Warren Ellis has a Big Idea right now, and he calls it Pop Comics. He's been talking about them on and off for a while now, but with the launch of MINISTRY OF SPACE we've finally got an example to hold in our hands. If you haven't read it, it's an alternate-history following up the idea that the British steal the German rocket scientists after World War II and dominate the space race. The first issue is excellent, and well worth your attention.

But one issue of one series doesn't really tell us an enormous amount about what this Pop Comics thing is meant to be. Helpfully, Ellis has issued a "working definition." I'm not going to reproduce the entire thing, since it's a mini-essay - you can read it here. However, here are what look like the two key bits.

"The basic definition of the Pop Comic is a finite, commercially accessible, inventive and intelligent modern comics work. A cultural handgrenade, short, bright and inexpensive. An art bomb, cheap as a single and demanding as much of your time. Three or four issues, or a short original graphic novel...

"And the Pop Comic is creator owned."

When questioned on the definition on his Delphi Forum, Ellis has pretty much taken the line that having invented the concept, he can define it however the hell he likes. This is, of course, entirely correct. It's his idea, and he can call it whatever he wants. That doesn't really address the question, though, of whether the label "Pop Comics" has a great deal to do with the actual content of the idea.

Where's this whole 'Pop' thing coming from? Pop is a concept lifted from music, but a tricky one to pin down. On one view, it's more of a zeitgeist thing than a musical concept, since the style of music that counts as pop will change from generation to generation. On the other hand, the key elements do tend to remain more or less steady. The KLF's notorious textbook THE MANUAL - HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE THE EASY WAY sets the golden basic rules out at length. The basics do not change - the use of ultra-simplistic lyrical themes, the length and structure of the songs (though instrumental verses have become more popular in the last decade with the rise of dance music), and for god's sake making sure it's something even the most club-footed drunkard can still dance to more or less successfully. The knack is to take this pile of hopeless clichés, and make them appear contemporary by welding them onto an idea you've nicked from something genuinely imaginative and watered down for public consumption.

Of course, there are exceptions. Every so often, the public will go straight to the source and turn people like Eminem into unlikely superstars, without waiting for Ricky Martin to do a watered-down version first. But this is rare, and it happens only to artists who are producing material that fits into the golden rules. Eminem records fit squarely into the rules. Much the same applies to the Britpop boom of the early nineties, the last period in which British indie music was having regular major hits.

But the majority of pop is people following the formula and appealing to the public mood of the time. There is nothing necessarily wrong in this; it just isn't much of an artistic pursuit. If you judge the Backstreet Boys as children's entertainers - which is what they are - then they're pretty good at it.

We have a tendency to romanticise pop. Pop means S Club 7 and Britney Spears. Only a tiny minority of it is even remotely like the Beatles or Nirvana.

If a pop comic is a comic - or a genre of comics - that has actually achieved a place in mainstream popular culture, then there probably aren't any right now. British humour comic VIZ might still just about qualify in the UK. In North America, the most prominent contender would be POKEMON. Bearing in mind the X-Men's position in the direct market and the success of the property in animation and film, the X franchise is about as close as the industry can get for the over-tens, which may well mean that Grant Morrison has chosen the best vehicle available to him right now for his own personal project. (If you think that NEW X-MEN is watered down Grant Morrison, by the way, you're missing the point. On the contrary, it's precisely what Morrison is all about. But that's an article for another time.)

There probably aren't any Pop Comics right now. Ellis would presumably answer that this isn't the point. His definition of Pop Comics is aspirational. He's not saying that this is what pop comics are right now. He's saying that this is what he wants pop comics to be like. It's a manifesto, not a description.

All very well, but if Ellis' aspirations for pop comics are divorced from the reality of pop, can it really take us very far as a concept? Much of what's in his definition, of course, is fine and goes to the roots of pop. "Commercially accessible", "modern" - these go to the roots of pop. "Inexpensive" - well, yes, insofar as this goes to accessibility. But Ellis seems to be identifying his concept of pop exclusively with the pop single, blurring over the fact that, at least in this country, pop does rather well in album format. Quite how Ellis hopes to produce miniseries or graphic novels for the price of a single is a bit of a mystery to me as well, to be honest, unless he's proposing to print them in digest format on toilet paper. This emphasis on the single fits rather snugly with Ellis' understandable aversion to the ongoing series format, but he seems to be pursuing the analogy further than it will bear.

"A cultural handgrenade" and "an art bomb"... Well, pop can do these things - look at the Sex Pistols or the KLF - but it's not something that's particularly Pop by nature. Pop can do art in the same sense that pop can do charity songs about starving Africans. It's something you weld onto the formula, it's not the formula itself. Whatever else they may have been, the New Kids on the Block were not an art bomb, and Bros were not a cultural handgrenade. This is the sort of arthouse vision of pop that leads people into trying to argue that Atari Teenage Riot are a pop band, and when you hit that point, you've lost the plot.

New Kids on the Block were not an art bomb. As for being creator-owned, Ellis has very good reasons for supporting this, but that doesn't change the fact that it's nothing to do with pop. Pop is all about the relationship between the work and the mass public, not the contractual and intellectual property arrangements behind its creation. The public does not care whether the Spice Girls own their own recordings, or what Robbie Williams receives royalties on. Ellis is right to support creator-ownership, but it is not something that is ever going to play a part in determining whether something becomes a pop comic or not - save, of course, under Ellis' own definition.

Ellis' vision is a sound one, but it's one for the intelligent mainstream as part of a wider spectrum of pop comics in a thriving medium. Because if and when the blessed day comes that the general public actually gives a toss about comics and starts buying them, the vast majority of what they buy will not be arty, will not be imaginative, and very probably will not be any good. Drivel will dominate, just as it does now. If you want a true mass market, that means appealing to the people who watch TV, listen to music, and watch films. It is a pipe dream to expect that their quality control will be any higher when it comes to comics. There will be a place for good material in mass-market comics, just as there is in the other mass media, but it's not going to be the majority. If we want nothing but an educated and thoughtful audience, that's fine, but we should be prepared to relegate ourselves to the Box of Popular Irrelevance next to ballet, opera and mime.

The words "Pop Comics" carry with them a whole load of baggage that the underlying concept isn't really equipped to deal with. Ellis can call the idea whatever he wants, but that doesn't automatically make it a good choice of name. If "Pop Comics" is going to be this year's rallying cry for the Ellisites, it would help if it were more in key with the idea it's mean to represent.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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