Famed Comics Writer Warren Ellis Shares His Heartwarming “Kevin Smith Story”

Warren Ellis, the writer behind comics like Transmetropolitan and The Wild Storm, took to his blog to share a heartwarming story about filmmaker Kevin Smith. In a blog post titled “My Kevin Smith Story,” Ellis suggested that the pair not only do not know one another, but that he (Ellis) had apparently said something in an interview once to frustrate Smith. Still, it turns out, when a reader of Ellis’s reached out to him about contacting Smith, an unexpectedly kind gesture followed. In the post, Ellis explained that he did not realize until he related the story recently that he had never talked about it publicly.

Many years ago, Ellis writes, he had a friend whose best friend was in the hospital. When it did not seem like his friend was going to survive, he reached out to Ellis to say that his friend loved Kevin Smith’s work. He asked if, since Smith had worked in comics, Ellis might know him well enough to arrange a phone call or a letter to the dying man. Ellis obliged — to the best of his ability, which he admits was limited. He knew Joe Quesada a little bit, and he knew that Quesada knew Smith, so he reached out that way.

“A few months later, I get an email saying, ‘I’m the guy whose best friend was in the hospital,’ Ellis wrote. “And here’s what happened. Joe, who had no reason to read any email from me, saw the email and with huge kindness forwarded the email to Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith has no reason to read an email with my name on it either. Kevin Smith stands up, makes some calls, gets on a plane, flies all the way across America and goes to the hospital and spends an entire day with the guy’s best friend.”

Over the years, the Venn diagram of the two’s lives has had surprisingly little overlap for two people who loom large in geek culture. Doing a quick search of the two together, you find an old interview in which Smith jokes briefly about Ellis’s work, a blog post in which Ellis praises Smith for his decision to self-distribute films via his roadshow style, and a number of stories about Detective Comics #1000, in which both of them had stories published.

“I still don’t know Kevin Smith, and have never spoken to him,” Ellis wrote. “But here’s what I know about Kevin Smith. He stands the f–k up.”

Smith has a movie coming out in October: Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. You can get tickets via Fathom Events. Ellis writes comics and TV regularly, and if you don’t follow his blog at https://warrenellis.ltd/, you are sorely missing out.