a warren ellis communiqué

i know this is totally off-topic, but i can't help but post it. i love it.

bad signal
WARREN ELLIS

Sometimes you just can't stop something crawling out of your head.

That dumb feverdream idea of Flash Gordon crossed with Deadwood? It's multiplying in my head. I don't want it to. Fitting another book into my schedule will kill me. This is going to be one longass file going into the Loose Ideas folder.

But for years I've had a setting and and a title in search of a story. IGNITION CITY has gone through five different iterations since 1991 approx, and has never really resolved into a story. I think it started out as a possible LAZARUS CHURCHYARD story, before I went for the (undrawn, unpublished) FURYEYES instead.

Ignition City, in the original conception, is Earth's only spaceport: a circular artificial island on the equator, its perimeter a ring of launchpads. Hot as hell during the day, when ships are banging off, the whole rocket summer thing. No launches at night, and the fucked-up climate reclaims itself by raining all night. Rain that tastes like rocket fuel. I still love the setting. It never had a story that lived up to it.

But now this hideous idea has taken hold, of an isolationist Earth of approx 1955 that only allows contact with space at one point - Ignition City. Humans are banned from going to space, and all those who have been up there are now considered irretrievably contaminated, and are deported to the community on Ignition City.

There's a certain Alan Moore-like appeal to embittered space heroes being forced to live in the sci-fi equivalent of the Cuban refugee camps in 80s Florida gone wild. Flash Gordon as an embittered space hero turned smuggler, living in an upended space rocket, its nosecone buried in the dirt. Buck Rogers back from the future and haunted by the knowledge of what is to come. Yuri Gagarin as the town drunk."The Brits" as figures of terror, Dan Dare and his crew of space-soldier animals disavowed by the British government and forced to live out their lives on Ignition City. Aliens living in the unsettled wilds to the north. It's a small confection of an idea, but it has a weird appeal to me. And it's going to bug me for days.

God forbid I should think of something that might earn me some money... Here I am looking for the big mainstream-crossover idea, and I've got Flash Gordon calling people cocksuckers. I feel faintly dirty.

I should be ready to go to a test first draft on FIVE GUNS #1 over the next several days. That one's turned out weird, too. Avatar wanted a commercial book -- they wanted to try their hand at superheroes, really, and I was asked to take a crack at it. What they're getting...well, sorry, William. Heh. I went to Chinese fiction, the wuxia [武俠], for its tales of extraordinary martial artists fighting lawlessness with magical zhao [招], unusual weapons and strange chivalry. I tied that in to a subject I briefly touched on in IRON MAN, of all things: the suppression of outbreaks of the future. A Haight-Ashbury of revolutionary science taking the place of, for instance, the city where martial arts are banned in SEVEN SWORDS (obvious touchstone there). The whole thing turned into this weird high-science story of fantasy revolution, the point where THE WATER MARGIN meets Arthurian fiction or similar. It's more CROUCHING MIRRORSHADES than it is THE ULTIMATES, now, sorry, Wiliam...

I love THE WATER MARGIN.

I am going to be SO POOR.

that is all. back to the suffering.