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The problem with most of Warren Ellis's comics, to me, is that the ending always feels like a beginning. Sometimes he ends a story just when I want to see what comes next. Sometimes, as with Transmetropolitan, this works all right, adding a hopeful element to a cynical story. Other times, like with Planetary, it feels like a fizzle, a whimper for a story that propelled forward with a series of extravagant bangs.

Freakangels, his recently completed weekly comics experiment with Paul Duffield, is the first Ellis work that makes good use of that old the-end-is-the-beginning feeling. Ellis even acknowledges it on the first page, when the narrator explains, "23 years ago, twelve strange children were born in England at exactly the same moment. 6 years ago, the world ended. This is the story of what happened next." The dozen psychic kids who are the center of Freakangels exist in a world after the conclusion of a story, and most of them are trying, in one way or another, to make this concluded world into a better place.

You can tell this is a story that was told in six-page segments every week; sometimes, characters just hang around and talk for a while, explaining what the plot needs to happen now. Other times, an action sequence spans the entire six pages in a chapter that takes a minute and a half to read. Sometimes, nothing happens. But serial storytelling is a difficult art. Read any Dickens book and you can tell when the old man was coasting, or when he suddenly realized that the end was in sight and it was time to start galloping. Ellis and Duffield give us characters who interact with each other in surprising, heartfelt ways. The point of the story at the end bears no relation to the story we think we're reading in the beginning. All put together like this, at over eight hundred pages, Freakangels is a distinct pleasure. Yes, the ending feels like a beginning, here. But you know what? That's okay, because Ellis has built a world in this series that is much like ours, in that it's neverending in an occasionally monotonous, often euphoric way.

Freakangels is available in book form, but it's also free to read the whole thing online. I read it in three or four sittings last weekend; I suggest you do the same this weekend.