I’m usually against decade lists, especially those conducted when that decade hasn’t even finished yet. However, after seeing this topic on a message board and considering it, I feel I can write more fully the topic of comic books from the decade more than I could with music or films. I’m not as in to comic books these days, but between 2003 and 2007 they were my life, pretty much. Some pretty awesome comic books were produced during that period and here I count them down.

FELL (written by Warren Ellis, illustrated by Ben Templesmith, creator owned and published by Image 2006 – )

I didn’t mean to put two books authored by Warren Ellis next to each other in the list, but in doing show I get to display just why Ellis has been on the most interesting and best writers of comic books this side of the millineum. Fell is both entirely unlike Nextwave but also contains some of Ellis’ familar tropes. So, whilst it may not be a super-hero comic and is dark, disturbing and often quite shocking, it is also frequently hiliarious, even if the comedy is more black than manic. In part, Fell is an experiment. On his e-mail mailing list, Bad Signal, Ellis often muses about the form of comics books, given equal attention to the way that stories are packaged and presented as the stories they contain. Fell came out of those thoughts – each issue, priced at the relative low price of $1.99, containing 16 pages of story with no ads and seven addition of “back matter” such as reader’s letters, script excerpts and notes on the creative process. Additionally, each issue was self-containing, meaning for two bucks (it was like £1.25 British) you got a full story told in a quick, concise manner.

It is testament to the skills of Ellis and ace artist Templesmith that the book never became chained by its format. Indeed, the pair even used it to their advantage. Having to tell so much story in such short space meant the pair favored a nine panel grid on most page, most famously used in Watchmen (which, before being a shit movie, was a really good comic book).

Fell tells the story of detective Richard Fell, sent to live out his days in the “feral district” of Snowtown, which may just be hell on Earth. Snowtown is a cramped, claustrophobic place and the tight grid brought that across perfectly, as did Temlesmith’s colouring, which is like if they made an animated noir movies using crayon colouring. He also manages to bring across the core aspects of the collected cast’s eccentric personalities in a beat, the most obvious example being the (in)famous Nun:

I mean, that panel tells you everything!

The stories in Fell were never too complicated, often the type of cop stories you’d expect off some snazzy US TV show. Ellis used the simple narratives, often basic police cases or interrogations, to investigate the darker side of the human condition, with both harrowing and hilarious results. One of my favourite jokes of the series is that Snowtown has “three-and-a-half” detectives; one is in a wheel chair.

Fell printed 8 issues in its first year, then a 12 month break before its 9th. The 10th is forthcoming. This wasn’t a book the creators undertook for commercial reasons – trying to make your money back on a book which costs half a normal book but probably takes twice as long to create is a foolhardy venture.

Instead it was an experiment, one which truly addressed the issues facing comic books in this day and age – namely how do you make something you can read in your lunchbreak as worthwhile as a DVD which costs probably only 3 times as much? Ellis did so by adjusting how you present that content, but also creating the best content he could. Despite its price tag, Fell wasn’t throwaway – in less pages, it managed to say more than some entire series.

You can buy the first tradepaper on Amazing here, or read the first issue for free on Images website here.