In continuing with my attempt to make this column as diverse and interesting as possible, today’s installment will be a new feature I hope to employ every once in a while: the creator profile. The challenge in this concept lies in the fact that I’m preaching to an audience that is (assumedly) not into comic books. Hence, for this column to still be entertaining to the common man, I’ve got to present this material in a manner that reflects the person’s accomplishments in a way that won’t bore a normal person to tears.
This month, I’d like to cast the spotlight on a man who has not only written some of the best comics to come out of the past decade, but who has also exhaled a breath of new life into several aspects of the industry. He seems to be one of the industry’s most prolific writers, and his creativity can’t be matched. Today I speak of a man named Warren Ellis.
A British writer born in February of 1968, Ellis began his career working on independent zines in the Eighties, and began working for Marvel Comics in 1994. Over the course of his career he’s written for DC Comics, their Vertigo line, the Wildstorm line, Image Comics, Avatar, Apparat, AiT/Planet Lar, and many others. It seems like you can’t go two or so months without hearing about another Warren Ellis project coming out. He has a very eclectic body of work in genre, content, and breadth of story: from superhero titles, to horror stories, to science fiction space stories, to articles on comics, and even a novel and a television show. His comics range from long-running series (two years or more), to lots of miniseries (between three and, let\'s say, twenty issues), to one-shots, he’s delivered them all. He’s a font of ideas.
I feel like one of the most interesting and influential creations of Ellis is something called The Bleed. Created in the pages of a long-running-yet-dying series called Stormwatch, Ellis introduced the phenomenon when he took over the series near the end of the run. Essentially, The Bleed is the space between alternate realities. That’s the simplest I can put it, and that on its own isn’t very revolutionary. However, this concept became a prime player in several Wildstorm series to follow. It was largely explored in Ellis’ spin-off of Stormwatch: The Authority. And the idea was greatly expanded upon in Ellis’ series Planetary. But even further, other writers began to use the concept and explore what its potential could be. Soon, a large portion of DC’s Wildstorm imprint was referencing or using The Bleed, and later the Multiverse-- the physical representation of all possible alternate realities that The Bleed separates. And I think the coolest thing is that recently a character from the regular DC universe of heroes has crossed over into the Wildstorm universe of characters. Through the course of a story, he went from one place to the other. Something like that happening, where DC would, even vaguely, acknowledge a story element from an imprint they have in the past tried to eliminate, boggles my mind.
That example is just my personal opinion. Ellis has also been a vocal supporter of creator rights, often disparaging the common practice of publishers keeping a creation and using it over and over with little or no compensation for the original creator. In that same vein, he very rarely goes into situations where he is hired to use established characters without full creative control. I even pulled a quote from an interview I found online: \"If you can\'t or won\'t create a story from scratch, what the hell are you doing here?\"
Hope you found this informative.