Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Warren Ellis isn't going to be the new writer on X-Men when Grant Morrison's run as writer comes to an end in a few issues time. This probably isn't news to most people, neither do they care. On his mailing list Warren wrote about what the stance would be were he to write the book, reprinted here at Millarworld. I don't particularly care because even the appointment of God as replacement writer after Morrison wouldn't persuade me to relapse into forty years of continuity on a permanent basis again.
But stirring though Ellis' essay is, it also highlights that were he to write the X-Men, it would be crap.It's difficult to talk about things in the teeny tiny little world of comics but most of what Ellis has written in the past was shit. Transmetropolitan, the title that made him started off fairly well, then after three fairly good years is ruined by Ellis writing the equivelent of prog rock, one year in the real world is equivelent to one year in the comic, and four or five issues are taken up with events that happen over one week in the comic world. What I've seen of the long-delayed Planetary look amazing but in many ways his best work was in the silly-tights world of Stormwatch some four or five years ago. I never read the title before his stuff, but he wrote a tightly scripted couple of years worth of stories about what a band of super-heroes would be like if they worked for the United Nations (Unsurprisingly their biggest headache involves their relationship with the U.S).
Ellis is good at aspirational essays and rants about why things are wrong in whatever field he feels like concentrating at the time. His Die Puny Humans blog often shows a ferocious throughput of ideas (and acts of self-fellating egoism), but like Grant Morrison, he trips up when it comes to putting these ideas into a story.
But stirring though Ellis' essay is, it also highlights that were he to write the X-Men, it would be crap.It's difficult to talk about things in the teeny tiny little world of comics but most of what Ellis has written in the past was shit. Transmetropolitan, the title that made him started off fairly well, then after three fairly good years is ruined by Ellis writing the equivelent of prog rock, one year in the real world is equivelent to one year in the comic, and four or five issues are taken up with events that happen over one week in the comic world. What I've seen of the long-delayed Planetary look amazing but in many ways his best work was in the silly-tights world of Stormwatch some four or five years ago. I never read the title before his stuff, but he wrote a tightly scripted couple of years worth of stories about what a band of super-heroes would be like if they worked for the United Nations (Unsurprisingly their biggest headache involves their relationship with the U.S).
Ellis is good at aspirational essays and rants about why things are wrong in whatever field he feels like concentrating at the time. His Die Puny Humans blog often shows a ferocious throughput of ideas (and acts of self-fellating egoism), but like Grant Morrison, he trips up when it comes to putting these ideas into a story.
