Sorry about that title, I got lost in an Arrested Development reference.
Also, sorry this hasn't been updated in a minute. I was contracted to do some video capture work for a relatively huge game. That on top of my day job copywriting at a design firm and the realization that fuck I need to lose weight because that's cheaper than buying new clothes has eaten into the time I was previously dedicating to this. I'm planning to bust through a game this weekend to update y'all with an 06 entry, and I still plan to hit 52 by the end of the year, but for right now, it's taking something of a backseat.
But I miss long form writing, so instead of gaming I wanted to take a moment to tell you about something else I've been enjoying the shit out of lately - comics. And Bachelor: Winter Games, but let's talk about comics.
Maybe about once every two years I bust through what I consider some of the finest work the medium has ever had, and that's what Warren Ellis produced in three separate titles that were all pretty indirectly connected (two less indirect, but I digress). These books are Stormwatch, The Authority, and Planetary. If Stormwatch was originally an answer to the hyper violent craze of the earlier 90's, then its spiritual successor The Authority was a perfectly succinct and pragmatic counterpoint that we the readers had grown up and demanded precision and nuance to our fantastic stories. Stormwatch and The Authority in particular are
Warren Ellis (and John Cassaday, artist on Planetary, Bryan Hitch, artist on The Authority and some issues of Stormwatch, as well as a bunch of other artists on Stormwatch as well), set the tone for the industry, in particular the books that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was informed by - and now dominate the box office every three months.
These books changed the fucking industry. They changed the comics industry. They changed the film industry. They changed... everything.
And it all started because of some British trans-humanist writer with a chip on his shoulder for the world simultaneously embracing the future and shunning it at the same time wasn't afraid to dream a little bigger.
For every person out there obsessively checking online for the latest leaked trailer of an upcoming comic book movie, there's someone else who's dreading the next one to be released, and I totally get that - fatigue is real. I own probably around 10,000 comics and even I don't bother with everything on CW or ABC in terms of comic fare, I just can't keep up and I don't particularly want to, there's just too much.
I think what's most incredible about each book is the thin line they manage to balance. One scene will have the characters furious at some group for singlehandedly halting progress. Whether that's because of diseases that haven't been cured, areas that haven't been explored - secrets being kept. They're furious, and it's hard not to be furious when you're reading it. You start thinking shit like "We could've had a fucking moon base by now if we hadn't paid for every single war we've been in since Vietnam" and you start to see the bigger picture of what Ellis is trying to say.
But then in the next panel you see a moment that, in spite of these books focusing on superheroes with truly otherworldly powers, just so perfectly encapsulates the beauty and the glory of everything we as a species have accomplished and it's inspiring. You stop getting mad that we don't have a moon base and start getting romantic about the fact that we walked on the moon at all. Because think about it - we managed to strap three people to the world's largest bullet and figured out just how fast it had to go to leave everything we'd ever known. And we did that the same year The Archies released Sugar, Sugar.
Warren Ellis finds a way to get you mad we haven't done more, but to truly appreciate what we have done at the same time and it's fucking masterful.
If there's one drawback to what's probably the dude's opus, Planetary, it's that the series itself is kind of a meta-commentary on comics as a whole. He takes about 70 years of comics and boils it down to 27 issues. Yes it's absolutely a trip, but it's a trip that means more if you know the general history of comics, including stuff about Marvel and DC characters, as well as publishing trends throughout the years.
I was so enamored rereading these books that I went on a fucking tear. Huge thanks to Amazon for having the following books, also penned by Warren Ellis;
Storm (limited series)
Ignition City (limited series)
Bad Signal Vol. 1 & 2 (collection of his old blog posts from the late 90's and early 2000's)
Injection Vol. 1 & 2 & 3 (ongoing)
Aetheric Mechanics (graphic novella)
Crecy (graphic novella)
Frankenstein's Womb (graphic novella)
Ocean (limited series)
Orbiter (limited series)
Ministry of Space (limited series)
Ultimate Hulk Vs. Iron Man (limited series)
City of Silence (limited series)
Transmetropolitan Vol. 1 (maxiseries)
I haven't been this obsessed with a writer's entire output since I read Rules of Attraction in 10th grade. What sets Ellis apart from other writers is the way he uses bleeding edge sci-fi to ground his intricate worlds and tell very human stories within them. He creates terrible, horrifying villains who find a way to inflict pain on the world in manners you never see coming, and their foils who are flawed into oblivion but couldn't be described as anything less than heroic, let alone inspiring.
If you are interested in comics but the long continuities of characters like Batman or Spider-man give you pause, I can't recommend checking out the three books I mentioned earlier. They're collected very neatly and are very friendly to new readers. While they might not change your mind about the superhero movies coming to theaters, they should definitely change your mind about what the medium can offer.