‘Ignition City – Volume One’ – Warren Ellis & Gianluca Pagliarani (Avatar Press)

My impromptu week of Warren Ellis is pretty much at an end. From what I understand, Ellis is a pretty big deal and I haven’t even scratched the surface of his output. What else should I be reading of his stuff?
What I have read though has been pretty much excellent and it’s a safe bet that I’ll be searching out more of his stuff to check out. Last stop on this whistle stop tour was volume one of ‘Ignition City’, a book that the blurb promised would be a “a retropunk future of the past where spaceships still belched smoke and arguments were still settled with laser pistols.” When something sounds just up my street, like this, I’m always a little suspicious that what’s inside won’t match up to my expectations. ‘Ignition City’ didn’t quite hit the mark for me but I still had a lot of fun reading it. If there’s a volume two out there then I’ll be after a copy…

The space faring Earth of the nineteen thirties and forties has been grounded by the nineteen fifties. There’s just too much to fear out there and people are better off staying where they are, at least that’s what the government want you to think.
Mary Raven has enough trouble being a space pilot whose craft has been confiscated by the US government but now her life is about to get much worse. Her father is dead and he didn’t die easy…
Mary is looking at a trip to Ignition City (Earth’s last spaceport) in order to retrieve her father’s effects; she’s also looking at finding out how he died and settling some scores while she’s there. Ignition City is home to a lot more than the petty squabbling of its denizens though; Mary Raven is about to find something out that will blow the lid off everything…

‘Ignition City Volume 1’ is clearly designed to be the opening salvo in something that should run and run. Attention is focussed on introducing us to the main players such as Mary Raven, Lightening Bowman and Dr Vukovic; characters who are fun to be around and show the reader just what it’s like to be living in an era when man has only just turned his back on the stars. It’s a hard existence when you’ve clearly had your dreams snatched from your grasp, Pagliarani’s squalid depiction of Ignition City makes this only too clear (although he’s not so hot with the facial expressions on some of the characters…)
The problem for me was that the focus on the characters felt like it came at the expense of the story itself. Maybe this is something that will iron itself out over future volumes but things felt very much unbalanced in the meantime…
Because there wasn’t enough room in the book to flesh things out sufficiently the ‘big reveal’ at the end of the book felt forced to say the least. I couldn’t quite get the connection between it and the events leading up to it. Having said that though, I do want to find out what happens next though so Ellis wasn't completely off his game :o)
Mary’s search for her father’s killer suffered from a lack of room as well. Because there’s no time for things to twist and turn, the reader gets something a little more linear instead and it’s clear from the start who the killer is. I was left thinking that with another fifty pages the plot could have been what it really wanted to be…

You know what though? When you’ve got a book full of raygun fights, weird aliens and gorgeous looking ‘retro’ spacecraft you can forgive a book it’s faults. And that’s what ‘Ignition City’ was. Despite my misgivings the pages still seemed to fly by in a welter of gunfire and hard-bitten space heroes facing off and posturing. ‘Volume 1’ is all about atmosphere and high adventure on some pretty mean streets; if you’re happy to let the plot wander off and do its own thing then I think you’ll be happy with what’s left over. Like I said, I’m certainly interested in seeing the broader picture that promises to develop in ‘Ignition City’. Recommended if, like me, you used to enjoy watching the old ‘Flash Gordon’ series on Saturday morning television…

Eight and a Half out of Ten