Ugly Cover, Great Book: go read The Captured Ghosts Interview with Warren Ellis

The great irony of Warren Ellis: The Captured Ghosts Interviews is this: it’s an interviewer with a comics writer who thinks very carefully about the design and packaging of the written product, and yet it’s released with an incredibly ugly , half-arsed cover that’s seemingly designed to discourage purchasing.

Which is a pity, because the contents of the book offer some fascinating insights into Ellis’ mindset, work processes, and usage of the internet, circa 2010/2011.

We live in an age where access to interviews with creators are at an all-time peak right now, what with the plethora of websites, podcasts, and livestreams devoted to archiving creative insights. What marks The Captured Ghosts Interviews as something special is it’s origins: these are the full transcripts of the interviews Meaney and Thurman did while making a documentary about Ellis and his work, which means you’re getting all the messy asides and digressions rather than the best sound-bytes.

It also means they have time, in a way most interviews don’t. There are whole sections devoted to Ellis’ origins as a writer, and formative experiences that helped shape his mindset. Stuff that would be glossed over or summarised is explored in detail.

Which leads to some choice insights into his feelings about design in comics:

The package is very, very important. It’s a piece of visual art, so it should be attractive. It should be something you want to own and something that gives you pleasure when you look at it. And for all the great skill that was deployed in comics art – commercial comics art , certainly , for the first time in the ’ 70s and ’ 80s – the packages themselves were hideous fucking things.

and the tendency for older writers to engage in nostalgia for their earlier days:

I do not pine for not being able to afford food. I do not pine for being terrified every time a bill came through the door. I do not pine for sleeping rough under the pier. I do not miss those days at all. Yes, there is a sense of purism, but people associate it with that because they were younger, and their minds moved faster, and they had more ideas than they had written down yet. So when you think back to those days, you think, “ God, I came up with a lot of stuff back then! God, I had so much energy!” You were young and you hadn’t written it all down yet. That’s all it is.

And internet privacy:

The nature of privacy – privacy hasn’t disappeared. It isn’t being eroded. It’s just changing What’s happening is, given the plethora of communications media available to us now, we are simply choosing to be less private, because we’re finding that more interesting. We can shut off all these devices at any time we like. We can cancel our Facebook accounts. We can turn off Twitter. We can even get rid of our phones , if we feel like it. We simply choose not to. Because giving up a certain level of privacy does somehow make us all feel more connected to everyone else, in a sort of ambient social space where we can choose to notice what our friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers are doing. We can turn it off, or we can allow great waves of it to pass us by and then start paying attention to it again. But there is now this ambient layer of sociality in society that we all live in that – if we choose to –makes us feel more connected to the people around us or even the people who are furthest away from us.

There are, of course, an incredible amount of insights into comics and comics writing as well, but its the digressions and interrogations into his obsessions that routinely yield the best bits of the book. Especially when he starts projecting into the next ten years of his life, where he foresaw an increasing move into prose (and, these days, seems to have landed in the lands of television with projects like Castlevania on Netflix).

If you’re a fan of Warren Ellis, or just a fan of seeing smart writers interrogate their practice, look past the ugly-as-fuck cover and pick up a copy of this book.