“My website, warrenellis.com, is where I work and speak,” says Ellis. “But Whitechapel is now where I live. If the place looks a bit weird, especially in comparison to my previous online communities, it’s because I wanted this one to reflect my interests, rather than just force you to buy stuff or attempt to take over your mind. Frankly, mind control is easy. It’s having to look at all that weird crap in your head that’s hard.”

Whitechapel is a precursor to the much-anticipated FreakAngels webcomic by Ellis and Duffield, coming to FreakAngels.com beginning in February, 2008. It is also the newest community Ellis has developed, following such boards as the immensely popular site The Engine which closed its doors early this year. Speaking about Whitechapel’s branching functionality Ellis says, “I’m not especially interested in a comics-centric board like the Engine. Which tends to beg the question of what a message board/online community should do. The Engine was originally raised for serious purpose. The new place, not so much. For me, it’s more of an overlook: a place to live and watch the world go by.”

WHITECHAPEL is now open for viewing and registration at www.freakangels.com/whitechapel. It uses a new system (Vanilla) that supports such options as a Member Map and linking Flickr photo feeds to profiles. Open to people of all interests, the message board will alsowork in part as a 10 week lead into the launch of the long form webcomic FreakAngels by Ellis and Duffield, which debuts in February, 2008.

Avatar Press is a comic book publisher that continues to push the boundaries between mainstream and independent with current and upcoming work from creators such as Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Brian Pulido, George A. Romero, George R.R. Martin, Joe R. Lansdale, John Russo, Mike Wolfer, Juan Jose Ryp, Jacen Burrows, and numerous others. The company has published a wide range of comic books including creator-owned titles like Garth Ennis’ 303 and Brian Pulido’s Lady Death, company-owned comics such as Pandora and The Ravening, licensed hits like Frank Miller’s Robocop and George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and numerous other titles. A publisher that has established itself as one of the cornerstones of the American indy comic book scene over the past decade, Avatar has published some 500 comic books since 1997.

Have crawled to pub briefly in
defiance of San Diego SARS (now
in Hideous Green Foam stage). So
let’s talk a little bit about
FREAKANGELS.

FREAKANGELS is a free online comic
debuting later this year, by myself
and artist Paul Duffield, via Avatar
Press. It’s an open-ended, longform
story told in the equivalent of
five pages a week. I never got to
do weekly comics, unlike many of
my British peers, so this is fun for
me. We have a shitload of pages
already done, so there’s a big
buffer in place.

I wanted to take a crack at something
open-ended in the webcomics mode,
and I’ve also been wanting to play
with steampunk styling. And also,
as has been my wont of late, I
wanted to do something British.

So welcome to Whitechapel, some
years from now, just barely above
ground in a flooded England. (I
pored over speculative floodmaps
to see what’d stay above water if
the Thames burst its barriers.)
Whitechapel is, among other things,
home to a clan of unrelated young
people with purple hair and purple
eyes: the Freakangels of the title.
And the Freakangels have a secret:
something bad is their fault.

Did you ever read The Midwich
Cuckoos (sp?)? Filmed as The Village
Of The Damned a few times. I
always wondered what those weird
psychic kids would be like if they’d
grown up to be disaffected teenagers
or twentysomethings.

Young, gifted and aimless, the
Freakangels gang have built some
kind of life for themselves in
Whitechapel — one of them, KK,
even zooms around in a steam-
powered gyrocopter she built
herself. A life that starts to show
big cracks when a girl called Alice
from Manchester turns up with a
shotgun and a grievance, having
met the lost, prodigal last Freakangel,
who had very different ideas about
what they should do with themselves
and this flooded future England.

FREAKANGELS will debut sometime
in the autumn. Keep an eye on
www.freakangels.com , and add
yourself to the email alert system
there.

Oh, and to answera FAQ: DESOLATION
JONES isn’t dead, just resting. We’ve
run into a few problems, but it’ll be
back soon, and monthly.