If you read the last post, you know what’s going on. Here are another five appealing team-ups between Batman and Warren Ellis’ creations:
LAZARUS CHURCHYARD
With eighty percent of his body replaced with an intelligent evolving plastic, Lazarus Churchyard cannot die. And after four centuries of drugs and boredom, that’s exactly what he wants. Looking like a decrepit Alice Cooper, such a nihilistic, outrageous character would make for a promising contrast with either a time-travelling Batman or any of his futuristic incarnations, from the Clint Eastwood-esque hero of The Dark Knight Returns to the spunky Terry McGinnis of Batman Beyond.
I’m not going to lie: the main appeal would be seeing the Caped Crusader in this strange cyberpunk world illustrated by D’Israeli. Say what you want about Batman, he is nothing if not adaptable. But then again, Warren Ellis’ first comic is also quite possibly his most insane piece of science fiction (with the exception of City of Silence), alternating between the poetic and the darkly comedic in tales of a virtual afterlife, a meat computer, post-apocalyptic Basque separatists, gender confusion, and religious necrophilia.
Lazarus Churchyard: The Final Cut
MIRANDA ZERO
Always one to push himself and the medium forward, Ellis created Global Frequency as a relentless spy/sci-fi/action comic, each issue telling a standalone story, drawn by a completely different (and awesome) artist, concerning a race against time to prevent some kind of doomsday scenario. The quality varied (my favorite stories are Steve Dillon’s ‘Invasive,’ about the epidemic of an idea that acts like a virus, and Jon J. Muth’s ‘Big Sky,’ about the devastating effects of what may or may not be an angel’s apparition), but every issue had at least one cool idea at its core.
The concept that held the series together was a secret response organization led by the pragmatic Miranda Zero, who shared Batman’s no-nonsense attitude. A possible team-up could also involve collaboration between Oracle and Aleph, the young woman who coordinated the flow of information between the various agents. It should be noted, however, that because Global Frequency was so action-oriented we never got to know all that much about Miranda’s and Aleph’s background (the closest we came was in issues #8 and #11), especially as they practically only spoke through expository info-dumps.
Global Frequency #1
ROSI BLADES & TONY LING
Two-Step is far from being Warren Ellis’ most profound comic. It isn’t even his funniest, despite the fast-paced Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker barrage of gags, vividly illustrated by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti.
Nevertheless, it’s impossible to resist the notion of a team-up between the Dark Knight and the protagonists of this millennial extravaganza: bored cam-girl Rosi Blades, who walks around a cartoonish alternate London in search of wild images to broadcast online, and zen gunman Tony Ling, who is a freelance operator in the black market for penis prostheses.
That’s right.
Two-Step #1
SPIDER JERUSALEM
It’s hard to overestimate how much of an impact Ellis’ masterpiece Transmetropolitan had on me – I’ve read it and reread it so many times and forced so many of my friends to read it that the books on my shelf are falling apart as they wait for me to pick them up again.
As in-your-face dark satire goes, the series was slightly more hardcore than Ben Elton’s early anarchist novels (This Other Eden, Gridlock, Stark) and slightly less surreal than TV’s Duckman, especially given Darick Robertson’s imaginative and energetic visuals. In Warren Ellis’ oeuvre, this undoubtedly shares Lazarus Churchyard‘s DNA. As science fiction, the comic was perhaps too good for its own right, having anticipated so much of what actually came to be (from Twitter to Google Glass and much more) that it’s now hard to appreciate how inventive it felt back then. But most of all, what set Transmetropolitan apart was that it appealed to pure rage over injustice, oppression, political hypocrisy, and consumerism. With lines like ‘If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog’s cock about Truth, this wouldn’t be happening.’ and ‘If you loved me, you’d all kill yourselves today.’ – it remains one of the punkest comics out there!
At the center of it all was Spider Jerusalem, a futuristic Hunter S. Thompson with a mutant chain-smoking cat. Sure, it would be completely out of place for Spider to team up with Batman, but it would be worth it just for the inevitable scene where the guerrilla gonzo journalist would turn on the Caped Crusader with his faithful bowel-disrupter weapon, before going into one of his diatribes, like the classic anti-monoculture rant: ‘If we didn’t want to live like this, we could have changed it any time, by not fucking paying for it. So let’s celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger.’
Transmetropolitan #6
WILLIAM GRAVEL
While the typical Ellis protagonist hides an idealistic heart underneath a sardonic exterior, William Gravel, SAS combat magician and occasional mercenary, is as cynical a bastard as they come. Imagine Batman having to team up with a nasty supernatural killer… and Gravel hanging out with a rich American in a silly costume (Gravel once suggested that the British Empire still secretly ruled the world, and America was nothing but a huge social experiment they’ve been running since Independence Day 1776).
Of course the kind of adventures Batman and Gravel specialize in are miles apart. That the latter’s stories are full of horrific graphic violence goes without saying (they’re published by Avatar, after all), but Ellis actually manages to give Garth Ennis a run for his money in terms of over-the-top profanity, obscenity, and gore. Between mutated genitalia stitched to a human tongue, the rotten corpses of men impregnated with lizards, and monsters that look like a cross between Predator and The Thing, there is enough fucked up imagery here to traumatize David Cronenberg!
Arguably, only the earlier mini-series are truly worth reading (even so, not for all tastes). However, it’s tempting to stick around just because Gravel himself is so fascinating. In contrast to Ellis’ and Mike Wolfer’s other collaboration (the hardcore sword & sorcery Wolfskin books, which are consistently entertaining), the ongoing Gravel series had some neat world-building but it wasn’t all that exciting, except for the prospect of watching its working class anti-hero regularly kick posh arse.
Strange Killings: The Body Orchard #1