Channel Zero Introduction by Warren Ellis

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Channel Zero Introduction by Warren Ellis

05/22/2012 11:33am

Pop culture rolled over and died some time ago. Some people actually think Marilyn Manson is scary, that Kurt Cobain had something to do with rebellion, that Bret Easton Ellis is a dangerous writer, that it’s a good thing that you can buy McDonald’s in Prague, that movies are somehow relevant to our lives.

Television is our stage and our anaesthetic. Real life happens on television in preference to our homes and streets. People resolve their relationships on freakshow chatshows instead of in living rooms or beds or even goddamn bars.

And it spreads. Rupert Murdoch beams his shit into Asia, English children are taught that Z is pronounced Zee by goddamn Barney, and all of a sudden, world cultures become the Monoculture, the same conversation, the same clothes, the same show. All tuned to Channel Zero.

And, all over the world, one by one, we quit fighting it. We sit and we put the book we’re reading down and laugh at the arseholes on Jerry Springer, snigger at Matthew Perry, get our news managed for us by CNN, and suddenly we’re like all the rest. We’re in cultural lockstep, taking holidays in other people’s misery, asking for our stinking badges, dead heads nodding over phosphordot fixes.

Someone’s remembered what comics are for.

In goddamn America, of all places.

Meet Brian Wood.

Over here in comics, things are different, you see. Sometimes we’re an outlaw medium. Sometimes we’re just the preferred tiny place for neurotics and losers to gibber in. Either way, we’re an outside art, a fringe medium watched by no-one but the more voracious cultural commentators and the aficionados. We don’t have huge corporations trembling at our every movement, because we make no money compared to the other visual narrative media. That vast commercial pressure isn’t brought to bear on comics. Which means, often, that we can say what we want without rich men’s scissors attacking our work until it’s safe for little Tommy in Dogshit, Nebraska. I hate little Tommy in Dogshit, Nebraska. I want to kill little Tommy in Dogshit, Nebraska. And so does Brian Wood.

Brian Wood remembers how to be angry. He remembers how to wake up in the morning and look out at this plastic MTV-soundtracked world we’ve agreed to exist in and get pissed off with it. And he goes to his desk and makes buzzing, scratchy, shuddering people, the innards of the people-shaped things he sees lockstepping down the street outside, and he puts them in a crazed, broken America that really is just the America we know seen through a cleaner window, and he makes those people move the way they should. He makes them talk about revolution. He makes them spark and snarl and scheme and scream the way pop culture icons are supposed to. They rant and rail against the dying of the light the way people should.

The longer CHANNEL ZERO runs, the purer it becomes. It grows dominated by symbols, huge dark images of a beaten world filled with a beaten generation, the place that, like Ginsberg howled, saw its best minds destroyed. Black things grow out of the pages, looming over and burying Jennie 2.5 and Channel Zero’s other hopeful monsters. The semiotics of a heartdead world hit like gunfire -- but, in the interstices, you begin to hear music. Anger and passion rise up again.

For all its black and white somber mien, CHANNEL ZERO is, to me, one of the most uplifting comics of the Nineties. CHANNEL ZERO is about winning. It’s about learning how to give a shit again, about finding ways to make things better. It’s about anger as a positive force of creation. It’s about your right to not have to live in the world they’ve built for you.

It’s about turning off the television.

-Warren Ellis

Dark Horse Comics

Channel Zero Introduction by Warren Ellis

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Channel Zero Introduction by Warren Ellis

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