This is why visiting things like the ocean can be powerful and soothing — you gain access something obviously larger, more important, and more dynamic than yourself. This realization, or a reminder of it, is often helpful in life.

(an illustration of such)

Fell is an ongoing series written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Ben Templesmith, and Fell Volume 1: Feral City collects issues 1 through 8.

I liked the first eight, rather a great deal. It tells the story of Detective Richard Fell, who’s been transferred to Snowtown from the city — whose name and features, except it not being the violent hell that Snowtown is, are not disclosed — because of some as-yet unexplained event he was a part of as a peace officer in the city. Each short chapter mostly deals with a case he’s working on, and it becomes pretty clear that Fell is damnably good at what he does. He can both deduct what’s going on quickly, and lock onto the sympathies, fears, and truths about his interviews with a deftness, at which point he’ll strike, often violently. The attitude of the piece is a like it’s chronicling the dark humor people use to hide from their difficult jobs. Which happen to be in hell.

Fell is good, and you get the idea that he’s a stubborn clinger to his ideals, which involve people not hurting and killing each other all the time, and you start to believe that he doesn’t want us to shrug our shoulders over it and be on our way, since that’s the way things are. He’s also fallible and prideful, likely because he knows he’s good, and might be too confident in himself so that things go awry. We’re seeing the tip of that particular iceberg, I think, which is what drove him out of the city, and its famed comforts.

I like the artwork, which is cartoony, but very expressionist. Red and yellow tend to color action panels, but the rest is a gloomy blue and gray, since Snowtown has few spots of human warmth for Fell to find himself in.

Each story is very short, with lots of tiny panels crammed onto each page, and I was able to read an entire chapter over brunch today, while being distracted by food, coffee, and attractive waitresses. Since each story is short, it explores and wraps up one of Fell’s cases quickly, so there isn’t much of an arc outside of Fell’s growing relationships with his fellow detectives, and his affection for Mayko, owner of the Idiot’s Bar, where Fell found himself drinking at shortly after moving. The only mystery as yet unsolved is the identity and motive of the dwarf nun, who has a face that looks like Richard Nixon.

It’s a good collection of tales of darkness, and it grabs on to certain human failures with frightening honesty, and you get the idea that Ellis is crying, laughing, and screaming about them all in the same sentence.