Broken Frontier

BROKEN FRONTIER: When talking about the Avatar books, can you explain how you pared up with the three different artists?

WARREN ELLIS: I'm sorry, there's no story there. The company just sends me out samples and I choose what I like. None of these guys even speak English, mate.

BF: If you look at Black Summer, you are clearly the kind of writer that only contributes to superhero material if you truly believe in a project.

WE: Yeah, it's not a genre I'm particularly fond off. But it's interesting to me to find ways to write superhero stories that I actually want to read.

BF: What is then the unique spin of Black Summer that redefines the genre like Nextwave and the Authority did?

WE: Well, I don't know that Nextwave and the Authority redefined the superhero genre and I don't know that Black Summer does. I think what Black Summer contains within it is just one of the last questions to be asked of the genre. Which is 'Where do you draw the line in pursuit of justice?'

BF: And how did you come up with that particular angle?

WE: I've been trying for 6 months to come up with this because of the bet William [Christensen, editor-in-chief of Avatar Press] and I had. I've never been a high concept-writer, I can't yank those one line-concepts out of my ass the way Alan Moore can. It drives me fucking insane. I just stopped calling the guy because he always goes 'I got this idea, Warren!' And it's brilliant and it's one sentence and I just spend the next thirty minutes going 'FUCK!'

BF: What is the place of Black Summer on the racks? Do you place it next to the Boys from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson as sort of the evil twin of comics?

WE: I don't even go to comic shops mate! [laughs] I'll leave that up to you to decide, I don't think in those terms.

BF: We noticed that in your Avatar books there tends to be a lot of violence, that's what Avatar is noted for. But how do you feel about the representation of violence in your Avatar books?

WE: I just did an issue of Thunderbolts where a guy gets his arm bitten off. I did issues for the Authority where Jack Hawksmoor punches someone in the face and you can see their entire jaw detached and his teeth jump out. I don't think the question is valid. I do violent stuff everywhere, like I did on Hellblazer for Vertigo.

BF: And what are some of the political themes and motives you want to explore in Black Summer?

WE: It's just a set of political questions, I'm not interested in giving answers. The book just poses questions and people should make an answer in their own way.

BF: Do you feel, as a British author, that it is easier to comment on the political climate in the USA in a more objective manner?

WE: No, as a British author I'm largely confused as to why an American author seems to choose not to do so.

BF: Maybe Europeans tend to have a more objective view ...

WE: [interrupts] I don't know. If you ask an American, I do not know if they would call it objective. [laughs]

BF: Maybe because Europeans don't work with the two party-system. In Belgium there are about five big political parties.

WE: [interrupts] Well, there's not a hell of lot else to do in Belgium. [laughs] Making chocolates and I don't know what else there is for you guys. [laughs harder]

BF: We do have over 200 different kinds of beer though! Watch what you say.

WE: That's true but you don't have the German purity laws. Therefore you make beer out of the most disgusting things!

BF: Have you been drinking the beer here, in San Diego?

WE: Oh god no, not here in the states! I do not drink beer when I'm here. Sorry David [Marks, Avatar Marketing Director]! If I'm in San Francisco, I would drink Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, which is about the most palatable.

I was in Columbus, Ohio one time and I walked into a bar and I said 'Is there a good local beer?' and they all stared at me and looked at me and I said 'I'll have a whiskey then.'

BF: Moving on to Doktor Sleepless who lives in the not too distant future, what is the difference with our reality today?

WE: Not much to be honest. I just wanted to take a small step ahead with this one, like 10 years. It's not a huge shift like in Transmetropolitan.

BF: How does Sleepless as a character fit in your oeuvre between Transmetropolitan and Desolation Jones?

WE: It fits into it in the sense that he is faking it from the start. He, without wanting to give too much away, it's there in the first issue, but he is not the good guy.

BF: What are his motives for doing what he does then?

WE: Many and various, I would be giving stuff away if I went into that too deeply but he has a plan. He is a mad scientist, he has to have a plan. In fact, in a lot of ways you can look at Heavenside, the city, as his experiment. His mad scientist experiment.

BF: Did you start working on Doktor Sleepless when you started penning Black Summer or  is it a coincidence that they came out at the same time?

WE: It's just a coincidence, it's the way these things go sometimes. Artists move in a different space, I move in a different space. The two were written several months apart but the simultaneous release is just publishing schedules.

BF: For Doktor Sleepless you provide a play list in the back matter. As a music lover, do you find yourself tailoring your listening habits to the projects you're working on? F.i. for Crécy, do you find yourself listening to Celtic folk?

WE: For Crécy I was listening to the Medieval Babes who revive a lot of songs from that era and they do straight vocal pieces. Kathryn Blake from Miranda Sexgarden is the one that does Medieval Babes now. And things like early music by the Kronos Quartet, that's something that was definitely on there.

BF: And during your creative process do you feel like - when listening to the music -  that it takes you places you otherwise wouldn't have reached?

WE: Oh yeah! To the point where I'm actually timing sequences to whatever I'm listening to. I couldn't pull a specific example out of my arse though. I used to do it a lot on Hellblazer as well. The title of my first Hellblazer was 'Haunted', a song from the Pogues. That was what I was playing over and over. Because it's Garth [Ennis] that originally associated the Pogues with Hellblazer.  That came out of that one.

When Alan [Moore] created John [Constantine, the main character from Hellblazer] he was a South London boy. When Jamie Delano came aboard he stepped back one and said that John originally came from Liverpool. Garth again stepped back one and associated Liverpool to the Irish. There's always been a big Irish community in Liverpool. So you can then make that connection with the Pogues all the way through John's history.

BF: Like Phonogram by Kieron mcGillen, do you think that one day, you could write a book that's as music driven as that comic?

WE: I don't know if I could now. I think you probably have to be Kieron and Jamie's age to do it, to pull it off. I don't know if you can pull that off if you're nearly forty.

BF: Because everybody knows the music's dead.

WE: [laughs] Especially now that John Peel's dead.

BF: For Doktor Sleepless, the statement that John Reinhardt makes about becoming a grinder. Is that a mirror to what you feel is going on today in the real world; that everybody's complaining and nagging the fact that we are not living in the future? Is that what the datashadow is about?

WE: Yeah, I've seen people walking around with t-shirts that read 'Where is my fucking jetpack? There is a huge feeling in the culture right now and has been for the last couple years that we've been cheated out of the future we were told about.

BF: So that is what you intend to correct?

WE: Yeah! It is one of the things I'm going to address with the Datashadow wiki .

All right, I got to be out here by three so we are going to have to wrap this up.

BF: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

WE: It's a pleasure.

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Crécy, Black Summer and Doktor Sleepless are all published by Avatar Press and available at your local comic store.