A Review of new Warren Ellis titles, Doktor Sleepless and Black Summer Being fairly new to comics, I’ve been real anxious to dig into this Warren Ellis character- who is this phenomenon that has again taken the comics world by storm with his latest original Avatar titles, Doktor Sleepless and Black Summer? How does he keep cranking out stories that continue to satisfy the most insatiable appetites of today’s cyber-punk and armchair occultist alike? Like many of you, dear navigators in cyberspace of the amazing information age, I am constantly on the hunt for a glimpse into the future from the latest techno messiah, in a world that appears to morph by the nano-second with perpetual revolutions of the mind as we collectively sift through the ancient knowledge of the universe, powerful esoteric wisdom handed down through centuries, and now readily available to us via… uhh…wikipedia. By doing a quick review of history, one can see that Ellis, like many other comic book writers, has a diverse background of publishers and works, covering a wide range of popular titles such as Excalibur, Hellblazer, and X-men. Now Ellis again steps into the unknown with a new pair of original titles, Doktor Sleepless and Black Summer. Having been lucidly drawn into the world of comics by Grant Morrison’s masterpiece, The Invisibles, I am now intrigued by the power of the comic, and eager to catch of glimpse of the Ellis magic in its purest creative form.
I was merely halfway through issue #1 of Doktor Sleepless when the illumination rained down upon me like a pink laser beam emblazing my third eye, and as I wished, the truth was revealed- Ellis is a hack. Quite a genius hack and entertainer of illusions at that, but anyone with a little vision or experience in practice can see through his clumsy slight of hand, revealing Doktor Sleepless as a sad fantasy that desperately aspires to the view of a descending avatar, but rarely gets its feet off the ground. Ellis awkwardly flirts with esoteric thought like a pimple faced fourteen year old with his first boner, but his insight is more like that of an ice cube rather than the tip of the iceberg, littered with loose references to interesting sounding traditions like Lamaist spiritualism and Amazonian shamanism. Suddenly it became clear why it has been such a success among contemporary comic book readers, who are mostly part of the new age horde of mindless cyber-punks, clinging to the misty shadows of echoes of words left far behind by the esoteric masters and prophets of yesterday. Can you say Lovecraft? How many times can you say it? Lovecraft. Lovecraft. Lovecraft. Lovecraft. Lovecraft. Lovecraft. Lovecraft. Lovecraft. Say it all you want, but it still means the same thing to the uninitiated- absolutely nothing. Aside from the writing, the artwork of Ivan Rodriquez is enjoyable for the most part, and the horrific tentacle-like fears of Dok Sleepless’ haunting childhood memories are a nice touch.
Black Summer is more of the same. Who hasn’t conceived of a genetically modified team of super heroes complete with weapons of mass destruction fused within their DNA who revolt against the government, obviously the one true evil? I have more old news for you, my young padawan- it has been done over and over and over since Orwell’s classic, 1984. Of course, this seems to be all the young hipsters want, more and more death and destruction, and Ellis delivers a heaping serving of mindless gore and violence to appease your vicariously primitive hunger for the apocalypse. Not to try and sound like I’m all “up on my high horse”, because I’m certainly not the type to back down from an altercation or let some oppressive neandrethal dominate me with pseudo-intellectual ape-like intimidation. However, some of us who actually think and live outside the box like a side order of creative visualization to help us digest all that blood and guts. Think of it as the salad before the steak, unless you are like me, and would prefer to just skip the steak altogether, stick to the greens and allow for a somewhat lighter perspective and more natural progression of ascension, versus the dense “ladder approach” to growth, feeding off the energy of others as a sort of vampiric stepping stone to achieve superficial heights. As for the artwork, personally, I’m also not a big fan of Juan Jose Ryp’s effort in Black Summer. It seems a little busy yet somehow dull, over-gorefied and messy for my taste, but perhaps that’s what the writing inspired.
While these new comics by Ellis are easily as entertaining as an accidental drunken escapade into the roller derby arena, they are not at all what they appear to be. Writers like Grant Morrison and (ahem) many others walk the walk and talk the talk of techno shamanism, and they don’t have to rely on name-dropping to engage an educated mind to their stories. The esoteric element is still there, but should be masterfully weaved into the framework of the characters fragmented reality and implied, not spoon-fed like mashed peas to a Gerber baby. Any half-serious student of the occult will eventually notice that Ellis is no expert, and his unoriginal characters can easily be identified as the hapless dorks of any typical internet messageboard or chatroom, such as “White Chapel”, where Ellis is known to hang out, preaching to his blind herd of sheeple about his version of futurism. These “grinders”, as they are branded in Doktor Sleepless, attach to their psyches every clever configuration of technological memes that you and I could easily imagine, and are fluttering about cyberspace in droves, identifying with each other’s false, projected personas, bathing in the boastful illusion that they are collectively illuminated, empowered by the mass of knowledge procured from the information age, and that they have secretly received Ellis’ “magical wisdom” by way of the powerfully subversive transmissions in his hodge-podge of painfully obvious esoteric references. These drones are easily hypnotized by subtle innuendos like the names of Black Summer characters “John Horus” and “Kathryn Artemis”- lame regurgitations of yesterday’s mythology.
Ellis has got one thing right- this is the future, but some of us want our media to reflect the trend of swimming upstream and looking forward to tomorrow, not treading water in vague remnants of a dead, smoldering past. I’m sure the necrophiliacs will disagree. John Horus, meet “Sophia Ma’at”, the Guardian of tomorrow- Goddess of Truth and Justice- now there’s a superhero I could look up too. I think our dear savior might actually become manifest through the obsessive, homoerotic, almost tantric stroking of Ellis by his cult of sheeple, collectively jerking off to the latest old world hack trying to cash-in on the ignorant, drug-induced, meathead horde who pound their chest to his virtually meaningless cyber-babble. The future is now, and for any real techno shaman, the old world has passed, the government is dead, and we’re already at the celebration event, and thus, we’re probably more interested in seeing time/space warped through language, stretching the limitations of our puny monkey minds. We want to experience extra-dimensional entities crawling through the invisible fabric of the universe towards our tiny, helpless chunk of earth, sent to rectify our petty human errs. We want to witness consciousness beyond comprehension, yet made reality through the use of truly crafty constructions, not Dr. Suess semantics composed of bitter brain boggling banter. In the new world, I expect to see a kaleidoscopic rainbow of disjointed fractals in patterns of sacred geometry, communicating the hidden language of the birds, handing down a holographic gift of the divine to illuminate and empower the center of my being, as a beam of light electrifies my pranic pillar and grafts the graceful force of the absolute within the marrow of my bones.
Maybe I am just a dreamer, and those kinds of powers are not capable of being transmitted through the written word, at least not anymore. I suppose for most readers, the Invisible College is only a flimsy pair of words with no true connection to the vast empire of wisdom that was Atlantis. For the old world, not even a glimmer of the tip of that iceberg remains, having sunk to the cold, dark, bottomless pits of your hollow bodied shells of mice and men who once housed the spirits of your noble keepers. Well if that gets you down, fret not, because I have some good news for you brother, they’re coming back. Kudos to Warren Ellis for being a hard-worker, and for utilizing the latest trends in cyberspace to allure and mystify the mediocre mind. For any of my readers with taste and loftier aspirations, save yourself a couple of bucks, take a little extra time to think for yourself, and make a little space for the new world, but if you’re still waiting for the future kingdom to come, you might be missing the boat. Look a little closer.
