Warren Ellis Is Walking Through Artist's Alley. and Everyone's Shut the Hell
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12/8/2017 Welcome to Silver Bullet Comics! // THE source, nuff said! // Comics, Subscriptions, News, Previews, Reviews, Events, Forums, Manga, CCG, … Home // Articles // Interviews / Op Ed Search Silver Bullet Comics... Ruminations of a Very Large Man: Profile on Warren Ellis (author) Jonathan Encarnacion (date) Jul. 18, 2005 (10.41.41am) Warren Ellis is walking through Artist’s Alley. And everyone's shut the hell up. A cane remixes the rhyme of his heavy step, causing a skew at the shoulders of his heavy leather coat. Two sharp, black-tipped eyes pierce through his Viking features (a bearded face framed with a shock of ponytailed hair) and roam the tables, scouring for talent to come by. A stoic expression seems to dismiss the sensationalized atmosphere generated by eager buzz. He hovers over a portfolio and taps a finger on it, dwarfing the 11" x 17" with his massive warlord build. He booms to the artist, revealing his southern English: “I like this – it reminds me of early Kaluta.” The artist's face betrays the effort of keeping cool: there’s an agreeable wrinkle at the edge of his eye caused by a lifted cheek; gratefulness for privileged flattery. “I’d usually like to take a stroll down the Artist’s Alley when I came to these more often,” Ellis says quietly, passing the table. “I haven’t done this in five years.” The ambiguities of his live identity have brought out levels of intimidation in excess: his Saturday Q&A, more populated than any other panel at the Paradise Comics Toronto Comicon, was spiked with awkward silences, attendants too afraid to approach the mic. Those that did suffered dearly. Truth of it is, though, that for most the pain was self-inflicted: wobbly voices, rigid shoulders - nervousness presented to a laid-back Ellis who at one point, seemed to wonder why the hell everyone was so frightened. Ellis can make for intimidating company, and not just through his size or popularity. His online presence demonstrates his bold, acerbic British wit powered by fierce, unwavering intellect. He does not tiptoe past an issue: he will call out on redundancies and on a lacking of well-applied thought. It’s this fashion of honesty that scares the hell out of people, so it comes as a surprise to most that in the real world, Ellis does more entertaining than condemning. Warren Ellis - “There are some people in the British comics community who have no limiting system in their brain when it comes to alcohol. And they will drink past the point where normal people would die.” file:///D:/BACKUPS/DATA/2009-02-17/From%20Previous%20'C'%20Drive%20-%20My%20Documents/SilverBulletComics%20work/543%20-%20Warr… 1/9 12/8/2017 Welcome to Silver Bullet Comics! // THE source, nuff said! // Comics, Subscriptions, News, Previews, Reviews, Events, Forums, Manga, CCG, … The green room is hermetically sealed off from the ambient noise of the con. It’s dimly-lit, with an orange glow that stains the otherwise sterile white walls. An intimate setting, tables matching the walls in color, Ellis at one and Bendis at another. Bendis is hunched over a pile of comics in front of him, cranking out private signings. Organizers and event staff populate the room sparsely; a more relaxed group, listening to Ellis and Bendis casually trade jokes for bar stories. Bendis reveals that Mike Oeming’s first-ever assignment was on the book Edward Penishands and it gets a cackle out of Ellis: literally, HAW HAW HAW. From outside, you’d swear there was a heavyset Norseman behind the door. You wouldn’t be far off: Thundersley, where Ellis hails from, is one of two villages of the same name fifty miles apart, both beginning as Norse settlements. As a kid, Ellis took great advantage of the physical size bestowed through his lineage. “I was on the school rugby team; I was on the school football team; I was in the school athletics team, I was a sprinter for a while. Then I moved to javelin, shot put. “One day I took a tackle run and watched my left leg spin 360 degrees at the knee,” the injury resulting in an occasional need for a cane to assist his stride. “The tendon that holds my kneecap in place – well, holds your kneecap in place; mine is wrapped around the jutting tip of my shinbone – it’s inoperable. “But – I still pulled the fucker down!” exclaiming it wasn’t all for nothing. Ellis spent most of his adolescent years, 14 to 18, on painkillers and reacquainting himself with his walk cycle. To this day, there’s no guarantee that the damage won’t someday result in losing the use of his left leg from the knee below. Although out of commission on the athletics front, Ellis is still more than eligible to take part in another ritual central to the southend culture. He barks over to Bendis: “You don’t drink, do you?” Bendis: Naw. “The Americans don’t drink,” Ellis stresses. “The British conventions, they were basically 200 pros who would walk into a bar, drink it, and then go looking for the next one.” Bendis: Funny thing; I’ve seen the Jersey guys try to keep up with the Scottish guys – Ellis: Oh, you’re shitting me – Bendis: – they can’t keep up. ‘No, we’re men!’ Ha! Those fuckers were gone. “The bars they used to use in Britain,” Ellis starts to tell, “they wouldn’t actually shut. The convention guys would ask around for a license extension. And the pubs would say,” – in an iffy girly voice – “‘Well, that costs a lot of money.’ And the guys would say,” – like some shady street merchant – “‘Don’t worry. You will make more money than you thought possible. Just be ready to hoover around dead bodies.’” Sometimes there’s a different function to such stimuli; something quite opposite from what results in a Saturday night impairment. Ellis has given formal, passionate talks about the relationship storytelling’s history has to drink, drug and ritual. Storytelling cultures would each have their own processes and practices “intended to get at the subconscious, the dark half of the brain,” he explained during a talk at the Hacienda bar, previous to the con; “the parts that we don’t consciously use and cannot ordinarily get to. And ritual is nothing but a performance – a story. We tell ourselves a story in order to reveal something to ourselves.” - file:///D:/BACKUPS/DATA/2009-02-17/From%20Previous%20'C'%20Drive%20-%20My%20Documents/SilverBulletComics%20work/543%20-%20Warr… 2/9 12/8/2017 Welcome to Silver Bullet Comics! // THE source, nuff said! // Comics, Subscriptions, News, Previews, Reviews, Events, Forums, Manga, CCG, … FANTASTIC! This is not a joke! You are our 1.000.000th visitor! ONLINE: 8/12/2017 23:45:42 You have been selected now! Ellis sets his cane in front of him, reaches for the Red Bull at his side (a recurring Our random theme on this trip), and uncaps a silver gel pen. He pulls toward him the first pile of winners books, and starts to run through the stacks systematically – un-bag, sign, re-bag – without a need for focused thought. A few issues from his run on Hellblazer pass; selection there’s his Avatar book, Scars, and a copy of his OGN from Alt/Planet Lar, Switchblade Honey. The pace breaks when he hits Ultimate Nightmare and Ultimate system could Fantastic Four, where he opens the book up to sign on the first page. choose you to win a SAMSUNG S8 CLICK HERE ©Aldaniti “Ultimate stuff, it’s glossy cover stock. Signature can rub off,” he notes in passing. Somewhere in the pile he encounters something of a jewel: small, photocopied, with a cover printed on yellow paper, one of Ellis' very first comics, “extremely small press”, crafted before the industry ever gave a shit about him. “Way, way, waaay the fuck back when. I don’t remember; ‘83, maybe? Long time ago – I just remember I was a kid. And everyone was doing this back then; Eddie Campbell was doing it, too. Back then we would all use local photocopiers. We’d take the original pages, paste them together and run them off. And we’d staple them. But long-arm staplers were expensive – only offices had them.” So with the base materials they assembled each book by hand. “We had the thing laid down flat. And we’d just drive the staples right the way through, flip the book over and fold over the staples with our thumbs, then fold the fuckers over. Runs of three hundred. file:///D:/BACKUPS/DATA/2009-02-17/From%20Previous%20'C'%20Drive%20-%20My%20Documents/SilverBulletComics%20work/543%20-%20Warr… 3/9 12/8/2017 Welcome to Silver Bullet Comics! // THE source, nuff said! // Comics, Subscriptions, News, Previews, Reviews, Events, Forums, Manga, CCG, … “Then every two months we’d be at the comic mart, with everyone at the pub like this:” He puts up both hands with skewed thumbs raised. “Paralyzed thumbs.” “I’d always been doing small press as a kid,” he continues, un-bag, sign, re-bag. “I was running a book shoppe – I must have been 20, maybe 22.” The shop carried comics of all kinds, including 'inkies', tabloid-sized comics on newsprint that would leave on the reader's hands black stains of ink. He remembers reading a story that “was so extraordinarily bad” – he starts to snicker – “that I wrote them a filthy letter.” The review was printed in the back of a forthcoming issue; regardless of how unfavorable, “it’s what they did in those days.