If I had to make a list of exactly why I love comics, Warren Ellis would easily make the top ten. He’s written some of my favorite comics of the past ten years: Transmetropolitan, Planetary, the riotous NextWave, Ocean, Red, Reload, and too many other titles to count. Now, he’s jumping back into the longform comics pool with his new series from Avatar, Doktor Sleepless.
The first page of the script says, “Who’s afraid of a cartoon mad scientist?” John Reinhardt hasn’t slept in over a year. Does he take some Rozerem and star in commercials with Lincoln and beavers? Heck no! He straps on some goggles and takes us for a ride.
The comic is going to be accompanied by its own wiki. As Ellis wrote in a Bad Signal email, “It will have backmatter. Massive backmatter. DOKTOR SLEEPLESS will be shadowed by a wiki at www.doktorsleepless.com and backmatter will move to and from the wiki. Sometimes it’ll be seen in print before it goes on the wiki, sometimes not. Once the book’s live, the wiki will be opened up for readers to add to it. You will see why.”
I asked Warren some questions about the project and its artist, Ivan Rodriguez.
You’re encouraging readers to participate in the wiki for this site. What sort of content are you hoping to get from readers?
Connecting up the dots. There’s a lot of information in DOKTOR SLEEPLESS, and it’s all interconnected and tangled together. Sorting out the disparate skeins and seeing how they might plug together will give many different angles on the work. It was people on the Lost wiki who pulled a screenshot from one episode and worked back to the realisation that people from the show’s metamaterial were actually on the island…
How did you determine Ivan Rodriguez was the right artist for this project? What does he bring to this project? You’ve talked about writing to an artist’s strengths; what aspects of this project play to his strengths?
He has a strong commercial, open texture to his work that’ll help make the book — which might otherwise have appeared somewhat odd and esoteric — more accessible to readers. I like the way he stages, I like the elegance of his figures. In his pages, everything seems hyper-real, if you like — too strange and graceful to be completely real. It’s an interesting effect, for a book like this.
What’s driving you to create this book? How would you compare/contrast this to, say, Transmetropolitan?
TRANSMET was about Truth in the modern world. DOKTOR SLEEPLESS is about Lies. TRANSMET was about a different kind of hero. DOKTOR SLEEPLESS is about a different kind of villain.
Doktor Sleepless will be coming out monthly in full color from Avatar in July. Each issue will be $3.99, with three covers available.
Thanks to Warren Ellis for his time.
Great use of the Three Questions. You got some very unique insights from The Old Bastard there!