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END ME SCOOB posted:Did he? I think I entirely missed that part of things. This is totally after his "I'm post-Obsidian and leaping from consult to consult" era, isn't it? New Vegas has a prequel comic I think he wrote.
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Jun 20, 2020 09:33
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Skwirl posted:New Vegas has a prequel comic I think he wrote. Well that's a hell of a dark way to find out I missed out on some New Vegas material. Gonna leave that one lost, thanks.
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Jun 20, 2020 09:48
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END ME SCOOB posted:Well that's a hell of a dark way to find out I missed out on some New Vegas material. Gonna leave that one lost, thanks. It just explains the story behind some random knife you find near Goodsprings. I've noticed people commenting on this and claiming that people who didn't speak up or confront these people ages ago are just as bad don't understand that comics is a horribly insular community. If you're just starting out and you're working for a guy who's a big name with pull with the comic companies, you have to decide on giving up your dreams of working in the industry and making a stand, or keeping your head down and getting your foot in the door. Kate Leth had a tweet that straight up said she is blacklisted from DC as a crazy man hating bitch because she refused the advances of people. It's not like a man wouldn't receive the same treatment. It's really, really lovely that it works like that, but it does, and again, that's why they do it and flaunt it. They have power over peoples lives and can use that to their own ends. You should be able to report this behavior to someone that can deal with it, but the companies would just go "well, this guy just did a semi popular web comic, and he says our big huge Eisener winning writer who has made us millions is a horrible sex monster, I think we know who to believe *rolls around in a giant pile of money*" At best you can hope you get enough credit to be able to call them out later or support accusers. It's really depressing when you think about it.
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Jun 21, 2020 01:32
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https://twitter.com/_EvelynHollow/status/1274080243112869890?s=20
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Jun 21, 2020 02:53
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Clearing out my Ellis TPBs I came across collections of his essays and early blog posts from 95-01, including the “Old Bastard Manifesto” where he says “I’m part of the problem, gently caress you.” I’m not going to take the time to reread and pick apart 20+ year old bloviating for more evidence of awful behavior (he seems to mostly rag on and on about superhero books and the state of the industry) but bull-loving-poo poo at his claim of not knowing the power and influence he wielded when Transmetropolitan AND Planetary were current AND he was pointing out how he co-owned the latter.
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Jun 21, 2020 09:58
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SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:Clearing out my Ellis TPBs I came across collections of his essays and early blog posts from 95-01, including the “Old Bastard Manifesto” where he says “I’m part of the problem, gently caress you.” I’m not going to take the time to reread and pick apart 20+ year old bloviating for more evidence of awful behavior (he seems to mostly rag on and on about superhero books and the state of the industry) but bull-loving-poo poo at his claim of not knowing the power and influence he wielded when Transmetropolitan AND Planetary were current AND he was pointing out how he co-owned the latter. My entire collection is packed up at the moment but I'm seriously thinking it's time to purge based on horrible creators. Maybe when unpacking day arrives.
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Jun 21, 2020 10:01
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https://twitter.com/BRIANMBENDIS/status/1274530962861256705?s=20 https://twitter.com/takisoma/status/1274580476716445697?s=20
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Jun 21, 2020 14:18
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cool bendis, now do ellis
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Jun 21, 2020 15:25
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site posted:cool bendis, now do ellis I am waiting for Zdarsky and Fraction to chime in on their buddy Ellis. I hope they do the right thing as I really enjoy their work. And in a similar vein of self interest, since people are offloading their Ellis collections, I still dont own TransMet and am looking to fix that without putting a cent into that fat bastards pocket. So if you by any chance have floppies or older trades that dont have the lovely coloring recent editions are known for hit me up, in the PMs.  SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:Clearing out my Ellis TPBs I came across collections of his essays and early blog posts from 95-01, including the “Old Bastard Manifesto” where he says “I’m part of the problem, gently caress you.” I’m not going to take the time to reread and pick apart 20+ year old bloviating for more evidence of awful behavior (he seems to mostly rag on and on about superhero books and the state of the industry) but bull-loving-poo poo at his claim of not knowing the power and influence he wielded when Transmetropolitan AND Planetary were current AND he was pointing out how he co-owned the latter. Throughout his career, Ellis always maintained two personas: the erudite punk-rock iconoclast, and the British self-effacing attitude of being just another working stiff. I never bought into the first one, which was so over the top I always assumed that it was just a joke, which in reality it seemed it was more of a mask to hide his bastardry, and is something he distanced himself from as he started getting more "respectable" gigs in book and screenplay/TV writing. His self-deprecation is something is has been doing since the dawn of time and continues to do now. I feel its bullshit he actually buys into himself. Always writing about being cut off from the world in the arsehole of England, not having many connections in the comic industry, artists refusing to do his work because they get better paying gigs elsewhere, mysterious projects being constantly canceled by mysterious forces, etc etc. Which always stands in hilariously stark contrast with his comments of having one of his watches set to LA time for all the TV work he does, or his overcrowded work schedule, or him meeting and hanging out with his acting heroes. I guess it helps him sleep at night. I think that he actually believes in that lovely apology he crafted, as messed up as that is. I used to hang out in his Engine Room and White Chapel forums back in the day, and the filthy assistant shtick always seemed like a joke since all of them were strong, independent, no-nonsense women. Just shows my naivety. But I always found it peculiar that the only photos that got comments in the photography threads I frequented were female nudes.
