11 September 2014
[tv] Warren Ellis’s Heisenberg Theory … Warren Ellis On Walter White … ‘What keeps him alive is being a fictional supervillain. What kills him is being human.’
9 April 2012
[ipad] What’s On Warren Ellis’ iPad? … ‘Managing information is a big part of my job. So the topslice is: Twitterific, for Twitter. Flipboard. Reeder, for reading Google Reader (which is wired into Pinboard for saving links and Instapaper for reserving long articles for later). BBC news app. Guardian for iPad in Newsstand. Foreign Policy for iPad. The Economist in Newsstand. These are all daily, sometimes hourly checkpoints for me. Can’t do without them.’
6 January 2011
[comics] A Moment Of Meme: A Moment of Ellis / A Moment of Morrison
29 May 2010
[comics] Favourite Tweets #1: Warren Ellis … ‘COME AND SIT IN AVANT-THARG’S SPACE LAP NOW, BOOB EARTHLETS’ (more…)
5 December 2008
[comics] On Twitter: Warren Ellis’ Adoring Readership … (more…)
25 July 2008
[tv] Warren Ellis on Joe 90: ‘I didn’t particularly like this show even as a kid. There was something essentially Wrong about it. Stick a kid with fucked-up eyes in a huge spinning machine with pulsating lights while computers ooze magnetic tape like worms.’
17 June 2008
[comics] Top 10 Warren Ellis ‘Tweets’ … … ‘Some days I want to be written by Frank Miller. So I can yell WHORES at random and get looks of concern rather than the usual pity. WHORES’
27 May 2007
[web] Burst Culture — Warren Ellis on Boing Boing, magazines, blogs, tumblelogs, Ad-sense and more… ‘I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web isn’t a replacement medium – it’s *another* medium.’
31 January 2007
[comics] Warren Ellis, Novelist — Ellis on his new book Crooked Little Vein … ‘I sat down and wrote the first ten thousand words of an utterly unsaleable novel. I figured I could recycle the material into comics later. So I handed her this horror of a thing, complete with Godzilla Bukkake scene, and said, take this and leave me alone. Thinking, obviously, that she’d decide I was insane and never bug me again. Two weeks later, she phoned to tell me she’d sold it to Harper Collins in New York…’
12 November 2006
[secondlife] Warren Ellis on Second Life: ‘The laissez-faire nature of SL has turned much of the mainland into a retard’s toybox. Second Life is, by and large, an ugly, stupid-looking place, a riot of bad signage, lurid coloured blocks and constructions that’d embarrass a four-year-old playing with Lego.’
5 October 2006
[comics] Ignition City Script — an excerpt from Warren Ellis’ script for a new comic called Ignition City … ‘Pic 2 … YURI, in his spacesuit, vodka bottle in hand, waking up as four hard little turds bounce off his head. YURI is also in his late forties. He looks as Yuri Gagarin would have if he’d lived that long, fucked himself out and become an alcoholic (both of which he was well on his way towards before he died). And, yes, he’s wearing an old Soviet spacesuit. Without the helmet, obviously. He just shambles around the settlement in a spacesuit he never takes off (and you can imagine what kind of mess it’s in), swilling vodka and shouting at people. Yuri is the town drunk.’
26 May 2006
[comics] Warren Ellis on Superman Returns: ‘…[the Superman Returns Trailer] hits the high points of the mythos in a sequence of painterly, carefully composed shots over an altered John Williams score. My appreciation of the Superman movies stops about halfway through the first one, but those high points have over the years accreted the strange magic of Judeo-Christian myth about them, and as a writer I can admire that.’ [from Bad Signal]
14 April 2006
[comics] Ministry Of Space #1, Desolation Jones #1 and Fell #1 — various Comic Scripts from Warren Ellis … ‘Pic 4; An older female PSYCHIATRIST studies us, surrounded by shadows. A light source from above bounces off her little glasses, so that we cannot see her eyes. Psych: It is understood that you have experienced extraordinary stresses in your work, Mister Jones. However, Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service requires more… Resilience? Put another way: James Bond never urinated on himself.’
11 January 2006
[comics] Fell #1 — Warren Ellis’ new comic available online with art from Ben Templesmith. ‘Detective Richard Fell is transferred over the bridge from the big city to Snowtown, a feral district whose police roster numbers three-and-a-half people (one detective has no legs). Dumped in this collapsing urban trashzone, Richard Fell is starting all over again. In a place where nothing seems to make any sense, Fell clings to the one thing he knows to be true: Everybody’s hiding something. Even him.’
10 January 2006
[comics] Michael Avon Oeming takes on Warren Ellis — interview between the two comic creators … ‘I come to the pub to work, not to talk. A fan once tracked down the pub I work in, and came in asking questions. When I arrived, everyone was very tense. He didn’t realise there were three large blokes behind him ready to stamp on him if he moved funny. He turned out to be a very nice guy. But they’re kind of protective of me here.’
3 January 2006
[comics] Warren Ellis Audio Interview — check out the Alan Moore section 
… ‘No Warren. Don’t tell me about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Film. I might cry.’
… ‘No Warren. Don’t tell me about the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Film. I might cry.’ 18 September 2005
[comics] Warren Ellis Is Going To Have Me Killed. Slowly. — scans and commentary on a small press comic from Ellis done in 1984 … ‘For the uniformed, I am Warren Ellis, a rather noisy 16-year-old fan…’ [via Progressive Ruin]
13 September 2005
[tv] Warren Ellis on CSI: ‘[CSI] …has gotten genuinely odd in its old age. I saw a re-run from last season recently, and there’s a two-minute sequence of William Petersen sluicing blood off a body on a metal tray put to “Sfevn-G-Englar” by Sigur Ros. That’s all it is. Slowed down visuals of water washing blood off brushed steel. Twenty years ago, that would’ve been an art film. Now it’s a musical interlude in a major US network show.’
11 July 2005
[comics] Desolation Jones #1: Author’s Commentary — Warren Ellis on the first issue of Desolation Jones
25 June 2005
[comics] Edison Hate Future — archive of odd little webcomics published by Warren Ellis on his blog … ‘edison look detached and amused, like he cope fine with constant horror and heartbreak of world…’ [via Robot Wisdom]
24 June 2005
[comics] Warren Ellis Interview — comics-related interview from Londonist … ‘I jumped into the net feet-first in the 90s, and the handheld is very much my outboard brain now. I’m answering these questions on it, in the pub.’
20 May 2005
[tech] Warren Ellis: Are the Technocrats Geniuses or Frauds? … ‘They have been hailed as both…’
14 May 2005
[comics] Proud Member of Warren Ellis’ Holy Slut Army … Ellis: ‘It was one of the more genuinely disturbing moments of my life, seeing people walking around wearing them at Dragon*Con last year?’
10 May 2005
[comics] Stories, Drinking And The World — Warren Ellis on Stories, the World and Comics … ‘For me, writing happens on my own. It’s exactly the same as a ritual, or sitting down at a campfire, or initiating a vision state in silent darkness. It has to come from me and the spaces in my brain. And that’s one reason why I stay in comics. Any other visual narrative medium is hopelessly compromised by committees and executives and notes and queries. In comics, it’s just the writer and the illustrator and the editor. You only have to get two other people, at most, on the same wavelength as you. And you get to speak in a mass-communication medium — where the sales are still better than genre novels or indie music, in many many cases — without filters. You get to say what you meant to say.’
4 May 2005
[comics] Preview of Desolation Jones #1 — from Warren Ellis and J.H. Williams III.
24 April 2005
[comics] Planetary Preview — PDF of the preview comic that Warren Ellis and John Cassady produced for Planetary.
22 February 2005
[hst] Up The Creek — Warren Ellis on Hunter S. Thompson. ‘…how you leave the stage is at least as important as how you enter it. And he left it alone in a kitchen with a .45, dying in — and wouldn’t it be nice if it were the last time these words were typed together? — dying in fear, and loathing.’
9 January 2004
[comics] Waiting for Tommy Interview with Warren Ellis … ‘Right now, it feels like 2004 will be my last very active year in American comics. This isn’t a big splashy f*ckyouall I’m-retiring I-won’t-play-Bond-again you-won’t-have-Dick-Nixon-to-kick-around-any-more kind of thing. I’m not flopping on the ground in weeping martyrdom or anything. I just think maybe I’ve taken this gig as far as I can go.’
16 December 2003
[comics] Undertow — Warren Ellis’ take on letting fiction escape into reality … ‘Everything we know about Jack The Ripper outside of the forensic documentation of those five murders is fiction. Even the name is a fabrication. The Jack The Ripper letters, in the most optimistic reading, constitute the actual killer creating a fictional framework for himself. And Jack operated in a landscape already primed for his presence by dramatisation. Robert Louis Stevenson’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE presented a monster whose identity was unknown to the public, turning the streets of 1880s London into a killing zone. A monster, it transpires in the story, from the educated classes — as Jack, with his apparently trained eye for vivisection, almost certainly was. For all we know of Jack The Ripper, he could have been Mr Hyde, released from fiction into Whitechapel.’ [via Barbelith]
19 September 2003
[comics] Metacommentary (f) — Extracts from Warren Ellis’ new novel … ‘I sat down and basically wrote the first thing that entered my head. Mostly in the pub. Got to 50 pages, stopped and handed it over to Lydia. “Go on then,” I laughed, “do something with that., It’s got a Godzilla bukkake scene. You’re doomed.” Lydia sold the book to HarperCollins in New York within a couple of weeks.’
