It's been twenty years since James Bond has shaken or stirred his way through the pages of a comic book, but one of the world's most famous spies is finally returning to the medium.

The new James Bond comic has a solid chance at being one of the most exciting comics of 2015. It's written by Warren Ellis, one of the most celebrated comic-book wordsmiths of the last 25 years, with art by Jason Masters, whose work you may have seen if you've taken a peek at some Batman comics in recent years. But if you're a fan of the movies, it's going to be decidedly different Bond experience than the one you may know from half a century of 007 films: Ellis and Masters are explicitly working with the Bond of Ian Fleming's novels—a rougher, meaner Bond than the one that we know from the movies. (Who, to be fair, is kind of an asshole in his own right.)

Ellis and Masters' first story, VARGR, will unfold across six issues, with at least one more story to follow. VARGR kicks off in Ian Fleming's James Bond #1 from Dynamite Entertainment, which you can purchase at finer comics shops or digitally via platforms like Comixology. (And it even starts with the prerequisite cold-open chase scene, so you'll be right at home if you're coming from the world of James Bond movies.) We spoke with writer Warren Ellis about the ways Fleming's Bond is a different man from the Bond we see in cinemas, why disfigurement is an important aspect of Bond villains, and why exactly a bastard like Bond ever got popular in the first place.

**GQ: You've already said plenty about what Bond is to you, but what makes Bond Bond? Or, rather, what makes Bond not Bond? What's a common slip-up other Bond storytellers flirt with making?**

Ellis: If he's crying and his wife hasn't just died, it's not Bond. I don't care what anyone else says. I'm not going to speak directly to other people's work, but I personally don't see Bond as having much of an emotional range. Also, he can be allowed to be a little sloppy in some situations—duty doesn't necessarily mean engagement, and I think you have to be aware that there's some arrogance to being, as one writer put it, a man with soft shoes and a small gun putting himself into insanely dangerous situations.

"I don't think it's important to completely excavate a man's soul in a single story. Also, hell, Bond might not have much of one."

Your story is about Fleming's Bond, which is a much nastier character—one you say the films have tried to pull away from. How so? Do you think that breaks the character?

I don't know that it necessarily breaks the character. It simply establishes the film Bond as a different man—well, several different men. But you know what I mean. Ultimately, of course, the films had to break away from the Fleming Bond, because the Fleming Bond is probably quite hard to sustain as a "hero" as the culture has evolved away from the days when Fleming was writing.

How do you think such a bastard became such an ideal? Of fashion, of temperament, of lifestyle?

It's a soothing post-empire fiction. There's an old saying about how the sun will never set on the British Empire because God doesn't trust the bastards in the dark. This pleases the darkest parts of us. We can do what we like because it's our right and consequences don't matter.

Bond is often held at remove—partly because of the limitations of cinema. Do you intend to delve deeper into Bond, or is it important to you that he remain a man of action?

Fleming's Bond was never what you'd call a greatly interior man, I don't think. It's worth bearing in mind that I'm writing the Bond of the books, and the film Bond is a different creature operating under different rules. I don't have to express every single story beat emotionally because that's what it's believed to take to keep bums on seats these days, and I don't think it's important to completely excavate the man's soul in a single story. Also, hell, he might not have much of one—and, once my two volumes are done, it might simply be that that I've expressed and laid bare. We'll see.