WAITING
FOR TOMMY: WARREN ELLIS REMIXED
By
Richard Johnston
MAliChoudhury-cactusmaac:
This may have been asked before but what do you want as your
tombstone epitaph?
WARREN: You know what Spike Milligan has on his tombstone
now? "I told you I was ill." And John Carpenter wanted "I'll
be right back."
I want
"Woke up in my clothes again this morning."
AARON
MEHTA: You, Rich Johnston, Rob Liefeld, Mark Millar and
Bob Wayne are all locked in a room. Only one of you is let
out alive. Who makes it?
WARREN: Me. Rich is a polite young man from Putney,
Millar's a weed, Liefeld is a nice God-fearing young man by
all accounts, and Bob Wayne's let himself go since his days
of knife-fighting over the last Minnie Mouse Special Oral
Edition RealDoll at the pervert conventions in Texas.
RICH:
Putney? Putney? Part of the Kingston Vale Posse now Warren.
We hunt and kill deer in Richmond with our bare hands! Bring
it on!
J.R.
LeMar: how about that list of your 8 favorite comic-book
writers?
WARREN: Gah.
Hm. In
no order, just pulling names out of my arse. Alan Moore. Bryan
Talbot. Eddie Campbell. Laurenn McCubbin. Grant Morrison.
Mark Millar. Brian Michael Bendis. Garth Ennis.
(Glenn
Dakin.)
(Jamie
Delano.)
(Enki
Bilal. Hugo Pratt. Pierre Christin. Junji Ito. Seth. Buronson.)
(See
how pointless it is, making me answer this question?)
THOMAS
DENTON: Warren, how do you feel about commemorative plates?
WARREN: I hope your girlfriend has your nuts off with
a pair of bolt cutters
THOMAS
DENTON: So that'd be anti-plate then, huh? Liefeld ducked
the question altogether, you know.
WARREN: He probably didn't want to offend you.
Or he
already owns one.
Or is
planning to have you taken care of so he can steal yours.
SIMON
KIRBY JR: A "vertigo-ized" Captain Marvel? Interesting
idea, but I'm not sure how that would be done in a way that
wasn't similar to Miracleman. Care to take a stab at that,
Mr. Ellis?
WARREN: It's a useful thought-experiment for superhero
fiction. And you're right, it butts up pretty hard against
MARVELMAN.
Captain
Marvel is a pig of a job to modernise. For one thing, there's
a shrieking cult of greybeards who'll tell you that Captain
Marvel doesn't need modernising and comics attained perfection
in 1948 or something. They almost have a point, insofar as
Captain Marvel is a children's character and as such should
probably be approached with that same mix of ever-so-slight
spookiness and action-comedy. It is a product of its times,
when that kind of cloying innocence and whimsy didn't make
people nod out or retch. I mean, look at the opening -- it
teaches kids both a little bit of traditional school history
with the classical names that make up the word SHAZAM, and
it drills in the good old Christian seven deadly sins.
I don't
know. Do you make Captain Marvel not a children's character?
Why not let some children's characters stay children's characters?
If you're going to modernise it, then you probably give it
a bit of Harry Potter. The transformation scene in Captain
Marvel is primal children's fiction -- say your magic word
and suddenly you're not a kid any more, you're imbued with
all the superpower of adulthood, you can rescue people or
smack them in the face and everybody loves and admires you.
It's a similar effect to Harry Potter going to Hogwarts --
you might be small and ugly and different, but somewhere's
there's a place where you are loved and admired and heroic.
It trips off similar buttons in kids.
So stick
'em together. You're a small kid, and you're lonely in the
middle of a big town, walking around on your own, and it's
getting late... and you fall down a hole. And you've no friends
to yell for. You have to walk down this long abandoned tunnel
with weird shit carved into the walls... and at the end of
it, things are no less creepy, because there's this old guy
who looks like Albus Dumbledore if he'd turned to crack...
but this old, wise, kindly guy living in some blocked-up sewer
pipe underground is going to be your best and only friend,
the clever and loving parent-figure-by-default, who's going
to give you the kind of gift you dream of at night -- a magic
word, that transforms you.
And in
becoming Captain Marvel, you discover there's magic in the
everyday world, if you know where to look. And maybe, you
know, it's learning how to find and revel in the strangeness
in the cracks of the real world that helps Billy Batson grow
up right. Helps him grow up to be Captain Marvel, even.
I'm rambling,
but you get the gist, I'm sure. Reconfigure it as a piece
of modern children's fiction. Let it be what it is, just cut
out all the mid-20th Century stuff that dates it so horribly.
RICH:
And with that DC are inundated with people pleading for Warren
Ellis to be allowed to write Captain Marvel. And Warren only
agreeing to it if the comic is in postage stamp-sized format.
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