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Jun 21, 2020 22:46
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Putrid Grin posted:the filthy assistant shtick always seemed like a joke since all of them were strong, independent, no-nonsense women. Just shows my naivety. Same here, and as someone who in retrospect was one of those no-nonsense women* in their 20s among comic shop retailers and creatives I wonder if I was unwittingly one of those used to create the smokescreen of what great guys these all were. * before I understood I’m non-binary
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Jun 21, 2020 23:09
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I just remembered Warren Ellis used to write a column for Suicide Girls.
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Jun 22, 2020 06:16
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He loved the Suicide Girls.
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Jun 22, 2020 09:04
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Kinda weird data point that both Stewart and Ellis were both so heavily involved in suicide girls.
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Jun 22, 2020 13:15
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RevKrule posted:Kinda weird data point that both Stewart and Ellis were both so heavily involved in suicide girls. The site has its own history of abuse and questionable practices dressed up in edgy quasi-feminist garb, so... in that age of the Internet, sounds like they were pretty well made for one another.
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Jun 22, 2020 14:03
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Ellis has a poem he wrote for a Transmetropolitan anthology about how living in the city is hell because every woman is so breathtakingly beautiful that he feels suicidal every time he leaves his house because he is so emotionally overwhelmed by them all the time and it makes him feel so lonely and ugly so he just gets high. He wrote that like almost 25 years ago. I went through all this with the first wave of #metoo. My favorite band, my favorite stand-up, my favorite author, basically all the biggest influences in my life turned out to be serial predators. It breaks your brain. It scares you. It makes you wonder how many of their sick attitudes and ideas have accidentally informed your life and the decisions you’ve made towards the women you love and and respect. It’s just awful. I have dozens of Ellis’s works in my home, Transmet was my home in college and hell the new Castlevania has been one of the few bright spots left for me in these plague times. This just sucks and I am sorry to all of the Ellis fans that he took advantage of and creeped on. Bust Rodd fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 14:27
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I know exactly what you mean. I'm still trying process my thoughts on all this. What he did was disturbing and wrong on so many levels. But on the other hand his work is the whole reason I view comics as an art form. I do have to wonder if he knew this was coming. In the latest season of Castlevania the character who is one of the "grumpy old man with a heard of gold" archetype that Ellis likes to use as his author stand in is revealed to be a serial child killer.
