Welcome to OEMED!, a series of monthly interviews with various creators, both writers and artists, mayhaps even an editor or two. If you’re not familiar with my work, look me up on Google, I have enough to type already.

These interviews should be fun and informative; from the POV of one artist/writer getting into the mind of another creator, helping readers get into our mindset. I won’t be asking about specific projects, but about the process behind those projects. I will try and be as honest as possible about myself, and with whom I am interviewing, and I won’t pull any punches if I have them, while at the same time, remaining respectful.

The first interview I have for you is with Warren Ellis. You know his work from
TRANSMETROPOLITAN, PLANETARY, AUTHORITY, GLOBAL FREQUENCY, STORMWATCH, ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR, DOWN, DESOLATION JONES, FELL and many other comics and original graphic novels.

Mike: Thanks for taking time for my first creator-to-creator interview. Boredom led me into comics, what about you? Raised around them, or found them on your own?

Warren: My dad brought home a comic for me when I was around three years old. It was either COUNTDOWN or TV 21 – one became the other anyway. But I think it was COUNTDOWN. Popular SF TV shows of the time done in comics form, in 2-page episodes as I recall. DR. WHO, UFO, THUNDERBIRDS, maybe STAR TREK, that kind of thing. And that was it. Hooked. My dad liked both SF and comics, and I caught the bug off him.

M: My mother also got me hooked on SF as a kid. We used to watch DR. WHO all the time, and that led me to my later fixation with BLAKE’S 7, and why I started using my middle name, Avon, after one of the characters. My mother was an artist and early on that sparked my interest. Do you think the fact that your father loved comics and SF bonded you with the genre?

W: I think so, yeah. He was also a writer – only published the once, a crime-comedy novel called THE THURSDAY SHED – so it’s pretty clearly in my genes, I guess. But, yeah, I remember reading through all his old SF novels as a kid, the musty Theodore Sturgeon MORE THAN HUMAN hardback, and the battered old DUNE paperback and the like.

M: Has you father read your work?

W: He died a couple of years back, but he’d read a fair bit of it, yeah. I got the deal for my prose novel (out next year, with a bit of luck) shortly before he died, which pleased him immensely.

M: At what point did you realize you were going to write comics, and how long until you felt you were really on the “in”?

W: I think I realised in the early 80s, as a kid – I was involved with the small press as a teenager, what we called stripzines back then and what people call mini-comics today. The scene in the early 80s was incredibly energetic, based around the two-monthly comic marts in London and the Fast Fiction table operated by Paul Gravett and Peter Stanley that sold zines for a 10% cut. I remember getting invaluable guidance from Paul, and from people who’ve since disappeared like Chris Brasted (who produced a pro-quality anthology called MAD DOG with a guy called SMS, who later worked on 2000AD). Photocopy toner under the fingernails, new work by the likes of Eddie Campbell, Glenn Dakin and Ilya every couple of months; sitting talking with Alan Moore; Grant Morrison came down a few times; the day a little stripzine from Canada came over called YUMMY FUR by a guy called Chester Brown (I think I still have that somewhere) …yeah. This was what I was going to do.

M: Wow, Yummy Fur is an underground legend in the states. I’ve realized through talking with many artist/writer friends that broken families are a common background. I spent most of my childhood daydreaming to escape day-to-day life, making stories out of radio songs or walking through the woods. What was your childhood like? How do you think it formed your writing?

W: My parents didn’t split until I was 14 or so. I think I had a fairly ordinary childhood – times with lots of friends, times with few friends, long summers of gangs on bikes marauding the village or fucking around in the woods; standard-issue awkward adolescence. The one standout thing was that I fucked up my knee playing rugby around 13, had to learn to walk again and spent the rest of my school years on painkillers. If I was ever solitary, though, it was usually by choice. I’m happy in my own company most of the time. And a little later on, I discovered the things that would plague me for the rest of my life: drink and girls.

M: Have you had any low points in your career? I had such a dry spell I worked as a security guard – and this was after having been in the industry for several years.

