Warren Ellis

Ellis's writing career started in the British roleplaying magazine 'Adventurer' for which he wrote the 1920s Cthulhu mythos strip 'Whiplash' throughout 1986.

Warren Girard Ellis (born 16 February 1968) is an English comic book writer, novelist, and screenwriter.

Ellis was born in Essex in February 1968.

He has stated that the televised broadcast of the Moon landing is his earliest coherent memory.

He was a student at the South East Essex Sixth Form College, commonly known as SEEVIC.

He contributed comic work to the college magazine Spike along with Richard Easter, who also later followed a career in writing.

Before starting his career as a writer, he worked in a book and stationery store, a pub, in bankruptcy, in a record shop, and lifted compost bags.

This was followed by a six-page short story published in 1990 in independent magazine Deadline.

Other early works include a Judge Dredd short and a Doctor Who one-pager.

His first ongoing work, Lazarus Churchyard with D'Israeli, appeared in Blast!, a short-lived British magazine.

By 1994, Ellis had begun working for Marvel Comics, where he took over the series Hellstorm: Prince of Lies with issue number 12, which he wrote until its cancellation after issue number 21.

He also wrote for the Marvel 2099 imprint, most notably in a storyline in which a futuristic Doctor Doom took over the United States.

Other notable early Marvel work is a run on Excalibur, a superhero series set in Britain.

He also wrote a four-issue arc of Thor called "Worldengine", in which he dramatically revamped both the character and book (though the changes lasted only as long as Ellis's run), and wroteWolverine with artist Leinil Francis Yu.

Ellis then started working for DC Comics, Caliber Comics and Image Comics' Wildstorm studio, where he wrote the Gen¹³ spin-off DV8 and took over Stormwatch, a previously action-oriented team book, to which he gave a more idea- and character-driven flavor.

He wrote issues 37–50 with artist Tom Raney, and the 11 issues of volume two with artists Oscar Jimenez and Bryan Hitch.

Hitch and he followed that with the Stormwatch spin-off The Authority, a cinematic super-action series for which Ellis coined the term "widescreen comics".

He is best known as the co-creator of several original comics series, including Transmetropolitan (1997–2002), Global Frequency (2002–2004) and Red (2003–2004), which was adapted into the feature films Red (2010) and Red 2 (2013).

In 1997, Ellis started Transmetropolitan, a creator-owned series about an acerbic "gonzo" journalist in a dystopian future America, co-created with artist Darick Robertson and published by DC's Helix imprint.

When Helix was discontinued the following year, Transmetropolitan was shifted to the Vertigo imprint, and remained one of the most successful nonsuperhero comics DC was then publishing.

Planetary, another Wildstorm series by Ellis and John Cassaday, launched in 1999, as did Ellis's short run on the DC/Vertigo series Hellblazer.

He left that series when DC announced, following the Columbine High School massacre, that it would not publish "Shoot", a Hellblazer story about school shootings, although the story had been written and illustrated prior to the Columbine massacre.

Ellis wrote the video games Hostile Waters (2001), Cold Winter (2005), and Dead Space (2008).

Transmetropolitan ran for 60 issues (plus a few specials), ending in 2002, and the entire run was later collected in a series of trade paperbacks.

It remains Ellis's largest work to date.

In 2002, Ellis started Global Frequency, a 12-issue limited series for Wildstorm, and continued to produce work for various publishers, including DC, Avatar Press, AiT/Planet Lar, Cliffhanger and Homage Comics.

In 2004, Ellis came back to mainstream superhero comics.

He took over Ultimate Fantastic Four and Iron Man for Marvel under a temporary exclusive work for hire contract.

Toward the end of 2004, Ellis released the "Apparat Singles Group", which he described as "An imaginary line of comics singles. Four imaginary first issues of imaginary series from an imaginary line of comics, even".

The Apparat titles were published by Avatar, but carried only the Apparat logo on their covers.

Ellis is the author of the novels Crooked Little Vein (2007) and Gun Machine (2013) and the novella Normal (2016).

He also wrote the animated TV movie G.I. Joe: Resolute (2009), wrote the English version of Marvel Anime (2010–2011), and served as the head writer on the acclaimed animated Netflix series Castlevania (2017–2021).

Ellis is well known for sociocultural commentary, both through his online presence and through his writing, which covers transhumanist (most notably nanotechnology, cryonics, mind transfer and human enhancement) and folkloric themes, often in combination with each other.

He is a humanist and former patron of Humanists UK, a charity focused on promoting humanism and advancing secularism.

He is a resident of Southend-on-Sea, England.

Planetary concluded in October 2009 with issue 27.

Ellis returned to Marvel Comics as part of the company's "Revolution" event, to head the "Counter-X" line of titles.

This project was intended to revitalise the X-Men spin-off books Generation X, X-Man, and X-Force, but it was not successful and Ellis stayed away from mainstream superhero comics for a time.

A prolific comic book writer, Ellis has written several Marvel series, including Astonishing X-Men, Thunderbolts, Moon Knight and the "Extremis" story arc of Iron Man, which was the basis for the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Iron Man 3 (2013).

Ellis created The Authority and Planetary for WildStorm, and wrote a run of Hellblazer for Vertigo and James Bond for Dynamite Entertainment.