FROM ROLLING STONE 14 SEPT 2000, PAGE 140, HARRY THOMAS

COMIC BOOKS, like jazz and hip-hop are an inherently American medium, but it's a thirty-two-year-old Brit named Warren Ellis who's dragging the genre kicking and screaming inti the twenty-first century. More influenced by the Jesus ans Mary Chain than by the Justice League, Ellis' characters are super-human but not always superheroic: They fight for left-wing agendas over God and country, screw each other's brains out and kick puppies in the street.

"I didn't grow up with superheroes the way most of my American peers did," says the auteur. "Therefore I've always considered them faintly silly. Unfortunately, if you want to work in the American business, you've got to put your time in on superheroes."

Ellis started by helping to revive a flagging title (Wildstorm's Stormwatch), out of which grew THE AUTHORITY, a "superhero opera" abpout a group fighting for an agenda far more radical than truth, justice and the American way. Last Winter Marvel Comics handed him X-Force, X-Man and Generation X, three of it's sagiing X-Men spin-offs. "Warren's sick, twisted and entertaining, " says Marvel editor Jason Liebig. "He's high-conspiracy, hyperviolent, hyperattitude.

Now done with his X-work. Ellis is focusing on the two immensely weird series he writes for DC: Planetary, a monthly chronicle of X-Files-style "mystery archeologists," and Transmetropolitan, a seethingnear future epic featuring Soider Jerusalem, an unstable, drug-gobbling gonzo journalist. Ellos' writing has a depth that's rare in comic books and a world view that's grim but oddly tender. As he writesin Planetary, "It's a strange world. Let's keep it that way."