W: Oh, man. 25. I’d been working with Tundra UK for a year or two. Had just moved in with Niki. And I got a phone call telling me that Tundra UK were shutting down and were not going to honour my last couple of invoices. We’d spent most of our money on the move and the rent. Niki’s dad had given us £1000, mostly I think to pay me off for taking her out of the house, but ostensibly to buy stuff for the flat. We ended up living on that, stretching it out over a few months while I tried to scratch up work. Nothing. And just as it ran out, I got a phone call from Archie Goodwin, who’d just gotten around to reading a pitch I’d sent him 18 months earlier…

M: Have you found your education to have helped you much with your writing? Other than typing class and learning basic reading and writing skills, it was pretty useless for me, to be honest. Most of my true education came after schooling.

W: I left education at 18. What I’d gotten from those two years at 6th form college was, 1) I really couldn’t draw very well, and 2) I learned how to pull apart a text properly. That was about it. Also, that the older I got the less willing I was to take orders from anyone.

M: What are some of your life experiences (or those of friends) that have made it into your work?

W: Too many. I try to cloak them, and usually people assume I made them up. I once saw someone try to bang heroin through a tear duct. An old girlfriend was sexually abused by her brother and given a teddy bear after each time – that was in TRANSMET. Killed himself when she was 15. You can find a lot of things like that in my work. I had some hard years, and a lot of people I knew had harder, and it can’t help but come out in the work because I try to talk about life as it’s lived. I want to show the exposed bone of the world, because that’s where a lot of people are.

M: I think too many comic writers never really think about the craft, they just keep writing and stumble their way out of crappiness – if ever at all. I found a little bit of studying the craft took me a long way, and I still dissect it as much as possible. What was the first “rule” or guideline you learned about writing?

W: Hm. You have to remember that a lot of us Brits learned to write comics from a single example: one page of JUDGE DREDD script reprinted in a 2000AD annual around 1980. Me and Garth Ennis still laugh about it. And we both still write scripts in something approaching that form. Around ‘88, someone told me the Stan Lee rule – 28(ish) words per panel. An average panel on an average page can’t usefully hold more than 28 words of dialogue and/or caption. I do that by eye, now – if a single balloon or caption runs into a third line on the script page, it’s starting to run too long.

I’m still learning, all the time. The thing I tell people is that you don’t learn how to write comics by reading comics. You learn how to write by reading books. You learn how to write comics by *dissecting* comics. You need to cut into the page and discover exactly what tools the creators employed to attain an effect.

M: What are some of the steps you make sure are accomplished in your writing? For example, each issue should end with a reason to pick up the next, even if it’s not a cliffhanger; that sort of thing.

W: The first page is killer. Comics aren’t movies; the audience doesn’t grant you that slack time in the first five minutes to get comfortable. Comics work like books or songs – if it doesn’t have you in the first line or the first 30 seconds of music, you’re dead. In any given episode: what do we learn about the protagonist? The protagonist is nominally the reason we’re there, and ideally I like to add to our knowledge of the character in each step of the story. Similarly, I want to learn something about the condition of the world of the story every time. If I’m working in genre, then usually I want to obey the genre – if it’s a spy story like DESOLATION JONES, then there needs to be interrogation, revelation and violence, no matter how they’re presented or hidden. This depends, of course, on your perception of the genre – I did my stint on ULTIMATE FF as young-adult SF, really, and spent more time with the people than I did the conflicts or whatever.

And I need to make the space for the artist to crank off a good guitar solo. It’s no good unless the artist has some fun, right?

M: You’ve spoken in terms of music; are you a musician at all? The fields are closely related; I have a lot of musician friends and find them to be similar to the artists I know. I find many artists/writers either are, like myself, frustrated talentless musicians; how about you?

W: Never picked up a musical instrument in my life, and I have a voice like a crow. I’ve dated singers who’ve begged me not to sing in the shower because the sound is so offensive to their ears. I have a critic’s ear – I can tell when someone’s off the note, but I can’t get within a mile of it myself. But, for me, music and writing are inextricable. I never write in silence. I’m in the pub right now with my mp3 player’s earbuds in, listening to Tom Waits croaking through “Cold Water.” I’ve always said that comics are closer to music than they are to film, and I tend to pick them apart the same way. Comics are all rhythm and stab, drums and guitars and keyboards; and they’re short, replayable experiences.

