Newsgroup: it.arti.fumetti
Titolo: [lungo] Come In Alone #1 by Warren Ellis

E' giunto infine il momento di leggere il primo articolo scritto da W.
Ellis per la sua nuova colonna su 
www.comicbookresources.com
.
Aspetto commenti.
--------------------------------------------------------
They want me to entertain you bastards. 
I don't mind entertaining you. Grant Morrison once accused me of being
a "raconteur." This was based on watching me doing my daily hour-long
Q&A sessions during the New Zealand and Australia conventions back in
the summer. I'm presuming this is some kind of charming Scottish
euphemism for "won't shut up." Mind you, Morrison's reaction to facing
a roomful of people staring at him in obvious lust for Entertainment
was to fold himself up into a big white plastic highbacked chair on
the stage like Leo McKern in The Prisoner, as if trying to make
himself as small a target as possible. 
 “Grant Morrison once accused me of being a 'raconteur.' ... I'm
presuming this is some kind of charming Scottish euphemism for 'won't
shut up.'”  
Strange conventions, they were. The Melbourne one is the one I still
get asked about, or that my strange and beautiful girlfriend Niki
prods me to talk about when she knows there's sf tv fans in the room.
The one where several of the guests, for many and various reasons,
discovered champagne on the premises. Which led inexorably to me and
Claudia Christian putting on a floorshow in front of her fans while
her manager cranked off a couple of rolls of film. And where, later
that same day, I saw Frazer Hines, who played a young Scots lad in
Doctor Who about a million years ago, walk past me dressed in the same
bloody costume, a pint of beer grasped desperately in a claw-like,
aged hand. Morrison and I ended up doing our last scheduled talks of
the convention together, swilling down champagne in front of the
gathered throng as we dispensed wisdom, refused to answer any question
clearly and basically fell apart before their very eyes. 
There is an inevitable odd distance to being an Englishman in
Australia, but it treated me more kindly than it did the Americans.
Another American tv actress on the convention got stopped at customs
and had a Maori gift, a painted greeting stick, confiscated because it
looked designed to smuggle drugs. Well, I say she got stopped --
actually, it was her very young son who got stopped, as he'd been told
to carry it through for her while she struggled with seventy thousand
pieces of luggage. I was whooshed through Customs with a "Welcome to
Australia, Mr Ellis!" while carrying a Sumatran shaman's medicine
horn, deeply impregnated with the residue of every jungle drug known
to primitive humankind. This all at the same moment when some big
Aussie probably had his hand up Morrison's bum hunting for plastic
bags. The Lucky Country, they call it. Well, at least I didn't have to
hoist and slam any mouthy fans into the wall there, the way I did in
New Zealand... it's that one that sticks in my mind more, you know...
it's not often you have to drop members of your audience... 
No, if you want a raconteur, you want Garth Ennis, or Larry Hama, or
Alan Moore. Ennis is a vicious mimic -- it's the same part of him that
nails those speech patterns and intonations in his dialogue writing.
He slipped up once, after a crate of Sierra Nevada in San Francisco,
and I caught him "doing" me. Filthy bogtrotter tried to blame it all
on Steve Dillon, but I know the truth, oh yes. Larry Hama, perhaps
unsurprisingly, knows lots of people with guns, and so has marvellous
stories to tell about stone lunatics with too much artillery who also
happen to be comics artists. There's something about comics artists,
isn't there? The few utter horrible frightening maniacs comics have
produced -- and I mean the rapists, the child-molesters, the ones who
chop up smooth young Puerto Rican men and clog up their drains with
the poor bastards -- they're always comics artists. There was one guy,
an inker, who'd gone this route. Typically, there was a DC editor on
his case for pages -- he was probably only six months ahead of
schedule or something -- and, phoning the guy's apartment, got a
rather tense and direct New York detective on the other end of the
line. No, young Jeffrey D here can't hand in his inks, he's in the
cells for slaughtering, mincing and wiping himself with fourteen
people... 
“[Garth] Ennis is a vicious mimic ... He slipped up once, after a
crate of Sierra Nevada in San Francisco, and I caught him "doing" me.
