Warren Ellis’s Crooked Little Vein

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on April 24, 2007 Sign up now!

by Laura Hudson, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 4/24/2007

Best known as a critically acclaimed comics writer and creator of such comics series as Transmetropolitan, The Authority and Fell, the eccentric British author and prominent comics blogger Warren Ellis will try his hand at a prose novel this summer. On July 24, Morrow will release Crooked Little Vein, in which Ellis traces a twisted path through the perverse underbelly of America. It’s the story of a disillusioned detective named Michael McGill and his sexy young sidekick, Trix, as the two set out to find the one thing that can save America from itself: a second, secret Constitution of the United States. PW Comics Week discussed writing comics and prose with Ellis.

PW Comics Week: Did you conceive of the idea for Crooked Little Vein and then seek out a publisher, or did they pursue you? Why choose this particular story for your first novel, and why now?

Warren Ellis: Actually, I kind of inherited a literary agent when I changed my Hollywood representation some years back. And the lit agent I inherited, Lydia Wills, made it her goal in life to bug the living crap out of me until I wrote her a novel. So CLV was conceived as a way to make her leave me the hell alone, really. I wrote 10,000 words that I deemed clearly, blatantly unpublishable and sent them to her with a fairly profane note to the effect that she should consider this a lesson in being careful what you wish for.

She phoned me two weeks later to tell me she'd sold it to HarperCollins, Morrow’s parent company, on the strength of those 10,000 words and no outline. To this day, I still feel strangely cheated. It would, however, seem to prove that I know nothing about the marketplace, and that apparently America is crying out for a book about porn farms, tantric ostrich abuse and the well-documented sexual preference for giant radioactive lizards. So don't listen to me. Buy the book. It has been Approved by Professionals.

PWCW: What kind of audience did you have in mind while you were writing? Were you primarily hoping to reach existing fans of your comics or a new readership entirely?

WE: People who can read. I like those. Also, people with money.

PWCW: You've devoted a lot of time in your blogs, columns and journals to the discussion of structure in comics writing. How well did your experience with the comic book medium transfer to the process of writing a novel?

WE: Oh, God, not at all. The peculiar method one evolves for writing comics—a complex, hybrid medium—are almost completely worthless for novels. It's like asking someone how learning to sex turkeys prepares them for horse riding dressage. The only point of reference is that they both involve doing something strange and unsightly to an animal.

PWCW: Many of the scenes in CLV feature sexually explicit subject matter, including scrotal infusion and Godzilla porn. Were there any attempts by your publisher to censor or tone down the more provocative content?

WE: Absolutely none. Honestly, I think they wanted more sex. You know book people. They are all quite prodigious perverts.

PWCW: Crooked Little Vein is scheduled for release in summer 2007, but you've been discussing it publicly since as early as 2004. Were there any obstacles during the intervening years that delayed publication?

WE: Many, not least of which was the collapse of the dollar relative to the pound. Which meant that the book fee [advance] could, if I were frugal and shopped around, buy a whole sandwich by the time it reached me. Illness, death, poverty, doom, overwork, you know. The usual. The 2000s have not been kind to me, so far. I've lost both parents, suffered a couple of major health collapses, developed a terminal allergy to common house dust, my old knee injury's flared up again, all my hair has fallen out, the latest flood maps show that global warming is going to sink the entire quarter of England that I live right in the middle of, Shane McGowan's in a wheelchair, and Bjork's new single is shit. It's tough to find the will to go on, some days.

PWCW: Do you anticipate that the publication of your first novel will "change everything," as some people have suggested? Is there a possibility you might move your focus away from comics and toward novels?

WE: Unlikely. Comics are in my blood, for one thing. For another... well, ask me six months after the book's been released. I don't see a time where I'd stop writing comics completely, but I enjoy the control and process of writing and publishing novels. Comics are a breakneck, deadline-intensive business. They're tiring. Moving my focus to novels has considerable appeal. But this, too, is a commercial art, and if by winter I'm having to look at converting my comp copies into a food source, well...

PWCW: Your second novel, Listener, is due out in 2008. How far along are you in that process?

WE: It should be wrapped and on my editor's desk by late summer.

PWCW: With Listener, you'll be moving from a detective story to a postapocalyptic sci-fi tale. What was your inspiration?

WE: I think every English writer has to produce a postapocalypse novel in the end, don't they? It's in the operating manual or something. They kick you out of the country if you don't, and then you have to become French. It's a cruel world.

PWCW: You've said that Listener originally began as a series of Livejournal [blog] posts back in 2003. How close is the novel to that initial material?

WE: It started as a writing exercise that I put on Livejournal, yes—it was a warmup thing in the mornings. What I did—some 13,000 words—is what fooled William Morrow into buying it, but what was there will end up as a small, heavily rewritten fraction of the eventual novel.

PWCW: Do you have any plans or ideas for a third novel?

WE: No, and no. I'll think about it if anyone asks me for one. It's my understanding that they only let you keep playing if people buy the first one. Otherwise it's back to Livejournal, writing long and involved posts about Harry Potter and Legolas [an elf character from Lord of the Rings] having sex with dragons, for you.