is a two part story spun off at a tangent from the ongoing Astonishing X-Men series.

The tangent takes us off to parallel worlds and explores alternative scenarios on four alternative Earths in four short and very different stories.

Again, the basic premise is simple, one alternative Earth wants to annex another (travel between the dimensions is achieved using the Ghost Boxes) and the X-Men stand in defence.

The stories have different styles, give us different perspectives on the same situation and have different outcomes. And being X-Men stories they are linked by familiar characters which means that we immediately understand, and believe, how they react to each situation.

Ghost Boxes gives the impression of being a collection of stories that Warren Ellis came up with but could not fit in to the main Astonishing X-Men storyline. There must be many many stories like that but most of them never get written. I am so glad that these were.

Welcome to the multiverse!

This imagining of the multiverse as snowflake in 196,833 dimensional spaces comes from the excellent Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday, which was first published as a regular comic in 1999 but my version is the large hardback collection Absolute Planetary.

This gets a worthy mention in my blog now as it was referred to surprisingly (to me!) in one of my regular podcasts this week.

Most of my podcasts are about business, current affairs or science and the most sciency of the science podcasts is Material World from the BBC. Because it is the one that is the most technical it is also the one that I enjoy the most.

One of the topics this week was symmetry, based on the book Finding Moonshine by Marcus du Sautoy (hardly my favourite mathematician but it is good to see mathematics getting some coverage in the media), and this looked at symmetry in various dimension.

In 2 dimensions (flat surfaces) this is rather easy and it's not much harder in three (our world as we see it) but in larger dimensions things get a lot more complex.

The topic was opened by the presenter, Quentin Cooper, quoting from Planetary, i.e. the page above, and then explaining that this is a genuine multiverse theory, thereby combining my loves for science and comics in one act. Superb!