Warren Ellis Wins. We Should All Just Quit: Freakangels

What have I been doing instead of maintaining this blog? Well, on Fridays I read Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield's ABSOLUTELY FREE and absolutely stunning Freakangels webcomic.6 pages a week. For free. And for their generosity, you should pay to get the inky, papery collection when it comes out.

Poke around, catch up--I think we're 15 installments in as of today. And join the messageboard, too; just remember to bring your brain, your sense of humor, and a good temperament.




What about the other six days a week you neglect me? the blog asked.

I have no good answer.

My God, Has It Been That Long?

Just got done posting a quick comment on Warren Ellis' Fell on his newish message board (replacing the near-utopian-in-comic-related-boards Engine) and realized it would have been even better posted on my very own cybermegaphone. Enjoy, ye who've waited these months for new content.

I'm starting to appreciate the structure and presentation of Fell: The Series almost as much as I enjoy Fell: The Stories.

Like most good episodic television shows, it's not a stringent requirement to access prior installments to enjoy the current one. The disuse of modern-funnybookish "cliffhangers", "story-arcs", and "future story-arc teasers disguised as subplots" keeps the interval between issues from being a "wait" situation; Fell comes out when it comes out. Not that I wasn't delighted to see Fell on the shelves this week, but I didn't ever catch myself thinking, "Christ, it's been forever since #8 came out! I'm not gonna enjoy #9 as much, due to the waiting between issues."

True, there's probably (read: obviously) some backstory living in Mr. Ellis' notebooks and scribbled on liquor market receipts, but the stories that begin and end inside a single floppy alleviate that burning need to see that history explicitly portrayed for me. I know it's there, but Fell in its current state kind of forces the reader (this reader) to exist in Snowtown's Now. The possibility that we might never find out the whys and wherefores of Detective Fell's consignment to Snowtown, or that there actually won't be a detailed six-part miniseries titled "Fell: Owsley, What's The Deal With Your Leg?" never seems to dog my thoughts while I'm immersed in the latest update.

End of gushing rant.

My overview on Fell #9: Typical Fell, atypical comic: solid, satisfying, and yet another Comic to Wave At Sniffling "Real" Fiction Snobs.

Now, what stuck with me specifically about this issue?

"...rich like astronauts."

I am now off to start a band, write songs, and record an album, just to title said recording "Rich Like Astronauts".

And if you're reading this blog and not reading Fell, I don't really know what to do with you.

Friday Night Fights: Sucka Punch! Round 4

In this corner, John Stone. He has the Devil's Paw.






And in this corner, our champion, Jakita Wagner. She is fond of hitting people in the brains until they stop fighting.



DING!




It's like Bahlactus always says, "Don't bring a Devil's Paw to a Bad-ass in Leather fight."


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Planetary 25, by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday (Wildstorm/DC 2006)

Warren Ellis Wins. We Should All Just Quit: Nextwave #12

2nd in a series:

Here's a panel from Nextwave #12, in which we meet Baby M.O.D.O.K. (M.O.T.O.T.?). Monica Rambeau's a little skeptical of the deadly nippper's lineage, but gets the birds, bees, flowers, trees, microchips and motherboards talk she's been begging for since she dropped the "Photon" moniker...



I tried to tell M.O.D.O.K to wrap his shit up tight, but he just wouldn't listen. Now he's on the hook for the next eighteen years.

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Nextwave #12, by Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen, and Wade Von Grawbadger (Marvel Comics 2007)

Warren Ellis Wins. We Should All Just Quit.

Here's the first in a series, actually approved by Internet Jesus Himself. Just look:

In a message dated 17/08/2007 10:28:52 GMT Standard Time, TIM writes:

Getting to the point: I adore Fell, and would love to feature a Fell panel every so often


^sure

And so we go. Thanks, Mr. Ellis.

Coming to CBS this fall...

CSI: SNOWTOWN

Series premiere. And also the series finale.



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^{From Fell #6, by Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith (Image Comics 2006)}

How Do You Take Your X-Men? Unsettling or Astonishing?

There was a metric ton of announcements coming from San Diego this weekend. Chances are if you're into comics, you've seen them all over Newsarama and everywhere else, so I'm not about to recap or deliver much opinion on any of those press releases.

Except one^[1].

To the delight of many, Warren Ellis has been tapped to take over Astonishing X-Men when Joss Whedon's latest arc winds up. That this news was greeted by mass fandom with near-unanimous glee wasn't surprising at all. What surprised me this weekend were the scores of online postings proclaiming, "Oh, Good Christ! Finally, the Scary X-Men we've been begging for!" And if not that, then "I can't wait to see the fetishist uniforms and weird piercings everyone's gonna get. This is the best news ever!"

