My Three-Way with Warren Ellis

My Three-Way with Warren Ellis

Apr 18

Warren Ellis sent an e-mail blast on his list, Bad Signal, announcing that he’d answer three questions for any comics website about his new ongoing series from Avatar coming out this summer, Doktor Sleepless. Read page one of the script here. The ongoing series will be shadowed by a wiki, featuring content generated both by Ellis and by readers.

As a reminder, Ellis is one of the finest comics writers of this or any generation, and is poised to explode into the mass culture with his first novel, Crooked Little Vein, also due out this summer.

In a general, even stream-of-consciousness way, what are the roots and seeds for the ideas behind Doktor Sleepless?

I was ready to do another big piece of political sf, and I knew what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about the subsumation of authenticity into fiction. I wanted to talk about liars, on a grand scale. I wanted to talk about the end of the world, in the major and the minor. And I wanted to talk about where I think we are today, and where we could end up in ten or fifteen years. The motor of innovation and novelty is really kind of cranked up right now, but, in contrast, the general culture is still in a sort of post-millennial shock, just laying there and drooling over its nipples.

You’ve mentioned “long-form” in describing the series before…do you envision this as a full-length series in the mold of a Transmetropolitan, and if so, do you have it conceptualized in a full 60-issue sense yet?

It’s definitely going to be big. I haven’t decided how big yet. I know how it ends, but I don’t know when it ends, and that’s quite deliberate. I ended up feeling a bit constrained by TRANSMET’S Five Year Plan. I want DOK to take its own shape.

Who would win in a fight–Spider Jerusalem or the good Doktor?

The good Doktor, because Spider was a flabby drug addict, and the Doktor is lithe and sneaky. Also, people like the Doktor, so he’d have help. Even Spider’s friends hated him.