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WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD

WARREN ELLIS LTD Articles.

On Creating THE AUTHORITY With Bryan Hitch

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authority clip issue 3

It was very weird to learn that James Gunn is planning a movie based on THE AUTHORITY, the comics series I created with and for Bryan Hitch. (I got phone calls from Jim Lee and everything.) Apparently these characters are going to be all over the first phase of James’ DC Comics film sequence.

Here’s the short version of how and why I did THE AUTHORITY.

I’d been doing a book called STORMWATCH for Wildstorm. We relaunched it once. Bryan Hitch came in and did a few issues of the second run with me, which is where we created Apollo and The Midnighter.

(Apollo, because the sun-god metaphor made connections with Superman. The Midnighter, because Batman was once called “The Darknight Detective” and because my dad, in his youth, was a drummer in a band called The Midnighters.)

Bryan and I gelled really well on those issues. We were talking regularly, and I started wondering what else we might do together and what I could write specifically for him. Around that time, I happened to find out the actual sales figures for STORMWATCH, and called the office in horror. The sales figures were like negative eight hundred. It was an actual comics black hole that reversed the laws of capitalism, the sales were so bad. “Why are you still paying me for scripts?” I asked. “Why are you still publishing them?”

What happened next tells you a lot about what kind of people worked at and ran that company, including Jim Lee and Scott Dunbier. This was twenty-five years ago, but their response was something very much like “We really like it and we always want to find out what happens next, so we’ll keep publishing it until you don’t want to write it any more.”

I was gobsmacked and MORTIFIED. I felt so fucking guilty I just sat there in my chair for hours.

And then I started coming up with a plan to repay them by coming up with a version of the property that actually made them some money. In the next moment, I realised Bryan was going to be the perfect partner for that, so I wrote it very much for him. I already had one of the five best colorists in the world at that time, Laura DePuy. All I had to do was convince her to stick with me a little longer and give her space to push the envelope of what was possible at the time.

And that’s how THE AUTHORITY happened. We did twelve issues, and then I told my editors to hire Mark Millar and Frank Quitely to replace us, which they did. And, with that hiring, actual comics history was made, and I repaid my debt to my wonderful publisher. (Aside from the debt of gratitude I will always owe to Scott and Jim and everyone else there.)

THE AUTHORITY by Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch, Paul Neary and Laura DePuy Martin is back in stores.

(A version of this previously appeared on my free weekly newsletter)

MISTER MAMMOTH, Matt Kindt & Jean-Denis Pendanx

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Quick note to recommend this graphic novel by Matt Kindt and Jean-Denis Pendanx. It’s a 1970s existential crime drama (signalled shamelessly in the opening, thereby destabilising the whole narrative) wrapping around earlier crime storyforms- a formally audacious mix of Borges and Welles at the heart of it – with a touch of 70s science fiction and all gorgeously illustrated in classic Franco-Belgian BD style by Pendanx. Mister Mammoth is the world’s greatest detective, and also its most famous pacifist. He’s nine feet tall and works out of a classic Thirties detective’s cold-water walk-up. He often solves crimes without leaving his chair. In this instance, he demands five thousand dollars a day for his time – but he points out that the job will only take him a day and his client can afford it. And so the trap it set.

It’s a clever, sustained, twisty and ultimately warm-hearted piece of work, with a quiet and intelligent finish. Probably my favourite thing I’ve read by Matt Kindt so far. (Although, since I wrote this note, I read HAIRBALL, which is also very good)

MISTER MAMMOTH (shop)

31may23

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15C my arse. I have a pull in my shoulder from hunching up against the cold in my sleep. But those are definitely the beginnings of berries. If the wind drops from the current howling gale tomorrow, I’ll be able to feed them. Right now, a pour from a hose or can blows sideways.

I have to fix the bath. A pipe has become unseated somewhere and it dropped herself’s drained bathwater into a downstairs room. I do not have time to fix the bath. I will nonetheless fix the bath. This is why Georges Simenon had a home staff and put a big Do Not Disturb sign on his door. I have to rewrite a bad script and read development materials and work on an outline today and also crawl under a bath. And start the newsletter for Sunday.

