Thad wrote:"Fell is coming back" is a headline I would have been excited about a year ago. I loved that series. I got my copy of issue #1 signed by artist Ben Templesmith the last time I went to a convention.
But under the circumstances? It means Warren Ellis has hit Step 3 of the Louis CK Playbook for How to Handle Being Outed as a Sexual Predator.
Step 1: Issue an "apology" that mostly consists of you humblebragging that you didn't know you were abusing a position of power because gosh darn it you just never realized how important and respected and influential you are.
Step 2: Just shut up and lie low for a year or so.
Step 3: Come back and act like nothing happened.
Occasionally, the Beat reminds me why I still read it despite its descent, over the past couple of years, into the same bland, semi-literate general pop-culture cheerleading as every other goddamn "comics" site. Once in awhile, it manages to commit acts of comics journalism, and here are a couple examples of that:
Warren Ellis makes a controversial return with Fell, by Heidi MacDonald
The Short-Lived Damnation of Warren Ellis, and the Danger It Creates, by Tara Ferguson
tl;dr Ellis ain't done shit to atone or make things right, he hasn't suffered any serious consequences, this is a fucked-up situation in isolation and a terrifying one in the larger context that Image is pretty much saying you can do whatever the fuck you want to women and you'll still have a place there.
Templesmith comes off pretty badly too, defending his collaboration with the strawman "I just can’t subscribe to a permanent social and economic living death for anyone, outside of criminal matters." Which, by and large, isn't what people are saying at all. So Many of Us, the site that detailed the accusations against Ellis last year, also laid out a path he could follow to achieve some restorative justice. He's done none of it. He's made no effort. He just lay low for awhile and then came back. Templesmith's response to that is utterly tone-deaf and completely out-of-touch with reality. I think he would have gotten more sympathy if he'd just said "Look, I've been working on this for years, since before all that stuff came out about Warren, and I just can't afford to do hundreds of hours of work and then not get paid for it." That's probably even the truth!
Anyway, fuck this. And fuck Image for doing it, though I'm not going to say people should boycott Image, because the hell of it is that would hurt the publisher a lot less than the independent creators whose books it puts out.
Definitely boycott Fell, though.
(I gotta remember to make sure it's not on my pull list anymore. I'm guessing it probably got removed at some point over the past 13 years, but I've been surprised when books have popped up in my box ages after they last came out.)
There's an update where Ellis did actually reply.
It sounds good, but then Ellis is good at sounding good, AND everything you said about him trying a Louis CK still applies. I'll believe it when So Many Of Us believes it.