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From an Ellis Badsignal post; I thought it'd be interesting to stuff it in here:
JONES is a book about loneliness
and liars disguised as a detective
story. FELL, which looks like the
darker book, is about a detective
who likes being a detective, who
finds joy in his life, yet who works
on the basis that everybody's
hiding something. He's almost the
baffled innocent, transferred into
a feral district and trying to get
a handle on this new phase in his
life. His job is in fact the only area
of his life in which he has control --
otherwise, he's all at sea. Richard
Fell's a delight to write because he
has no grip at all on his social life
as a direct result of the fact that
he's a nice guy. Michael Jones? Not
so much. I even question his
kindness. He's a horror to write.
But, as the series goes on, you'll
hopefully see that the stories are
less about him than the people
around him. And, for those people
who see the formation of a
supporting cast around Jones -- no.
Don't assume I'm getting comfortable.
JONES, I know, is very much within
my style -- I wanted to write an
Englishman abroad, and write about
a group of my interests, and I make
no apologies for that -- but I don't
think that, right now, there's
another book like it out there right
now. And that's good enough for me."
Aside from the expected self-aggrandisement at the end, it's notable at Ellis seems to be very much aware of his "stylistic tics" - there's a Bad Signal I now can't find where he talks about becoming lazy and producing his trademarked Grumpysmokingbastard stuff instead of being arsed to think up anything new. What I've seen of Jones seems interesting, especially the idea of the Desolation Test itself (I'll hunt down the Newsarama article when I'm less exhausted), and I like the idea of an Ellis book with an almost inverted protagonist. Has anyone got the text of the POWERS issue with the long W.E. rant about superhero comics? There's an interesting bit where he talks about literally deconstructing the genre by taking it apart piece by piece and then using the bits that make it tick (such as, from memory, "wild invention", "fetishism", and others) without resorting to the conventions of the cape book...especially examining at the actual look of the character, this could be an interesting counterpoint to DESOLATION JONES as a series.
In a slightly threadrotty way, I'm wondering what the exact rationale is with EllisProtagonist naming conventions: they all appear to be signifying (Elijah SNOW, Jenny SPARKS, SPIDER Jerusalem(?) DESOLATION Jones, etc, DO YOU SEE?, fishcakes), but I'm not entirely sure they're just "kewl" names for characters. It might be that this is his idea of the tradition of alliterative names in superhero comics, or something.
Anyway, very much looking forward to this, as it has art by .H.Williams III, which is always a treat, and I'd be interested to see how Ellis copes with an ongoing series with a non-Wrong-Bastard (I hope) protagonist, set in roughly the present day. |
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