Filthy bogtrotter tried to blame it all on Steve Dillon...”   
Comics artists are not to be trusted. 
The only comics writer I can think of who's attained any kind of
notoriety for his transgressions is Del Close, who co-wrote the
marvellous, ahead-of-its-time DC anthology series WASTELAND. Del Close
was also an actor, teacher and director, and worked with the young
John Belushi at Second City in Chicago. He worked with the older John
Belushi in a slightly different way, allegedly, with reports of his
shooting speedballs into Belushi's broad white Albanian arse while
muttering "Junkies give the best fixes." (This is referenced in the
uncomfortably mean Wired by Bob Woodward, by the way. Send him your
mail.) Now, why can't more comics writers have things like that on
their resumé? I mean, Alan Moore got expelled from school for dealing
drugs. But I suspect he wasn't really trying. If he'd known then what
he knows now, he'd've made damn sure he was expelled for being caught
banging smack into the veins between Keith Moon's toes. 
Alan's two daughters, Amber and Leah, are occasionally online, I'm
told, at 
http://www.comicon.com
. Someone once told Alan that they
thought Leah was a lovely name. Yeah, he said. It's Hebrew for cow. 
Where was I? 
The intent of these columns is manifold. Obviously, in the first
instance, it is hoped that I will entertain you in some unnamed and
numinous Robbie Williams-like manner. Optimism has been expressed that
I will manifest this special Raconteur ability and amuse the living
shit out of you with stories gleaned from a fast ten years or so in
comics, and from my occasional travels. One of the perks of the job is
that I get asked to go to different places and talk about comics. I'm
actually off to Iceland in a few days as I write this, in
mid-November, and I'll probably write one of these columns while I'm
there. If all goes to plan, then, in a month you'll learn how I died
in Iceland, where they close off the interior of the country in winter
because human life becomes unsupportable there. 
“...CIA will be the stage for lectures and essays on the comics form.”
More often, however, CIA will be the stage for lectures and essays on
the comics form. There's a lot of things I want to say and a lot of
ideas I want to test on you, and here's where I'll be knocking them
into something approaching coherent form. The Western commercial
comics form is in a fascinating state of flux right now, and I'd like
to track the chaos with you as this mess we've inherited begins --
partly by design and partly by accident -- to turn into something new
and unseen. We'll start slowly, from next week. We've got time yet,
and these things need to be studied carefully. And I promise I'll drop
in the occasional unsubstantiated story about Joe Quesada selling
mixed crates of Polynesian adolescents to Mark Waid and Devin Grayson
to lighten things up from time to time. 
My name's Warren Ellis. I write comics. Pleased to meet you. 
Come in alone. 
I can be contacted by email about this column at
war...@comicbookresources.com
. My website, currently undergoing an
update, is 
http://www.warrenellis.com
. A COME IN ALONE message board
has been set up here. 
---
Hellboy
Dove c'è molta luce, l'ombra è più nera.
                                         W. Goethe
 

Aspetto commenti.
[mega cut]
Volevo soltanto segnalare che sia Steven Grant con il suo "Master of
the Obvious", sia Warren Ellis con "Come In Alone" vengono pagati da
Comic Book Resources, dove queste rubriche appaiono, A CONTATTI. Ciò
significa che copiare gli articoli e postarli su IAF toglie potenziali
contatti e potrebbe portare persino alla CANCELLAZIONE delle rubriche
stesse, visto che purtroppo le regole del'editoria on-line
rispecchiano fin troppo bene quelle dell'editoria cartacea (pochi
contatti = poco interesse = spina staccata).
Molto meglio dunque andare a dare un'occhiata ogni settimana
direttamente all'URL
http://www.comicbookresources.com/columns/index.cgi?/column=cia
per allietarsi con i deliri del buon Ellis... e poi magari passare
alle acute osservazioni del vecchio Grant.
Saluti,
T.
--
Tafano
[togli "-nospam" dall'indirizzo e-mail]
---------------------------------------
Etiamsi omnes, ego non