bad signal
WARREN ELLIS
Have crawled to pub briefly in
defiance of San Diego SARS (now
in Hideous Green Foam stage). So
let’s talk a little bit about
FREAKANGELS.
FREAKANGELS is a free online comic
debuting later this year, by myself
and artist Paul Duffield, via Avatar
Press. It’s an open-ended, longform
story told in the equivalent of
five pages a week. I never got to
do weekly comics, unlike many of
my British peers, so this is fun for
me. We have a shitload of pages
already done, so there’s a big
buffer in place.
I wanted to take a crack at something
open-ended in the webcomics mode,
and I’ve also been wanting to play
with steampunk styling. And also,
as has been my wont of late, I
wanted to do something British.
So welcome to Whitechapel, some
years from now, just barely above
ground in a flooded England. (I
pored over speculative floodmaps
to see what’d stay above water if
the Thames burst its barriers.)
Whitechapel is, among other things,
home to a clan of unrelated young
people with purple hair and purple
eyes: the Freakangels of the title.
And the Freakangels have a secret:
something bad is their fault.
Did you ever read The Midwich
Cuckoos (sp?)? Filmed as The Village
Of The Damned a few times. I
always wondered what those weird
psychic kids would be like if they’d
grown up to be disaffected teenagers
or twentysomethings.
Young, gifted and aimless, the
Freakangels gang have built some
kind of life for themselves in
Whitechapel — one of them, KK,
even zooms around in a steam-
powered gyrocopter she built
herself. A life that starts to show
big cracks when a girl called Alice
from Manchester turns up with a
shotgun and a grievance, having
met the lost, prodigal last Freakangel,
who had very different ideas about
what they should do with themselves
and this flooded future England.
FREAKANGELS will debut sometime
in the autumn. Keep an eye on
www.freakangels.com , and add
yourself to the email alert system
there.
Oh, and to answera FAQ: DESOLATION
JONES isn’t dead, just resting. We’ve
run into a few problems, but it’ll be
back soon, and monthly.