Warren Ellis's Blog, page 147
March 23, 2011
CAPTURED GHOSTS: New Trailer
That bloody documentary about me just released a new trailer, which you can find here on WIRED'S underwire blog.
Horrible.
March 22, 2011
HALF MOON: New Concept Art From Mike
I said we were showing you this in realtime. Mike shot this over a couple of hours ago. I think he wants to stick some Letratone on it at some point. But, goddamn, look at this. This is like eighty percent of what we've been talking about boiled down into one sketch.
Isn't that just bloody gorgeous?
I made him listen to "King Night" by SALEM earlier, and he figures that "that's our theme music right there." I need to knock together a HALF MOON playlist tomorrow.
Related articles
HALF MOON With Mike Oeming: First Notes (warrenellis.com)
Bookmarks for 2011-03-22
"It's a website where you can download and listen to electronic podcasts and radio show in streaming. We feature the mosts interesting ones ;)"
(tags:music podcast )
Tuesdays Are The New Mondays
Matt Jones of BERG just sent me this: "Farmpunk" —
A farmpunk could be described as a neo-agrarian who approaches [agri]culture, community development and/or design with a hacker ethos. "Cyber-agrarian" could supplant neo-agrarian, indicating a back-to-the-land perspective that stands apart from past movements because it is heavily informed by conceptual integration in a post-industrial information society (thus "forward to the land" perhaps?) The art and science of modern ecological design will be best achieved through the combined arts of cybermancy and geomancy. These hermeneutic disciplines are not categorical or reductionist, but open-ended. Natural ecologies must be seen as the original cybernetic systems.
Also includes the wonderful phrase "Post-Normal Science." Which is now my favourite term.
Apparently the documentary about me and my work, CAPTURED GHOSTS, ran out of money.
Hence they're on Kickstarter, tempting you with rewards in return for a financial pledge to help them finish the thing.
I just noticed that my friend the mad journalist woman Laurie Penny has her new book MEAT MARKET released by Zer0 Books next month. I wrote a blurb for this, lemme see if I can dig it out…
"Laurie Penny hones her every phrase to a razor's edge. She is absolutely surgical in her anatomising of a mad world. MEAT MARKET is the kind of cut you learn from." -- Warren Ellis, author of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, RED
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Which also reminds me: Laurie wants me to give this a listen at some point. You might want to as well.
Via Rita King, your memefood for the day: 50 Unexplainable Black And White Photos.
Katie West by Chad Michael Ward.
Katie's own book of photography, BLACK AND WHITE, is still available.
I think Katie and Laurie were going to work together on something at some point, actually. I hope that still happens one day. But right now Laurie's trying to save journalism and all that, which reminds me, I have to stop and answer a long email about Schemes from her now. More later.
(I'm also hoping that one day Laurie and Molly Crabapple find a way to work together. They got on like a house on fire when I introduced them. My only worry is that, working together, they probably would set actual houses on actual fire.)
March 21, 2011
HALF MOON With Mike Oeming: First Notes
POWERS, MICE TEMPLAR, staff creator at Valve Software, and a vast number of other things (including one of my favourite graphic novellas, PARLIAMENT OF JUSTICE.
Course you do. Everyone knows Mike Avon Oeming. He's one of the best pure comics artists working today, and an excellent and underrated writer. Look at this.
Sometimes, a new project starts as simply as this:
An email out of the blue. And then a flurry of responses – because I'm not stupid, I wanted to get moving before he sobered up or the drugs wore off or whatever the hell had happened to him to make him email me.
These sketches are all from the earliest part of the discussion, before I'd said
Which led to another round of sketches and notes, and cutting some stuff and rethinking some stuff, which led to the concept firming up a bit, which led to what we're currently calling HALF MOON.
We're working in realtime on this one. We agreed on the general concepts just a couple of hours ago, and will spend the next few days in development on it, to see what we've actually got. So I thought, and Mike agreed, it might be interesting to open the process out and let you see a bit of the sausage-making. As it were.
So what you're seeing here is the stuff that led to the stuff we're actually doing. The piece on the left, for instance: I was particularly interested in the heavy helmet collar, so that's what we're taking from that image.
(When we started, Mike shot me a lot of stuff from his sketchbook, just to see if anything sparked. And, as noted above, there were a LOT of spacegirls. So I'm happy to write something that he clearly sub-consciously really wants to draw!)
There will be more notes here as the project develops. And at some point we'll even tell you where to find it. At some point.
Bryan Lee O'Malley's Los Angeles
You know Bryan Lee O'Malley. He did SCOTT PILGRIM. He's also written a couple of my favourite pop songs. He's a bit handy with a camera and the old Instagram, it turns out.
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I Will Die With Damp Bones (warrenellis.com)
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Bookmarks for 2011-03-20
"106 of the most beloved Street Art Photos – Year 2010"
(tags:cities art )
Hauntological Futures | booktwo.org
"I think my problem with hauntology is that it deals with the problem of the future by going back to the past. And that is fine: but it will not save us."
(tags:hauntology )
SVK Approaches Invisibly
We're getting there.
SVK is shooting for a mid/end-April completion, currently. A completely jinxed project, this. I got really sick twice, so did Matt Brooker (and his back went out to the extent that he couldn't sit and draw), AND there were moments like this:
Warren sits down to work
Warren opens the SVK script
Warren just starts typing
A waterpipe explodes in the bathroom
Absolutely fucking cursed from start to finish. But, as you can see above, it's looking good, because Matt Brooker (better known to comics folk as D'Israeli) is the king. I probably shouldn't be leaking that bit of art out, but fuck it.
Have you signed on to the SVK mailing list yet?
The mailing list is there because our partners in crime, BERG, are not distributing it in comics stores. It's going to be mail-order only. Which is why we're not too worried about the extended production time – there's no solicitation process to comics stores, a thing that adds two months from completion to publication. On SVK, as soon as we're done we go to print and mail them out when they're back from the printers (complete with attached UV torch).
There's a UV torch because… well, it was announced in WIRED UK, and you can find that link at the SVK mailing list site. But the deal is that when you use the UV torch on the page, you can see what most of the characters are thinking.
That's what SVK is. A Special Viewing Kit. Among other things. SVK is a story and a design experiment. And, I think a sign of bigger and better things to come from our collaborators and enablers at BERG.
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Bitdust (warrenellis.com)
Idle Thought On Comics And Social Media (warrenellis.com)
Having Someone's Disease In You: Not Always Fun (warrenellis.com)
The Care And Management Of Eyeballs (warrenellis.com)
March 20, 2011
Comics Paperbacks
Fonografiks is busy re-imagining popular comics as second-hand paperbacks from the Sixties and Seventies. Wonderful stuff at the link. Also, these two obscure works:
Warren Ellis's Blog
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