On his Bad Signal email list, Warren Ellis shares details on his upcoming webcomic Freakangels. The free online comic, drawn by Paul Duffield, will debut this fall at http://www.freakangels.com. Ellis writes:
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.
Ellis ended the note with an update on Desolation Jones that should make fans happy: “Oh, and to answer a FAQ: DESOLATION JONES isn’t dead, just resting. We’ve run into a few problems, but it’ll be back soon, and monthly.”
