I don’t review a lot of comic books, mostly because I don’t read them that often. Not out of any contempt for the medium, mind you; some of my favorite works of literature have come in graphic novel form, mostly from the mind of Alan Moore. Comic collecting just happens to be the red-headed stepchild of my hobbies: rarely receiving much money or attention, rarely noticed, and quietly suffering through years of neglect and waiting for that one glorious moment when I’ll walk into my local comic shop and drop a hundred bucks on new material. Because that’s what I do. I’ll go without purchasing comics for a year or so, and then, when I go to buy comics, I buy them by the armful. The system works.
The other reason I don’t review comics is because I actually loathe and fear most comic book fans. Wait… come back. Sit down. Now, I don’t mean you. I mean that other guy — you know, the one who writes in several pages of “corrections” to the letters column of every issue of Dark Horse’s Conan and signs his name “Lord Darkthorne.” Or, perhaps, the guy who flies into a beer-fueled rant at one in the morning on your blog, telling you to “go to a bar to get laid” because you cast aspersions on the Hulk movie. Just kidding. (Although I did tell my girlfriend of three years that I’d been commanded to go to a bar and get laid by someone on the Internet. Despite my best efforts, she didn’t go for it)
Of course, I don’t think these people are necessarily all that common, or even representative of comic readers on the whole — but all the same, I know they exist, and I am reluctant to incur their wrath. Especially if I plan to mercilessly slur the good name of Sir Warren Ellis, which, of course, I don’t. (You hear that, Lord Darkthorne? It’s going to be okay.)
Most of the comic readers I know speak of Warren Ellis the way someone might talk about Alexander the Great , or maybe Z-Man Barzell. Ellis appears to be some sort of comic-nerd Rome, in that all conversations about the medium eventually lead to him. “Do you read Warren Ellis?” my friends will ask me, bright-eyed with anticipation, and I’ll shake my head politely, smiling and wondering if I can change the subject to Lord Dunsany or Krull or something I actually know about.
Well, no more. On my last visit to my friendly local comics shop, I asked for some recommendations — anything, really. Without so much as batting an eye, the clerk asked “Have you read any Warren Ellis?” and made a frantic beeline for the shelf to pick out a host of Ellis titles for me. I came away with the first trade paperback of Planetary and the first arc of Desolation Jones, a brief description of which was enough to sell me.
To sum up the plot briefly: Michael Jones is an ex-intelligence agent and the only living survivor of The Desolation Project, a destructive medical procedure that kept him alive and conscious for an entire year while being barraged with horrific images. Now a reclusive albino junkie, Jones lives in Los Angeles, which has become a kind of “open prison” for ex-intelligence types without anywhere else to go. As the story opens, Jones is hired by Colonel Nigh to recover a valuable stolen item — a reel of vintage porn made by Adolph Hitler. This, by iteself, is more than enough; but as with any good detective story, Jones soon finds out there is far more to his assignment than he thought.
What follows is a gritty, delightfully squalid adventure in the Raymond Chandler vein, except with a lot more pornography and lurid violence. Jones is a bitter, shambling wreck of an antihero, barely functional most of the time, but with enough raw tenacity to brutally and permanently finish most of the fights he gets into. If I could level one criticism at Desolation Jones, it might be that the titular character isn’t always quite as interesting as the throng of memorable characters that surround him. The most poignant of these is probably Emily Crowe, a beautiful ex-intelligence agent who, because of an experimental procedure gone wrong, exudes fear and revulsion, damning her to crippling loneliness and isolation. Desolation Jones is full of characters like this; tough, tragic, and vividly realized.
Most compelling of all, however, is Ellis’ sense of place. The Los Angeles of Desolation Jones is at once familiar and foreign, ringing with verisimilitude, but outlandish enough to keep the reader surprised and entertained. One trait I think Ellis definitely shares with Alan Moore is how deftly and prodigiously he throws out (and throws away) brilliant ideas; tossing off material that might constitute an entire series in the hands of another author, but is only filler in Ellis’ world.
In keeping with what I’ve often heard about Ellis, Desolation Jones is not a lighthearted romp. It’s seedy, violent, brutal, and frequently ugly. The art by J.H. Williams III is wonderfully varied and rich; sometimes deeply textured, sometimes stark and overbright, like overexposed film. Once the exposition is out of the way, the body count mounts pretty quickly in Jones, with a gruesome, heartbreaking ending that’s well-crafted and merciless, like Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest with all the dials cranked into the red.
While Desolation Jones is a little more nihilistic than I usually like my comics, I now have an inkling why everyone raves about Ellis so much. Recommended. 8/10
