My final Warren Ellis take is on Lazarus Churchyard: The Final Cut. Lazarus is 400 years old when the stories begin. Most of his body has been replaced with "intelligent plastic" that can adapt and react to any situation within 0.132 of a second. Immortality isn't as appealing as you might think. Ennui sets in, and to fight it, Lazarus consumes mass quantities of all kinds of drugs. What he really wants, like the Sybil in Eliot's epigraph to The Wasteland, is to die. What he fears most of all, I think, is that eventually he'll be the only one left alive on earth, even more alone than he is now.The Final Cut is a collection of connected stories, not a novel. In the first story, Churchyard is promised death if he can solve a mystery in a virtual world. Things, as you might expect, don't work out exactly as planned. All the stories are violent, but funny, with really nice artwork by D'Israeli.
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