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Underground > Comic Books >

Warren Ellis to retire from comics?

  
  

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Krug
17:10 / 05.01.04
What do you think?

I think he won't quit. I think his output might decrease which would mean less crappy comics because I can't remember him doing anything good in quite a few years besides Planetary. He might doing other stuff that he's been promising for years on Bad Signal.
 
 
FinderWolf
17:15 / 05.01.04
He's not quitting comics - in the interview he says he's quitting *American* comics. He'll be doing some European-published stuff, esp. most likely for Humanoids Publishing.
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
17:44 / 05.01.04
< deliberately provocative >

So he is quitting comics then?

< /deliberately provocative >

I think it was a shame when he decided he was too good to write comics like Storm Watch and The Authority, I've been catching up with the former at work and they really were some of the best work he's done along with Planetary...
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
15:13 / 06.01.04
I also like the way that, in his opening blurb, Rich tries to credit Warren for any success that Neil Gaiman's 'Endless Nights' might have had. Because it's not as if Gaiman's Sandman stuff has been selling extremely well in paperback and hardback for over a decade...
 
 
XXII:X:II = XXX
21:47 / 06.01.04
About fucking time. He hates comic readers, and readers who read comics hate him. It's a win-win situation as far as I'm concerned. I look forward to either the true blossoming of his writing career or, more likely, a spectacular flameout, followed by a smokey plummet to earth.

Again, I can't help but think that somehow this cements the analogy between Ellis and KISS. They've broken up how many times now? And they come back, and everyone gets all jizzy for a little while, but then it sinks back in, oh yeah, THAT'S why I stopped listening to them, and they announce their retirement, and everyone goes to see their "last" shows so they can say they did, let sit for about six years, and repeat the whole process over again. Let's just hope we get six years without Ellis.

VJB2
 
 
XXII:X:II = XXX
21:50 / 06.01.04
Oh, and Rich Johnston's a sycophantic little hanger-on. His persistence in comics journalism testifies to what an oxymoron that term is.
 
 
woodenpidgeon
07:24 / 05.02.04
I must be the minority here but I like:

Global Frequency
Red

And Planetary a whole lot.

If Ellis didn't write anything on the web-- would anyone object so much?
 
 
Krug
16:53 / 05.02.04
Ellis seems to talk about social skills which is a laugh becuase I don't see a lot of difference between him and the fanboys who rant "Fukk Yu SpId3y Rul3z!"
And yes we would hate him less if he kept a low profile like Milligan does.
 
 
eddie thirteen
15:53 / 07.02.04
I agree with that last statement. I remember reading early Transmet and finding it kind of juvenile and egomaniacal (with Spider as Ellis' masturbation fantasy of himself as literary genius -- who, um, completely steals the style of Hunter Thompson, but never mind -- whose every utterance is eagerly sucked up by the great and unworthy unwashed...in the context of a future that seems otherwise totally post-literate, but again, never mind), but still pretty entertaining, now and then. Stuff like The Authority just made me wanna vomit, but I could accept that the guy was getting all hacky in hope of making a buck...cynical, sure, and many other writers were able to make the transition from personal work to mainstream superhero comics while retaining a respect for their readers that, frankly, I don't think Ellis had even while writing Transmet -- but again, never mind! It's definitely Ellis' online persona that convinced me he doesn't need my attention, and certainly none of my money; his actual writing really isn't that great, and lots of it is complete shit, but he's not significantly worse than many, many popular writers.
 
 
Simplist
16:30 / 07.02.04
...Spider as Ellis' masturbation fantasy of himself as literary genius -- who, um, completely steals the style of Hunter Thompson, but never mind -- whose every utterance is eagerly sucked up by the great and unworthy unwashed...in the context of a future that seems otherwise totally post-literate, but again, never mind...

