by Chris Arrant
Who needs an introduction when you can just say:
Warren Ellis is writing Astonishing X-Men.
Let's let that sink in a little bit.
Warren Ellis has been to pretty much every corner in the comics industry. He's worked exclusively at different times for Marvel and DC, has done lng-running series such as Transmetropolitan and Planetary, and has more graphic novels in print than any other comics creator in the English-speaking world. He's written video games, is writing a TV series for AMC, and just released his first prose novel. But one thing he's never tackled head-on until now is the core X-Men.
Astonishing.
Newsarama: First off, why X-Men?
Warren Ellis: Well, Chris, I'm closing in on 40 now, so I'm pretty much washed up and preparing for the time where I'll have to sell what operating internal organs I have left for bill money, and I'm looking around to see what's left in commercial comics that I haven't done. And one of the things I haven't yet done is work on a big franchise, just to see what it's like. I worked in the X-Office back in the 90s, but they never let me near their big toys in case I broke them or put them in my mouth or something. So when this came up, and when the degree of creative freedom that comes with it became clear, I thought, why the hell not? I mean, you never get to make your "stamp" on these things, because the franchise needs to keep running and everything gets dug over and re-invented in the end. But I like the technical challenge in these commercial gigs: to bring the property into the era of its production, as it were, and to write stories I'd like to read.
NRAMA: This announcement reminds me back in 2003, when you went off your DC exclusive at the same time Grant Morrison announced he was leaving New X-Men. You shrugged off quite a bit of speculation that you're taking over then, but as a public writing exercise on your Bad Signal e-newsletter you wrote as to what you'd do, via a lecture to be delivered by Emma Frost to the students at Xavier's School.
It's obvious that 2003 is far removed from where we are today in many respects, but where's your head at creatively as it relates to the X-men in this day and age?
WE: Secondary mutations. Breeding pairs. Warpies. The counting problem -- 198 was the number of surviving mutants post-House of M, but, really, who did that count? I'm not saying that new mutants will be popping out of the woodwork, but there's some serious geopolitical blinkers happening, still. Do you really think Nigeria or Zimbabwe are capable or willing to count mutant heads? Take Nigeria, a place we all think we know well because of their generous email invitations to enter into banking relationships. The life expectancy in Nigeria is 47 years. 3% of the population is living with HIV. Their water's nine parts poison and their soil is riddled with H5N1 and Lassa Fever. The place is rife with ethnic and religious unrest, they threw a CNN team out a few years ago for daring to report the news, and they only stopped blatantly working with narco-traffickers about a year ago. (Also, when did people start treating Africa as a single country?) You can guarantee that some things that happened in places like Nigeria never made it to the outside world. I'm not saying I want to do a run that's all about looking back, but I think it's worth making sure we can see the entire playing field.
The metaphor of mutantcy has meant many things to many people over the years. It's been code for adolescence, for race, for sexuality, for politics and probably a dozen other things. I want to see what it actually means in the 21st Century. This, to me, is interesting work: to take a sounding of a franchise that has meant so much and so many things to so many people over the years, and to see what else it still has to say; to look forward and see how this badge of X -- which didn't have the cultural load it carries today when Lee and Kirby generated the idea -- can be made to mean.
Also, I think planes will probably crash, beer will be drunk, people will get stabbed and certain characters will have what Joss called "the crazy weasel sex." But there will be no crying. This is very important. There is too much crying in science fiction these days.
NRAMA: Take that Baltar!
continued...
NRAMA: Seeing as how you're taking over on Astonishing X-Men from your friend Joss Whedon, are you carrying over any of the themes of story points he introduced in his issues?
WE: Well, when this first came up -- even, I think, before I talked to Joss about it -- I told Axel [Alonso, Marvel Editor] and Nick [Lowe, Marvel Editor] that the title had to change. It had to be called Astonishing X-Men: Second Stage. And so it will. For several reasons. First off, I want Joss and John's run to stand contained and inviolate. If all you ever really wanted was Whedon/Cassaday X-Men, then there'll be those four trades or whatever and that's it, it's as closed as an X-Men story gets. Which, commercially, is suicide, I'm sure. But I can do that much for my friends.
Second Stage, therefore, picks up none of the themes or story points in their run. It's a clean break. It also gives me a clear field of fire, which was important to me. I didn't want to spend time sweeping up after Joss. I mean, seriously, I've seen that guy eat.
I think what Joss really did was to hit the pause button on the franchise, to some extent: to create a bubble of imaginary time where he could just sit down and tell four X-Men stories he really wanted to read. Not that there hasn't been progression, because he's significantly moved on several characters -- but it was very much small stories, chamber music as opposed to, say, the nun-eating rock monster of Morrison's New X-Men run. (Although...was it a rock monster? Hmmm... 2000, 2001, around that time? Probably the tree-shagging, mind-fucking electronica skinnyboi, then, Radiohead, Bjork, Amon Tobin... you could've maybe turned around the entire last half of the run by making him listen to Godspeed! You Black Emperor...)
Anyway.
And, you know, there's almost a case to be made that Grant dragged the franchise to the end of the 20th Century, not least by fast-forwarding through the recent history of the superhero comic. The first page of his run is Logan and Scott stabbing and obliterating giant death robots, but within the space of pages, he's reestablished the X-Men as a pacifist team. In fact, they actually fail every time they attempt to default to physical violence to resolve situations, which inverts the whole thing (Joe Casey tried something similar in his Superman run). And then, by the end, he inverts it again with the ultimate act of violence -- loving violence, mind, indulgent violence -- by essentially burning out an entire future. Resetting the X-Men as a team run by sex and violence -- Emma and Scott. And the first thing Joss does is to put them back in the fetish gear, send them out to beat up everyone they see in the name of Acceptance Into The Society -- pacifists in municipal worker's gear didn't cut it, but a crew of gimp suits smacking people around brings them the love of the culture!
(And, in fact, how does that play out post-Civil War, a place where it has been rendered impossible to draw comfort from the image of a team of people in superhero-styled uniforms running towards you? Are they Tony Stark's fartcatchers taking the government's silver, or are they dangerous rogues who refuse to work with the authorities in a safe and responsible way? In the Marvel Universe, the superhero costume is a more ambiguous and unsettling symbol than ever before.)
Where was I?
NRAMA: …Picking up after Joss?
WE: I talked to Joss before I took the gig. Joss is okay with it. I'm not touching anything he's done.
I really like "Because We're Dead" by The Slow Club.
NRAMA: Everyone wants to know -- who's on the X-men team you're writing, and why?
WE: Oh, no, Chris. Way too early for that yet. Joss' final story has yet to play out, and I've yet to settle on my own core team.
NRAMA: Moving on then… For Astonishing X-Men, you're working with artist Simone Bianchi. As a writer who's known to tailor your scripts to match with the artist's strengths, have you sized up Bianchi yet and figured out how you're going to (kindly) exploit his talents?
WE: I think, honestly, that I can just relax and make his life hell. Bianchi can clearly draw anything. The stuff I've seen from him so far has been drawn from plots, rather than the full-script form I use, so he's making his own panelling choices, and it's interesting to see that he often defaults to the sort of wide panel that both Cassaday and Hitch excel at. He'll shift between that and more European storytelling tricks -- he's Italian, and I've found that both Italian and Spanish artists tend to fuse the American and Franco-Belgian forms – [Tanino] Liberatore's a great example. So, really, I'm going to be fitting myself around what he already does.
Wonderful stuff, though, isn't it? He's his own artist, but I see all kinds of other artists in him. His work almost looks like a more relaxed, instinctual Travis Charest, sometimes...
NRAMA: Astonishing X-Men stands clear as one of the top books in comic stores. Forgetting the creative aspect and just thinking business and interaction, how is coming on such a high-selling book with so much expectation different than say, Thunderbolts or Doktor Sleepless?
WE: Well, original creator-owned work is always a completely different animal. And, frankly, I don't know that anyone had any expectations for my Thunderbolts run (which, like Nextwave, I write mostly for my own amusement). I dunno. I don't think about that sort of thing much anymore. I just write what I want, and people will either buy it or they won't. Having a mainstream novel released in hardback from a major publisher -- that's nerve-wracking. Writing comics? Piece of piss, mate.
NRAMA: Rounding out this interview, is there anything specific that fans can be looking forward to reading when they read Warren Ellis' Astonishing X-Men?
WE: Oh, the usual, you know. Raping your childhoods, using my position to destroy everything you love, displaying opinions you may not agree with and writing with my own voice and personality. All the things people hate in commercial comics these days. And yet, all the things I am specifically hired for. It's a funny old world.
For a chat with Ellis' creative partner Simone Bianchi, click here....
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