Warren Ellis - Gravel

[andydecker]

Gravel - created and written by Warren Ellis, artwork and script by Mike Wolfer and Raulo Cáceres

(Avatar Comics, 21 issues, 2007 - 2010)

Gravel is a comic series by the American company Avatar. The character was created by British writer Warren Ellis in 1999. At the time a fast rising star writer at Marvel and DC, he used the creative freedom of Avatar to develop creator-owned concepts.

Raulo Cáceres

William Gravel is a "combat magician", a soldier for the SAS. He kills Her Majesty‘s enemies and monsters with magic. A very typical Ellis character, Gravel is a hard smoking, hard drinking and brutal working class hero. The first Gravel stories were a couple of mini-series with a lot of gore and OTT violence, drawn by Mike Wolfer. It began with "Strange Kiss". In 2007 Avatar started an ongoing series titled Gravel, which ran for 21 issues until 2010. These later stories were co-scripted by Wolfer, the artwork was by rotating artists. The first story-arc is about a power struggle among the minor magicians of England. Gravel kills them all messily and reluctantly becomes one of the Major Seven magicians.

Raulo Cáceres

As far as action-horror goes, this is not bad. Gravel is a typical millennial character, and despite the non-censorship this isn‘t exactly Sabbat. In many regards this is Warren Ellis on autopilot, he wrote much better books at the time like the sf story Transmetropolitan. His much awaited run on John Constantine – Hellblazer at the same time ended prematurely after only 10 month because DC pulled a bleak and controversial but ready for publication story - it was published years later, but became avaiable shortly after the incident on the net - and Ellis left the book. A lot of ideas and concepts for Hellblazer and the aborted before publication Satanna – among Ellis' first work for Marvel a few years earlier -, were supposedly recycled for Gravel.

Spanish artist Cáceres did a lot of artwork for Avatar at the time. Among his most impressive works are a few covers for Alan Moore's Providence. They were used as Variant Covers and mostly illustrate key scenes of Lovecraft stories. They are worth a look or two.