I am going to get this out of the way right now. (If vulgarities offend you, skip to the next paragraph.) Doktor Sleepless is Warren Ellis jerking off to a stack of New Scientists and a bottle of whiskey, dick in one hand and a big “Fuck You” in the other. I apologize for the harsh language, but at this point in Ellis’ career, it needs to be said.

Compared to the overall landscape of comic books, Warren Ellis’ stories are not the sort that fade into the background. They are usually hyper and edgy, with at least a bit of technofuturism thrown in for good measure. But it is this latter trait which leads to some messy results. While his best stories tend to have some technobabble as garnish to help drive the story, his worst seem to exist entirely as a means through which to spout said technobabble.

Doktor Sleepless is such a story. The plot is there, but it is almost filler; a graphic accompaniment to Ellis’ philosophical musings. But what is the plot? Describing any long-term goals of the characters is speculative at best for now, but so far we have a few of the characters and the culture in which they live. Doktor Sleepless, aka John Reindhart, has returned from who knows where with his Nurse (Igor) to, ostensibly, bring the future back to the people. The streets of Heavenside (other side of the mountain is Hellside) are lined with graffiti yells of “Where’s my fucking jet pack”, “You owe me a flying car”, and “Not my future”. The setting is certainly the future, but not the future anyone thought it would be.

It is a depressing world characterized by “aggressive apathy” (as two homeless people expound). What led to this bleak future? Ellis never gets too deep into that, but he is quick to remind us (and the whole city of Heavenside) that things are not so bad. Okay, no one is vacationing on Mars, but ubiquitous wireless and steampunk-esque body modifications let everyone interact with each other and the environment just by looking inside their own eyeball. Technology may not have progressed the way science fiction movies said they would, but it definitely has progressed.

Interestingly, the technology of Doktor Sleepless is not so unbelievable. It is beyond anything possible today, but only by a small degree of separation. (Ellis even had to change some pages after finding out the tech he imagined already existed.) Today, with citywide wireless and PDAs, a macroscopic version of Doktor Sleepless is possible. Once these technologies become more widespread and miniaturized, we may find ourself in this imagined future.

This is Ellis’ very point. Especially with social networking, with which Ellis is so enamored, there are so many exciting developments right around the corner. Better yet, there are so many exciting developments right now, waiting to be broken apart and grinded back together into something entirely new. If we embrace the electrifying state of science and technology today, and approach it creatively, we’ll never reach that sad point of hopelessness and boredom.

While Ellis is conveying this entirely reasonable manifesto, he is spending the other half of his time proving how awesome a man he is. He is Warren Ellis, futurist extraordinaire. He has books and magazines and RSS feeds. He has a thousand ideas a minute, all mashups designed to make social life even sweeter. Fuck all of you boring people.

(Un)fortunately, Ellis is actually pretty awesome. He keeps himself at the forefront of technology as much as possible, and integrates every half-possible speculation into his writings. More times than not (e.g., Transmetropolitan, Planetary), the technobabble flows smoothly. But sometimes, as with Doktor Sleepless, it feels more like Ellis is slapping us across the face with his Future Glove^TM. In this way, in order to like Doktor Sleepless you have to like Warren Ellis, not good comics or good stories. The book is far from bad (especially this far in), but Ellis’ style can be overwhelming for the uninitiated. Go into it with an open mind and a good sense of humor, and you’ll be fine.

Further reading:

Doktor Sleepless wiki

Newsarama interview with Warren Ellis

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