ON DECK: My script offends me so I am chopping bits off it. Reading the development materials for a creative consultant gig ahead of a phoner with the principles om Friday morning.
INBOX: 72
LISTENING: a random Sonnov piece
OUTSIDE:

Balé Literal is a tool of poetic resistance, an exhibition-dance turned into a living organism. It is a movement made up of a varied repertoire of dangling object-works, set in motion by a group of people orchestrated by the Brazilian artist Laura Lima (Minas Gerais, 1971). Balé because it is an invitation to a communal dance. Literal because it subverts the meaning of things, mobilising the subversive ambivalence of the poetic. Conceived as a collectively activated mode of encounter, Balé Literal is a choreography of words, objects and people moving together to the rhythm of our errant times.

Disappearing Books

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Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. Its images are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and the text is generated without the letter ‘e’ using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that was ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: the book’s pages are garbled and can only be deciphered with an AR app, which, after enough readings, decays the images and words just as memory would. The printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains as a leftover artifact. By disappearing, the story makes a case for the collective amnesia that follows great cataclysm.

I have a memory of a piece William Gibson wrote that deleted itself after reading: ah, here it is:

Gibson’s text focused on the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time (the title referred to a Kodak photo album from which the text’s memories are taken). Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5″ floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist’s book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book’s first exposure to light.

FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS, Ian Penman

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For I do not exist: there exist but thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms reflecting me increases.

— Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye

This is flat out one of my books of the year. Ian Penman sat down to write a book about the director/writer Rainer Werner Fassbinder, couldn’t get going, and decided to blast the book out in four weeks the way Fassbinder used to blast out everything.

How to recapture him in all his stubborn, unyielding, messy glory? How to proceed in the spirit of? I decided to try and write the way Fassbinder himself worked: get straight to it and get going right away. The very opposite of what Robert Musil called an aesthetic of postponement.

In something like four hundred numbered pieces, some no more than a few lines long, Penman creates a kaleidoscopic view of Fassbinder and that which surrounds him. Perhaps you, like me, only have a glancing familiarity with his work. Doesn’t matter a bit. Because it’s the story of a creative life and creative acts. And the cost of those acts:

Everything in excess: food, sex, drinks, drugs, cigarettes; but also work. Fassbinder gives the lie to the idea that productivity is in itself a ‘healthy’ thing. There is nothing necessarily ‘healthy’ about the pursuit of any demanding or difficult or very personal art. There may be cruelty involved, to self and others. It throws into question what we might consider a ‘healthy’ productive life at all. The line between self-medication and lethal dose become increasingly thin. The same thing that cures you of one malady exacerbates another.

Life lived at a hurtling rate: beyond a certain point impossible to tell whether it’s speeding up or skidding down or whether finally these now amount to the same thing.

It’s an insanely quotable book – “such palm-smoothed coin-words.” It’s an absolutely thrilling consideration of edge culture and edge creativity, time and place, damage and achievement, art and life.

Yet again, another winner from Fitzcarraldo Books. What an amazing house they are.

FASSBINDER THOUSANDS OF MIRRORS, Ian Penman (shop)

30may23

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Another grey day with a chill in the air. My body thinks it’s still February and wants me to go back in the cave to finish hibernating.

ON DECK: Unless something else happens during the day, I’m bulling my way through to the end of a treatment and then going to a new project outline tonight.
INBOX: 75, but that’s mostly delivery notifications. Ran out of everything at once.
LISTENING: Night Tracks.
READING: PROCESS: THE WRITING LIVES OF GREAT AUTHORS
OUTSIDE: this article on THE PAPER:

Where are you?
OG: I’m home today but I usually work at the Cardiff University hospital library. It’s got a good, studious atmosphere, as I’m surrounded by lots of extremely stressed medical students drinking Monster energy and reading about bones.

 

What can you see from your desk/ through the window?
EM: I don’t have a fixed desk space at home—sometimes I sit by the front window, but it can be quite distracting. Like the other morning I ended up charging a scaffolder’s tools cos the guy he was working for on the street wouldn’t open the door to him, then I ended up chatting for ages with a different guy who used to live in this house, who made his presence known by shouting, ‘Is the pond still out the back?!’ at me repeatedly through the window.