LOL, this was exactly what put me off Transmet when I read the first TP. At the climax of the arc, Spider saves the day when crowds all across the city are transfixed at the sight of plain text scrolling down giant screens as he publishes his expose in real time... I can't imagine a present, much less a future, where this is at all plausible.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
17:42 / 07.02.04
Yes, but see, Ellis has always been a hack. It's only the massive online presence he and his fans have that has persuaded people that he's a name in anything other than superhero comics, which he's been on record as loathing time and time again - but of course Planetary is a superhero comic, Spider Jerusalem might as well wear a black cowl... all his stuff, whether it has the obvious trappings of the superhero milieu or dresses more sci-fi, is basically adolescent-liberal power fantasy writ 21st century. His last few Authority stories, for example, were lazy writing at it's most embarrassing, something he slips into with monotonous regularity whenever he gets bored, which is monotonously often.

He's got a nice ear for snappy dialogue, which rarely leaves him, but a vastly irritating habit of casting himself - or rather, his ubiquitous Old Bastard persona - as the main character in almost everything he writes (Spider in Transmetropolitan, Pete Wisdom in Excalibur, Jenny Sparks in Authority, Curzon in his Thor miniseries, Elijah Snow in Planetary, Damian Hellstrom in Hellstorm, Constantine in Helblazer, to name but a few - the same chainsmoking arrogant bastards cropping up over and over again to spout the party line and shout at the other characters in an entertaining manner, and usually to produce the totipotent deus ex out of thin air and save the day when the fanboy in him wants to get off).

This last is oddly reminiscent of the Mary Sue effect in fan fiction, especially with Pete Wisdom, a character who, it seems, was created purely to hang out with Excalibur and sleep with Kitty Pryde, which is just a little bit cheesy...
 
 
--
20:25 / 07.02.04
Not really familiar with the man's stuff... I've read Transmet, which I quite liked until around issue #50 or so. Then it just got really bad.
 
 
Captain Zoom
20:43 / 07.02.04
I think Ellis is one of those writers who can be appreciated if you're only reading one of his titles at a time. Otherwise the repetition of phrasing and story can become aggravating. If you look at a situation like GM writing JLA and The Invisibles at the same time, there's never (as far as I can remember) a point where Batman utters a phrase that a month or two later finds itself coming out of King Mob's mouth. On the other hand, anything Elijah Snow says probably has it's genesis in a fairly similar quotation from Spider Jerusalem, which is also recycled into William (is that his name?) Gravel, because who the hell reads Vertigo comics and Avatar comics in the same lifetime? (That'd be sarcasm right there.)

One of the reasons I've managed to enjoy Ellis' work is because for a lot of the time that Transmet was being published, I didn't read anything else he wrote. The odd Planetary, when it actually came out, but I had no interest in much of his other stuff. And now I read Planetary and nothing else he writes. So I don't see the repetition.

I think if he quits comics it will be a loss. Not a huge one, but he does come up with entertaining stories that are usually a cut above the normal fare. I hope that if he goes into the European market it will help to bring those comics into the north american arena as there's lots of stuff being published overseas that probably deserves a far wider audience. If a "bit-time american comics [that's comics that are american] writer" goes over to the european side, his fans'll follow and bring back what they can. A bit of cross-pollination's not always a bad thing.

That said, I will not miss his online persona. If there's one thing I quite despise the world wide web for, it's putting fans in touch with the people they are fans of. A lot of the time they turn out to be complete asses, which taints the work, for me at least.

Seeya, Warren. Enjoy whatever it is you end up doing.

Zoom.
 
 
cusm
20:47 / 07.02.04
I've been reading his LiveJournal blog for awhile now, which he uses to dump occasional random short snippets of story he's tinkering with. There's a lot of good stuff in there. His best seems to be in the cyberpunk transhuman erotica vein. I'm beginning to agree that the purely textual medium might be better for him than comics in the long run. His writing talents come out better in narrative, I think.
 
 
Krug
02:48 / 08.02.04
He has no ear for dialog!

All his protagonists are toughies who talk in the same badarse way (the way he talks when he's angry online).

It's been a few years since he wrote a good comic.
 
 
eddie thirteen
04:33 / 08.02.04
Okay, now I feel like I'm just beating a guy while he's down because I've been stuck on a scene in my own story all day, but I agree with this, too. I'm hardpressed to see a real difference between the dialogue of -- for instance -- Spider Jerusalem and Ellis' uninspired John Constantine (no loss when he walked from Hellblazer, though ironically the "unpublished" story [which I've seen on at least three different websites] that got him in trouble was by far the best work he did on the book). And that's pretty bad, since Spider lives several decades in the future and is also (I think) supposed to be American. I mean, Jesus Christ. Both sound pretty much like incensed Ellis, but have the magical ability to sound that way for pages at a time without garnering the likely real world reaction Ellis would elicit were he speaking to someone that way and not typing at them...i.e., because it's a comic book, the harangued characters do not turn to violence (at least not until the haranguer's finished his haranguing), and they *never* do what most normal people would do when confronted by a raving psycho who says "fuck" every third word, which is...walk away.

