Warren Ellis's Blog, page 169

comicsweek 19jan11

New comics are released in the US, Canada and the UK on 19 Jan. May be later in other territories. A very quick look at what's good, because I'm in the middle of three other things:

THE BOYS, by old mates Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, reaches #50. Also, Garth Ennis' Battlefields reaches its sixth collected volume with Motherland: Garth's war stories are always required reading. INVINCIBLE IRON MAN, by old mate Matt Fraction, reaches #500. Also, Fraction's CASANOVA vol 1: LUXURIA is re-released in its enhanced, coloured and remastered form: CASANOVA is probably the best science fiction comic in print anywhere in the world right now. Simple as that. If you haven't read it yet, fix that with this book.

It's Brian Wood week: #61 of political sf serial DMZ, #36 of his series of Viking stories NORTHLANDERS.

MEMOIR #1 (OF 6): I know nothing about this beyond the solicits text reprinted below, but CHOKER was fun, and anyone wrestling Nikki Cook into drawing six issues of anything gets my vote.

Writer BEN McCOOL (CHOKER) teams up with artist NIKKI COOK (Girl Comics, DMZ) for this six-part tale of mystery and memory loss. Lowesville is a small town in the American Midwest, peaceful and quaint. But one morning the population awakens with no idea of who they are, where they are, or what's happened. The town's memory has been completely erased. All except for one man… He remembers everything.

Bendis and Maleev's SCARLET #4 – I've only read the first two issues, and need to catch up. So far, it's been a raw-boned look at a corrupt society and the moral justification for vigilantism. I suspect there's much more to be unpacked.

The Complete BAD COMPANY: a collection of the classic serial from 2000AD, where Peter Milligan and Brett Ewins took that anthology's traditional "future war" form and stood it on its head. This was brilliant stuff.

RAT CATCHER – crime graphic novel written by Andy Diggle. Looks fun.

SECRET AVENGERS Vol 1: MISSION TO MARS (HC) – I gave Ed Brubaker all kinds of hell about SEKRITLY AVENGING ON MARS, but, really, this is the sort of state of the art superhero comic that, if you like superhero comics, you're doing yourself a great injustice by not reading.

STIGMATA is a hardcover GN illustrated by the European maestro Lorenzo Mattotti. I haven't seen it yet, but, really, you should at least look at anything by Mattotti.

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RED 2 Script Commissioned

As reported in many and various places, Summit have commissioned RED screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber to write a sequel script to the film.

Of course, a sequel script takes the property even further away from Cully's and my original book. But then, there wouldn't be a sequel without the characters Jon and Erich created in addition to our own, and the entertaining adaptation they rendered from the work. The commencement of the sequel process is all about the success of their work.#

Be advised, though, that this IS just the commencement of the process, and it comes with many hurdles. No guarantee of a film yet. Though I'm hoping it happens, just because I like those people. And, you know, bigger and better guns for Dame Helen…

Just filed the first piece of DO ANYTHING 2 with Bleeding...

Just filed the first piece of DO ANYTHING 2 with Bleeding Cool. They'll probably want to wait until I build up a few numbers before they start running them, unless they're more eager to run it than I suspect.

This one is actually going to be more of a mess than the last one, if that's possible.

GUEST INFORMANT: Paul Duffield

I asked Paul Duffield, illustrator of our online comic FREAKANGELS, to write to you about whatever was in his head today. Unusually for comics artists, he can form sentences very well, and this is what he had to say:

Image by Ben Templesmith via Flickr

A few weeks ago I was asked to do an interview for a dissertation about motion comics because of my background in animation. It's not something I'd ever given much thought to, but surely I should be full of positive things to say since they combine my favourite disciplines. Instead I was left with the tricky task of trying to explain why I'm not keen on them, wondering all the time whether I was just being a big snob about the whole thing.

The problem is, film (including animation) and comics are very different creatures, but I'm of the opinion that they are too freely associated with each other academically and creatively. When editing in a film is discussed, it's a very direct and tangible topic that can be measured in seconds and frames. Short of appealing to the subjectivity of conscious experience and all that, you have to admit that the editor of a film is almost completely in control of the watcher's experience. But for the creator of a comic comics that's not the case by half.

If you consider adapting a double page spread in a comic to film, it might take up as much as 2 or 3 minutes of the watcher's time, but when seen on the page the same sequence can be casually scanned by a reader in any order and in less than a few seconds. Obviously that doesn't tend to happen when the reader is in a proper flow, but it is real issue when the text-to-image ratio gets too dense, or when a layout is confusing. The reader can be distracted by events in the future that they glimpse on the opposite page, or have their attention grabbed by a particular drawing for any number of hard-to-predict reasons. The comics creator can hope to guide the reader in the right direction, but reading a comic will never be the same passive experience that watching a film is.

For me, that's how a comic is defined: a page exists all at once but is read bit by bit. It's a unique storytelling property, and it leads to the wonderful fact that comics are a different work of art on the level of the story, the page and the panel… and the equally frustrating fact that it's often hard to herd the reader into appreciating that during a casual read.

