by Michael Oliveri

omic fans are no doubt familiar with the name Warren Ellis. Noted for his bizarre plots and mad characters spanning many genres, this British writer has established a tremendous fanbase worldwide. His Transmetropolitan series started as the flagship title of DC Comics's Helix imprint, then survived its collapse and became a mainstay of the mature-reader Vertigo line. Horror fans will no doubt love his Strange Kiss, Stranger Kisses, and the current Strange Killings series of titles, featuring lots of blood, guts, and nasty magic. His work on WildStorm's The Authority turned the superhero genre on its head, featuring a cast of brutal heroes and villains in wild plots.

Ellis's current projects include Global Frequency (WildStorm), a series of twelve, self-contained issues featuring a global network of sleeper agents who are only activated as the last line of defense, the aforementioned Strange Killings (Avatar), and the upcoming Scars (Avatar), a six-issue crime series.

More information on Ellis's projects can be found at www.warrenellis.com. Readers interested in subscribing to Ellis's Bad Signal, in which Ellis sends out news, info, and anything else that might be on his mind, should send an email to badsignal-subscribe@lists.flirble.org.

RS: Let's start with writing. Have you always been a writer or were you making a living at another profession beforehand? How did you find yourself writing for comics?

WE: I've been doing this fulltime... God, coming on ten years, I suppose. Before that, I'd done most of the shitty jobs you can imagine; ran a bookstore, ran a pub, worked in bankruptcy, worked in a record shop, lifted compost bags for a living. I'd been in and out of comics in a small-time, amateur way -- fell into writing comics journalism largely by accident, and then the people I was writing the journalism for decided to go into publishing, and said to me that if I was so bloody clever, why didn't I try writing them some comics? They bought the first thing I showed them -- Lazarus Churchyard -- and I was off. Of course, I spent the next few years heartbreakingly poor and teetering on the edge of starvation, but I was off nonetheless.

RS: Most of your work is concentrated in the comics arena, but you've also done a little prose. Your Available Light collection comes to mind here, and I seem to remember reading that you've written a Daredevil novel. Do you have any more prose fiction in the works that we can look forward to? How about other media, such as television or film?

WE: The Daredevil thing never happened, actually. The company had one of its periodic shit-hemmorhages, and that book got taken out in the convulsions. By far my favourite small prose job was for the science journal Nature. They commissioned fifty-two short sf pieces for the millennium, and asked me if I wanted to play. So I got to keep company, at least in my head, with the likes of Arthur C Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson and Bruce Sterling.

I've been approached to do more prose, novels and such, but frankly the money is awful, and I'm in business here. Horrible cold answer, I know, but I have longterm commitments in the comics medium, bills to pay and whisky to buy.

I've dabbled a little in other media; wrote a computer game, wrote a screenplay on commission from an animation company, this and that. Planetary had a TV development option bought on it by The WB a couple of times, and I've been paid to a lot of stuff in animation and new media that no-one's ever seen. I usually have a few things in Hollywood existing as potential at any one time.

RS: You did some work for two games: the Hostile Waters video game and White Wolf's Adventure! roleplaying game. How was your experience working with those projects? Would you do it again?

WE: The computer game was a riot to do, just a whole lot of fun. I'd do it again, but with the right people -- my experiences in the computer game industry since then have not been positive. The Adventure piece suffered from things going on in my life at the time, and didn't go as well as I would have wanted to, but White Wolf were excellent people to deal with. Would I do it again? Again, it's a case of a huge amount of time against minimal payment. I'd like to, and have been offered shots at writing gamebooks and the like, but it's penny work for something novel-sized with no royalties and no rights. I am old and feeble now, and must manage my time.

RS: You touch on a lot of fringe and extreme subjects in your non-fiction Bad World columns. Similarly, a lot of your fiction work features some seriously messed-up individuals, such as Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem or the heroes and villains of The Authority. Do you feel these quirks are eccentric oddities or a societal norm?

