Comic Book Rant - Warren Ellis Off Thunderbolts, Still Egotistical Prick

You'd think after Warren Ellis made a complete ass of himself after it was announced Heath Ledger died, which, if you remember, he made several crude and false accusations about the circumstances of said death, he'd try and keep a lower profile. Sadly, no.

Today, Ellis had a little post on the Freak Angel's White Chapel Discussion Board concerning his leaving Thunderbolts. Not content with the typical goodbye post, Ellis felt the need to berate any and all creators that work for Marvel, DC or do super hero based comics in general.

He goes on to compare himself to well known creators, such as Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker, Brian K. Vaughan and Grant Morrison, trying to imply that he and these creators are only good because they do creator owned work and shun Marvel and DC and that all other creators are either with them or against them, throwing down the gauntlet in some imaginary war he's made up in his mind where the quality of writing is dependant on not doing work for hire. Full transcript of his posts and more after the jump.

The tenor -- and, frankly, the informedness -- of online comics conversation over the last five years has changed to the point where I probably need to explain once again why I don't stay long on company-owned works.

It's as simple as this -- if I don't own it, I'm not going to spend my life on it. Joe Quesada and Dan Buckley know that, they're fine with that, and they hire me on that understanding.

Or, if you like: you can only paint someone else's house for so long before you start thinking that it might be nice to own your own house one day.

I'm okay with painting other people's houses for short periods, because I'm good at it and it pays well and on nice days it's fun. But I never ever confuse painting a house for owning that house. And if I spent every waking hour painting other people's houses, I wouldn't be able to build houses of my own.

The more creators who only took on housepainting as a part-time gig, the healthier this medium would be.

For those of you who harbour a wish to write comics, consider this today: you're either on this side of the line, with me and Brian K Vaughan and Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison and Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction... or you're not.

The problem with this little comparison is that all those writers he listed are predominantly work-for-hire writers. Brubaker is doing Criminal with Marvel's Icon imprint, but the majority of his work has been with DC and Marvel for the past decade. Fraction is Marvel's new go-to guy for most books these days and I can only think of Cassanova off the top of my head for his independant work. Morrison has been the guiding hand for DC's universe since 52 and is set to take it to the next level with Final Crisis. I can't remember the last major creator owned project he did.

Of those listed, BKV is about the only one that would qualify in this mythical independant / creator owned faction Ellis is holding above all the other writer's heads and using as a scape goat for quitting Thunderbolts after running out of ideas, like he's done with every major work-for-hire project he's done.

On top of this, he outlines the exact reasons he's leaving Thunderbolts - he made enough money off the fans that bought it and is going back to creator owned work. His creator owned work wasn't selling as well as he'd expected, so he came back to Marvel and new readers liked his Marvel work and picked up his creator owned stuff. He noticed a nice spike in sales of his Transmetropolitan trades, so milked the mainstream stuff a little longer and is now giving everyone the big F-U and going back to creator owned. Her's the follow up post.

In hindsight, there is one thing that needs to be recapitulated here, as I guess memories are short:

I actually had no intention of going back into WFH (work for hire). The creator owned stuff was selling to expected numbers and things were ticking along fine.

What happened was that Mark Millar and Brian Bendis got in touch -- they'd hit a scheduling wall and weren't able to service twelve issues of ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR, and asked me to help them out. And when your friends ask you for a favour, you do it, you know? So I said yes, and got to work.

That's how I ended up doing more superhero comics.

The first odd thing happened after the first issue came out. Now, remember, I'd been doing mostly original material for the previous few years, and doing fine. But I was suddenly flooded with email from kids -- teenagers -- who had never heard of me before. What was happening, it turned out, was that I was reaching seven or eight hundred stores at maximum, and there was anything up to a couple of thousand stores who just weren't ordering my stuff. I remember talking this over with people at Marvel and particularly DC, and it turned out that this was in fact the case -- that two thirds of comics stores really don't order much other than superhero comics and a few licensed books. And in those years of doing my own thing, the audience had turned over to the point where there were people who'd never read a thing by me. It hadn't been all that long ago that I'd been selling 200,000 copies of DV8 and 150,000 copies of WOLVERINE, I thought...

The second really odd thing came in some months later. Sales of TRANSMET TPBs spiked massively. And the only thing that had changed was that I was writing UFF. What had happened was that these new readers had liked UFF, gone looking for other stuff by me, found nothing in their local store, gone to Amazon or bookstores, and picked up TRANSMET books. A few months later, I saw numbers on all my other creator-owned TPBs pick up too.

And now we can sell more than 12,000 copies of CRECY in a matter of months.

And what's REALLY strange is that I discovered Marvel under Joe Quesada and Dan Buckley is in fact a really nice place to work.

This would be fine on its own, but he's pretentious enough to try and mask this all behind some imagined moral high ground and trying to divert any negative comments towards the other writers that don't do creator owned work instead of manning up and taking his fan tongue lashing for leaving a popular book like man.

The man has done more pages of work-for-hire in his career than creator owned, yet still goes off on this little hissy fit tangents every three or four years where he blames people that work for Marvel or DC for all the problems with the comic industry, claims they aren't real writers because of this and screws over any fans that were following his current work as he goes off to write creator owned for a couple years. Then, his work doesn't sell to his satisfaction and he comes crawling back to Marvel and DC for more work and the whole process repeats again.

It's time Ellis grew the fuck up and realized doing creator owned work and work-for-hire are not mutually exclusive. The simple act of writing creator owned work doesn't make you a good writer. Yes, Ellis is an excellent writer in his own right, but he's far from the greatest writer in comics today and he'll always be that 'other guy' when people are talking about writers like Ed Brubaker, Grant Morrison and the various others he listed as being on "his side" of this comic book writer Civil War.

In the end, Ellis comes off as a hypocrite who's ego won't let him see the fact he's not an indy writer and is about as mainstream as it gets. It's obvious by the very same creators he lumped himself in with, all of which are writing multiple Marvel or DC titles and have been for years, that he can't come to terms with the fact he's the very thing he hates and instead of accepting this about himself, he lashes out at everyone else, fans and colleagues alike.

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