10 September 2003
[comics] Warren Ellis on Cerebus: ‘Over the course of many thousands of pages, it’s also been a detailed political novel, a comedy of the court, a drama of the church, a vision quest, a biography of the last days of Oscar Wilde, several deeply strange attacks on feminism and women in general, and an exegesis of Sim’s own bizarre personal take on religion. It fascinates because Sim is an absolutely brilliant maker of pages, a sublime cartoonist with total control of the form… and because, during the progression of the work, you can clearly see his mind crumbling under the pressure of his immense undertaking and twenty-five years of increasing solitude in which he can only express himself to the world through the agency of a talking anteater.’ [via ¡Journalista!]
10 May 2003
[comics] Warren Ellis Answers — interviewed on Slashdot … [Related: Die Puny Humans]
‘When you talk about movies, there’s always that which bookstores live by; the book is almost always better than the movie. You could have no better case in point than FROM HELL, Alan Moore’s best graphic novel to date, brilliantly illustrated by Eddie Campbell. It’s hard to describe just how much better the book is. It’s like, “If the movie was an episode of ‘Battlestar Galactica’ with a guest appearance by the Smurfs and everyone spoke Dutch, the graphic novel is ‘Citizen Kane’ with added sex scenes and music by your favourite ten bands and everyone in the world you ever hated dies at the end.” That’s how much better it is.’
24 February 2003
[comics] Comic Links …
- Orbital Preview — new GN from Warren Ellis and Collen Doran.
- Global Frequency Preview — Issue Five with art from Jon J. Muth.
- New X-Men #137 — Barbelith discusses the latest issue of Grant Morrison’s X-Men.
31 October 2002
[comics] The Transmetropolitan Condition — interview with Warren Ellis … ‘There are moments of pure, heart stopping beauty in the most tragic and broken environments. And the loveliest community on earth will not be able to eliminate the dog turd.’ [via Boing Boing]
22 October 2002
[comics] Mists of Time — Warren Ellis discusses Alan Moore’s out-of-print work … On Moore and Sienkiewicz’s Brought To Light: ‘ It’s an absolute tour de force. Sienkiewicz produces mad images, political caricature via Ralph Steadman, slapping down anything that might work — photocopies, splatter, bits of metal, anything that might work. The Eagle, pissed out of his mind and coked to the tits, hunches there at the bar and vomits out the secret history of the American century — impeccably research documentary coming out of the beak of a fictional beard. Remember the best bit of the film JFK? Where Donald Sutherland lays out the whole thing in one long riveting monologue, and then concludes it with a sigh, and: “Well, I never thought things were the same after that.”? It’s like that, only funnier and scarier and more compelling. It demands it be read in one sitting, and it just sears with passion and commitment.’
12 September 2002
[books] Warren Ellis on James Bond … ‘In some ways — and I don’t think Fleming was unaware of this — he is what Allen Ginsberg called “bleak male energy,” causing and taking immense damage in single-minded pursuit of what he wants. At the conclusion of YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, the front end of his personality essentially rubbed out by torture, drugs, multiple trauma and a sequence of horrible mental hammerblows, there is an almost disturbing glimpse of an amnesiac Bond as gentle, open, devoted, and almost sweet. And his lover dreads the day that he recovers. He is England’s blunt instrument of international assault — the spiteful, vicious bastard of a faded empire that still wants the world to do as it’s bloody well told.’
29 August 2002
[comics] Die Puny Humans — Warren Ellis has a weblog … ‘die puny humans is my newsmine. I wanted a place to put my research that was accessible, searchable, and, crucially, not cluttering up my bloody computer. This is it. Means I can get to my stuff from anywhere with a web connection. Anything I find on my daily trawls around the web that interests me goes up here.’
3 August 2002
[comics] Global Frequency — web site for Warren Ellis’ new comic … ‘There are a thousand and one people on the Global Frequency. A worldwide independent defense intelligence organization 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.’
12 July 2002
[comics] Doran Talks Orbiter — Colleen Doran discusses her new graphic novel collaboration with Warren Ellis … ‘To me, being a cartoonist means world-building. We are creating a reality from nothing, and everything matters. People’s costumes matter, their body language matters. The sets matter a great deal – that creates the world, they create the reality for the reader, and it should be complete. I know a lot of artists don’t believe that – they like the art to be very, very simple, and leave the detail up to the mind of the reader, but what about leaving it in the mind of the writer and artist, and allow us to bring you into our world and let the reader visit what we’ve envisioned, a complete vision – something that is three dimensional and totally realized and will take you completely out of yourself.’ [Related: A Distant Soil Website]
4 July 2002
[comics] More Warren Ellis stuff:
- Bad Signal: OPi8 Forum — Warren is creating an invitation-only weblog based in a Delphi Forum [wtf?] … ‘if you think blogs are basically just guys talking about how they have no friends, you need to read these. Actual content by people with lives.’
