Warren Ellis's Blog, page 183

comicsweek 24nov10

New comics are released into comics stores on Wednesdays in North America and Thursdays in the UK.

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After we finished TRANSMETROPOLITAN, two major sf series followed it at DC Vertigo. Brian Vaughan and Pia Guerra's Y THE LAST MAN and, still being serialised today, Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli's DMZ. I love this series. Brian's done some simply amazing things with it, and in places has broken ground that much of the rest of the medium hasn't even noticed yet. DMZ #59 is the pause before what looks like the final year of the book — or, at least, the final year of the war in and around Manhattan that DMZ has depicted. For most of the series, Manhattan has been the DMZ of the title, a buffer between opposing fronts in a new American civil war. Things have not gone well. This issue, guest illustrated by the remarkable writer/artist David Lapham, sets the stage for what comes next.

And here are clicky pictures for two more pages:

INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #32 and SECRET AVENGERS #7 are probably the two most entertaining straight superhero books Marvel are producing right now, and they're both out this week.

The new ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY is out, #20, presented, as has become customary, in an expensive hardcover edition. At this point, I imagine you already know if you want it or not. As a continuation of a serial, it's your choice whether you want a USD $24 book that's the middle of a story as your first experience of Chris Ware. That said, if you haven't yet read Chris Ware, you should see to that soon. I was going to refer you to his publisher's catalogue, but most of his books seem to be out of stock.

THE WALKING DEAD continues to impress: Robert Kirkman's best work, writing with an admirable ruthlessness, and Charlie Adlard becoming ever more magnificent. The thirteenth collection, TOO FAR GONE, is out this week, as is #79 of the serial. This is first and last time I'll mention THE WALKING DEAD in these notes, because it's about to become as ubiquitous as LOST and hardly hurting for an audience. And you'll be able to find all the collections easily in bookstores, and wonder to yourself why this wasn't selling sixty thousand copies per serial issue in comics stores.

STATION IDENT: EG Gauger

This week's Station Idents are provided by artist EG Gauger.

This piece of art, executed in Walnut inkwash on a piece of marble slab lifted from bulldozed junk piles in Berlin's St. Marien cemetery, is for sale. Find out more at this link.

Crush

Mondays are always work days that don't involve much actual writing. Mondays are for email, setting up conferences, touching base on things, general admin, catching up with news… Mark Romanek is negotiating to direct the pilot of LOCKE AND KEY based on Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez' comics series, which is lovely news (I once wrote a foreword to a LOCKE AND KEY collection)… I'm trying to clear the time to attend THRILLING WONDER STORIES 2 in London on Friday, but it's not looking good… RED's still in the US movie top ten this week, even after the crushing of what I may have called on Twitter HARRY POTTER AND THE UNSETTLING HANDJOB IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT… six weeks in the top ten, even, which is very pleasant… having to reconfigure the next month's work, not so much. Just a few too many things have gone Horribly Wrong in the last six months. Still, things should get quiet at the end of the week, when America goes into a meat coma…

Also Molly Crabapple is threatening my internal organs again, which I think means she's back in London to paint more filthy murals next week. And Templesmith is talking about some all-inclusive Templesmith App for iOS. He didn't seem thrilled when I suggested it was going to be called iSquid, but then I don't think he's really parsed the whole "stroke or swipe the Templesmith for information" of it all.

Also, this:

More stuff tomorrow.

Greetings Card Of The Season: SATAN

It's that time of year. And we live to meet your needs, here at the International Electrophonic Union. Behold:

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Indeed. You may view your purchase options here at the IEU Store.

GUEST INFORMANT: Steven Shaviro

Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University in the US and the author of many wonderful books like DOOM PATROLS and CONNECTED. His new book POST CINEMATIC AFFECT, is about the intersection of supermodern life and the new cinema. I asked him to write to you about his strangest and/or most interesting film experiences of the last year.

This is not a definitive top ten list; there are too many recent films that I still haven't seen (including Red, based on Warren's graphic novel). But the films that especially impressed me over the past year include the following:

* Splice (Vincenzo Natali). A box office flop, but to my mind the best SF/biohorror film since early Cronenberg. Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody are genius bioengineers who create an intelligent transhuman entity as their "child," and then don't know how to treat her. Disturbing less for the body special effects than for the emotional claustrophobia. What's the use of creating something new, if we still act in all the old, stupid ways?

* Scott Pilgrim Vs the World (Edgar Wright). Another box office flop that I thought was pure genius. A movie entirely styled in the manner of indy comics and 1980s videogames. A film so dynamic, and so attuned to our current multimediated world, that it even made Michael Cera seem empathetic. This is the future of movies; nearly everything else seems drearily 20th-century in comparison.

