As announced earlier today, Warren Ellis will be taking over Marvel's Secret Avengers with issue #16. In light of that exciting announcement, we had a brief chat with the writer to bring us up to speed on what he's got planned for the team.

Yes. Secret Avengers has an incredibly simple setup. Run the mission. Don't get seen. Save the world. Easy. The frontispiece tells you everything about the characters you need to know.You make it sound like I get my choice of Marvel jobs! No, what happened was, Ed Brubaker was leaving the book, and he suggested me to replace him. I'm still under contract at Marvel, and they can take my house away if I turn down a job. Which is why I'm writing the Spectacular Spider-Ham: The Vicodin Years book that's also being announced this weekend.Right now, six issues. I said to Tom [Brevoort], I'll do six, and if I haven't completely screwed the deadlines, I'll do you another six. But if the book falls late, I'll bail out and you can hand off to someone who's actually professional. So we'll see.The thing that I like about them -- that also makes it easy for me to step in for a while until they find a writer they actually like -- is that they don't have a context in the greater Marvel Universe. They operate under the radar and out of sight. If they did in fact have a broader continuity context, the book's central concept would break.Not so much. One thing that does change the nature of the book is that my six issues are all self-contained single issues. So they're all about working through each book's mission, which doesn't leave much space for the characters to do anything other than be who they are.Moon Knight could have been a member of either team. Insofar as he is, as Henry McCoy describes him in my first issue, a borderline psychotic who wears a white bag over his head.