As has been mentioned before here I’m a fan of Warren Ellis. Though he does have a distinct style to his writing he also likes to play around with different genres which keeps his various works from blending to much in to each other and staying unique and interesting. At the moment, along with all his other projects, he and artist Paul Duffield are producing an ongoing webcomic called Freakangels.
Like pretty much every other webcomic out there Freakangels is a free to read affair posted regularly here on the interwebs. As the comics tag line tells it “23 years ago, twelve strange children were born in England at exactly the same time. 6 years ago, the world ended. This is the story of what happened next.” Those twelve children, each gifted with incredible powers, are the cause of the worlds end. Now, racked with guilt, they have staked out a portion of the Whitechapel district of London to defend. Protecting its inhabitants as a way of making amends for what they did.
It’s something of a mash up of a post apocalyptic steampunk tale and a superhero story. Each of the twelve children, now grown into maladjusted twenty-three year olds, is gifted with a variety of powerful mental powers. Powers they do their best to keep hidden from the people of Whitechapel while at the same time using them to defend the territory from rival gangs and bands of violent refuges from the sunken wastes of the city beyond.
The writing is Ellis’s normal high quality. His characters have a very real, believable quality to them. Though extremely powerful they are also very flawed. Of course Ellis’s creative use of language, and his propensity of swearing does factor in as usual so the comic is definitely not an all ages affair. Duffield’s art compliments the story well, having an almost washed out watercolor feel to it that I think fits the setting and mood of the story. It adds a slightly surreal beauty to the grimy and crumbling world it depicts.
An interesting thing is that the comic is formatted in regular comic book page format. Though as I said you can read the comic free at www.freakangels.com, the story is also being released in installments in printed versions. The first four chapters have been released so far, both in normal trade paperback and nicer hardback collections. Regardless of how you read the series, via it her on the net or from the collected print collections I highly recommend this one.