Warren Ellis Off Thunderbolts

POSTED BY Alex Zalben, 31 March 2008

Warren Ellis revealed officially that he'll be leaving Thunderbolts with issue #121, in response to some leaked online chatter. This is, you may remember, about when Christos Gage starts his Secret Invasion run... Wonder if he'll be taking over permanently, hmm?

In any case, Ellis has a fascinating chain of dialogue going on in response to why he left over at his message board. Here's his first post, and you can check out the rest of the convo here:

The tenor -- and, frankly, the informedness -- of online comics conversation over the last five years has changed to the point where I probably need to explain once again why I don't stay long on company-owned works.

It's as simple as this -- if I don't own it, I'm not going to spend my life on it. Joe Quesada and Dan Buckley know that, they're fine with that, and they hire me on that understanding.

Or, if you like: you can only paint someone else's house for so long before you start thinking that it might be nice to own your own house one day.

I'm okay with painting other people's houses for short periods, because I'm good at it and it pays well and on nice days it's fun. But I never ever confuse painting a house for owning that house. And if I spent every waking hour painting other people's houses, I wouldn't be able to build houses of my own.

The more creators who only took on housepainting as a part-time gig, the healthier this medium would be.

For those of you who harbour a wish to write comics, consider this today: you're either on this side of the line, with me and Brian K Vaughan and Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison and Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction... or you're not.