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Jun 22, 2020 15:36
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Putrid Grin posted:Throughout his career, Ellis always maintained two personas: the erudite punk-rock iconoclast, and the British self-effacing attitude of being just another working stiff. I never bought into the first one, which was so over the top I always assumed that it was just a joke, which in reality it seemed it was more of a mask to hide his bastardry, and is something he distanced himself from as he started getting more "respectable" gigs in book and screenplay/TV writing. I always got the impression that punk persona was a reaction, then overreaction, to the comics community of the time. I remember in the early 2000s in particular, every time Ellis made fun of superheroes, he got just a little bit more notorious and got just a little more angry email. Naturally, he kept doing it, and kept putting out indie work via whoever would publish it that very distinctly was virtually any genre besides superheroes. Even later, when he does do superhero work, it's often borrowing heavily from police procedurals, science fiction, and/or espionage thrillers. I seem to remember offhand that same punk tendency was to blame for Kitty Pryde and Pete Wisdom getting together in the first place. There were running jokes in late '90s/early '00s X-Men fan community circles about it, that Ellis making the relationship explicitly sexual was a deliberate reaction to something Chris Claremont had said. David D. Davidson posted:I do have to wonder if he knew this was coming. In the latest season of Castlevania the character who is one of the "grumpy old man with a heard of gold" archetype that Ellis likes to use as his author stand in is revealed to be a serial child killer. I think it goes back further than that. Crooked Little Vein, in retrospect, is particularly disturbing. I'm generally not one to try and psychoanalyze people through their creative output, but much of Ellis's work is so blatantly straight off the dome that it's difficult to do anything else. You can count the number of times he's written a simple, functional personal relationship on the fingers of one hand, and most of the exceptions like Trevor & Sypha in "Castlevania" are part of preexisting canon that he couldn't reasonably ignore. It's kind of in line with that old joke about how many novels exist about middle-aged professors contemplating an extramarital affair; many of Ellis's protagonists and supporting cast have this thing going on where they're aware of and influenced by sexual desire, but resent its presence in their lives and/or have had it go extraordinarily badly in the recent past.
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Jun 22, 2020 17:52
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The fact that Spider hosed Yelena is now a bit 
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Jun 22, 2020 18:14
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Wanderer posted:I always got the impression that punk persona was a reaction, then overreaction, to the comics community of the time. I remember in the early 2000s in particular, every time Ellis made fun of superheroes, he got just a little bit more notorious and got just a little more angry email. Naturally, he kept doing it, and kept putting out indie work via whoever would publish it that very distinctly was virtually any genre besides superheroes. Even later, when he does do superhero work, it's often borrowing heavily from police procedurals, science fiction, and/or espionage thrillers. This was hardly unique to Ellis (or the WEF) but this idea at the turn of the century of 'broadening the horizons' of comics was largely down to 'basically superhero books but with more military/vampire/werewolf/cyberpunk/space alien/hardboiled cop costumes/settings layered over the capes and tights. You know, to show it's mature and serious literature. All of this is just barely relevant to the topic of the thread, except maybe to show just how shallow the revolutionary/transformative impulse was towards change in the comics industry. quote:I seem to remember offhand that same punk tendency was to blame for Kitty Pryde and Pete Wisdom getting together in the first place. There were running jokes in late '90s/early '00s X-Men fan community circles about it, that Ellis making the relationship explicitly sexual was a deliberate reaction to something Chris Claremont had said. Claremont had the whole Kitty Pryde/Colossus romance going when it was (explicitly in the text) a 13-14 year old Kitty and a 19 year old Colossus. Claremont from what I recall initially played it up as Kitty having a schoolgirl crush on the older Colossus, but also almost immediately established an alternate dystopian future where the two of them were married. After Secret Wars (possibly at the insistence of Jim Shooter, I can't find anything conclusive about that) Colossus breaks off their romantic relationship. Fast forward to 1994 and Claremont is off of the books and Warren Ellis takes over Excalibur, and basically the first thing he does with the book is establish textually that Kitty Pryde is definitely eighteen years old, and introduce blatant self-insert Pete Wisdom, a 30-something badass. Six issues later... https://twitter.com/Cpachecoficial/status/1125668351504732161
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Jun 22, 2020 18:17
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:The fact that Spider hosed Yelena is now a bit It's not like the idea of having sex with Spider isn't presented as the most horrible thought imaginable. Plus I never thought he was an Ellis self-insert anyway - I thought he was Hunter S Thompson by way of Grant Morrison.
