Fell #1

Ellis has got another good title on his hands. Damn if that chain-smoking, cane-swinging bastard doesn't have a knack for caustic characters with memorable one-liners. If comic books were movies, Warren Ellis would have a few lines, right up there with anything from “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw” to “One time in band camp…”. “If you're gonna shoot porno, don't clog the drains” appears in the second panel. For a change the supporting characters are more caustic (because an adjective for that escapes me right now) than the hero (anti-hero…no, scratch that, actually maybe not, it's one of those things people write but never actually say, like “gal-pal”). Ben Templesmith makes with the bleak yet rich panels, and is apparently happy there's no vampires.

Warren Ellis is reaching out to the poeple with this one. These single issues contain an entire story each for $1.99. So I can get the baby formula, and afford a comic book this week, instead of just buying the book and shoving a binky in the kid's mouth. (That's not even funny, is it? I'm such a dad.)

Plus if you like the prose, there's some more of it sans pictures to extend the reading life, and it kind of acts as the DVD bonus material concept applied to a comic book. Ellis still hasn't added me to his myspace, but why should I care, since I still don't know why I have a myspace account, I'm finding plenty of music elsewhere on the net these days.

Paul Pope Exhibit

A Paul Pope solo exhibit will be at the Diesel Denim Gallery, 68 Greene Street, (Btwn Spring and Broome), New York, NY 10012, (212) 966-5593, through October 30. I got into the city recently but couldn't make it to the gallery before they closed, but I've got a little over a month to try again.

And read Heavy Liquid if you haven't already. Great stuff. I'm not kidding, and if you've read it already read it again, or stare at the pictures for awhile.

Lots of nice artwork at his web site to check out.

And if you go to amazon.com to search for Paul Pope books, use the titles, or else you'll have pages of books by/about Pope John Paul II.

Brian Wood (Redux)

If you haven't read Brian Wood before, read Channel Zero.

Then check out Demo (the Becky Cloonan art is gorgeous) the new stuff like DMZ looks interesting too. I also enjoyed Couriers and Cous Cous Express.

My second in a series of lazy posts not formatted because the text was pulled directly from my e-mail. Was this necessary? Maybe not, but people like to make clicky-clicky, without messy pasting of URLs in the northern region of browser windows.