Trivia / Warren Ellis

• Attention Deficit Creator Disorder: It varies, but this often turns out to be a good thing; some of his best work is stuff he came up with and wrote while he was supposed to be writing something else. Avatar Press probably has a red phone just for him: "What's that, Mr. Ellis? You want to have SuperIron Man kill the POTUS? Shoot it on over and we'll print a run, see how the fans like it. We'll keep the presses warm, too, because they probably will."
• Doing It for the Art: Pretty much his entire work on Avatar Press. While their sales are extremely miniscule in comparison to even the most unpopular mainstream comic, Ellis manages to publish some of his most distinctive work for Avatar.
• Life Imitates Art: He started writing about New Media at the beginning of The '90s. He started writing his best-known work, Transmetropolitan, in 1997. And it's all come true.
  The years since I finished TRANSMETROPOLITAN have been a litany of horror. That book is COMING TRUE. Right down to the stupid details Darick Robertson and I threw in like two-headed cats and cameras in shades. Every time I invent something, lately, it turns up in the news six months later(including but not limited to space shuttles blowing up, and in a script I decided not to finish, snipers terrorizing cities.) And then I have to open up the throttle a little more and let more horrible shit out from the back of my head.
  It's possible that I'm actually driving humanity towards total apocalypse.
  —Epilogue to Angel Stomp Future
  • He's noted in his newsletter that when he started Global Frequency, the trademarked phones that every operative carried were the stuff of science fiction. By the time the series ended, they were nearly obsolete.
• Schedule Slip: When reading his ongoing work, prepare to wait months, if not years, for the next issue to come. According to Ellis via his message board, his main writing computer and backups failed back in late 2007 (the computer going out in a puff of smoke soon after the backups died), and the data-recovery company that he sent his hard drives to promptly vanished off the face of the Earth after the owner died while on an operating table in Europe and the employees scattered to the four winds, leaving behind only a boarded up empty space where the offices used to be. Many of Ellis's current projects were on those hard drives, including Fell and newuniversal. He has since then set up a FAQ thread on the Whitechapel forums where he explains the fate and (possible) future of many of his projects that were directly affected by the crash.