M: I’m the same way – I need music to write. It gets me in the zone like a trance.

In a nutshell, this is my writing process-

1 – Idea
2 – Story outline
3 – Find the character arc
4 – Crappy first draft; find themes and such
5 – Clean that bitch up

I like to build my scripts from the ground up. Do you do anything like this, or do you find you can just jump right into it at this point?

W: I’m the most arse-backwards writer in the business. I’ve been known to start with a scene somewhere in the middle with no characters or setting and build in both directions. I usually start with a bunch of random notes, connect them up and go from there. Technically, I’m one-draft, but I edit as I go. It goes down as dialogue and brief directions, raw, and I take another pass at everything when I go back and format it into script. Most often, I go into something already knowing the themes – it begins with something I want to talk about, and everything follows from that. I tend to feel character arcs are part and parcel of the writing process – it’s not a separate step; it’s just something that happens if your story’s working. Or, sometimes, not – I don’t consider “the growth/change of a character” crucial to a good story. Sherlock Holmes maybe had two elements of character development in his entire career.

M: Do you keep the artist in mind when writing, if at all?

W: Constantly. I’m living with the script for a week. The artist is living with it for a month. It needs to be tailored to them, and it needs to show them off at their absolute best. I’ll read tons of their work beforehand, look for what they do well, look for the things they haven’t gotten to do and the unrealised potential therein, and go into it trying to make them look as good as possible. Jim Lee once said that it’s possibly my greatest strength as a writer, and it’s one I enjoy. There’s nothing quite like seeing an artist step into the space I make for them.

M: How do you deal with an artist who goes off script? Do you work around it or send someone to break fingers?

W: I don’t work with them again. Ever. I am horrible about this. I tell artists, if something doesn’t work for you, tell me, and we’ll fix it. Back in the 90s, I spent an hour on the phone telling an artist this. When the pages came back, it turned out that he didn’t like the back five pages, and drew something else. And this was full script, not a vague Marvel-style thing. I went mental. When I finally got the guy on the phone again to find out what went wrong, he said, well, this is just the start of our collaboration, you’ll learn. So I had him fired. I was really just starting out at Marvel, and could easily have been fired myself – the artist had been on the book for a couple of years. But I was prepared to take the hit. No one else is going to stand up for your work but you. Turned out the artist had done this to a lot of writers over the years, but no one had stood up and said, “Enough.” I’m told that to this day he complains that I had him blacklisted in the business. Which I didn’t, and I still don’t use his name in public. But, after that, people were a lot more careful with my scripts, and that kind of thing has only happened a couple of times since. And I don’t work with those people again.

M: Has an artist’s storytelling style actually improved your work? Either through changing something, or simply through their approach?

W: Hitch would fiddle with progressions during monologues on THE AUTHORITY every now and then, which suited me fine, and the work was better for it. Darick would always find angles and acting on TRANSMET that brought pages to life. Happens all the time. If you’re lucky, you can find the telepathic people who can see what was really in your head when you’re trying to describe something – the Colleen Dorans and Cully Hamners. Jon J Muth did a marvellous thing on his ep of GLOBAL FREQUENCY where he went off-script just a tiny bit and introduced a long walk into the story. Everything I wrote was still there, but he framed it wonderfully. Paul Gulacy would crack one panel into two or three for that staccato Gulacy effect. I’d love to write for him again.

M: I hate editorial input, and I do a lot of licensed projects that drive me crazy, but I do find by making me work harder I actually do write better work. Its a cliché, but do you find it’s true that obstacles can actually make your writing better?

W: They’ll lead you in new directions, to be sure. The most recent was not getting to use Nick Fury on NEXTWAVE, and having to create Dirk Anger in his place, which just let me loose. Dirk Anger is Nick Fury having a massive nervous breakdown, and the gags I get out of that are some of the best pages in the book.

