RECENT READING: Do Anything by Warren Ellis

Warren Ellis takes a look at the history of comics using the metaphor of Jack Kirby’s Robot Head as the central metaphor and anchor for his free-associating path through the topic.

That doesn’t do the book justice, though. I don’t think any description ever will. Because one of the things that unifies Ellis’ disparate project tends to be his interesting in breaking down a form to its components and rebuilding it into something new.

Ten years, when this book was just a column on Bleeding Cool, he took that approach to a weekly essay on comics books. The days, you can see him deploy the same approach over on his website, courtesy of the way he’s thinking out loud about comic book publishing and developing his vision for a weekly newsletter in an ongoing web series.

I discovered this book by a circuitous route. I’d been a fan of Ellis for years, courtesy of his work on Transmetropolitan and his Authority comics for Image, and gradually followed him into fiction writing (go read Normal) and writing for screen (Go watch Castelvania on Netflix). Mostly, though, I became a fan of watching Ellis think out loud on his blog and in his newsletter, watching him interrogate ideas and chart his interests for readers who may be curious.

Do Anything was an old project by the time I latched onto his social media, but it would occasionally get referenced because it was written in a very particular way: an ongoing serial essay that was drafted in a reporters notebook, one long essay with the breaks inserted later, during the second draft as Ellis went back and coaxed a little more out of the seeds he planted.

I’m a sucker for anything notebook related, especially when it’s based upon changing up a process, so I went and sought the book out. It’s not available online, but the book is slim and cheap–essentially, it’s a 48-page comic format that just happens to be full of words instead of pictures.

There are books that leave their fingerprints on you, when you read them as a writer. Books that break open the way you’d thought about something and showed you whole possibilities you hadn’t seen. This is definitely one of them.

DO ANYTHING: THOUGHTS ON COMICS AND THINGS, WARREN ELLIS: Amazon (AUS | UK | USA)