By that definition, there's not much "comic" in motion comics, since they tend to be presented just like an animation, or more precisely like an animatic, which is a stage that animated films sometimes pass through in early production in order to test the timing of a storyboard. Consequently, all the effort in producing a motion comic tends to go into creating the illusion of movement in a static frame, leaving little scope for the animated elements to actually add to the storytelling or characterisation. When it comes down to it, there's nothing to distinguish something claiming to be a "motion comic" from other low-budget animation beyond the superficial comic trappings left over from the cut-up original.

This isn't to say that they can't and haven't be well done before, but I think there might be a deeper problem at work – if a motion comic is constructed out of frames from pre-existing comics, they have to present parts of a now-missing page, (literally ripping bits of art out of a larger piece of art), and because they're low budget, they offer very little to replace what has been lost. I've never found the result as engaging as either the original comic, or a purpose-built animation. And if a motion comic is actually a purpose-built animation, then there's no need to call it a comic – it's not one.

Ideally, I'd love to see animation and comics in a new fusion-genre with its own unique storytelling properties, but most attempts seem to fall into the sort of lacklustre animation I've described, or into experimental webcomics with interactive or animated features (the only successful one of which I've ever seen is When I am King). With the internet and internet devices being what they are, I wonder if we're seeing a new medium spending a bit too long in its infancy, or just the illusion of one that just doesn't have anywhere meaningful to go. I guess time will tell.

Paul Duffield can be found at spoonbard.com when he's not drawing FREAKANGELS.

Other Guest Informant posts on warrenellis.com.

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Station Ident

Received in email from Bruce Bortin, who says:

This graf was on the wall of a parking lot at the corner of 14th St & Harrison in Oakland CA USA a few months ago. I trudge by there on my way to and from my job at San Francisco's Homeless Advocacy Project, where I do daily battle with a bloated and entrenched federal bureaucracy, trying to get benefits for the psychologically and methadonically disabled citizens of that great but benighted city.

I'm prit-near 58 years old. This is who reads you.

Thanks for everything.

Thank you.

Good morning, sinners.

Magazines And Kindle

My feeds are full of people talking about magazines and iPads. I would like to read more magazines on my Kindle.

I have a digital subscription to LOCUS, the journal of record for the science fiction publishing industry, but getting it on to the Kindle is slightly more of a fuckabout than it should be. My Kindle lives on my desk, propped between my Buddha Machine and my Gristleism box. I should be able to flick it on to wifi, have magazines automagically load on to it, and flick it off again. Which I could, if I wanted something off Kindle's shitty selection. (Like the appalling and overpriced port of THE ECONOMIST.) Magazine publishers who decide to improve Kindle would get great love from me.

Because you know what's great about Kindle? It's not just about the grey slate. My iPhone is a Kindle, through the Kindle for iPhone app. My computer is a Kindle, through Kindle for PC. There's a Kindle app for your iPad, too, and for my daughter's Android phone. Kindle will put its disease into most connected devices, and will sync across all of them.

I do have a digital version of THE WIRE as part of my subscription to that magazine. But, I have to say — like a lot of magazines, the design is not the reason to buy it. THE WIRE's magazine is in fact famously practical and minimalist. If all you're really selling are the words — why aren't you just shoving them into a Kindle wrapper, instead of giving me a 250MB download of exported graphics files?

More Kindle magazines, please. Thank you.

From my Instagram

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Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from warrenellis's posterous

The Girl Who Played With Fire (film)

Katie West commented to me the other day that she'd started keeping lists of the culture she consumed this year, because doing a year-end list always favours the last five things you saw or read. So I just watched this:

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE, Swedish language. The odd thing about this adaptation of Larsson — as opposed to the same team's adapation of DRAGON TATTOO — is that the changes made from the book seem to make it a better adaptation, but not necessarily a better film. It's a streamlined true Larsson, rather than a less-true Larsson optimised for film.

The ending of DRAGON TATTOO, the book, is like a great orchestral strike followed by two hours of variations on minor themes as members of the orchestra drift off one by one until there's just some geezer left tinkling a triangle. The film version ends with a nice little rimshot. PLAYED WITH FIRE is stripped down, but is so protective of the spine of the storytelling that the ending, which in the book is a collision of plotlines… really kind of drags. Kinder to the book in lots of ways (crueller in a few: Bublanski becomes a cartoon, for example, and the more gothic aspects of Niederman are erased, which also affects the climax). Less successful as a film.

Still a joy to watch Noomi Rapace and the undervalued Michael Nyquist work.

Trish Keenan

Trish Keenan, of the band Broadcast, died this morning of pneumonia following a swine flu infection.

I first discovered Broadcast around 1997, and their HA HA SOUND remains one of my favourite albums. Their 2009 collaboration with The Focus Group, WITCH CULTS OF THE RADIO AGE, was barely off my playlists for a year. Keenan described that record to Joe Stannard in THE WIRE like this:

"I'd like people to enjoy the album as a Hammer horror dream collage where Broadcast play the role of the guest band at the mansion drug party by night, and a science worshipping Eloi possessed by 3/4 rhythms by day, all headed by the Focus Group leader who lays down sonic laws that break through the corrective systems of timing and keys."

She was an artist and channeller of the authentic British strangeness, a medium singing the glossolalia of radiophonic culture. I'm saddened and not a little horrified by her passing, and the cone of silence it leaves in the world.

FREAKANGELS 0121

Beginning the sixth and final volume.