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Jun 22, 2020 22:01
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Back when posting on Usenet was still a thing I pointed out that Warren Ellis had added a hard cynical British bastard who smoked and drank a lot and made them into a focal point character in 1. Hellstorm 2. Excalibur 3. Thor 4. Doom 2099 5. Ultraforce 6. Stormwatch* 7. Transmetropolitan His response to me was basically "Spider Jerusalem isn't British though". * Jenny Sparks is obviously the outlier here, in that she is a hard cynical chainsmoking hard-drinking woman from England I'm just saying, obvious self-inserts can have other influences/distinguishing characteristics and but "cynical technology fetishist who brags about all of his drug taking and makes smoking a core part of his personality and drops violent truth bombs on all of the shiteyed fucknoses of the world and beds his Filthy Assistants" bears a striking resemblance to both Spider Jerusalem and Warren Ellis's online persona, it's just one was more explicitly based on Hunter S. Thompson (though not by much) than the other, I dunno. Edge & Christian fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 22:12
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The two novels he wrote also feature a protagonist like that. They both have a hot assistant that they have/had sex with.
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Jun 22, 2020 22:39
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I think this was an issue with a number of mid-20th century Confessional poets in a similar way. Being the first person to bare your flaws and ruthlessly disclose the worst parts of yourself takes courage, that's for sure, but if you become famous and acclaimed for it, and your professional trajectory depends on you continuing to do it, then you lose a lot of incentive to actually, you know, work on those flaws and become a better and more balanced person. You become addicted to augmenting and amplifying the worst parts of yourself to feed to fans who want to see you at your worst, and the ugly parts of yourself that in reality harm everyone around you become part of "the brand." See also that whole wave of indie autobio comics guys like Seth, Chester Brown, Joe Matt, etc.. who have by 2020 devolved into narcissistic misanthropes of the sort they used to gently excoriate themselves for resembling. This isn't meant to absolve Ellis of anything he did, but it is to say that you can't position yourself as The Callous Fucken Bastard of Not Giving A poo poo About Your Feelings without becoming a callous loving bastard who doesn't give a poo poo about other peoples' feelings, and that when the cult of transgressive truth-to-power outlives its moment and rots it has a habit of just turning into abrasive emotional abusiveness. You don't end up fetishizing aggressive cynicism to that degree without to some extent already believing or coming to believe that you have an entitlement to just say and do whatever you want to other people.
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Jun 22, 2020 23:04
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ravenkult posted:The two novels he wrote also feature a protagonist like that. They both have a hot assistant that they have/had sex with. That's true of Crooked Little Vein, which was already uncomfortably autobiographical before this news hit. It's not true of Gun Machine; inasmuch as John Tallow has an assistant in that book, it's Scarly, and Scarly is a lesbian. There's actually a scene towards the end of the book that reads weirdly now, where Tallow watches Scarly's wife make dinner, and finds himself inexplicably on the verge of tears, as he's been so monomaniacally focused on his own work and obsessions that he has no friends or family. You could argue that it's another case of the creation reflecting the creator here, or it's just Ellis further deconstructing the idea of the TV detective, as he also did in Injection, Frank Ironwine, and the current Batman's Grave. If you're going to look for more uncomfortable parallels in Ellis's work, there are probably a few to be found. I'd need to sit down with a stack of comics to flesh out the theory, but around 2002 when the forums closed, his creator-owned work gradually goes from featuring Hard-Drinking Truth-Telling British Guys to a somewhat broader assortment. Many of his protagonists from this later period are notably psychologically and/or physically brittle (John Tallow; the main character in Normal; Robin and Maria in Injection), and that's a trend that goes back to before his health scare in 2015. (Arguably, it goes all the way back to Lazarus Churchyard.) It's not the only thing going on--there's a fair bit of his work that you can trace directly back to his daughter being born and growing up, most notably Scars--but I do wonder if there's an obvious breakpoint.
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Jun 22, 2020 23:26
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How Wonderful! posted:See also that whole wave of indie autobio comics guys like Seth, Chester Brown, Joe Matt, etc.. who have by 2020 devolved into narcissistic misanthropes of the sort they used to gently excoriate themselves for resembling.
