COVID-19 Ruined Plans for a Warren Ellis Comic Imprint and I'm Peeved About That

Warren Ellis is one of my favorite writers around of comic-books, novels, and now hit-television shows about Dracula getting mad at extremist-Christians for murdering his science-practicing wife. Ellis has made more stellar comics than one can list, although I've always been mostly partial to his really weird, "Deep-cut," works like his stuff for Avatar Press as well as his seminal-but-short run on, "Moon Knight." Ellis has been doing a lot more book and television work lately, but in his latest, "Orbital Operations," newsletter (which you really should subscribe to) he reveals that there were actually plans in place for a comic-book imprint curated by him. However, as with so many other things COVID-19 has ruined, that has withered and died as brutally as my dream of riding a three-humped camel someday. Although that isn't COVID-19's fault so much as they are so rare it is all but impossible for me to ever ride one. I'll have to be content with only having ridden camels with one hump and two humps--but I digress.

As Ellis puts it, " I was building my very own imprint at a comics publisher, but the lockdown and the general fuckery of trusting your exclusive distribution in comics shops and bookstores to a single entity who immediately upon lockdown announced that they weren't paying anybody pretty much put paid to that and the serial print comics business." He follows this with, "I considered it my last chance to make any kind of impact in the comics medium, after a career I think we can consider solidly middling at best.  But, the thing is, you have to be okay with letting that stuff go." He goes on to say sometimes things just happen and there is little you can do. I'd argue his comic-book career is far beyond, "Middling," but the man clearly expects the best from himself, which is admirable and humble in its own way.

I'm am hot-pissed that COVID-19 ruined our chances of getting a comic imprint with works written by and closely attend to by Warren Ellis. That would have been just awesome, and whatever publisher this fell apart with has earned my wrath...although we may never know which publisher it was so I guess my wrath just has to kind of float in the ether without a specific target. In summary, this news sucks and is yet another of million or so examples of things ruined by COVID-19.