In the garden, it has come to this: plant hats.

So many of the gardens on our street have been paved over that it seems all the slugs and snails in the postcode have come to live in ours. Therefore, I’m trying everything I can find to help my plants survive.

The City Is Ribbed For Your Pleasure

Warren Ellismorning computer

Above, the work of Ay-O, age 92.

I really need to find time to cull my RSS feed subscriptions, because they’re overrun with posts about AI, and the only AI story I cared about lately was the one where AI might have identified a new antibiotic. (Try replacing “AI” with “clever use of spreadsheets” in every story you see about AI.) This is the sort of thing filling my RSS reader:

“AI generated inflatable skyscrapers.” One suspects this comes from the same techbro k-hole as the time networked clothing was described as “wearable shirts.” Apparently the above is “fresh inspiration” and not “there are a lot of condoms in the image library learning model.” Look closely and you will see that the speculative city of the future is ribbed for your pleasure.

On Routines

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The thing about daily routines is that, in the end, they slip and slide. I was reading over my most recent Daily Routine notation from earlier this year (that I somehow managed to misname as Jan 2022) and, boy, it’s the end of May and I don’t do all of that any more. Winter went on forever, there was family health stress, a few deadline-intensive jobs, getting DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT up and running, various other things and, frankly, a large dose of fuckit.

This leads me back to the start of the loop, where you begin thinking about “productivity” and what you need to change or begin doing. And the thing about thinking about “productivity” is that you can easily find yourself in a space where thinking about “productivity” becomes the only activity you’re performing, and the things you’re trying to design to make work easier or better become the entirety of the work.

So I went outside and planted strawberries in the raised bed instead.

I have a magpie mind. Maintaining a concrete routine can work for months and even years, but in the end I’ll feel caged and look for a side door to slip out of, loosen the days up, turn a nine-part plan into a beginning and a finish and just wing it from A to B in whatever route suits me. I say to people: I always have a plan, but I always wing it in the middle and adjust to the air currents as I go.

Unfortunately, this can lead to me saying to myself, I can pick up that fucking notebook again or I could watch THE GROUNDSTAR CONSPIRACY with George Peppard and Michael Sarrazin, and what happened to Michael Sarrazin anyway, he was in fucking everything when I was a kid and often seemed to be either hallucinating or naked or both, and the music in this film feels really weird for the kind of film it is, and maybe I should isolate some of that music for sound design or maybe a basis for incidental music or an ident because Seventies electronic sound really is its own thing –

And then I pick up the notebook. Just not when I was supposed to.

Anyway, I need to change my routine back up, because I’ve gotten lazy.

PIRANESI, Susanna Clarke

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The beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

I never read JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL – didn’t look like my sort of thing. But, given the attention paid to it, I was interested in reading Susanna Clarke’s prose. So I picked up the shorter PIRANESI, which looked more like my sort of thing, and then it sat on the digital pile for god knows how long. I opened it one Friday night, and finished it on the Wednesday night. I did not get much sleep. It is really very good.

Also very hard to talk about without serious spoilers, but let me try: there is a man who lives in The House, an apparently infinite arrangement of vast halls filled with giant statues, all constructed upon an ocean with occasionally dangerous tides that provides him seafood to live on, and subject to its own internal weather systems. This is the entire world. He has always lived in The House – however, he possesses education, objects and modern locutions that suggest this is not the case. He is visited twice a week by The Other, the only human he knows, who gives him tasks of observation and measurement in pursuit of The Great And Secret Knowledge. The Other calls our man Piranesi.

Piranesi is not mad. But he has been lied to. A lot.

It is a supernatural/science-fictional mystery novel, but it’s chiefly a study of solitude and empathy, and of living fully in a world full of marvels. (And, perhaps, the old saw about “where we get our ideas from.”) The mystery, by the way, is wonderful. But there’s an argument to be made that the book is really an allegory for how we live and how we don’t live, how we see and how we don’t see, and how the things done to us and taken away from us can sometimes lead to a new life that has its own wonders and joys.

PIRANESI, Susanna Clarke (shop)

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