‘Black Gas’ – Warren Ellis (Avatar Press)

You know how it is, you spend ages waiting for a Warren Ellis comic book to check out and then three come along at once…
I’ve never read anything by Warren Ellis and, being more than partial to a good comic book read, this was something that I had to rectify sooner rather than later. Ellis is supposed to be a pretty big deal after all.
First up on my quick stop tour of all things Ellis was ‘Black Gas’, a book that piqued my interest with a picture of what looked like zombies on the cover. That was more than enough for me to crack it open but there was so much more inside…

A tiny island off the East Coast of America is far more than it seems. The American Indians fought a bloody civil war there hundreds of years ago and no-body knows why. Until today.
A crack in a fault line has let loose a black gas that has got into the lungs of all but two people on Smoky Island. These two people are trapped on an island where the people aren’t people anymore. The inhabitants of Smoky Island started eating each other an hour ago. Now, it’s about to get worse…

When is a zombie not a zombie? When they’re acting like a zombie but not actually dead… There’s enough of the zombie here to get people like me interested but there is a lot more to the Black Gas than a regular ‘Dawn of the Dead’ style read. A lot more… ‘Black Gas’ is very much an adult read with Ellis’ plot & Fiumara and Waterhouse’s artwork all combining to present the reader with something that is dark yet utterly compelling. A word of warning though, don’t read this book if you are in any way squeamish. Ellis and co. don’t hold their punches… Even I was a little taken aback by what I found inside the cover. Fiumara won through in the art stakes but it was a close run thing.

When the apocalypse comes, there’s no messing around with people getting in touch with how they feel about it all. It’s all about the race to survive and not end up as lunch for some ravening monstrosity. Robert Kirkman has shown this to good affect in ‘The Walking Dead’ but Ellis takes it one step further. When civilisation goes down the pan it happens fast. Ellis has his hands firmly on the reins here and the result is a tale where I actually had to make a conscious effort to slow things down so I could enjoy the art. Things move quickly in ‘Black Gas’ and it’s at a pace that will have you along for the ride before you realise what you’re doing.

Ellis strikes a fine balance between plumbing the depths of depravity (which he does with an ease that is a little suspicious…) and showing his reader just what it’s like for the people who are left. Tyler and Soo are two characters who will surprise you at just how they manage to cope with what’s going down. Ellis led me to think that each person would take it in a certain way… and then totally turned my expectations upside down. We don’t get to spend a lot of time with Johnny but he proves to be more than effective in showing the reader what an apocalyptic event is all about; relentless violence and tough decisions. And, as is the case with any good apocalypse, just because our heroes tale comes to an end it doesn’t mean that things have come to an end altogether. The final panels are simple yet horribly effective and you just know that there could never be a sequel.

‘Black Gas’ was perhaps a little too graphic for this reader (although, without giving too much away, that was perhaps due to things that have happened to me over the last week) but a read that was never anything less than gripping. If this is what Warren Ellis is all about then I reckon I’m in for a treat with the next couple of books…

Nine out of Ten