WE: Societal norm. The whole point of Bad World is that these people are not unusual. If they were, I wouldn't have been able to fill a book with them -- you've seen the Bad World book from Avatar Press, right? Most of the stuff in Transmetropolitan was light extrapolation from real, contemporary things.

RS: By the same token, Lazarus Churchyard, City of Silence, and Transmetropolitan paint a rather bleak, dystopian view of the future. Is this just a fun playground for writing in or do you see the world headed this direction?

WE: I really don't see the City of Transmet as dystopian. It's just like where we live now. There are horrible fucking things and there are things of sublime beauty, and they all live in the same place.

Lazarus Churchyard: okay, yeah, that's a disgusting place to live. But I guess I started writing that around 1990, and back then his world was a valid extrapolated future -- depopulated, degreened, really coughing its last while people huddled in bars trying not to think about it too much.

RS: I'd like to shift gears again and talk a little about marketing. Two American-published books featuring British characters and settings, Hellblazer and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, are being "Americanized" for their big screen adaptations. Are these smart marketing moves or recipes for disaster?

WE: No idea. But I'll tell you what; 99% of the people who go and see them won't be aware that they're adaptations of graphic novels.

RS: For most Americans, the word comics evokes images of superheroes and spandex rather than the wide variety of illustrated subject matter available in Europe. Is it too late to change this or is it a hopeless endeavor? Should anyone even be concerned about it?

WE: I co-founded and consult for a site, http://www.artbomb.net, that seeks to directly deal with this. I think the site mentions the word "superhero" once. It shows the breadth of work available in graphic novels in America. You know who goes there? People who don't read comics. People who don't read the magazines or the websites. There's a groundswell, coming largely from the college crowd, literary magazines and the media magazines, whose first discovery of comics was something like Sandman, or Jimmy Corrigan, or Ghost World, who were barely aware of comics even as those superhero things. It's changing. The reason it's changing so slowly is that the hardcore commercial comics audience sees any change, or speech about change, as a direct threat to their weekly purchase of pervert-suit comics.

It may be a hopeless endeavour to attempt to change it, who knows? Maybe the change will simply happen on its own, as people who like to read shit die of old age and leave the people with working brains as the last ones standing. I dunno.

RS: You wrote an issue of Hellblazer dealing with the subject matter of schoolyard violence, and DC killed it. Likewise, several companies in various media have delayed, canceled, or altered works related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on NYC. Is this the right decision or should creators be given more freedom to address these issues? Is there a line that should be drawn?

WE: Of course it was the wrong decision, it's why I quit the book. I understand why they took the decision, even though I don't agree with it, but they own Hellblazer and it is their right to choose what is done with things they own.

There is no line to be drawn. These things need to be discussed. And they need to be discussed in open ways, where sensible concepts can be presented, before we get to the point where Batman is shown wrestling Osama Bin Laden in the streets of Gotham.

RS: You do a lot of work with Avatar Press (www.avatarpress.com), a small press compared to the giants like DC and Marvel. Beyond their apparent willingness to publish more extreme subject matter, what keeps you working with them?

WE: We need a healthy small press. Simple as that. I can draw a certain amount of attention to Avatar, which allows them to do new things and stretch themselves in ways they couldn't before. They're working with the likes of Alan Moore and Joe Lansdale now.

RS: Besides yourself, there are several incredible British talents working in comics these days: Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, etc. Is this the next British Invasion? Or do Americans just suck?

WE: There's been a constant British Invasion since the mid-Eighties. Put simply: American comics creators got into comics to do the same comics they grew up with. British comics creators got into comics to do new comics. We have a totally different tone and energy to our work, and that's what people respond to.

Mike Oliveri writes horror fiction and is a long-time comic book geek. His first novel, Deadliest of the Species, won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel, and his collection 4x4 (a collaboration with Geoff Cooper, Michael T. Huyck, Jr., and Brian Keene) earned rave reviews and sold out within a year of release. More information about Mike and his work can be found at www.mikeoliveri.com.