Warren Ellis

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Warren Ellis.

Warren Ellis (born February 16, 1968 ) is an English author of numerous comics, books and screenplays. Also, Ellis is a very active online personality. He lives in Southend-on-Sea in England .

career

Ellis began writing in 1990 and published a six-page story in Deadline magazine, UK. He also wrote a one-page Doctor Who comic and a Judge Dredd short story. Ellis' first ongoing series, Lazarus Churchyard with illustrator D'israeli , was published in Blast! . In 1994 Ellis started at Marvel and took over the Hellstorm series there , which he wrote until it was discontinued with issue 21. He also worked on Marvel 2099 and Thor .

In addition to his work for Marvel, he wrote comics for DC , Caliber and Image , where he mainly worked for the Wildstorm studio. In addition to DV8 , he took over the Stormwatch series , which he supervised from # 37 - 50 together with artist Tom Raney . Stormwatch was restarted afterwards and ran for 11 issues with Ellis and draftsman Bryan Hitch at the helm. Then, from what was left of Stormwatch, The Authority was started, a series about a superhero team who took action against threats and triggered a trend towards action-oriented series on the American comic market, the plot structure of which was based on Hollywood blockbusters.

In 1997, Ellis started the series Transmetropolitan , the rights of which he and the illustrator Darick Robertson kept for himself and did not give them to the publisher, as is common in the big American comic publishers. The series was about a gonzo journalist named Spider Jerusalem (modeled on Hunter S. Thompson ), who is fighting for the election of a fascist US president in a futuristic America . It was largely published by the DC subsidiary Vertigo and became one of the most successful DC series without superheroes over 60 issues.

In 1998, Ellis began to communicate with his fans , first via mailing lists and then via Internet forums , making him one of the first comic book authors to have an online presence. Two of his online fans were u. a. the future Marvel comic book writers Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction . Through the exchange with fans on his forum in the 90s, Ellis is considered a pioneer of Internet communication.

In 1999, Ellis started with the cartoonist John Cassaday at Wildstorm with the series Planetary , which picked up on common superhero and pulp clichés and presented them in an unusual way. He also made a brief appearance on Vertigos Hellblazer , which he ended prematurely after DC refused to publish a previously written story, called Shoot , that dealt with a similar topic shortly after the Columbine High School rampage .

In 2003 Wildstorm released the 12-part series Global Frequency , which almost became a television series, but was discontinued after the pilot film . Warren Ellis describes a clandestine non-governmental organization based on a smart mob . The pilot film has now become available to a large fan base on the Internet. In 2004 Ellis returned to the mainstream superhero comics on a two-year contract with Marvel. He took over Iron Man and Ultimate Fantastic Four .

Warren Ellis is notorious for happily turning the superhero genre upside down somewhere between parody and modernization. His Wildstorm creations are now even referred to as the Ellis Universe . It is striking that he again and again familiar characters from the universes of Marvel and DC satirizes or presented as alternative equivalents.

Example: In both Stormwatch and Planetary , he offered a character that is strongly reminiscent of Superman and, in the first case, was the protagonist's opponent. The "villains" at Planetary are based in a similar style on Marvel's Fantastic Four and at The Authority there is a counterpart to the Avengers (Avengers) , even if Ellis had already left the series at this point; while two of the main characters in the series are a parody of Superman and Batman - as a gay couple. Nevertheless, the whole thing is never a pure parody, but has its own serious storyline with original ideas.

Since 2006, Ellis has also been responsible for the Marvel series Nextwave , which he says he sees as “superhero comic in its distilled form”, in which heroes in disguise “pose in the streets for no good reason”. And even if Nextwave is less dark than his Wildstorm work, the above-mentioned motifs can also be found here, that Ellis on the one hand also relies on new and well-known characters already established in the Marvel universe, on the other hand also parodies motifs and characters from Marvel .

Elli's first novel Gott schütze Amerika (Crooked Little Vein) was published in July 2007 in the USA and two years later in a German translation by Heyne .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Susan Vahabzadeh: One for All. Retrieved August 2, 2020 .

Web links

Commons : Warren Ellis  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Ellis, Warren
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English comic book author
DATE OF BIRTH February 16, 1968