Mind you, this isn't to say that ranting Ellis can't be funny. And I kinda doubt that even Ellis thinks real people actually talk that way. But to say that someone has an ear for dialogue implies that they're listening to other people talk (resisting the easy jab implicit in this) and producing a facsimile thereof. I'm sorry, but....no.

More than anything, I'm angry at Warren Ellis for turning the word "bastard" into a cliche. This hasn't stopped him from using it, but still. It's a good word. And he killed it! Bastard.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:16 / 08.02.04
I *really* liked the script for "Hostile Waters", but in general I think I agree with everything Jack and Zoom just said. Ellis does seem not to be rolling the barrel enthusiastically enough - he resets, reaches into the tombola and picks out the same scraps of paper: "superbeings"; "cathedrals of living flesh"; "smoking swearing guy"; "HST quotations in the mouths of characters unlikely ever to have read him, for readers unlikely to etc."; "nanobots". Then he arranges these into a popular comic or saying.

It's kind of a shame that these ideas keep recurring (I feel similarly about Morrison), because when he's good he really can be good - but it's hard to make yourself care when you've seen it all before.
 
 
--
01:09 / 09.02.04
Last night I dreamed I was reading a comic by Ellis... It starred myself and dealt with a homosexual fling I had with Spider Jerusalem.

That's what happens when you eat chicken rice-a-roni right before bedtime I guess.
 
 
eddie thirteen
02:34 / 09.02.04
Heh heh. Y'know, Sypha, you'd better not tell Ellis about this...it sounds like a definite invasion of his cbu, and dangerously -- dangerously! -- close to *gasp!* Transmet slash fic. How dare you dream of his characters in an unauthorized fashion? Somewhere Warren Ellis is crying.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
06:43 / 09.02.04
Whoever pointed out that W Ellis could keep a low profile in the way P Milligan does was absolutely goddamn right. Ellis strikes me as an ok writer who promotes himself well, and often, and rigorously, but come on, let's face it, what's he actually done ? Planetary was/is fairly entertaining, but it's not as if Moses is coming down from the mountain, burning tablets in hand. Though that seems to be the way one's expected to see it - it can't be that much of a struggle to do one of those things every couple of months, can it ? Especially when most of it's down to the art. And seeing as nothing he's done is even vaguely a patch on Shade or The Enigma ( We should pause for a second here, and just remember how fantastic, how original, inspiring, how you-don't-get-that-stuff-around-here-anymore, The Enigma was, ) I just think fuck him, fuck W Ellis, it's really not going to be too big a loss. Milligan, on the other hand, definitely would be.
 
 
Chubby P
08:56 / 09.02.04
Peter Milligan already "quit". After the failure of the Minx he disappeared and at the time I remember reading a rumour that he was done with comics. No song and dance from Milligan though. He just quietly went away. And then a couple of years later he came back. Trashed an X-men spinoff comic and turned it into something fantastic and has once more been producing brilliant work. His time off obviously did him good. And he managed to do this without having to eat any humble pie due to not shooting his mouth off when he was jaded with the industry.

Like people have said before me, Milligans work speaks for itself!
 
 
Bed Head
10:51 / 09.02.04
And, the first 6 issues of Human Target have been about a squillion times better than the first 6 issues of Shade ever were, even if you’re reading your old Shades with the rosiest of rose-tinted specs and chewing on a hindsight pill. If the muse takes him, Human Target has so much potential for Milligan to hit a ‘hotel shade’-type stride anytime soon. I reckon.

Warren Ellis - I never liked him. Won’t miss him. He’s not glamourous enough to sell me comics.
 
 
_Boboss
11:09 / 09.02.04
comics' last pure modernist, pin-up/Image author and hard sf enthusiast goes the way of his influences.

well that's okay because weston's going to finish ministry of space before he goes. yay!
 
