William Gravel, Combat Magician

Strange Kiss (3-issue mini). [From Avatar Press: Finally, the entire Strange Kiss series is back in print and collected in one volume! Featuring an all-new introduction by Warren Ellis and new pinup art by Mike Wolfer. Strange Kiss is best described by Ellis himself, "A horrific murder-suicide in the middle of a busy city street at midday; an old man rotting and bloating in a hospital bed, something sick gestating inside him; in a darkened place close by, people screaming, impregnated, doomed. Something beautiful and awful is trying to reproduce, and its strange kiss is only to be feared..."] Old Book of the Week 1/14/04 ArtBomb review

Strange Kiss Scriptbook.

Stranger Kisses (3-issue mini). [From Avatar Press: Warren Ellis brings his mad visions to life with the same team who brought you Strange Kiss, with Mike Wolfer on art and Dan Parsons on painted grey tones. Stranger Kisses is about people for whom two genders are not enough, no matter how you play mix-and-match with sexuality. It's also about videotape, bad secrets, and what it's like to have an entire city wanting to kill you. The videotape is of seriously physically modified whores. Possibly altered at the genetic level. Because those extra orifices look grown. And those weird protuberances don't look artificial.... A very 21st Century comic, mad and modern and speedy and full of nasty ideas. Most sequels end up as pale imitations of the first. Stranger Kisses makes its ancestor look like a runt. It's Big Comics, Pop Comics. hard fast explosive storytelling, mad science and weird sex. What the hell more do you want? The year 2000. In LA, the future of rich man's whoring and trophy women is being designed. Two sexes are not enough. People like their kisses stranger than that.] ArtBomb review

1 Strange Killings (3-issue mini). [From Avatar Press: Warren Ellis' and Mike Wolfer's three issue action-packed Strange Killings series is now collected in this one volume! This TPB is the third installment, after Strange Kiss and Stranger Kisses, of the on-going adventures of William Gravel, Combat Magician. For the second time in history, the British Government sends in its crack troops, the Special Air Service, to quell a major prison riot. But not even these, the most accomplished and frightening soldiers on Earth, are equipped to face what lies at the center of the prison, the heart of the riot. In fact the only man in the SAS qualified to deal with the horror within is the recently disgraced Sergeant Major William Gravel: combat magician. But inside the prison lies a man waiting to fight with more than mortal weapons. The will be at least one more strange killing this evening.] ArtBomb review

2 The Body Orchard (6-issue min). [From Avatar Press: Warren Ellis and Mike Wolfer return for more Strange Killings! Before his disgrace and removal to solo deniable duties, Sergeant Major William Gravel was part of SAS team Alpha One Four. He hasn't seen his teammates since his fall. He knows only that they're still in the job, doing the things he used to do. Which doesn't remotely explain why, while he's moonlighting in New York, the Alpha One Four team should be seen blowing away a newly-elected mayor -- a military man himself - and then vanishing into thin air... This series digs deep into William Gravel's magic past and begs an answer to one of the greatest combat magician secrets, what is the Body Orchard? This is the fourth volume in Ellis' series of Strange TPB's (Strange Kiss, Stranger Kisses, Strange Killings).]

3 Strong Medicine (3-issue mini). [From Avatar Press: Ellis and Wolfer return for this fifth volume of the adventures of Combat Magician William Gravel and unleash a new series full of bad juju. Gravel finally escapes his deniable ops in the USA and is able to return to his home in London. But before he can even settle in, he gets sucked into a horrific child mutilation investigation. Because this child was killed in a very specific way, it was a muti killing designed to bring powerful magic to someone. And if Gravel can't stop him, many more children will die to create a black magician with very strong medicine.]

4 Necromancer (6-issue mini). [From Avatar Press: Warren Ellis' cult hit Strange Killings is back with "combat magician" William Gravel's most gut-wrenching mission yet! Deployed to a steaming Philippine island, Gravel's assignment is to assassinate an investigative reporter about to expose a chemical weapon lab sanctioned by the British government. But double-crosses and political intrigue have marked Gravel for murder by his S.A.S. comrades as he realizes that he has been led into a trap by a vengeance-seeking superior. And it only gets worse. There're zombies: Scores of flesh-ripping, reanimated corpses seeking to shred and devour everyone and everything in their path. If Gravel is able to uncover the shocking truth hidden within the jungle on this island of the dead, can even his otherworldly powers help him escape from a madman, and army of the undead and four squads of heavily armed S.A.S soldiers out for his blood?]