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Special Feature   Ain't It Cool Media By Adam McGovern Published: 2008-08-04 Examining the Warren Ellis of Multiple Worlds, at Avatar Press

Along with Local, Fallen Angel and Incredible Hercules, Doktor Sleepless is the current comic I can’t live without.

Its spinning narrative centers on a high-tech troublemaker in a mid-21^st century American everytown who’s trying to reengineer subversion for an era in which, not unlike our numbed present and more diabolically than any fictional dystopia, people not only don’t see how things could change but barely notice that anything’s wrong.

Fascinating in its accumulating impact for a future trade collection, it’s also fresh and clear at whatever point you access it; each issue seems like the latest chapter of a completely different series than you actually read last month, as premises shift along with the elusive truths, short attention spans and multiple perspectives of the internet era.

Writer Warren Ellis has hit a perfect pitch in his comicbook-of-ideas weaving of sociological manifesto and gripping narrative; this book is shaping up to be to Ellis’ worldview what Promethea was to Alan Moore’s. Ivan Rodriguez’s laconic, functional art is deceptively simple and ideally keyed to the comic’s tone of complacent exurbia with a skin-deep undercurrent of toxicity and turmoil; supercool in the same McLuhanesque sense as the social media that link and fixate the masses in this eerie slow-motion epic.

The latest issue, #7, ominously says “To be concluded” at the end, though I’ve heard that Issues 1 through 8 are just the first symphonic section of a much more extensive structure; true to what Ellis and Rodriguez are up to, you can’t yet perceive it but you know it’s there.

Turning up the media’s temperature to the heat of rocket fuel and adrenaline fever is Ellis’ Anna Mercury (now on its second issue and not to be confused with Miranda Mercury, which debuted within minutes of it and is also highly recommended, when Archaia Studios Press gets publishing again).

Anna is a special op who polices a ring of hyperspatial planets that few people know are arrayed around Earth, and which give Ellis occasion to run hypothetical social experiments on advanced societies with feudal values and modern-fairytale technology. As befits the off-real texture of these adventures, Anna’s an adult Alice in Wonderland whose own mad-hatter-ishness is more than equal to the disorienting situations she’s dropped into, but comes with a capacity for diagonal thought that can cut to the heart of insoluble problems and reason good people caught in the crossfire out of their pessimism and self-reproach.

In the first arc she’s cleaning up a mess the American military command unconsciously created and the Brits who send her out feel responsible to make right. It’s the kind of unfavorable comparison in the competence and honor columns that our empire has spent eight years earning, though dramatized here with a breakneck cockiness that shows clear affection for some elements of the American aesthetic and character and, like the heroine’s Modesty-Blaise-joins-the-B-52s look, symbolically affirms some lasting two-way promise in the Anglo/Yank special relationship. Artist Facundo Percio’s nocturnal textures and draftsmanlike precision serve the post-2000 AD atmosphere well, and this book is climbing the must-read pile at escape velocity.

Sometimes Ellis works in fine detail and sometimes high relief; No Hero, a GN whose installments started with a zero issue in June, is in that latter, Fell-ish high-concept category, summarizable in one sensational solicitation blurb and scrupulously sourced with back-page essays on what news article sparked the idea or which historical figures are being transplanted to a dystopian fantasy.

In this case it’s a group of superhumans named after 17^th century dissenters and created in the 1960s by the drugs brewed up by a character who himself synthesizes Tony Stark and Timothy Leary (actually not too far a stretch considering the post-flower-power revelations of Leary’s long-time employ by the FBI). The transformation is wrenching and irreversible, to the individuals and their society, yet someone is figuring out how to kill the invincible. So far the book is impeccably executed, though parts of it have been executed by others everywhere from Astro City to The Boys. Ellis can always deliver the state of the art, but I’ll be dropping this one and keeping up with Sleepless and Mercury, in which he remakes the artform too.