Send me a mysterious package tied with yellow string and sealed with wax.

Fill said package not only with your book, but with an audio CD, some instant coffee, and a handful of Yo! MTV Raps trading cards.

Include reading instructions, after presumably intuiting that, yes, I am easily confused.

Make me feel like I’m a unique snowflake. (Happy star optional.)

See? It’s that easy. Now I can’t wait to read the book inside. I just hope it lives up to the genuinely gleeful experience I had unwrapping it. You can read more about it at the Outside Writers Collective.

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?

Elliot S! Maggin’s out-of-print Superman novel, Miracle Monday (1982), is brimming with joyfully odd ideas and wild, poetic tangents. Lex Luthor isn’t even the antagonist here – despite some time-travelling tourists, it’s really a Superman versus The Devil story – but Maggin’s Luthor steals every page on which he appears.

This Lex Luthor calls a press conference while he’s in jail to announce his inevitable breakout. He hides deadly scientific equipment by disguising it as modern art and selling it to respected museums. (For instance, “…the Whitney housed a corkscrew-nosed missile which could actually hold as many as six passengers while it tunnelled 12 miles underground.”) And he has dozens of alternate identities including journalists, doctors, and artists. This quirk allows Maggin to create the most (kinda-) convincing reason as to why Luthor, evil genius, never seems to realise that his arch-enemy looks an awful lot like the pesky reporter Clark Kent:

“It would probably have been a simple matter, had he chosen to do so, for Luthor to figure out what Superman’s secret identity was. Luthor did not think the information would do him any good. He assumed that Superman had the same sort of set up as Luthor had with his made-to-order people, and that if he were exposed, Superman would simply create new aliases.”

Luthor lists some of the men he’s suspected are just Superman in disguise – like Joe Namath, Muhammad Ali, and Bruce Wayne. He doesn’t understand that Clark Kent is much more than just a fake name, a cheap suit, and a pair of useless eyeglasses. Maggin’s Superman loves the Clark-persona he’s painstakingly constructed, valuing him just as much as “…he valued a human life.”

(Second prize for deft use of comic book logic goes to John Byrne. His Superman reboot transformed Luthor into from a mad scientist into a villainous businessman, and addressed the “but doesn’t Superman look a little familiar…?” conundrum early in his run. Again, it’s that Luthor can’t imagine anyone would think differently to him. When an underling reveals all the evidence that Clark and Superman are one and the same, Luthor belittles her: “I know that no man with the power of Superman would ever pretend to be a mere human!”)

DC Comics’ current Luthor has reverted back to a criminal mastermind, and one who takes himself very seriously considering he’s wearing a garish 1970s sci-fi battlesuit. I hope that Maggin’s Luthor – genius, prankster, unflinching smart-ass – reemerges one day, just to hear him whittle Superman’s nickname from “Supes” to “Soups” to “Chicken Noodle” again.

(Why the exclamation point in Elliot S! Maggin? Read Timothy Callahan’s lovely piece on Maggin for more.)