If you don't know who is WARREN ELLIS, you don't love Comics Art.
If you are here reading this interview, you perfectly know who's The Old Bastard.
If you want more take a look at www.warrenellis.com.

This interview has been conducted via email the 15th of July 2002.

Focus on Transmetropolitan, Superidol, the upcoming Global Frequency [1]. It seems that you are using the "mask" of the sci-fi genre as a way to dissect our contemporary society. I remember that you also said: "If there's one thing I hate, it's people". What is the urge that makes you choose a particular theme or a particular approach to the stories you write? Are you a little bit disenchanted by humanity?

Isn't everyone?
SF, as far as I'm concerned, is specifically designed to be used as a tool with which to examine the contemporary world. There are really only two kinds of SF; the Mary Shelley mode, where the ethical implications of a new idea are considered, and the HG Wells mode, where our present condition is examined using novelty as a distancing viewpoint. I shuttle between the two as an sf writer, but tend towards Wells, especially in Transmetropolitan. SF as the social novel.

You are one of the few creators speaking so openly and clearly about how to find new ways to attract the "outside people" and let them know that comics are a valuable Art form, that they can enjoy them as a film, a song or a videogame. So you said "no" to the superhero dictatorship (in Item Five of your grandiose "The Old Bastard's Manifesto"[2]), "no" to the serialization and "yes" to graphic novel and to "comics-diversity". What do you think will be the future of comics?

A lot of it will depend on more publishers establishing reliable bookstore distribution, but we're moving (it seems) inexorably towards the graphic novel as the standard form for comics work, whether as original direct-to-book release, or in finite serial form towards eventual collection.
The works that are selling in bookstores are, by and large, outside the superhero genre. I think we're entering a phase -- and it may just be a phase, a transient period -- where comics stores exist to serve only the superhero fans and the nostalgia buffs, and the real motion happens elsewhere. There are 135,000 copies of FROM HELL in circulation -- you think they all sold in comics stores?

Your final word to superheroism is Planetary. What does it mean for you? Why did you choose the approach of compiling some sort of distilled encyclopaedia of the genre?

To get five years of research out of my head. There was a period in American comics, which is thankfully now passing, where, to make people aware of your other work, you had to put in time writing superhero comics. I was never a big superhero reader, so I had to research the genre pretty thoroughly in order to do it well. And now I have a head full of this crap, as well as a strident awareness that the things that originally brought people to superhero comics are now entirely absent. So Planetary is intended to get all this rubbish out of my brain and on to the page, and also to show people -- this is why the genre has lasted this long. These are the glories that first got people interested. See what you lost, through all this inbreeding?
See what this ridiculous overextension of one subgenre covered up and left behind?

Warren Ellis and Internet: your website and your famous WEF (and, incredible but true, you are going to close it really soon), Artbomb.net (your direct way to support and promote comics novels). How important and strategic in your idea of Comics Art, has been, and still is, the World Wide Web?

Use of the Web started out, for me, as a promotional tool. Living in England, not being on the convention circuit, not being a Wizard regular, promotion of books gets hard. And, frankly, I like living in England and not having to spend every summer trawling through conventions. So I investigated using the Web as a way to travel without moving. Five or six years later, I am "comics' Internet guru" according to one news operation, and my techniques seem to be at least half of everyone's PR kit these days.

A whole bunch of things grew out of WEF, including the basis of Artbomb.net -- that (optimistically) half of all comics stores don't carry the books that a significant amount of people would like to read, and a huge percentage of those people won't go into a comics store anyway. And no amount of store outreach will change that. This is how the web works for comics. The web isn't a geek thing. Net connections are ubiquitous. And with the profile of serious work rising by the month, there are an awful lot of people reading about interesting new comics on the web who don't know how to find them, or even to learn more about them. This is what Artbomb.net does, and this is where the Web is most useful to the medium.

A strange end. Right now, alien spaceships appear from nowhere obscuring the sky of your town. There is no time, you have to run and leave your home. Can take with you only 3 comics, 3 music CDs, 3 movies, 3 novels. Which ones, and why, are you going to save from destruction?

FROM HELL [by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell], THE ADVENTURES OF LUTHER ARKWRIGHT [by Brian Talbot], ALEC: THE KING CANUTE CROWD [by Eddie Campbell]. The latter two are huge influences, the former is Alan's masterpiece.

CDs? AGAETIS BYRJUN, Sigur Ros. DOOLITTLE/COME ON PILGRIM, Pixies. THE VELVET UNDERGROUND AND NICO. Couldn't live without them.

Movies is tough, so I'm going to cheat. The BBC TV series EDGE OF DARKNESS on DVD, which is just majestic in its writing. NETWORK, which is perfect in its anger and perversity. And maybe a John Woo flick, for the hell of it -- the operatic HARD BOILED, say.

I mostly read non-fiction, so I'd grab EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS by Peter Biskind (history of the New Hollywood), ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN by Woodward and Bernstein, and BARROW'S BOYS, a mad history of British polar exploration that has to be read to be believed.

Notes:

[1] from www.warrenellis.com
GLOBAL FREQUENCY
There are a thousand and one people on the Global Frequency.
A worldwide independent defense intelligence organisation with a thousand and one agents, all over the world. Anyone you know might be with them. It's the world's little open secret. You could be sitting there watching the news and suddenly hear an unusual cellphone tone, and within moments you might see your neighbour leaving the house in a hurry, wearing a jacket or a shirt with the distinctive Global Frequency symbol... or, hell, your girlfriend might answer the phone, and then put on her Global Frequency badge and promise to explain later... for all you know, they have your file, and you'll be recruited next... anyone could be on the Global Frequency, and you'd never know until they got the call...
... from Aleph, central dispatcher for the Global Frequency, getting her orders from Miranda Zero, creator and operator of the organisation. Not her real name, but the only one you're getting. Her real name and identity were erased from the world's records the moment she went into business for herself. Global Frequency is run on the cash she made doing bad things in the Nineties, and on the hush money paid her by the G-8 industrialised nations for...
...for what the Global Frequency does. Clearing up after the 20th Century. Keeping an eye on the bad mad things in the dark that the public never found out about. All the black projects, the mad science, the chilly encounters with the unknown, the Cold War traps... they're all sitting there like landmines. Eventually someone will trip over one of them. Global Frequency are there to catch them when they fall, and defuse the mines before they explode into mainstream consciousness and cause more pain and horror than they already have...
Are you on the Global Frequency?

Twelve stories. Twelve issues. Twelve artists. From DC Wildstorm, beginning October 2002. www.globalfrequency.org

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[2] From The Old Bastard's Manifesto by Warren Ellis (2000)
ITEM FIVE
Fuck superheroes, frankly. The notion that these things dominate an entire genre is absurd. It's like every bookstore in the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. A medium where the relationship of fiction about nurses outweighs mainstream literary fiction by a ratio of one hundred to one. Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else.

It's been the hip and trendy thing to do, recently, to say that superheroes are, you know, all right. And, if they're well done, I agree with you. There's room for any kind of good work, no matter what genre it's in.

But that doesn't excuse you from going out and burning out all the bad work at the fucking root with torches. It doesn't excuse all the nameless toss that DC and Marvel and Image and all the others slop out every month. If you want to read three hundred superhero comics a month then you are sick and you need medical help.

Rip from their steaming corpses the things that led superhero comics to dominate the medium - the mad energy, the astonishing visuals, the fetishism, whatever - and apply them to the telling of other stories in other genres. That's all THE MATRIX did, after all."

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