"So it's all about gender roles and equality and looking out for people. It's mostly, actually, about this grand political thing but Warren Ellis takes the time to really paint us a picture that's about feelings and friendship and love and doing something important and it's way more textured than, say, something like the X-Men. It's moving in a way that really kind of transcends the main storyline and throws in other stuff, like why it's important to educate your kids. And it's pretty. It's a comic that cares."

"I like the X-Men."

So the conversation went when I was trying to convince my husband to read Transmetropolitan after I went on a massive weekend-long trade binge. It was beautiful, me curling up on the couch watching Yelena and Spider fall in love or like or whatever one can substitute for it in this day and age while the hours spun by me. After that, I settle in for a heady dose of Planetary. I was calling my disconnection from anything remotely resembling the real world "research", as one of my fellow writers had encouraged me to write about my love for Warren Ellis to try to explain why women like him so much. My response to that, sadly, was a blank "We do?"

Though, in retrospect, I can see it. Ellis bridges the gap between comics that involve some good old fashioned blowin' stuff up and fuzzy comics about our feelings. He can have a pair of drug-addicts end up like Ricky and Lucy out in the country and we believe it. Elijah Snow, Planetary's ageless hero, has a team of assistants that he'd rescued from various circumstances while they were mere babies backing him up and a mission to save the whole wide freaky world. And access to really, really big guns. And, hell, Black Summer is the darkest buddy comic in the universe - a bunch of friends become capes only to have it go horribly, horribly wrong. How do the pieces react? Who stays together, who causes trouble, who is going to save the day?

But beyond all that gushy stuff, Ellis creates entire worlds for us to play in with him. Whether he's taking existing places like London and turning them into a post-apocalyptic ice-cream colored dream (Freak Angels, available FOR FREE online at (www.freakangels.com and totally worth paying for, if it ever comes down to that) or creating new ones like the ever-surprising Heavenside, as seen in the intriguing Doktor Sleepless. Heavenside actually seems like any old city we've visited until the Shrieky Girls share a dance between a thousand of them via their skin-deep internet connections and the good Doktor flips on his sky light and broadcasts his madness over the radio waves. There's something compelling about Warren's worlds. Planetary is a rich tapestry of weird that one could spend weeks getting lost in. The man knows how to paint a picture with words and find the perfect people to paint them with, well, paint.

Under all of that, in almost everything that Warren Ellis is putting out today, is a savage social commentary on the state of global politics, especially those in the good ol' US of A. And while that intrigues me, as he is decidedly not a native son, I kind of want to ask him what he thinks when things he wrote about keep happening, especially as his Avatar releases get edgier and edgier. His constant balance between the personal, the global and the artistic is a sight to behold. Beyond the pen and ink drawings of 4-color comic books, there's the breathtaking Available Light, an artsy-ish coffee table book. Available Light, released on AiT/Planet Lar*, is a collection of photographs taken with a camera phone (before they were on every free phone, making it, you know, cool) and accompanied by a short story (flash fiction, also before it was cool). This is some of Ellis' bravest work, going forward and back and even giving us a touching look into the birth of his daughter. If you don't listen to anything else I say in this love letter to a cranky artiste, listen to this - go buy Available Light. And not just because Larry Young* and Warren Ellis are righteous dudes.

Warren's worlds are not always pretty ones, with hope only there for those worthies who seek and deserve it, and I wonder if it makes him nervous to be our funnybook Cassandra, crying our doom from the shelves of our local comic book store.

* Larry Young, in the interest of full disclosure, also writes the fabulous I Gots Me Some Enthusiasm for RBN and has the cutest! baby! ever! Seriously. In between all this, he's the force behind AiT/Planet Lar. Well, most of it, anyway.