And if you take the close of Ellis' Newsarama interview from Friday on its own, this is a perfectly reasonable expectation to operate under:

NRAMA: Rounding out this interview, is there anything specific that fans can be looking forward to reading when they read Warren Ellis' Astonishing X-Men?

WE: Oh, the usual, you know. Raping your childhoods, using my position to destroy everything you love, displaying opinions you may not agree with and writing with my own voice and personality. All the things people hate in commercial comics these days. And yet, all the things I am specifically hired for. It's a funny old world.

Me? I don't believe he's serious for a minute. "All the things [Ellis is] specifically hired for", when Marvel Comics is doing the hiring, is to write one of their bread-and-butter titles in a way that will sell multiple copies of each issue without alienating any reader past present or future. He's no more likely to rape anyone's childhood writing the X-Men than he was when he was writing "Dracula gets his balls kicked out" in Planetary.

I wouldn't think there's some strict Warren Ellis Standard Operating Procedure that mandates a "scary" approach to dealing with established characters and (to a reasonable extent) their continuity and history. I also don't think we readers doubt his ability to craft a traditional superhero story without 100% observance of those traditions. So why the rush to assumption that an A-list work-for-hire Marvel Comic will suddenly turn darker or thrust itself in some unsettling direction just because he's writing it? Are many readers simply superimposing his message board quips, social commentary, his novel, or his various posts on topics or images that interest him, over his mainstream work?

I wonder if he's had a chance to sample the online reaction just in his own forum? And if he has, I wonder if it delights him or maybe worries him a little: "JESUS! Do people think I'm 100% depraved?"

Looking past the exaggerated Ellis-speak of the earlier interview excerpt, he seems to be mostly thoughtful and jazzed about getting the keys to Marvel's Ferrari during the rest of his talk:

Warren Ellis:...I want to see what it actually means in the 21st Century. This, to me, is interesting work: to take a sounding of a franchise that has meant so much and so many things to so many people over the years, and to see what else it still has to say; to look forward and see how this badge of X -- which didn't have the cultural load it carries today when Lee and Kirby generated the idea -- can be made to mean.

...So when this came up, and when the degree of creative freedom that comes with it became clear, I thought, why the hell not? I mean, you never get to make your "stamp" on these things, because the franchise needs to keep running and everything gets dug over and re-invented in the end. But I like the technical challenge in these commercial gigs: to bring the property into the era of its production, as it were, and to write stories I'd like to read.

I'm as excited as the next comics fan about the future of Astonishing X-Men, and mostly because Mr. Ellis is striving to "write stories [he'd] like to read". Not because I have this preconceived notion that he'll finally be able to "weird up" some characters that have plenty of weirdness built in already that he (or any other competent, observant, and quick-witted writer) discovered before he typed Page 1.

I'm excited because I can bet on wanting to turn the page as quickly as possible. I'm excited because I'll probably find it maddening to have to wait 30-60 days for the next installment, because the ending of the current issue is so good. Not because I associate "Written by Warren Ellis" with "out there" or "scary".

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[1]Most of my commentary was part of my post at Warren Ellis' Engine.net. I cross-posted here because as is common in 95% of my message-boarding, my expressed opinion stopped the discussion stone cold dead. I have the suckiest mutant power ever.

5 Red Bulls and I Can See Through Time.

I’m not sure people actually like energy drinks (I’d swear Red Bull’s aftertaste is sweetened uranium), but people sure do seem to need them. I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve leaned on a Red Bull here and a Rockstar there to ensure that I’m awake to hear inspiration when it calls. (In my case, that call is the two cats involved in a spectacularly violent booty call at 2 every morning; I could offer no better explanation for the quality of my contributions here.)

So what do we do when the FDA or the WHO comes out with their inevitable Unexpected Doom Alert? Y’know, the “Wow! Never thought Rockstar Zero Carb could do that to a medulla oblongata!” or the, “If your anus explodes suddenly, please drive to an emergency room and instruct the nurse to call 1-800-RED BULL for information” kind of bulletin.

At first, the thought of an exploding anuses pandemic, fueled by admittedly Red Bull-dependent Warren Ellis and his constant flood of output (several monthly comics, a novel, columns for Suicide Girls and Reuters, daily updates on his many websites, blogs, trading posts on his online community^[1]) scared me more than threat of death by zombie.

But the comics industry would save us. They’d do their damndest to put a lid on Warren Ellis and his volatile rectum and soldier along, because they know this: that Red Bull-soaked sphincter could write a decent monthly title on its own. In fact, it's been a long-standing rumor that DC tried to get that anus onboard to fix Countdown, but couldn't come to mutually agreeable terms. And that's a shame.



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[1]I just can't bring myself to call Warren Ellis' Engine a "message board". Newsarama has a message board. Entourage has a message board.