In England, the word cunt is punctuation.

The other day I had gone back and re-read a few stories from Warren Ellis' brief run on Hellblazer, which was really quite good. Ellis is one of those creators that I trust, but only as far as I can throw him. When he hits the mark, he hits it hard. But unfortunately, he often misses the mark too. Ellis is an "idea man", and while I think that this is something sorely lacking in most modern comics, it can also hold a good writer back.

All of this occurred to me while I was reading Hellblazer because, frankly, it's really fucking good. Ellis' famed smarminess (see Warren Ellis (dot) Com for examples) has been a useful tool over the years, but too often it is apparent that most of his protagonists at this point are little more than Spider Jerusalem derivatives, who himself was admittedly a Hunter S. Thompson derivative. All of this nut-kicking, chain-smoking, and swearing is quite charming in the beginning, but it begins to wear itself pretty thin after a while. Especially when considering that Transmetropolitan is 10 years old now.

The reason I frame this in the context of Ellis' Hellblazer run is because Ellis is just that much more convincing when he's writing British characters. Looking back on series like Desolation Jones reaffirm this suspicion.

Crecy, Warren Ellis' new graphic-novella released by Avatar Press as part of his Apparat Line, is another perfect example of why Warren Ellis should not be writing Thunderbolts and should be writing Wisdom instead. Crecy is a surprisingly economic piece of work about the Battle of Crecy, from the British point of view.

There's a reason why Hugh Grant movies sell in America. Warren Ellis' omniscient narrator is a perfect example of how the British could be verbally abusing you to your face, and you'd still walk away from the conversation having been charmed. Take out the racism, the perpetual class-warfare, the hatred of everything not English, the constant need to correct everyone who is not English that they are wrong and backwards, and you'd have a Summer Blockbuster on your hands right there.

Crecy doesn't read quite like a story, but it also doesn't quite read like the overt history lesson that it is. More than anything it reads like a lament and an admission of not only the things that the British got right, but also the ugly things that the British had to get wrong in order to survive. The combination of admitting your mistakes while also admitting that it is necessary to continue them is extremely powerful when handled by Ellis. These are the kinds of lofty experiments that make it worth buying as many Warren Ellis books as possible.

Crecy bodes well for not only Avatar, but for comics as well. With the release of both Doktor Sleepless and Black Summer, the Apparat line has shown that it is not only alive and well, but more than willing to kick in your nuts.

Powered by ScribeFire.

God!

This book is so dense it hurts my face. Eight pages of comic story, six of which are tightly packed, dense-as-hell nine panel grids.Juan Jose Ryp's art is thick as hell. Each line is pitted against the others, and each panel/illustration is just visually packed with information. The illustration used for the wrap-around cover is a perfect example of Ryp's dense style, and in combination with Ellis's writing...

Argh! It hurts!

The fact that Ellis was able to squeeze this much information into eight pages of comic story is testament to his level of skill, which I don't think anyone at this point was still disputing. God. It reads like the first paragraph in a J.G. Ballard novel. This comic will fuck you up.

I guess I'm buying the rest of the series, even though I didn't have any particular interest in following this story before.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Now, I have to admit that I'm pretty wary of this book. I love a lot of Ellis' work, but so much of it falls flat for me. He's certainly one of the more interesting "idea-men" in comics today, but it often seems like the level of craft that he pours into his books generally depends on his level of interest in exploring the subject matter at any given time. He seems to do his best work when he has much fewer distractions on his plate. His better known creator-owned work Transmetropolitan, Planetary, and Desolation Jones are among some of his best, but people often forget how prolific he really is, and tend to dismiss the crap that the occasionally puts out.

So why should I check out Black Summer?

Let's ask Ellis:

On Character Motivation

He's been asking himself the question that informs the book: where do you draw the line? If you're totally committed to the idea of covering your face and taking on a fake name and standing outside the law in order to fight for justice where do you stop? Crime pervades society. We're all aware of corporations that behave in a criminal manner. Is that as far as you go?

Wait. You know the 90s are over right? We don't need to deconstruct super heroes anymore. Now we need to do continuity laden (or reference laden) homages with nothing but reverence. Oh and it wouldn't hurt if you included some Mammet-esque dialog and pregnant pauses.

On the Conceptual Process

"William
and I have an easy, longtime friendship and we do this a lot," revealed
Ellis. "And he bet me I couldn't come up with a high-concept superhero
'event' book that naturally featured all new characters and ideas, but
also hit some of the notes of a standard Big Two event program."

Couldn't you just finish the last issue of Planetary?

On Inspiration

So
when this hit me and I'm pretty sure I was standing in my garden at
three in the morning with a glass of whisky, smoking furiously and
swearing at the sky, reduced to waiting for the thunderbolt to hit it
spoke to me not only of the reasons why someone might put on a helmet
and find justice their own way, but also why we read these myths of
social justice ourselves.

On the Jungian Dichotomy

Half
the potential audience is going to see John Horus as the bad guy, and
that's not without merit. Half the audience is going to see him as the
Good Guy, and I can see where they're coming from too. I take no public
position.I'm writing it from both angles at once and letting people
make up their own minds.

So it's like Civil War, except...no one will buy it. Explosions are pretty.

On The Future

All
these things are cyclical. And I'm not sure you can characterize DC's
current output like that, they seem really focused on classic
broad-sweep superheroics right now. It comes down, I think, to what I
said before: what are the questions left to ask? And a lot of the
questions left to ask are sociopolitical. It's an aspect of these
decadent days we find ourselves in. Pigs with two heads are abroad in
the land. The British military is trying to loft a communications
satellite grid called Skynet. These are the End Times.

Wow. "Skynet"?! That's so badly cyberpunk it doesn't even come out the William Gibson story - it comes from the adaptation.

Honestly, I still love so much of Warren Ellis' work, but he really needs to stop letting people talk him into doing any work remotely related to super heroes anymore. And the fact that this is another book that comes out of one of his bets with William Chrstensen leaves me with little hope. I mean, did anyone else read Wolfskin? There was a reason Ellis had to stop working on it. It was awful. It made me dumber just by reading it. I can only imagine what it did to Ellis, who was writing it.

It's been a while since he's done anything that's truly blown my mind the way Transmet or Planetary did, but maybe I'm just too far along for that stuff to effect me the same way. Desolation Jones could possibly be his next great work if Marvel would stop asking him to write books that mock their entire companies publishing line.

Although, I have been really enjoying newuniversal.

powered by performancing firefox