Comicsphere: Ministry Of Space by Warren Ellis

This series answered a question that I am sure a lot of British people have asked themselves — why aren\’t we in space and what it would it have been like if we had managed to get our acts together and get up there?

Ministry Of Space really had a flavour of Dan Dare about it and I know it wasn\’t just the artwork but the entire aesthetic from the language to the way the characters had of acting that did this. The amount of synergy that Ellis gets with his writer\’s is always an amazing thing to behold — and Chris Weston is surely firing on all cylinders. It really takes you to a lot of different places — I am simultaneously getting the hit I got from reading 1950s Eagle Comics; watching British sci-fi of a certain period a la Quatermass or Doctor Who even; bemoaning the current attitude towards space travel; and envisioning a future where some of what is on display here is possible.

Ellis has obviously conquered the world market (for that read America) but he is also producing some of the most uniquely British science fiction of anyone in any field. And by British science fiction I don\’t necessarily mean about Britain, though that often seems the case, but in its sensibilities and its attitudes and preoccupations. This was at once a really fun read and something to think about too. can\’t ask much more from a story.