bLink 29

[Editor's note: After a hiatus during which Thom Wong was lost inside a virtual wormhole, he's back. (Ok, he actually had exams.) For the next six weeks, we'll run the last 12 of his bi-weekly bLinks. What's a bLink and who is Thom Wong? Click here for details, and here for a list of his previous, secret internet gems.]

When I was 12, I wanted to be a comic book writer. More specifically, I wanted to make comics. I had no idea there was someone who wrote the dialogue and another who wrote action. However, I couldn't shake the feeling that most superheroes were, to put it mildly, a little lame. Tights? Never getting the girl? Catch phrases? Superheroes seemed less like people I'd want to be and more like Pauly Shore (i.e. not so cool).

Warren Ellis is my kind of comic writer. He smokes. He drinks Jack Daniels for breakfast. He has a fascination with the occult and science and inter-dimensional travel. If you sign up for his mailing list he will send you updates of his sordid life from the pub, usually drunk. And he writes comics -- you know, the things that kids read. A Warren Ellis superhero is just as likely to throw up from binge drinking as she is to fly through the space-time continuum. And she will talk openly about the kinds of things they warn you about in church.

He also runs a forum for even more comic geekery, and updates his blog with personal motivation posters, rants against god and humanity, and invitations to receive the seed of his intelligence. I'll admit it -- this man is my hero.

Thom Wong is a law student who spends an unreasonable amount of time online. His 40 bLinks column runs every Tuesday and Thursday on The Tyee.