Well, that was fun.

Now, according to the announcements at San Diego, Simone Bianchi is moving on to better things by taking on Astonishing X-Men.  And alongside him will be Warren Ellis.  Now, I'll reserve judgment on that choice.  At his best, Ellis is an interesting writer with interesting ideas, but he doesn't strike me as a particularly natural fit for the X-Men.  We shall see.

Anyhow, that announcement is as good a reason as any to look at Doktor Sleepless #1, a new creator-owned series that Ellis is putting out through Avatar.  It's fashionable to knock Ellis for the number of superhero comics he does, and it's certainly a bit of a U-turn from the days when he was loudly proclaiming a seismic shift in the marketplace.  But changing your mind has never been a sin, and besides, Ellis still puts out a steady stream of more alternative titles alongside his mainstream moneyspinners.

Doktor Sleepless is a curious book.  It's set in a near future America in a city identified simply as "Heavenside" (although for some reason, my instinct is to say San Francisco).  The title character is John Reinhardt, a self-proclaimed philosopher and traveller who has created the identity of "cartoon mad scientist" Doktor Sleepless in an attempt to get attention for his oddball futurist ideas.  He could be an iconoclast, a maniac, or both.

This city features lots of techno body-modification among the "grinder" underclass, who appear to spend a lot of their time grumbling that the promised future of retro sci-fi movies has failed to appear.  The Doktor seems to think it's his job to give them a kick up the arse and make them build their own future instead of waiting for everything to be delivered to them on a plate.  But quite what sort of future he wants them to build is open to question.

Now, the thing about Ellis is that over the last few years he has developed some very, very narrow obsessions which keep cropping up again and again in almost all his stories.  He loves his mobile internet, and he loves his alternative community-building technology, and he really won't stop banging on about it.  I'm not going to claim that he does in every single story - he's got a graphic novel out this week about the Battle of Crecy in 1346, for example, and I'm sure that even in Ellis's version, they didn't have Bluetooth arrows.  And to be fair, it doesn't come up in Fell either.  But there's a thin line between having a favourite theme and being a rut, and boy, Ellis has written about this an awful lot.  He loves man/machine interfaces, so he does.

If you're a Warren Ellis fan, you'll probably love this.  It's very Warren Ellis indeed.  It's got all the elements you love.  It's got vaguely alternative sassy girls with sci-fi implants.  It's got a ranting, possibly unstable inspirational male lead who says things like "I am science Jesus now."  It's got neat little details about theoretical technology so that lovers can feel each other's heartbeats at all times.  It's got the grounded female lead to play off the mad male one.  It's got all that. 

It's also got a new idea - Ellis is supporting this with a wiki, in which he's inviting readers to post articles about the series and draw connections between obscure details.  He claims everything in the series is connected, and there are certainly a lot of throwaway lines of dialogue in this story drawing on all the back story that Ellis has worked out.  Apparently all of this is inspired by a Lost wiki that impressed Ellis tremendously.

This is an innovative idea for reader participation.  Unfortunately, at time of writing, the website isn't working yet.  You can't edit the pages without logging in.  You can't log in without registering.  And you can't register because... well, you just can't.  There's a sign up now saying that "The good doktor will open registrations shortly," but you'd have thought they'd have it up for the launch date.  Can't understand that.

Anyway: the core Warren Ellis fanbase will adore this series.  More casual readers could be forgiven for thinking that they've seen it all before, and Ellis is still mining a very narrow seam.  This is true, and it's also true that artist Ivan Rodriguez's work isn't entirely convincing.  He's a perfectly solid artist who does decent figures, sound body language, and all that.  But visualising the future and designing a subculture... it all looks a little bit too obvious.  Maybe that's the point.  After all, Ellis is deriding his grinder characters for clinging to an outmoded view of the future.  Maybe he wants them to look like generic alt-cyberpunk types so that their look can change to something more original in time.  Or maybe not.

I'm torn; I really think Ellis is in danger of stripmining this theme.  But, this is one of his stronger and more focussed efforts, and the wiki is a genuinely intriguing concept.  If only it was switched on.

The potential is there.  It's clearly a subject that Ellis is passionate about; perhaps this can be his defining statement on the topic.  I'll give him the benefit of the doubt for now.

Rating: B+

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