Fallen Angel

I just finished reading all of Fallen Angel Volume 1 (Issues 1-20).
This shit is worthy of my time. It’s good stuff.

The basic premise is this: The mysterious city of Bete Noire is your ordinary american city by day, but by night it fills to the brim with evil. Mainly small time thieves and such, but often much more.
Our main character Lee, or “Fallen Angel” as her bar-man Dolf named her, is I guess what you’d get if you crossed Batman with Veronica Mars. People come to her and ask for help, and if she thinks you deserve her help, she will. She is still a Super-Hero after all, so she does have her own little powers. Combine that with supernatural themes and you have Fallen Angel.
The thing that attracted me to this series was the catholic mythology it’s based on, after reading the Wikipedia entry. The thing that kept me reading was the amazing story.

Fallen Angel was cancelled after the 20th issue, however it was brought back recently for volume 2. I believe they are up to about issue 7. From what I’ve read of volume 2, it’s really different. In my opinion, not for the better. It’s set several years later so they can introduce some new characters, which is great. The art style however has dramatically changed in to a more realistic painted look, which makes recognising characters from volume 1 sometimes difficult. Angel looks so much more awesome in this painted style, but a lot of it gets blurry and blends together. With the new characters they’ve also introduced a lot of Lee’s background and various other things have come out that before were just mysteries, which in my opinion really kills the awesomeness of Bete Noire, since there is no more mystery.

If you want an awesome graphic novel to read, I recommend Fallen Angel volume 1. Pick up whats out so far of volume 2 if you want to continue the story, but I don’t love it as much as volume 1. Then again I’ve only read the first 3 issues of v2, it may still grow on me.