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| A page from the series Red, words by Warren Ellis, art by Cully Hamner. |
Some of you might recall the movie Red, with an all-star cast of older Hollywood stars. Bruce Willis might have been the lead, but anytime you want to give me a movie with Helen Mirren being fun and scary, I'm there for it. It's about assassins coming out of retirement when one of them is threatened. I quite like it. It's nothing earth-shattering, but it's fun and the sequel was good too. I'm sorry they didn't get to do a third one.
Perhaps a lesser know fact is that it's also based on a mini-series by Warren Ellis and Cully Hamner. The two bear only a passing resemblance to one another. As I recall, Ellis wrote at the time that if they did a direct adaptation of their series, it would be about 20 minutes long.
Fair enough. The series is a a tightly packed thriller. Three issues and done. Retired assassin Paul Moses lives quietly, talking only to the woman who handles his pension checks, and tries very, very hard to forget the horrors he's committed. That's fine until a new CIA director sees his file, freaks out, and sends a team to take care of him. Moses decides to show the CIA why he was so scary.
It's a little different than the quirky hijinks and romance from the movie.
Ellis is one of my favourite writers. It's still bizarre to me that this is the thing of his that's been adapted. Not Global Frequency. Not Transmetropolitan. Not Planetary.
And Hamner, look, he's a really good artist, but he's a bloody great storyteller. This page is a masterclass in how to tell a story. You could take out the word balloons and still absolutely know what's going on here. Ellis, very wisely, stays out of the way for most of the book and just lets Hamner do his thing.
So far I've shown a sketch from my sketchbook, a commission, and this is a page of art I bought. Just to give an idea of the different things I have. Comic pages have become quite the hot thing in recent years. The right artists can get thousands. A cover or a splash page can also go for thousands. But there's still something about just a well crafted page of storytelling that works too, especially if you're on a budget. To reassure Cathy if she's reading this, thousands were not spent.
This page doesn't have a dramatic story, but there are a few amusing highlights. Hamner put this and a few other pages from Red for sale online through his broker Essential Sequential. I freaked out because I love the book and figured the art was long since gone. I managed to snag this page. But through a bit of good timing Hamner and the company were going to be at Emerald City Comic Con when I was going to be there. So I was able to get the page without paying shipping.
When I picked it up I spoke to Hamner and expressed amazement that there were any pages left.
"Oh yeah, I was cleaning out my closet and I found this bunch of pages buried back there so I just threw them online."
Artists...
Fair enough, I guess. Not every page is worth something. I've been to shows where some comic artists have had pages stacked on their table like pamphlets. They can be big money. Or they can just be taking up space. It's why a lot of artists are moving to digital these days. It's faster for repetitive tasks and you can fix mistakes quickly. And if you're not a big name artist on a big name book, the speed you can work offsets any money you might make selling pages.
The only other thing to mention is that during the con, when I would pull out my portfolio to slip a page, poster or something, the artist would often ask to see what else I had. Without fail they stopped on this page.
"Just look at the skill in that," one artist said. "I can't believe you got a page of this."
"He found them when digging out his closet," I said.
The artist laughed. "Ok. That I can believe....."
Last Five
1. Neighbourhood #2 (Laika) - The Arcade Fire
2. Repetition - TV on the Radio
3. Vertigo - U2
4. Carly Ray - Mark Bragg
5. Drive my car - The Beatles*
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