- Amusing Barbelith Thread on the closure of the Warren Ellis Forum … ‘I will not miss the WEF, and I’m sure another haven for the more pretentious sort of fatbeard will emerge in no time.’
2 July 2002
[comics] The WEF Shutdown — Warren Ellis is shutting down his long running Forum … ‘Time for change. I’m all done.’
25 April 2002
[comics] Interesting thread on Warren Ellis on the Barbelith Underground … ‘Someone alleged the other week that Warren Ellis is perhaps the world’s most successful writer of slash fiction, and I thought that was an interesting point, if essentially not true.’ [More]
30 March 2002
[quote] Warren Ellis: ‘Do you know how creepy it is to think that at least eight people will be having sex tonight because of you?’ [from Bad Signal … Subcribe]
24 January 2002
[comics] Lego Spider Jerusalem … ‘Being a Lego bastard WORKS’ [via WEF]
15 January 2002
[comics] Warren Ellis’ Artbomb Launches… From the FAQ: ‘ARTBOMB is about broadening the appeal of diverse comic books and graphic novels. We hope to demonstrate that comics can offer an entertainment value that many people currently enjoy in film or television or prose. This a storytelling medium that has a lot of dynamic voices with mainstream and adult appeal. It’s our mission to help promote their works to new audiences.’ [Related: WEF, Ellis Website]
11 December 2001
[comics] Warren Ellis on Friends Reunited [login required] … ‘Just got back from San Francisco on a speaking gig, narrowly missing 9-11 (decided to head straight home via Chicago instead of heading into NYC to see some people — touched down at Heathrow just as the first airliner hit the WTC).’
28 October 2001
[comics] What Warren Ellis would do if he were a comics publisher [login as Guest] …
‘My initial plan would be to release two books a month. One of them would be original, and one would be reprint. There are major works that have, for whatever reason, been lost to the modern reader. AMERICAN FLAGG issues 1-12, Howard Chaykin. THE NEW ADVENTURES OF HITLER, Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell with Nick Abadzis. NIGHT MUSIC, the short stories of P Craig Russell. Disappeared. I’d even attempt to license some away: DC Vertigo has let Milligan and Fegredo’s wonderful FACE vanish, and Milligan and Ormston’s darkly funny THE EATERS too. If they don’t want to publish them, I’ll publish them. Alan Moore has probably published enough creator-owned short work in enough venues to merit a collection. In fact, you know what I’d do? I’d assemble what was completed of BIG NUMBERS. I’d go to Alan’s for a couple of days and interview him fairly exhaustively about the project. I’d spend a week talking to a few other people by email. Give me another three weeks to collate and arrange it all, and I’ve got BIG NUMBERS: The Lost Graphic Novel, a book about the thwarted realist breakthrough work of the 80s.’
13 October 2001
[comics] Newsarama covers DC’s plans for The Authority with reaction from Mark Millar, Bryan Hitch and Warren Ellis.
‘The Authority will not appear in any form we recognize for some time to come. Because for it to work, it must be callous. It must be horrible, and violent, and must be gleeful about what it’s doing. If it’s not cranked up to ridiculous volume, viciously insulting to the genre that spawned it and blatantly absurd in its scale and its disregard for human life… it’s just another superhero team book. You can find those anywhere. Unfortunately, the clash between the Authority style and the real-life events and attitudes surrounding it means that, at least for a little while, it’ll have to be just another superhero team book. If it’s going to be published at all. Personally, I think the audience is ready for it. It’s escapism, and it’s revenge fantasy on the biggest possible scale. But the people who make the decisions clearly believe otherwise.’ — Warren Ellis.
8 September 2001
[comics] The Old Bastard Speaks! … Long, interesting interview with Warren Ellis in Comicon concentrating on the business of comics … ‘I mean you may remember back in the eighties when the term graphic novel was coined. There were some serious graphic novels, but there were a great many 48-page books called, ‘The Incredible Hulk vs. The Living Monolith Graphic Novel’, which led to the form being buried. It’s a little early to tell. Things like Jimmy Corrigan shifting in the tens of thousands and presumably things like Safe Area Gorazde and Pedro and Me doing similar numbers can only be a good thing. But in the eighties the only real breakout, serious, non-genre graphic novel was Maus. And now there are a spread of them. So that alone is better.’ [Related: Ordering Comics, WEF]
21 August 2001
[comics] Warren Ellis Recommends… books, comics and music. ‘I’d just like to take the opportunity to say that Lee Van Cleef always had the best hat.’