Fell (comics)

Fell
Cover to Fell #1, illustrated by Ben Templesmith, published by Image Comics
Publication information
Publisher	Image Comics
Schedule	Irregular
Format	Ongoing series
Genre	Crime
Publication date	September 2005 – January 2008
No. of issues	9 (as of October 2016[update])
Creative team
Written by	Warren Ellis
Artist(s)	Ben Templesmith

Fell is an American comic book, written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Ben Templesmith, and published by Image Comics. It has received two Eisner Awards nominations, for Best New Series and Best Continuing Series. It began publication in 2005 and has been on hiatus since 2008, awaiting the release of its tenth installment. In a 2013 interview, Templesmith stated, "There’s one issue done and I could have it illustrated tomorrow and Image won’t print it. They would want two or three more issues of script written in the can, because they’re not going to release one issue of a monthly book once every two years." Ellis has also made statements online indicating that once the series does return it may be short lived, saying that they would like to finish "the intended final seven issues".

Fell is an experiment by Warren Ellis in order to create a more affordable comic by producing a lower page count than normal. This is balanced by a nine panel grid format for each page, in order to compress the story into the smaller size. Ben Templesmith's artwork creates a hazy outline that accompanies the immoral haze of a decaying noir style city.

Each issue is also a self-contained story, supplemented with behind-the-scenes shots of unfinished artwork, a text section where the author expands the story's background, provides excerpts from the script, and (tentatively) answers reader e-mail. The series suffered from scheduling issues due to Warren Ellis' computer, which contained several future Fell scripts along with his backups, dying in late 2008, so Ellis is currently in the process of recreating them. Ellis announced on January 14, 2011, through his website, that the script to issue #10 had been emailed to Image Comics and Ben Templesmith.

Homicide detective Richard Fell is transferred from his old post across the bridge to Snowtown, a city rife with urban decay of America's worst inner cities and the poverty of a third-world country. At one point described as a "feral city," Snowtown's denizens are generally desperate, hostile, or both. Violence is commonplace, with whole chunks of the city devoid of proper utilities, services and basic amenities. So hopeless is the city that the citizenry have begun spraypainting giant S's that have been crossed out as a form of protective magic, in the hopes that Snowtown will not harm what has been labelled as its own. Having joined the "three and a half detectives" in the entirety of Snowtown (one having no legs), Fell is determined to do all he can to better the city in many ways. He takes calls on his time off, he ignores a lack of a warrant for the sake of a little girl and he pushes through efforts to hire more precinct employees. He is noted by his powers of observation and deduction (a salute to Sherlock Holmes) and his ever-present digital camera.