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PROFILE: Warren Ellis Interview Introduction
Your columns are moving away from the work at your web-site to paid positions. Yes, yes. Your new column at Pulp, Come In Alone at ComicBookResources, Bad World... No no, Bad World I do for free. It's an arrangement I have with Chad. I'm actually doing a column for ENGINE, which is a Playstation 2 magazine in Britain, starting in a couple of months. Which is about...? Comics. Excellent... Comics and Computers. Do you think this is evidence that the comic industry has started paying attention to what you've been discussing? The fact that they're willing to pay you to talk about them. It may simply mean they think other people are interested in what I'm talking about, and will pay to read it. Heh. I mean I don't know I mean, the column I'm doing for PULP, Pacific Radio is about comics and Japanese Culture. It's as much about Western Comics as it is about Japanese culture, but the point is certainly a discussion of manga and Japanese culture in general. So it's certainly going to have a different tone to it than COME IN ALONE. Meanwhile the column for ENGINE will be evangelism, pure and simple. It starts from the standpoint that the ideas that make you buy Playstation 2 games, we do ideas of this calibre 5 times on one page in comics. It's where Playstation 2 games steal from. So here's what you need to be reading. It's going to be like 500 words a month of "Buy this you little bastards..." Speaking of activism, Instructions. You started that in Transmetropolitan, and then moved them to CBR, and I presume that they'll be moving somewhere else afterwards... Did you ever have someone object to those recommendations? Yeah! Yeah, there was one guy who, quite publicly on the forum, "I don't need your instructions because I can think for myself!" You recommend a lot of new and young creators, particularly writers, but sometimes writer/artists as well. Do you work with them beyond stuff like Instructions, or recommendations on the forum, to promote their books? Would you be interested in something like that? Well, I have done, I'm always in conversations with other people about how to get their books out to people. You've got a line of new comics coming from Image, have you considered something like "Warren Ellis Presents: A Book By This Writer"? There's nothing I can do through my Image deal, that's not the deal I've cut with Image. It was something I offered to do for Lea. I've been doing this a long time. I've always been in the position, with very few exceptions, where I've had no support from the company I'm working with in terms of promotion. So I've had to learn to do it all myself, and I've had to learn the hard way what works and what doesn't. It doesn't make any sense to keep that to myself. Along what lines do you see your work evolving? In the tour book, you said that "The Authority is just Stormwatch with all the clever bits taken out, and explosions put in their place." Would you say your work is evolving along those lines? No! Stormwatch, I tried to do, I figured that if I was going to do a Superhero book I was going to do one that was as smart as I could make it. And quiet, and low-key, so the horror stood out more clearly. And Nobody bought it! So we put together Stormwatch volume 2. "Y'know, I want to keep it smart, but we're going to try and make it a bit brighter, and move faster." And then that didn't work out either. So eventually I said "Let's just throw out the clever stuff, and we'll just have shit blowing up." And all of the sudden, I'm a star! [Laughs] It really is, it's Stormwatch freebased. [Laughs]
Do you think Mark Millar has carried on that torch? Mark is doing it very differently, which is good. Cos I don't think anyone could top killing God. What Mark's doing is very different, but it's still got that fantastic scale to it. In the most recent issue, where you've got the evacuation of Jerusalem. Where there's the huge hanging doors over everything, these trails of refugees filing in, fantastic stuff! I'm really enjoying what he's doing. Do you worry about books when you give them up, books that you've started? Nooo, because I didn't own them in the first place! I'm just handing them off for someone else to play with, they're not mine. Interesting. There are creators, contemporaries of yours, that have - you don't want to say thrown hissy-fits - but let's be serious here - over losing a book. I mean, The Hulk. Those guys are completely institutionalized. I mean, they really are. I mean Peter David, is not a stupid man. Very far from it. And intellectually, he must know, what writing the Hulk for 20 years or whatever it was, actually meant. It was just shining the company shoes for 20 years. He was servicing a copyright. No more and no less. He has no claims to that