* Life and Death of a Porno Gang (Mladen Djordjevic). This Serbian film has not yet been released in the US or the UK, though it played at several horror festivals, and has been in circulation on the Internet. A troupe of performers goes around the countryside on a hippie bus, offering audiences "the first porno cabaret in the Balkans." But they are drawn instead into a creepy underworld of violence and exploitation. Eros turns out to be no match for Thanatos, at least in today's world of gangster capitalism. A film that pushes into new extremes of graphic sex and violence (although in this respect it is outmatched by its companion piece, Srdjan Spasojevic's A Serbian Film, which goes to extremes that would make even the crassest exploitation filmmakers blush).

* Enter the Void (Gaspar Noé). An amazing psychedelic downer of a movie. The main character is killed in the first few minutes, and spends the rest of this 2 1/2-hour-long film in the afterlife, forced to relive his sordid memories and forgotten dreams, and to see what happens to his loved ones in his absence. It's all cheap drugs, furtive sex, and failed hustles; and yet it also gives you a transcendental rush. It's actually a remake of Kubrick's 2001 for the twenty-first century, when we have forgotten about outer space and become fascinated instead with inner space.

* Adopted (Pauly Shore). Yes, the whiny and obnoxious MTV comedian of the early 1990s is back, having reinvented himself as an independent filmmaker. In this pseudo-documentary, Pauly (playing himself) goes to South Africa to adopt an orphan, figuring that what's good for Madonna and for Angelina Jolie has to be good for him as well. The result is awesomely cringe-inducing; Pauly embodies everything that's despicable about the condescending, racist, rich Westerner who goes to a poorer part of the world convinced that he is God's gift to the "natives." It's hard to tell when Pauly is deliberately being satirical, and when he doesn't quite realize what he's doing; but this confusion is what gives the film its undeniable edge.

POST CINEMATIC AFFECT is available in good bookstores, from the publisher, and from amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

Links for 2010-11-22

Smithereens: Amazon.co.uk: Steve Aylett: Books
"SMITHEREENS collects 19 stories including 'The Man Whose Head Expanded', the prophetic 'Download Syndrome', 'The Burnished Adventures of Injury Mouse', 'Voyage of the Iguana', the last ever Beerlight story 'Specter's Way', 'Horoscope', and the closest thing Aylett has ever written to a traditional SF story, 'Bossanova' (featuring a robot and two spaceships!) There are also animal-attack-while-writing reminiscences in 'Evernemesi' and top-of-the-line declarative bitterness in 'On Reading New Books'. Aylett's last collection. "
(tags:books )

received goods 22nov10

A case of joy has arrived, courtesy of Herr Direktor Funranium: six bottles of precision-engineered caffeine delivery system the Black Blood Of The Earth, proving that he can ship a box of this wonderful supercoffee internationally.

Sleep? Sleep is for YOU OTHER PEOPLE. You UNMODIFIED people. I will swap MY ENTIRE BLOOD VOLUME with the Black Blood, and develop POWERS.

Also yes probably also death BUT STILL.

STATION IDENT: EG Gauger

This week's Station Idents are provided by artist EG Gauger.

This piece of art, executed in walnut inkwash on a piece of marble slab lifted from bulldozed junk piles in Berlin's St. Marien cemetery, is for sale. Find out more at this link.

Not A Post

I was going to write something about books, as has been the fashion in our digital circles this year, but of course I haven't bought a paper book in months, due to having obtained a new Kindle in late summer, out of curiosity and also because I have filled the house with books that I have only read once and now sit around collecting dust and beetle turds and generally get in the way, to the point where the child has to clamber over great accreted ramparts of them to get to my office, where she stands and mocks me for owning a Kindle, a device which is apparently "just sad" in the rarefied coolosphere of a fifteen-year-old girl, not understanding that if I continue to buy books that I only read once then sooner or later she's going to have to start eating the bloody things, and so I bought the Kindle for sound environmental reasons, not the least of which is that I prefer not to encourage more landfill publishing in the crime genre, an area I've had to investigate of late and crammed with so much bad writing (particularly that one that won that big literary prize, which goes "wank wank wank (repeat for four hundred pages) wank wank ooh guns bang end") that it's had some kind of hideous osmotic effect on me and now I'm only using full stops once in every two hundred words.

I do, however, have a lovely-looking Duane Swierzcynzki novel to read next week. So there's that.

This appears in lieu of an actual post because I'm working on four things at once, with only one available pair of hands. I trust that pluripotential cell culturing of extra limbs and smart microsurgery will cure this in the near term, because there is so much left to do, and yet only so much longer left to live.

See you in the morning.

Musician, writer and editor Meredith Yayanos, backstage a...

Musician, writer and editor Meredith Yayanos, backstage at Project BORN last night.