2007-12-20 Why Comics are Braver and Better than Movies

Warren Ellis is not the nastiest and sickest comics writer out there - thank God - but there are things about the human condition that clearly get under his skin in the middle of the night. Please, please, please can we have some more?

Ellis's character Richard Fell has a dark secret but a good nature, and it is his emerging humanity and his relationship with a waitress which marks this out from so much similar material. Ben Templesmith's art also takes this to another level, compared to some of Ellis's other work such as Scars, where the drawing style undermines the seriousness of the subject matter: here, Templesmith's ragged edges and weird mixing of the real and surreal match the adult tone of the material.

This is the first time I've ever finished a comic and gone straight back to the first page to read it all over again. Can't really say more than that.