M: I notice most of your work stems from original creations instead of established characters. I fucking love that. How do you feel about creating characters for other companies? Every time I create something for another company, I feel like I’m giving away too much. There could be a movie there that I’m getting all of, instead of some slice that’s owned and controlled by the company. Maybe I’m just greedy. :)

W: I try not to give original works away on work-for-hire. Not only is it not in the job description (see below), but it’s really just bloody stupid. The history of American comics is out there for all to see. It’s no secret that lives and careers have been destroyed by people not knowing or caring what they’re signing away. There’s no excuse now for signing over all rights to an original work in perpetuity. So I don’t do it. Unless I’m guaranteed a piece of it. And often not even then. Book publishers don’t steal all the goddamn rights to a novel and leave you some crumbs. I started out in creator-owned work, and that’s how I’ll end. And it only makes sense.

Creators who spend all their time on company-owned stuff eventually reveal themselves as having nothing of themselves to give or say, and it’s those people who disappear from the field. They become something less than creators. I know how harsh and horrible that sounds, but no one can survive as an artist by producing nothing but cover versions all the time. Taking an occasional shot at these things can get the blood moving and work some muscles, but, really, if you can’t or won’t create a story from scratch, what the hell are you doing here?

M: Do you find yourself holding back story ideas so you can use them later for yourself?

W: I actually try not to do that. I’m sure it’s happened from time to time. I will withhold original characters or settings that I feel have legs, but that’s not the job with work-for-hire anyway. It took me a while to realise it, and in retrospect it seems obvious, but the point of a work-for-hire job is to make the company’s creative properties work in and of themselves, not to inject new and original characters into the properties. That’s not what you’re hired for – you’re there to make the company-owned property make money again. And, ultimately, the audience for those books doesn’t want new stuff. Some of them have said it to my face, and not as politely as all that. They want the old things done better. That’s all.

M: What are you hoping to do in the future? IN comics and out.

W: I would really like to write some television. I mean, I did an episode of the JUSTICE LEAGUE cartoon, but I’d like to write some live-action TV sometime. It’ll never happen, of course, but I nurture the idea of it from time to time. For ten years, I’ve been wanting to write original graphic novels in what is now, I guess, the manga format, though I fell in love with it when it was the Paradox Mystery format, paperback-size and 100 pages black-and-white. I’ve tried to get something going in that format again and again, and it’s never worked out. No one wants to know. That’s long been a source of frustration for me.

M: Yeah, changing formats is a hard thing to do. It doesn’t fly. Everyone wants something new, but no one wants change. Any thoughts on the future of comics? With so many people reading trades, I’m not sure what the future of monthly comics really is…

W: I think, in one sense, their future is the present: they’re a specialist item, available only through specialist stores. The commercial end of the medium is engaged in a constant act of CPR, keeping the single alive by overheating the audience. There’s a ceiling for that kind of book, and so the way they’re raising sales is in trying to get that static audience to buy more books. What I’d like to see more of are attempts to bring new customers into comics stores, which I seem to be achieving in a small way with FELL.

To be honest, I’d be happy to see only two kinds of single in the market – serial-to-collection, for the early adopters who just have to have the story first, and self-contained-single, where each story is a standalone piece that any reader can enter at any point in the run. The former is the equivalent of “appointment television”, where you can’t help but want to catch the first run of something. The latter is TV-to-DVD, really, isn’t it? These are the only two forms I work in, personally. I’m not interested in writing open-ended stuff that runs forever, because there’s no creative risk. Look what happens when it’s done half-arsed. The Death of Superman was huge. The return of Superman did hideous damage to the state of the market.

Now, of course, waiting for the trade is considered one of the big bugbears of the medium. I was one of the bigger proponents of the trade paperback in the 90s, and people kind of squint at me now with that “see what you’ve done” thing. But I make a lot of money now from the forty or so TPBs I have in print – works that 15 years ago would not have earned a penny beyond the month of their release. Yes, the market fractured, and we don’t see a lot of the available money spent in the month of release anymore – but my DC royalties paid for the family Xmas this year. So it all worked out. For me, anyway.

