Lazarus Churchyard

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Lazarus Churchyard is a comic series created in the early 1990s by Warren Ellis and illustrated by D'Israeli. It originally appeared in Blast! magazine until its demise, and was subsequently reprinted elsewhere, for example Beyond 2000AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine. Although some stories have been illustrated by others, Ellis is on record as only considering the D'Israeli-illustrated work "the definitive Churchyard".

The stories are cyberpunk in theme, although Ellis himself has stated that he does not consider it cyberpunk, having referred to it at times as "decadent SF". The eponymous central character took part in a "plasborging" experiment in which around eighty per cent of his body was replaced with an intelligent, evolving plastic, which can react in 0.132 of a second to any situation and adapt accordingly. In the story, this adaptation usually takes the form of growing spikes, blades or similar weapons. The plastic also processes toxins of all kinds, essentially making Churchyard immortal.

The stories take place some four hundred years after this experiment; Churchyard is by now heartily sick of his immortality and simply wants to die. He inhabits a dystopian future in which the United Kingdom has been taken over by a corporation called Isis-Elek and renamed Savoy, while large parts of the globe have been rendered uninhabitable by germ warfare. Many of the elements of this world foreshadow elements of Ellis's later Transmetropolitan - designer plastic surgery, legalised recreational drugs, and notably a passing reference to "The alien colony in Old Vilnius". However, Lazarus Churchyard is more caricatured in tone; the drugs, sex and violence less detailed and more extreme.

Despite this, the stories still manage to include clear expressions of social conscience. In Lucy, Lazarus tells the story of a robot created as part of an early experiment into the intelligent plastic which created him. Called Lucy, the robot was a "sentient plastic lifeform... sculpted to look like the prettiest twelve-year-old you ever saw". Lucy's subsequent abuse at the hands of her creator is told in heart-rending detail.

The Ellis/D'Israeli stories were collected in a single volume in 1992 by Atomeka Press and most recently in 2001 by Image Comics (ISBN 1-58240-180-2). In his introduction to the collected edition, D'Israeli describes Ellis at the time of writing as being "an amazing spleen-fuelled stick-figure with a carnivorous glint in his eye, dressed in a black suit which was degraded just so". As such, it is possible that his visualisation of Lazarus was at least partly based on Ellis himself.