book, he never had any claims to that book. He must know that, and yet every indication was he was utterly stunned. Totally taken aback that he was removed from it. When he was nothing more than a cog in that book's machine, as it was. On a bit of a tangent, is it difficult for you, because you'll very publicly say something like "Mark Waid is smarter than the books he writes." And then Mark Waid will come on the forum and chat with you. Yeah. And Mark Waid, I assume, is a friend of yours. Yeah. Is that difficult? Is that sort of interpersonal relationship difficult for you when he reads that? No, because I've said it to his face. [Laughs] I don't say anything on the forums, or online or anywhere else that I would not say to someone's face. Probably have not already said to someone's face. But yeah, I've said it to his face. Well, it brings up a similar issue. Marvel. You've gotten some pretty good shots in at Marvel, but then Counter X comes along, where you'll say something like "I've still got a Mark Powers project I have to do." Basically, you're doing Marvel books when for all intents and purposes you hate the way Marvel works. Well I mean I'm not doing them now. [Pause] It's a dichotomy between understanding what the company is, and making promises to individuals working there. You know, it's not Mark Powers' fault that Marvel is a shitty company. Mark Powers is very nice to me, we work very well together and he asked me to come and do something again [when I left Excalibur]. There was no reason for me not to make that promise. You've been fairly reserved about commenting on Quesada's appointment to EIC at Marvel. That's because I don't know Joe. I've only met the guy once so I really have no opinion. Well, the press had you writing Spider-man, at one point. For Joe... Did they? Oh yeah. "A spider-man mini-series by Warren Ellis for Marvel Knights." Missed that...
[Laughs] They finally figured out how to market stuff to popular culture. And you're not really saying anything about it. You're the greatest industry pundit right now, and you just haven't commented on Quesada at all. Is it just because you don't know Joe, or are you taking a wait and see approach to the situation? [Ed's note: Warren has, since this interview, begun commenting heavily on the state of affairs at Marvel, via his COME IN ALONE column at CBR.] In talks, since I've been in the states, I've been saying that Joe's been there for 4 weeks, or thereabouts. Aside from the Ultimate thing, everything he's said has been "well, we're looking at doing this..." and "we're talking about doing that..." and "we're thinking about doing this...", and the only concrete thing he's actually done is fire Chris Claremont. ... and he came back! [Laughs] By now, Joe should be able to walk in and say not just "We're looking at fixing the trade paperback program...", he should be able to say "We're doing this, this is what we're doing, and we're doing it now." I mean the honeymoon period will not go on for much longer. He's only got a limited amount of time in which he can make his early, sweeping changes. He's hired Axel [Alonso] 'n Stuart [Moore] though. You've worked with both of those people... I've worked with both of them, but there are some basic problems with Marvel that are not being attended to. There is the lack of a trade paperback program. There is the lack of a foreign royalty program. There is the fact that Marvel does not admit to paying royalties. They call them "Creator-Incentives". These are some fairly basic infra-structural problems that need attending to. We all benefit from a healthy Marvel. Introduction |
But I know that you've specifically recommended to Lea Hernandez to add back-up features to Rumble Girls, running columns in the back and whatnot.
I said to Brian [Hitch], "What we're going to do, we're going to have to make this like Akira, only that whole thing just boiled down to 22 pages every month." Everybody loved it! We came up with the widescreen way of doing it, and we had Laura [Depuy] in from the start - I had already developed a relationship with her through Stormwatch - and, yeah! We just worked that like a sunnuvabitch. That whole "widescreen" thing. That was a term that had been thrown around in regard to JLA, but I don't think it really applied to that kind of thing until The Authority. Until Brian and Paul and Laura really made it sing. 
You're lucky. Marvel has been making some interesting announcements lately. They announced the details of their Ultimate Marvel Magazine, it's going to be a full-sized magazine with two comics features and supplemental material. Sort of like Wizard, but without the ridiculousness. It's going to be geared to the same 'tweener market. What's most interesting though is that they're actually using some marketing buzzwords that make it all seem really valid.