 
Chubby P
08:42 / 19.02.04
If you come back out of retirement before you retire did you ever truly retire?
Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen on Ultimate Fantastic Four
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:01 / 19.02.04
Well, if it stops him making records...
 
 
_Boboss
10:19 / 19.02.04
well fuck me. luckily i'm far too much of a wuss to go listening to that kind of thing. but the question needs to be asked because the answer is bursting the seams of inevitability - is it any good?

smokin smokin smokin, keep them caricatures smokin

with gothic drums
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
11:15 / 19.02.04
NB: for the hard of reading, I said an ear for snappy dialogue. As in amusing repartee, witty insults, condensed scorn delivered via a one-liner. The kind of thing you like to see in an above-average action movie. He does not, I agree, have a good ear for dialogue in general - and I think that leaving comics could be the making of him as a serious writer. But then I don't think much of comics as a serious art form for writers. I'm of the opinion that it's a creative dead end. Unpopular one round here, I know, but...
 
 
FinderWolf
19:19 / 19.02.04
Ellis & Immonen might do some really nice FF work on this, who knows? I'll keep my mind open, even though Ellis has been not at his best lately, it seems to me.

But I really wanted to post because BedHead used the word "squillion," as in "about a squillion times better", and it made my day.

>> And, the first 6 issues of Human Target have been about a squillion times better
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
22:19 / 19.02.04
But then I don't think much of comics as a serious art form for writers. I'm of the opinion that it's a creative dead end. Unpopular one round here, I know, but...

Wowzer. That's a *really* interesting question. Are comics a creative dead end? It's one of those questions that really could run and run, draggin examples in from further and further points of the medium.

Hooever - could one suggest, as an intermediate point, that comic writers often do not get the criticism that, say, a novelist ocuppying a similar position in their field might? I have an awkward feeling that Ellis, for example, is sort of a victim of his fans - he has not really encountered a coherent critique of his work, and the stuff keeps selling even if it is consistently late and often parasitic of earlier work, so who is suffering if he carries on as is?
 
 
Jack Fear
22:33 / 19.02.04
Well, if it stops him making records...

Alas, Flyboy--if you have tears, prepare to shed them now--the newly redesigned warrenellis.com reports that Wasp Factory Records has signed Warren and the hilariously-named "Scott Deathboy" to deliver an entire album in that vein.

Which is unfortunate: not only is the music second-rate, not only are his texts the sort of uninspired doom-mongering that comes off as Nicole Blackman rejectamenta, but he simply hasn't got a very interesting voice. Dame Fortune has not blessed him with Alan Moore's sepulchral basso, not with the cheeky 'ard-man tones of Ian Dury.

Instead, his speaking voice is somewhere between Brian Eno and Kermit the Frog, a flutey tenor with an inexplicably posh,half-swallowed quality--tragically at odds with both his drinkysmokeytoughguy image and his would-be-spookity words.

I think it was Wittgenstein who said, "A man's got to know his limitations." Or maybe it was Dirty Harry. Same difference, really.
 
 
eddie thirteen
23:59 / 19.02.04
Um, I think staying within popular comics genres -- superheroes, superheroes, and for variety, superheroes (in any guise) -- is a creative deadend, though a (diminishingly so) very lucrative one...I mean, it's nice work if you can get it. I'm sure it whomps all kinds of ass over flipping hamburgers. In the case of Ellis, I'm honestly of the opposite opinion...if, say, Kordey had drawn Transmet, would it have lasted beyond issue #6? Ellis has been very fortunate in working with some extremely talented artists (and now, "Scott Deathboy"). Stripped of his visual crutches, I suspect he'd suck. And, if not, then where's his novel? I mean, he's only been talking about how much he hates comics since about fifteen minutes after he began writing them.
 
 
Jack Fear
01:18 / 20.02.04
where's his novel?

From warrenellis.com:

"Still without a title at time of writing, I have sold an original prose novel to Senior Editor Josh Behar at HarperCollins in New York. ... slated to be published in early 2005."

There you go.

