Ellis on authenticity, in music and beyond

[arbre_rieur]

Six pages from Doktor Sleepless 5. According to Ellis, the series is meant to be a sort of spiritual successor to Transmetropolitan.

Comments

[kiplingkat]

First of all, I love Warren Ellis' work. I love what he doing on Astonishing but...

A. Talking about the cultural "reality" through the analogy of rock music is very...well, didn't we do that when we are all 17? But then maybe that is who the book is written for?

B. Doesn't "Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own ideas about yourself. Etc" = "Be yourself"?

C. Spending pages lecturing the reader about it in a comic book seems to be one of the first questions a writer would ask himself when thinking "Have I become a pretentious tawt?"

[brandiweed.livejournal.com]

B. Doesn't "Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own ideas about yourself. Etc" = "Be yourself"?

Not necessarily. Just chat up an Otherkin sometime.

[thandrak]

... I'm reading Proust right now. For pleasure. It's actually surprisingly readable. (The Lydia Davis translation.)

... have I become a pretentious twat?

[kiplingkat]

And I'm reading The Social Contract (Rousseau) for kicks. So?

Are you spending pages/hours lecturing people about your personal concept of reality?

It's one thing to use fiction to create clever stories that ask your readers to think about the nature of things (See: Sandman, in fact see Ellis' SuperGod). It's another to use fiction to outright lecture them what they should be thinking about things. Ask the question, don't tell people what to think.

As one poster put below comic books =/= blog posts, and they don't equal socio-philosophical essays either.

[lynxara]

Yeah, this is a basic failing of show-don't-tell. The art pretty clearly betrays it, too.

I wonder if Ellis is starting to think more in prose terms but just finds it easier to get comics published.

[darkknightjrk]

I'm reading selected Sherlock Holmes short stories for fun. If that makes me a prententious twat, then I don't wanna change.

[thandrak]

Bah! Sherlock Holmes is too plebian! One must be reading obscurities like Varney the Vampire for true twatishness.