Some Things I Like and Dislike

Warren Ellis is one creepy-looking dude
Here.

I've spent the last couple of weeks, as I mentioned before, catching up on reading. I've run through a number of novels I've wanted to read for some time, a number of comics I let molder on my shelves for too long, and a god-knows how many blog posts I've left clogging up my Reader. And now, damn it, I'm having thoughts. So many thoughts, but mostly just disjointed one-liners. That is, I hear, the problem with reviewing. Nick Hornby writes in Housekeeping vs. the Dirt:

The truest and wisest words ever written about reviewing were spoken by Sarah Vowell in her book Take the Cannoli. Asked by a magazine to review a Tom Waits album, she concludes that she "quite likes the ballads," and writes that down; now all she needs is another eight-hundred-odd words restating this one blinding apercu.

Well, the advantage I have is that I've been having a lot of disjointed thoughts about one author in particular. Warren Ellis is, apparently, some kind of comics god. Transmet was one of the first comics I ever read. Global Frequency came next. Both of these comics were--and are--pretty great. Transmet, certainly, is a game-changer. Then of course, there's the much overlooked Planetary, which, in many ways, is his best work to date.

But much of his new work is disappointing. He's been working with Avatar--a comics publisher whose comics smell really good, but a little like dying brain cells. He's been putting out a ton of short little mini-series--six or so issue long comics. Some of them, Anna Mercury, for example, or Aetheric Mechanics, have that sparkle of greatness that made Ellis the legend that he is today.

Ellis, though, has always had a bit of didactic blowhard in him, and sometimes I just don't think he can help himself. Doktor Sleepless, for example, a bizarre and obnoxious comic is often just page after page of Ellis talking through his main character.

But the real problem that Ellis seems to be having is pacing. Nearly all of his comics suffer from an acutely overwritten back end. Anna Mercury, Aetheric Mechanics, Black Summer, and more that I can't remember right now all ended up with too much plot and thematic materiel for a six-or-so issue run, and so the last couple of issues ended up being cramped, which is too bad, because some of those comics could have been great.

I think there's a good chance that these two tendencies in Ellis work--didactic, plodding characterization and bad pacing--are related. When he doesn't have space to do what he wanted to, he has to cram his plot and theme reveals in the last couple of issues--without any sort of elegance.

But, then again, maybe Ellis really loves the sound of his own voice (not that it's a bad voice). His blog is, as often as not, him waxing Ellis-like about futurism and culture, pretty much the same themes as his most overwrought works (um, Sleepless). But there are plenty of kernels of fun in his sometimes too-serious blog. For example: his recurring posts called Flickrgeist. The name is pretty self-explanatory, I think, and it's always a fun look: