Warren Ellis is a strange, strange man. I know, I know, so's Allan Moore, and Garth Ennis. Grant Morrison's got his moments o' wierdness. Neil Gaimen's work is so faerytale-like and beautiful that it's sometimes hard to see how harsh it is, how twisted, how much more it owes to Grimm's than Seigel and Shuster.
But Warren Ellis is probably the wierdest. I just finished reading Bad World. It's a collection of quotations from conspiracy theorists/random nutjobs who have scrawled their bizarre thoughts in HTML instead of bathroom walls and underground 'zines with mailing lists that barely fill a page. Bad World isn't even "comics" by the McCloudian definition (That's right. I just adjectivised Scott McCloud. Look at me; I'm a literary critic!), but it's the perfect companion piece to Transmetropolitan (Which I have only just now realised I've never spoken of on this site. Bad blogger! Coming soon: Orion's twisted thoughts on Transmetropolitan. Yes, it's late and I'm incoherent. Welcome to the internet, motherfuckers).
Ellis takes us by the hand, in this very strange book, and leads us through the thoughts and ideas of people who just don't seem to live in the same world as we do. Maybe they're afraid of our world? Maybe they're just confused by it? I think that Ellis thinks he understands how they think, but he doesn't quite come out and say so. Either way, through Ellis, we visit their worlds, seeing the conspiracy theories, the pseudo-religious crusades, the logic that only the crazy can concieve of. We see how royally fucked up people can be, and that the internet is the place where they shine, where they find conveluted and bizarre ways to defend, rationalise, and justify their worlds.
In a wierd way that is, I think, Ellis' signature move as a storyteller, he makes their hideousness, their lunacy, almost beautiful. Perhaps, aweful, in the Romantic sense, "full of awe." The same way you can look at a tornado that's about to kill you and say, "My gods, that is beautiful." I'm not saying that he defends them. Far from it! Ellis is more willing to condemn and judge than any other commentator I know of aside from Bill Maher, but he picks the people he'll condemn very carefull, and often he invents them himself, so he's usually right. No, he shows us that there's something pathetic about them, again, in that old sense, full of pathos, full of emotion, in the twisted tales of these post-modern extatic prophets of insansity. He makes them sad, and pitiful, but inspires in his readers, or at least in me, not scorn but actual pity, actual compasion, actual concern for them as people.
And they are people. Ellis doesn't let you forget that. They're regular old people, living sad, frightening little lives that lead them to believe that commiting suicide to hitch a ride on a comet from Heaven is the only sane choice, or that they are the love children of aliens come to Earth to save us from ourselves, or that stuffing dogs and cats in individually marked zip-lock bags and storing them in a shed is a productive use of their time. These people are frightening because of what they might do to people like us (the supposedly sane), but also for what they could do to themselves.
The grand finale, the sucker-punch at the end, the kick to the crotch that is the deneument of every Ellis story (and stop reading right now if you don't want it given away!) is that the Bad World in the title isn't their world, their worlds. It's ours. See, the fantastic and the bizarre can be an escape, a way of replacing one's own boring little life with something, perhaps not less dangerous, not ihabited by any less pain of fear, but at the very least, more grandious, more exciting. The mundane, even banal, details of our world are frightening enough without having to introduce aliens and demons and poisened koolaid.
Ellis sees a great potential in human beings. That much is clear in his work. He is capable of envisioning amazing beauty, even if it is usually accompanied by ugliness the likes of which almost no one could possibly see. Like Swift, he's sad and angry because we have created this kind of ugliness, this hate and brutality and violence and intolerance, when we could have made beauty, kindness, hope.
Warren Ellis contains, simultaneously, the wonder of a child, and the bitterness of the adult who was that child.
Posted by orion at November 12, 2004 12:15 AM