Greetings, Maniacs, and welcome to another installment of The No-Fly Zone, where we shoot down superheroes in midair and focus on the many other corners of comicdom. This is the place where John Constantine grabs a pint with Cerebus, sitting at the bar next to the cast of Box Office Poison, with a few autobiographers like Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman waiting behind them. This is the place where capes fear to tread, and we explore all of the many genres the comics medium has to offer.
Before we dive in: Free Comic Book Day is coming on Saturday! Head down to your local comic shops to pick up some goodies! Show some love and buy a couple of things while you’re there. If you’re in the New Orleans area, you can get in on the action with me, because I’ve got two signings for my own comic, Dead Souls, scheduled for that day, and a whole bunch of free stuff to give away, like posters, stickers, and buttons. I’ll be at More Fun Comics at 8210 Oak Street in Uptown, from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. After that, I’ll be at BSI Comics at 3030 Severn Avenue in Metairie from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Come hang out and get some free Dead Souls stuff, and pick up the first and second issues.
This week on The No-Fly Zone, we’re going to look at a web comic—an example of one of the most interesting and volatile turns the industry has taken in recent years. Say what you will about comics online, but you should be reading FreakAngels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield.
Freakangels - Episode 7, Page 3
© Warren Ellis, Paul Duffield
FreakAngels hardly constitutes the first successful web comic or the first to follow a regular trade collection schedule. It’s not Ellis’s first web comic, either. However, few have the clout of such an established writer behind them. As it stands, the comic hits the website with six pages every Friday, with a trade paperback collection every six to eight months. Avatar has published two, thus far. Each collection contains one arc and runs for 144 pages, contributing to a sprawling epic that challenges many stereotypes about web comics. FreakAngels never traffics in single page gags, nor does it ever sell the story short for length. Rather, it tells a story that renders great credit upon the emerging medium and, indeed, all of comics. Anyone trying to jump on board should start from the beginning, either with the first volume or over at the website, where the entire saga unfolds online and for free.
Each volume opens with “23 years ago, twelve strange children were born in England at exactly the same moment. 6 years ago, the world ended. This is the story of what happened next.” In the same vein as the science fiction novel The Midwich Cuckoos (later filmed as Village of the Damned) by John Wyndham, the children share supernatural abilities, most notably telepathy and telekinesis. The limits of the group’s powers constitutes one of the many questions raised by Ellis, because some of them are quite content to use theirs for personal gain—but only one or two, because the rest protect the flooded Whitechapel district of London out of a sense of responsibility. Bit by bit, readers have learned that the 12 children caused the flood that engulfed London. Though the narrative has revealed little outright, readers know that the children—the titular and self-proclaimed FreakAngels—were persecuted to some degree by the society into which they were born. At some point, they’d had enough and combined their powers to make something terrible happen. The group remains in Whitechapel to protect it, providing crude utilities, supplies, medical care, and defense from gangs in the outlying areas. They mostly get along, talking telepathically and occasionally taking the piss out of one another. But, when a young girl named Alice arrives in town wielding a shotgun, we learn that not all of the FreakAngels have noble intentions. It seems that a rogue member named Mark killed her brothers in a gun-running deal gone wrong. And, he’s twisted Alice’s mind to send her back to Whitechapel to do some damage. The FreakAngels thought they’d killed Mark when he went off the rails, but it seems there’s more to the story.
Mark’s enigmatic history stands as one of the many questions posed in FreakAngels. Each of the group has his or her own quirks and a history to back it up. Arkady has powers the others haven’t discovered yet, but she maintains an irreverent and child-like demeanor after an overdose of something. We don’t know what yet, but it’s probably telepathic. Luke uses his mental powers to seduce women. While that hardly comes as unexpected—someone out of the group would—it follows his mindset and politics before the flood, in which he saw the future FreakAngels as some sort of master race. KK really likes sex, but she doesn’t want the others to know. And, she really hates it when they use her full name. Sirkka likes sex and wants everyone to know. Unfortunately, Jack really likes her, but can’t stand the idea of sharing her with a harem of adoring humans. The cast comes with a bevy of charms and idiosyncrasies, but the interesting character work serves to showcase a larger story about post-apocalyptic society-building. The group protects Whitechapel well enough with some fantastically steampunk-looking gadgets, but it eventually dawns on them that they need to bring the surviving residents electricity and running water. Further challenges emerge, as the group encounters a microcosm of the problems all society’s face, including distribution of resources, law enforcement, and immigrant populations.
Freakangels, Episode 13, Page 1
© Warren Ellis, Paul Duffield
FreakAngels stands as sort of a perfect union of plot, setting, and characterization. Each of the group is a delicious nut to crack, set against a post-apocalyptic world with a strong steampunk influence. The FreakAngels never feel interchangeable, which helps when the cast is as large as this one. As such, Ellis has overcome a lot of the challenges and common objections to web comics. The story is dense, the characters are many, and each weekly installment doesn’t conclude neatly with a punch line. Now would be a fine time to give due credit to artist Paul Duffield, who makes FreakAngels visually palatable on one’s computer screen. In its own way, FreakAngels looks like a manga. Each page has no more than four panels, and the story is mostly told in close-ups, making it very easy on the eyes. The panels aren’t very dialogue-heavy either, which makes for pretty brisk reading. The tedium of reading comics online can wear on those of us used to a book in hand, but Duffield overcomes that with ease. In fact, his style coincides with the format, with a decidedly Japanese look to the art, minus gross exaggeration, speed lines, and an overabundance of blank backgrounds.
FreakAngels may do great things for comics on the web in the long run. Clearly, publisher Avatar and Ellis treat the entire enterprise in the same way that television feeds into DVD sets, hoping that fans of the web comic will buy the printed version. Whether that works as a viable sales model remains to be seen, but this is one of the best arguments for it that’s come along in a while. If you like web comics, read FreakAngels and then buy the trades to make your opinion known. This may be the future of the industry as we know it.
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