“Where’s the future we were promised? That’s what I hear you say. Who cheated me out of my spaceship and my ray gun? Stop looking for something that isn’t there. You live in the future and you don’t know it.
“It’s not so long ago that a letter or a photo took months to cross the world. You can tell people where you are today and what it looks like in seconds, no matter where they are. Your own bodies talk to your environments all the time without you doing anything. You can interrogate buildings and have conversations with objects. That wasn’t in the future you were expecting.
“You want your jetpack, but you don’t even think about your IM lenses and your phones. Were you born with them? No. You’re science fictional creatures, each and every one of you.”
“
| — | Warren Ellis, Doktor Sleepless (via matthewjacksonwrites) |
ITEM FOUR
Once, the characters were the most important part of a book to its audience. Then, the publisher’s brand became paramount. Later, a schism emerged, where for every person who aligned themselves with a publisher, another aligned themselves with a particular family of books from a publisher. All these identification systems have pretty much gone the way of the dodo with the new century. But a new alignment is emerging. More and more stores are racking their books not by publisher, nor alphabetically by title, but by creator. Which makes sense. Do you go into a record store and look for the new long-player recording by your favourite popular beat combo by record company? Go looking for the Eels single in the Dreamworks section of Tower Records? ‘Course you bloody don’t.
No-one wants the creators to appear bigger than the characters. The publishers hate the notion that Grant Morrison could have been a more important thing to ACTION COMICS than the presence of Superman - that maybe the characters don’t sell themselves and that the creators might have something to do with it.
People do respond to reviews and mainstream media features and fond memories by entering stores in search of the new Neil Gaiman, or the new Alan Moore, or the new Frank Miller. So rack them accordingly. Let people have a Neil Gaiman section in stores, or Alex Ross, or Will Eisner, or Grant Morrison. We might not be a grown-up medium yet, but if we dress like it, we might just bring it on.
I like to think that Warren Ellis’ insights are most likely the result of his love of whiskey, cigarettes, and Red Bull.
But in all seriousness he’s right, I don’t even go for favorite characters anymore, I only go for the writers. Gaiman, Ellis, Morrison, they are the writers who works I will rush out to pick up when it hits the shelves. When they do happen to go for my favorite characters it’s a win-win. I’ve been coming to this gradual realization about me and comics, but that’s for another time.
Check out the rest of the Old Bastard’s Manifesto, it was published nearly 12 years ago, and it’s kind of shocking on how things have/haven’t changed since then. More on that also later.
I’m a bit half and half about it. I’ll hunt down all sorts of stuff just because of the creator (lately I’ve been reading all sorts of stuff I wouldn’t have read if Warren Ellis had nothing to do with them) but at the same time I’m still kinda pumped to just…I dunno, see what’s going on with Iron Fist and such.
Mostly, I’m more interested in genres. Like, I’m really big into the big cosmic sci-fi space opera stuff right now but I’ve been into, like, “street level” Marvel stuff too. Still, Ellis is right. The characters themselves are starting to be worth less and less. I mean, I’m kinda vaguely interested in the Superman title now that I hear Jurgens and Giffen are going to take over! I read Secret Avengers when Ellis did a recent run on it and haven’t read anything before or after his run. I started reading Uncanny X-Men just because it was being written by the guy that wrote S.W.O.R.D.
But I only read S.W.O.R.D. because the original Death’s Head showed up in it.
Hm.
