Switchblade Honey, Warren Ellis' "anti-Star Trek"

[superboyprime]

Switchblade Honey was a space opera graphic novel by Warren Ellis, which he described as "an extended gag at the expense of the colourless, clean SF of the big media. The anti-Star Trek, if you like."







He's sent to prison, where he stays for two months before being recruited for a very special mission...















Ryder explains why humanity ought to be saved:




Ellis goes a bit into the inspiration behind the book:




tags-- creator: warren ellis, title: switchblade honey

Comments

[kiev4am]

This! Thank you. I don't understand the s_d Ellis hate either. Yes, Ellis has themes/slants/soapboxes that recur in a lot of his work. So do most writers who've been around that long. It's only a problem for people who don't like those recurring things.

[box_in_the_box]

Or it's a problem for the fact that Ellis manages to repeat his own tropes to an oppressive degree, and is guilty of an utterly loathsome degree of hypocrisy in his practices.

Yes, everyone has their own style, and yes, everyone has their own tics, but a) Ellis has become so mind-numbingly predictable at it that his own stuff almost reads like a parody written by someone who's intentionally trying to create an unflattering satire of Ellis' worst work, and b) Ellis basically built his entire brand name on shouting about how much every other writer's work except for his own was shit, which makes his old "Come in Alone" columns really amusing in retrospect, because 90 percent of the writing and behavior that he devotes his most inflammatory invective to denouncing in those columns is the exact same shit that he's become guilty of doing since then.

When Millar and Bendis first started working on the Ultimate Marvel titles, Ellis compared it to "seeing your best friend get drunk and fuck a retarded girl at a party," on the grounds that he thought the Ultimate line was inherently shit and that Bendis and Millar were degrading themselves just by working on it.

And then, Ellis did Ultimate Fantastic Four, and SUDDENLY, doing rebooted versions of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby characters became, in his mind, the equivalent of doing "covers of Beatles albums."

There's a lot of very, very, VERY good reasons to hate Ellis' work, and what's hilarious is, most of them have already been thoroughly detailed by Ellis himself, back before he became the living embodiment of everything that he once hated most in the industry.

Help! I'm Being Oppressed!

[bliumchik]

Right. Well. I have zero knowledge of Ellis' old columns, or whatever, and thus am not qualified to judge his relative hypocrisy level, but really? He repeats his own tropes to an oppressive degree? Exactly which degree is that? Is there some sort of chart of repetitiveness with a red line on it, beyond which it stops being some old guy who doesn't feel like branching out of his comfort zone and becomes, like, Personally Offensive And Inescapable?

I mean, like I said, sure it would suck if the entire comics universe was Warren Ellis. That's even true for someone like me who likes his work. But hi there, IT'S NOT. In fact he's easily avoidable, even on scans_daily provided you are willing to expend the minimum effort of not clicking a cut-link. I do not think that qualifies as oppressive. Irritating, I'll grant you. Oppressive not so much.

Re: Help! I'm Being Oppressed!

[cmdr_zoom]

It's pretty much the same reason why I'm no longer a fan (or at least not an uncritical one) of Joss Whedon. His stuff is new and different and funny... and then you see a few more examples, and you come to realize that he really only has one flavor of new and different and funny. And after you've seen everything in his bag of tricks, it's just kind of predictible and tiresome. A paint-by-numbers experience of ticking off the usual tropes and plot developments as they come up. And the same dialogue coming out of the mouths of everyone the writer doesn't take extra care to give a different voice.

The peril of indulging in deconstruction and post-modernism and "look at this trope, isn't it kind of silly?" is that one trains one's audience to be similarly critical of one's own work.

[kiev4am]

Well, I haven't read his old columns, just his comics and bits of his website occasionally. Yes, his online persona is highly opinionated and scattershot, to the point of self-parody. But it is mostly self-parody. I'm sure he knows when he's being a jerk, or inconsistent, or trying to have it both ways because he's suddenly in a part of the industry he didn't used to be in, etc. He's a storyteller, not a politician; he doesn't have a responsibility to be consistent or measured (annoying as it is). Lots of writers are Not Nice People, and it's always an individual choice whether to overlook the personal faults of the artist or not - which itself depends on how much one already likes the art. Which is totally subjective. I'm giving him a pass because I like his stories. If I liked them less I'd probably agree with you more.

And I know Ellis' tropes, but I honestly don't see the same ones in every book. What oppressively links Planetary, Fell, Global Frequency and Orbiter, for instance? Genuine question. Plus, there are some tropes I'm happy to see repeated. For example, the way Ellis will show genuine friendship - not the usual 'simmering chemistry' will they/won't they flirtation, but solid platonic fellowship - between a main male and main female character in a book. I find that to be very refreshing, and to bear repeating. Mileage varying, and so on.