It’s always interesting when comic book writers attempt a first novel. It starkly shows the differences between writing comic books and writing prose. Even Neil Gaiman – and I’m a fan, don’t get me wrong – seemed to overwrite in his early novels, compensating for the lack of pictures on the page; it’s why his stripped-back kids(ish) novels like Coraline started strongest.

Now that Warren Ellis (of Transmetropolitan, The Authority, and a frankly ridiculous amount of others) has written his first novel, Crooked Little Vein. What’s it like? It’s exactly what you’d expect. Swearing, smoking, sexual perversions, hyperbolic insults, characters popping up to mention facts from New Scientist – Ellis draws from a well-worn box of writing tools. If you’re a fan, you might say his unique style is never less than bitingly memorable. If you’re not, you might say he’s been mining the same material for too long with diminishing results.

(I’m somewhere between the two: I enjoy most of his writing, but find myself drawn more to his ideas than his execution, and like him more when he’s not playing for laughs. There’s no denying, though, that Crooked Little Vein contains its fair share of extremely lovely sentences.)

Working with different artists gives comic writers a sense of variety that the writing itself mightn’t earn, kind-of-but-not-really like a screenwriter’s work being filmed by different directors. The fact that this is a prose novel provides an automatic gulf of difference from the rest of Ellis’ comic book writing.

For one, comics are separate from ‘photographic’ reality – something we can match more easily to our everyday experience – because they’re drawn. Academic David Carrier calls this the “aggressive caricature” inherent in comic book art. It’s part of the reason why superhero comics are able to be so spectacularly insane without batting an eyelid. I mean that in the best possible way.

Combine that with the fact that Crooked Little Vein is somewhat set in the ‘real’ world – without the leeway provided by Transmetropolian‘s future, or The Authority‘s heroes-become-gods, or even X-Men‘s Marvel Universe madness – and Ellis has to jump through conceptual hoops to justify his book’s narrative oddness. Exhibit A: McGill, the battered, Chandleresque private eye protagonist, says that he’s attracted weirdness all his life:

McGill’s mission takes him on a journey through various strange American subcultures, giving Ellis  leeway to explore his usual filthy interests. (Most memorably: Godzilla bukakkeists.) Ellis pushes this logic further, however, and sharpens the premise of Crooked Little Vein to a point that could summarise his whole career so far.

He suggests that there’s no longer such things as a subculture any more. Everything – every perversion, every obsession, and therefore every subject that Ellis finds fascinating – now sits on the surface of society. As he puts it in the quick author interview filling the back pages, “This is how life really is lived in America, no matter what the news tells you.”

What better way to justify the whole world as his particular literary playground?