I’d like to see more original graphic novels, but too many publishers are still afraid of them. If there is a future, I think it’s still in driving more people into intelligent and deserving comics stores. But there are still too few stores, of any kind. I’ve always said that if the publishers want to “save” the industry, then they should be finding ways to make it easier to open new comics stores in locations not currently served. I know someone who, if she wanted to visit a comics store, would have to drive for 12 hours – and she’s not exactly living in the swamps, you know?

M: Okay, you’re sitting in a pub and you see some guys walk in wearing comic book shirts. They look over and think they might recognize you. Do you—

A – Make no eye contact
B – Head out the door?
C – Walk up to the bar and hope they speak to you
D – Walk up to them and tell them who you are for free drinks

Mark Millar will answer D when I ask him, so you can be just as honest.

W: A. 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. Most of them aren’t sure what I do, but they know I’m a writer, and a few of them have seen me on TV in the past. So they watch my back a little. Funny, really. It’s not like I’m actually famous. On the rare occasions I do conventions I can wander around without anyone approaching me. Never ever confuse this gig with real fame. That’s how some people go crazy.

M: You really work in the Pub? How does that work out? Do you have a day, then spend time working at the Pub or are you there all day?

W: I give myself a couple of hours up here, usually from noon-1 until 2-3. I suffer from a terminal allergy to common housedust, and even with the medication, I find I need to get out of the house for a couple of hours a day. So, I have this Treo handheld computer, a fold-out keyboard it plugs into, the phone and the mp3 player, and it all goes into the coat pockets – a mobile office complete with GPRS internet connection. So, for a couple of hours a day, I come up here, drink Red Bull, smoke (I don’t smoke at home), read the newspapers that I download to the handheld first thing, and write…

M: Man, that’s great. I drink a little to loosen the ID, that helps with some of the writing but I could see working at a bar getting out of hand for me. I can’t drink Guinness and enjoy it. Am I a pussy for drinking Stella?

W: Nope. I am the only British creator who doesn’t like Guinness, I think. A bunch of us went to a tiny island off the coast of Ireland for Garth Ennis’ stag do, some years back, and each round was the same – 14 pints of Guinness, and a whisky for Warren. Absolute fucking muck. Stella’s acceptable.

M: When are we going to work together? Don’t make me beg.

W: That’d be a bit of a step down for you, wouldn’t it?

M: I’ll poke Bendis’ other eye out to work with you, just say the word!

---

For extra credit.

These 10 questions originally came from a French series, “Bouillon de Culture” hosted by Bernard Pivot, and whored off by James Lipton have been improved by yours truly…

1. What is your favorite word to hear in a convention?

“Drink?”

2. What is your least favorite word to hear in an editor’s office?

“Hello.” (I avoid editorial offices like the plague. I like the separation of phone and email. Familiarity breeds contempt. Most of the people I knew who would haunt editors’ offices aren’t working anymore.)

3. What turns you on sexually?

Dark-haired women. God help me.

4. What turns you off sexually?

Scabs.

5. What is your favorite curse word your mother uses?

My mother doesn’t curse. You can imagine what a disappointment I am.

6. What sound or noise do you love when you’re kicking someone in a dark alley?

The sound of someone shrieking the word, “Sorry.”

7. What sound or noise do you hate when running from the police?

Gunfire.

8. What profession other than urine-stained coke whore would you like to attempt?

Hey, that worked out pretty well for me. There was a girl who worked in the stock market, back in the 80s, who frequently covered my rent.

You think I’m joking.

9. What person would you not like to do?

Sharon Osbourne. Can you imagine that voice while you were working?

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to say to God when he rejects you at the Pearly Gates?

“You’re a piece of shit, aren’t you?”

---

Check out more Warren Ellis at warrenellis.com or The-Engine.net.

Check out more Mike Oeming at www.mike-oeming.com. Join the Oeming newsletter for previews and announcements via email to: oeming@aol.com.