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Jun 22, 2020 23:27
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Edge & Christian posted:I'll be the first admit I haven't read (or at least haven't retained much memory) of anything that Seth has done since like Wimbledon Green and maybe parts of Clyde Fans, but has he been producing (or saying) something lovely lately? This isn't the first time I've seen him lumped in with Matt and Brown, and I absolutely buy that Seth has turned into a caricature of himself in terms of his fancy old dress suits and olde tymey apartment, but (at least to me, taking away the sort of outsized profile/respect that generation of men get) that all seems pretty harmless compared to many (most?) of his contemporaries. I don't think there's anything on the level of Chester Brown's vigorous apologia of Don't Ask Don't Tell style barely legal sex trafficking but I think it's clear that lives a highly stylized and peculiar life that indicates his life and his work dovetailing down into the same nostalgia-hole. And I think just a general obliviousness, a sense that the hermetic quality of his approach to his own work shelters him from having to think about the ethical ramifications of it. There's a TCJ interview from around when the big collected Clyde Fans came out where he talks about revising here and there, and making a doll that a character buys more clearly a racist "golliwog"-style toy that was just kind of like, astonishing that he not only looked at his initial drawing and thought "mm, needs more racism" but also felt this to be a fit factoid to share publicly. Not a giant gaffe or travesty but just dumb stuff from desiring to write, draw, and construct a life within a snowglobe that for better or for worse is aggressively rooted in whiteness and nostalgia.
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Jun 23, 2020 00:00
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Just waking up in the morning gotta thank God I don't know but today seems kinda odd No barking from the dog No smog And fuckin Warren Ellis got me-too'd ahahahahahahahahaha
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Jun 23, 2020 00:13
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Bust Rodd posted:Ellis has a poem he wrote for a Transmetropolitan anthology about how living in the city is hell because every woman is so breathtakingly beautiful that he feels suicidal every time he leaves his house because he is so emotionally overwhelmed by them all the time and it makes him feel so lonely and ugly so he just gets high. He wrote that like almost 25 years ago. What the gently caress... Who thinks like this?
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Jun 23, 2020 00:39
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Anora posted:What the gently caress...
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Jun 23, 2020 00:44
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Bust Rodd posted:Ellis has a poem he wrote for a Transmetropolitan anthology about how living in the city is hell because every woman is so breathtakingly beautiful that he feels suicidal every time he leaves his house because he is so emotionally overwhelmed by them all the time and it makes him feel so lonely and ugly so he just gets high. He wrote that like almost 25 years ago. Do you know which issue that's in? I actually went looking for it a couple of years ago and couldn't find it. I can remember the art distinctly, with Spider looking at a woman holding a white cat, but it wasn't where I thought it was.
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Jun 23, 2020 05:35
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Add one more to the pile. Not egregious, but certainly harassment. https://twitter.com/lorua_/status/1275440509465444352?s=21
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Jun 23, 2020 16:25
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https://twitter.com/renfamous/status/1275139306303246336?s=19
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Jun 23, 2020 18:14
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https://twitter.com/cheryllynneaton/status/1275465398775930881?s=20
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Jun 23, 2020 18:57
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Wanderer posted:Do you know which issue that's in? I actually went looking for it a couple of years ago and couldn't find it. I can remember the art distinctly, with Spider looking at a woman holding a white cat, but it wasn't where I thought it was. It's in one of the two specials, either 'I Hate It Here' or 'Filth Of The City'. I want to say it's 'I Hate It Here'.
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Jun 23, 2020 19:13
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Yeah, it's dumb https://twitter.com/ales_kot/status/1275492053628055552?s=19
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Jun 23, 2020 19:15
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im giving it a week or less til it comes out that whoever came up with that pledge gets outted themselves
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Jun 23, 2020 19:37
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Tsilkani posted:It's in one of the two specials, either 'I Hate It Here' or 'Filth Of The City'. I want to say it's 'I Hate It Here'. Okay, we're talking about two different things. The bit in I Hate It Here is blatantly Ellis riffing on an old Bill Hicks bit; there's another piece somewhere in the main book, a one-page scene, that's similar but played less for laughs, and that's the one I've never been able to find again.
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Jun 23, 2020 19:49
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https://twitter.com/DavidWalker1201/status/1275433478255853569?s=20
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Jun 23, 2020 20:36
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turns out both og spider-gwen creators suck https://twitter.com/ohcararara/status/1275523716881973252?s=20
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Jun 23, 2020 21:42
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site posted:turns out both og spider-gwen creators suck Oh, wow. While not as relevant to the forum, that's also bad news about Myke Cole whose novels I've heard good things about.
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Jun 23, 2020 23:28
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