Three Great Contemporary British Comic Writers
Some of the Best Graphic Novelists From the United Kingdom Revealed
Like any other story-telling medium, there’s one really reliable way to find the best stories in comics – follow the talent. The big American comic book companies like Marvel and DC try and hook readers in to buying large amounts of their product by tying them together in shared super-hero universes, but more and more, the big sellers are the ones with the most well known and successful creative teams involved.
However, particularly away from superheroes, the greatest comic writers have often been the British ones, raised on different stories to the American creators of the same generation and able to bring a fresh perspective to their stories. Below is an introduction to three major contemporary British talents, along with a short outline of some of their works.
Warren Ellis – Science, Wonder and Venom
Hailing from Essex in the UK, Warren Ellis is perhaps best known for his attempts to put some hard science back into the often vague and story-serving “science fiction” of comics. Transmetropolitan, his longest work to date and one of his most famous, features an anger-fueled journalist in a far-flung future, which often resembles the present all too closely. With detailed art by Darick Robertson and published by DC’s Vertigo line, it’s well worth checking out.
Aside from that five year opus, Ellis has produced a huge amount of other work over the years. His latest long-lasting sci-fi project, Doktor Sleepless, with art by Ivan Rodriguez, follows the return of a rabble-rousing mad scientist to an unspecified future grown dull and complacent. His one-off works include the graphic novel Orbiter with Colleen Doran, about the development of space travel, while Crécy took a rare look into the past of the fourteenth century, with medieval-styled art by Raulo Caceres.
Garth Ennis – Violence, Love and War
Whereas the others mentioned here have at least dabbled in superhero comics, Irish-born Garth Ennis has managed to avoid them for the most part and focus on his own creations and areas of interest. In particular, he has almost single-handedly kept the war story genre alive in modern comic books.
The closest he’s come to the capes-and-tights genre is a lengthy period writing Marvel’s Punisher series, turning it from an often shallow celebration of superheroic mass murder into a genuinely unsettling examination of the real implications of such a crusade, on both the world and the perpetrator. He’s also created The Boys for Dynamite Entertainment with Darick Robertson, in which a group of ex-military operatives ‘police’ a superhero community, usually with extreme prejudice.
But his best known work remains Preacher from Vertigo, a five year epic which spans genres effortlessly from western to romance and back again, framed around a classic road trip storyline and a strong religious theme. Combined with the artwork of long-time collaborator Steve Dillon, who excels at portraying the realistic emotions and horrific violence which characterise a lot of Ennis’ stories, it’s widely regarded as one of the finest comics for “mature readers” ever crafted.
Alan Moore – Magic, Literature and the Classics
For many years, Alan Moore has been regarded as one of the great all-time comic writers. His strong literary sensibility makes him stand out in the field, and many of the artists who have worked with him have commented on the incredible level of detail he puts into his scripts. He also often produces additional prose materials to supplement the individual comic books he writes.
His most well-known work has perhaps been Watchmen with Dave Gibbons, a post-nuclear superhero epic, recently adapted into a major movie by Warner Brothers. This was a lengthy, thoughtful storyline which surrounded its colourful protagonists with both adult themes and weighty real-world issues; its approach was, at the time, uncommon, and has since been replicated across the industry.
As well as Watchmen, Moore also produced other comic stories which has gone on to be extremely well-regarded, such as V For Vendetta, about a masked anarchist in a fascist future Britain, and From Hell in the nineties, which offers an extremely detailed interpretation of the truth behind Jack The Ripper. Both of these have gone on to be adapted for film, although Moore himself has disowned all such versions of his work.
Moore’s most well-known recent work has been The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neill, which combined an array of classic literary characters like Alan Quartermain, Doctor Jekyll and Captain Nemo into the same ambitious adventure. It was published under America’s Best Comics, a line of comics by Moore from DC’s Wildstorm imprint featuring various characters, many slightly superheroic in nature, such as Tom Strong and Promethea, as well as the police procedural Top 10, set in a world where super-powers are commonplace.
British Writers Bring a New Approach to Comics
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