Now that his forum is closing, what will Warren do without the daily written felatio that his cult of personality provided him? Perhaps he'll get off his ass and finish writing Ministry of Space #3 (and whatever other projects he hasn't finished before starting ten other projects). His online persona was so abrasive to me that I stopped reading almost all of his work. Have you ever seen anyone rail on and on about work-for-hire and then whore himself out to do JLA/Planetary, etc.? What a hypocritical twit...

ctsmith

Warren Ellis: Overrated and Annoying. Good riddance

But where will all the GothNerd Chicks go now?

Who's going to take care of them?

can someone gime a link? Ive never been there, i wanan see how rude these people are.

The Warren Ellis Forum

Here ya go.

I'm sure they'll find some other writer with an over-inflated sense of how important they are and form another cult of personality. This will prevent said writer from completing his/her projects in a timely fashion.

ctsmith

Thanks

I wasn't a giant fan of the Warren Ellis forum, and I'm not even a great fan of what I've read of his writing. But I checked his forum out quite a bit as a lurker to take the temperature of a branch of comics culture on all sorts of issues, and occasionally dropped in. So I have a kind of an odd, distanced view.

My interests were so abstract regarding the forum I have to admit I don't really know what exactly was being advocated in regards to the comics medium. In fact, there seemed to be an impatience with anyone who wasn't on the exact same page as forum regulars, which is hardly a new thing to Internet culture, but kind of kept me from finding out by accident. But if I had to guess, it seemed like forum regulars believed the future of comics is creator-controlled work. Moving towards that future required both energetic advocacy of a kind that would midwife those works through the entirety of the system, and called for the occasional blunt criticism of the corporate culture to which these new creators would stand in opposition. That doesn't sound all that bad to me, although because I actually am the elitist these guys are accused of being, I can guarantee you we wouldn't agree on any of the specifics and half the generalities.

That being said, Dave Cummings' post was really dopey and so was the Mike Doran post he quoted. Although I'm sure Dave's a bright guy and I know Doran's a bright guy. But come on. People should be allowed to criticize anything they want as furiously as they want without being accused of working through psychological issues, and only in the world of a bad 1992 movie about virtual reality is thinking bad things about something the same as the actual real-world crappy things that happen all the time.

The specifics are all goofy, too. While comics are just entertainment to Dave, that's not what they are for everyone, nor what many people believe they should be. Doran suggesting there isn't a link between the dominance of the superhero genre and the relative lack of market diversity is insane, as is Dave's assertion that because there are a lot of bad indy comics that superhero comics and non-superhero comics exist on some kind of equal artistic footing. And so on. If that stuff actually shut the forum down early, it was probably due to the migraines that came from trying to figure out the weird-ass logic involved.

Oh, and I can't speak for anyone but me, but if I remember my graduate course in Dave Sim correctly, I think that Warren Ellis owns a piece of Planetary, which would make JLA/Planetary different from work for hire and exclude it from criticisms of same. And when did he sign a contract to get work done on the timetable set by the Comicon posters?

One thing I'm with Warren Ellis on is that all the forums should be shut down, immediately!

Fine. But most anyone who expressed thoughts straying from the hivemind got slapped down if Ellis didn't care to hear them. I think that's the point he was (maybe a little awkwardly) trying to express. The promise of a free discussion on any particular topic (within the normal boundaries of polite conversation), and the reality of trigger-happy Mods power-tripping all over anyone who stopped nodding their heads for a second.

You know i liked to go there, watch the news, and discussions, but my problem was not really for the regular posters` snobism but more about Warren`s overall attitude and not necesserely about his anti-super-hero stance. I had the feeling sometimes he was just a lonely, paranoid man, with all these hours behind a screen roting his brain. I haven`t been there in a year and returned to see what was going on recently, and it seemed that the man had literaly lost it this time. There was some sort of message saying to the posters:"i`m better looking than you, i`m richer than you, i`m getting laid far more than you" etc...It was really pathetic, and so overly overdramatic. I thought:"is this guy for real?"

Worst of all, is that nobody could put him in his place. It was so pathetic to see how all these posters would go up to him sometimes with the "sorry Warren God and Master, i won`t repeat it again". Everytime it would stun me how low these guys would go to degrade themselves to please the guy.

A cult? You damn right.

And f*ck you Warren, f*ck you.