OOW Studios

This is an excerpt from an old interview with Warren Ellis in a book entitled Writers on Comics Scriptwriting.  I’m guessing it’s from around 2000, judging by the comics he was working on at the time.  I find this specific piece interesting and think it’s still accurate and profound.

Your work is, by and large, deeply political. Do you think comics, as a medium, make for a good political soapbox?

“Well, it’s one of the last mediums you can get on a soapbox in.  It’s one of the last media to not have had all the interesting quirks and creases ironed out of it by corporate control and the demands of a mass audience, because the mass audience doesn’t want to hear about politics. A mass audience wants its football and its tits. This is one of the bonuses, if you like, of working in comics. We address a relatively small and relatively literate audience. We’re not addressing the culture as a whole, so we get to do things like be on a soapbox or write our comics on drugs and be quite open about it. It’s nothing you could do with television or film any more.”

– Warren Ellis