"..Concerning the Secret Constitution Of The United States, the perception of perversion, a detective who is an authentic Shit Magnet and how Benjamin Franklin killed an arse-probing alien with one punch..."

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
 
 
Char Aina
01:21 / 20.02.04
you do see a lot of really shit writing in comics, and i feel i am not alone in having bought some of it. hell, a lot of it.

i think the serialisation helps shit authors get away with it, as many folks have been collecting a title for ages and will not stop. there is a definite buffer there for the festering of incompetence.

ellis could be good, but i agree with haus. once you've read a few of his pieces you really cant be arsed with much more of his output. i am getting that way about morrison, but nowhere near as much.

few but moore, it seems, are approaching this business like real writers, whatever they are.
 
 
Krug
03:24 / 20.02.04
I think you were on the money about comics being a creative deadend in some way but can you really blame a medium for the parasites who hack their way into deadlines and keep the boat afloat with purty pictures?

Morrison has hacked his way through the last year of X-Men. I will simply not see it any other way. This isn't the same guy who wrote Kill Your Boyfriend, Mystery Play, St. Switin's Day, Doom Patrol (from what few issues I'v read), The Invisibles and so on. I think the deadlines do make things worse for just about everyone. Most of these people fill up their plates far too much and divide their time unfairly.

How different would Invisibles have been if Morrison was selfpublishing it and was comfortable enough to take all the time he wanted with every single issue?

On the other hand we have people like Clowes, Tomine, Millidge and Lapham who take all the time they want and continue to produce first class material without missing a beat.

I can't swear on it but I'm convinced that Transmet got shit around the same time the WEF reached a certain level of popularity/notoriety and Ellis was no longer a struggling writer but part of his hipster clique of hacks and "creative types." He didn't have to move the book forward just keep it where it was and have things happen around it.

Ellis convinced himself that all he had to do was stop pretending Spider Jerusalem wasn't him and that it stopped being a story about a journalist trying to tell the truth in a world where it doesn't exist or has no significance. Spider only seemed to be winning because he was the star of the book. There's this part in "Lust for Life" where this crazy assistant claims that Spider turned her into a whore which made the reader question if Spider was really the good guy just because the story was mostly about him. Ellis didn't veer into that territory again and everything after that (with a single exception), everything about Spider was right and nothing else was important.

I don't think Ellis is a bad writer just that he's allowed the fame, the groupies, the online friends get the best of him and there's no reason why he can't do better comics.

Comics are generally then, a creative deadend for writers because writers can continue to profit without being creative as long as the pictures are shiny, because the audience isn't much smarter than your average television audience.

I don't see how the people who read (insert your own crappy comic here because I don't want to offend anyone) are any smarter than the people who sit down and watch the Bachelor or My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance or those hip new gaymakeoversarefunny shows (whatever they are). Morrison said in his brilliant "The Revolution is Now" column how the mediocre superhero comic was smarter than the average popular television show. Which isn't really that true and misleads you into thinking the same for the audiences.

I don't think audiences have ever realised how much power they wield and how they can just turn off their tvs and quit buying Spiderman if it's anything less than brilliant and instantly send a message to the fucking retards who're pushing their pencils without a intelligent thought in their head.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
04:16 / 20.02.04
But then I don't think much of comics as a serious art form for writers. I'm of the opinion that it's a creative dead end. Unpopular one round here, I know, but...

Wowzer. That's a *really* interesting question. Are comics a creative dead end? It's one of those questions that really could run and run, draggin examples in from further and further points of the medium.

The question isn't are comics a creative dead end, just one for writers. I would think that there is some truth to the feeling that writers have a limited lifespan in comics, with very rare exceptions. There are a number of things that can be done by artist/writers, but writers are limited in many ways by their artists. This is NOT to put down writers (I don't want to re-open the Name Withheld can of worms) but that for a person to grow as an artist, they have to stretch themselves...and as good as Alan Moore is, he is still subject to how well the artist envisions his scripts.

How many of the more creative comics writers of the 70's are still putting together innovative work? Or the 80's? Or even the 90's?

As much as I like the writing aspect of comics (and will read a poorly drawn but well written book, but very rarely the other way around), I do think that after a time in mainstream Big Company comics, a writer has to either grow or die, and most times that growth leads them out of comics.
 
  

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