Warren Ellis's Blog, page 166
January 25, 2011
Mega City One
Via kateoplis:
China is planning to create the world's biggest mega city by merging nine cities to create a metropolis twice the size of Wales with a population of 42 million. The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London…
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comicsweek 26jan11
Comics are on sale in the UK, US and Canada from 26 Jan, later in other territories. Here's a few things worth paying attention to this week:
THE NEW YORK FIVE #1 (of 4) – a sequel to Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly's NEW YORK FOUR graphic novel — pretty sure this'll read fine as a standalone. Nicely observed human strangeness in the big city, with gorgeous art.
THE STRANGE CASE OF EDWARD GOREY is a very-well reviewed memoir of the artist by Alexander Theroux, in a typically lovely Fantagraphics Books edition.
THE SIXTH GUN #8 – this supernatural Western snuck up on a lot of people. Possibly because, you know, most people's blood turns to scabs as soon as you say "supernatural Western." It's actually really attractive, energetic popcorn comics.
I haven't read Jeremy Bastian's CURSED PIRATE GIRL, but I've seen some of the art, and it's absolutely beautiful. There's an element of Tenniel's woodcuts to it, and certainly an ALICE IN WONDERLAND-like dreaminess infused into the whole thing — but it also seems more active and driven. And it's called CURSED PIRATE GIRL, which is a win right there. Keep an eye out for the trade paperback, out this week.
Talking of woodcuts, Lynd Ward's SIX NOVELS IN WOODCUTS gets a slipcased edition with a contextualising foreword by art spiegelman. These wordless graphic novels are actually central comics works, and you should look at them at some point (even if it's not this edition, which is somewhat pricey).
In hardcover, SAGA OF THE SWAMP THING Book 4 takes the reprint series well into the American Gothic sequence of Alan Moore's defining run with Steve Bissette, John Totleben, Rick Veitch and other drawing. Some of Alan's best short horror fiction is contained here.
Also in hardcover, volume 3 of Matz & Jacamon's THE KILLER, entitled MODUS VIVENDI. THE KILLER, French comics beauty tinged with Westlake as well as Jean-Pierre Melville, is some of the best crime comics being published today. Remarkably fearless in the way it keeps the titular character moving and changing.
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Bookmarks for 2011-01-24
teaser for the webcomic by Robin LeBlanc and Neil Struthers
(tags:webcomic )
Google Takes Cloud Print Mobile. Well, Sort Of — PC Still Required
"Imagine printing an important document from your smartphone on the way to work and finding the printout waiting for you when you walk in the door. Just open a document in Google Docs or an email in Gmail in your mobile browser and choose 'Print' from the dropdown menu in the top right corner."
(tags:comp )
The Illustrated Section
"The Illustrated Section is your home for digital comics, picture books, sketchbooks, and art instruction books made by independent creators. Everything here is available for instant download in the widely universal and diverse PDF format."
(tags:comics magazine ebook shop )
January 24, 2011
GUEST INFORMANT: Matt Jones
Matt Jones is a principal at BERG, has done award-winning design work for the BBC, has been a director for Nokia Design and Dopplr, and is a visiting tutor at the Royal College Of Art. He is also very good at drinking beer. I asked him to write to you about whatever was in his head today, and he said:
I just had a chat with my dad on the phone.
He's 80 this year, a retired – well, lots of things. He gets bored. Amongst other things he was an engineer in the steel industry – and he thought that his grasp of maths might of helped in understanding a recent BBC documentary entitled "What Is Reality?" (http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/xxgbn/).
The programme was a series of interviews with particle physicists and cosmologists. He told me he didn't sleep a wink after watching it – his mind was racing all night. He told me he came to the conclusion that they were all bluffing.
By coincidence – I'd been reading an article in New Scientist about the many models and theories of quantum reality at play. I told him about the one that caught my eye – referenced in the leader of NS the same week.
It is simply entitled:
"Shut Up & Calculate".
As that leader article describes: "the most practical approach comes from the quantum agnostics who simply "shut up and calculate", while subscribing to no particular interpretation. This approach has delivered novel materials and devices."
"Shut Up & Calculate" is the 'what works, works' practical chaosmagick that gives us most of the early 21st century. It ignores philosophising, and puts it's emphasis on results. It's the surprise you get when you turn the handle, rather than worryingly looking at the machine.
So, "Shut Up & Calculate".
The old engineer laughed.
He liked that. A lot.
Matt Jones blogs when the mood takes him at Magical Nihilism. You can usually catch him speaking at tech and design conferences around the world a few times a year.
Bookmarks for 2011-01-23
"The Minister of Chance is a new form of entertainment – a radiophonic drama – made using a combination of film and radio techniques and delivered by podcast. It is the first, but we hope not last, of its kind." New form of entertainment my arse.
(tags:radio )
January 23, 2011
Who I Am And Where I Am (January 2011)
My name's Warren Ellis. I write comics, graphic novels, journalism and anything else that people pay money for. I live in south-east England.
I'm the writer of the graphic novel RED, the film version of which (starring Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman & Helen Mirren) came out in October. I'm the writer of the GRAVEL graphic novels, under development for film by Legendary Pictures. I also wrote the novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. I have an Amazon.com page here. (Ignore anything it says about LISTENER, that book was lost and cancelled years ago.)
I write here almost every day. A collection of the writing I've done here and elsewhere on the internet, SHIVERING SANDS, was published in 2009.
Quick links: Whitechapel (message board) – Twitter – an Official Warren Ellis Page on that Facebook thing – a store of Things at CafePress.
(I do have a personal page on that Facebook thing, but I only add people I know, really)
You can also find me on Instagram as warrenellis. I have a Tumblr that I pretty much only use for reblogging stuff I find on Tumblr and mirroring my Instagram posts. It's not very interesting. You don't want the link.
For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or tell me about new music or send me tips or whatever, I've set up a Gmail account that I check once every day or so: warrenellis@gmail.com. This isn't, I stress, my main email account, and it's not for asking me when some comic's coming out (there's a FAQ for that). Always interested in new music, new art, new connections, dirty pictures, madness etc.
If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.
If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.
If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical… um, well, you can't, right now. My book agent has gotten flooded with stuff of late, and I feel terrible about drowning them in things like that. So I'm going to sort myself out a PO Box here in the UK in a couple of weeks, I swear…
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Bookmarks for 2011-01-22
"The man's death is believed to be related to a lethal hallucinogenic drug, paramethoxymethamphetamine or PMMA, that may have been sold as ecstasy, and may go by the street name "death"."
(tags:drugs )
perfect wave magazine vol. 1 – spring/summer 2011 | in theory, a perfect wave driven by perfect winds should, after a certain time, produce a perfect wave field, no matter the initial state. However, in real atmospheres, unstable behavior makes a wave f
side-scrolling multimedia web magazine
(tags:webmag )
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