Warren Ellis's Blog, page 187

On Joe Straczynski Sort Of Leaving Monthly Comics After SUPERMAN:EARTH ONE Made A Packet

So Joe Straczynski wrote an original graphic novel (OGN) called SUPERMAN: EARTH ONE that came out a few weeks back. And apparently it's been such a success that Joe announced that he was leaving monthly comics and focussing solely on OGNs. He later cleaned up the quote, saying:

I think the graphic novel form and miniseries, which are published monthly, is the future for me, certainly, for reasons I'll get to in a minute, and DC believes that there there's a coming wave in that area.

And, of course, all kinds of people have gotten their knickers in a twist about, oh noes, a creator deciding his own career and, zomg, a perceived dis to the holy fucking monthly periodical comic book single. And also HERF DERF COMIX MAEKS MOAR MONEYS AS SINGLES. Massive amounts of pixels have been expended on this. I've seen very few numbers that seem to completely surround the thing.

Rough numbers, then: retailer Brian Hibbs states that the regular SUPERMAN comic is currently selling 50,000 copies. It changes hands for USD 2.99. EARTH ONE is about the same length as six SUPERMAN comics, so, assuming steady sales, the equivalent serialisation would gross some $900,000 over six months. (Of course, the sales of most serialisations tail off.) (Also, I'm rounding up. Rough numbers) Those issues are of course yanked off the New Arrivals rack after one week. Some months after the serialisation concludes, they go into what is usually a paperback collection. One can only speculate what number that would do. I would suggest that, since you don't see many news stories about SUPERMAN serial collections selling out their print runs in one month, that that number would be unremarkable.

Brian thinks the sold-out print run of SUPERMAN: EARTH ONE was between 35 and 50k. I think his numbers are hinky, but let's go with them. Let's split the difference and say 40,000 copies. And the print run has sold out. It's priced at $20. So that's $800,000. In one month. In hardback. With a reprint of the hardback to come soon, and, eventually, a printing in paperback.

That's a smaller gross right now, using the low end of Brian's estimate of the print run. But as soon as it goes into reprint, it clears the 900K mark and keeps going — before it has its paperback run.

Of course, if Brian's wrong and the print run was 50k, then that's a stone million in gross in one month. With a reprint in the lucrative hardback format and a long life in paperback to come. At which point, you start to understand old Joe's position.

(My questions about Joe's position certainly have nothing do to with the numbers. What I'm wondering is what happens the first time Joe writes an OGN that isn't a new iteration of the biggest heritage brand in comics with the concomitant press coverage and bookstore push. But Joe's a big boy — and a nice guy, we met once when the showrunner gig for the eventually aborted GLOBAL FREQUENCY tv show was being floated — and I'm sure he's thought about that. I'm looking forward to the first original work he releases as OGN.)

Station Ident: Paul Sizer

This week's station idents are provided by artist and designer Paul Sizer.

Paul Sizer's graphic novel LITTLE WHITE MOUSE is being re-released. Go here for details on how to instruct your local comics store to order it for you.

Not Ramming Speed, No

Spotted in the back of one of the stables where Lili's horse is stored. Who keeps wine glasses and, I don't know, some kind of Soviet defibrillator from the 60s in the back of a stable? Did they jumpstart Brezhnev and then give him a celebratory mouthful of Leningrad plonk in the back there? Questions must be asked.

Not taken with iPhone Hipstamatic app. I actually use Mill Colour, Lo-Mob or ShakeItPhoto for processing images on the iPhone. Usually. But I discovered a lovely little service yesterday called Instagram, that's basically another attempt to do Twitter for photos. It's iOS only right now, though I'm betting there'll be an Android app in the first half of next year. But the joy of it is that it's just really fucking simple. Easy ways to find people, a handful of preset processing filters to apply to your photos, simple feed of images, and you can set it up to ping in realtime. It's so nice, sometimes, to find a little fun thing that just bloody works.

The older I get, and the less time there seems to be in every day, the more I like things that just work. I can't imagine having to handcode a webpage again, or building workarounds and rules to get email working, or hitting a modem with a hammer to make it force-connect. Tweaking Gmail and snapping useful extensions into Chrome is as far as I want to go, these days. To the point where I'm getting unreasonably annoyed when, for instance, the Evernote plug-in for Chrome decides it wants to spin or hang or shit itself. IT'S 2010 THINGS ON THE INTERWEB SHOULD JUST FUCKING WORK NOW sort of annoyed. Which is slightly absurd. But then, of course, so am I.

Rapportive for Gmail. That's the sort of thing I like to see. Just fucking works. Automatic look-up on anyone who emails you. Open the mail, and, in the right hand strip where the ads go, it gives you a quick precis on the sender culled from public elements of their social network entries. When I open email from people like JahFurry, I can even see their last three tweets in the Raplet window.

(I've just discovered that Ariana does nested labels in her Gmail. Must figure that one out.)

As you can see, I'm procrastinating like a bugger because my brain has not spun up to working speed yet. This is the sort of crap I used to pollute my mailing list with.

Hey, did you see TinyLetter? Really simple and free way to run an email list. I should totally do a newsletter again. Barantunde does! I'm going for more coffee now.

Who I Am And Where I Am (November 2010)

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 extrude a monthly column for WIRED UK magazine. I have an Amazon.com page here.

I write here almost every day. A collection of the writing I've done here and elsewhere on the internet, SHIVERING SANDS, was published last year.

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 before the end of the year, I swear…

Links for 2010-11-12

Improvised Exotic Weapons ? Homemade Exotic Weapons. Plans for specialty knives, firearms and more.
"The following plans and blueprints are for some of the most unique and exotic improvised weapons out there. Complete ?how to build? plans in a ?homemade? type format."
(tags:war )
Russian assassin 'sent to kill double agent who betrayed Anna Chapman' | World news | The Guardian

(tags:war )

All High Souls

I discovered Head Of Wantastiquet a few months back. Avant-banjo, mate. (Ariana's been giving me shit for months about that term.) New album just came out. And in the middle of what I'd come to expect for Head Of Wantastiquet — great bowed washes of weird mutant wormhole Americana — there's this. Which might prove to me one of my favourite instrumental tracks of the year. This embed should work, fingers crossed:

Free music - All High Souls

The album is DEAD SEAS, which is on eMusic, I presume iTunes, and amazon.com and amazon.co.uk as physical CD and mp3 download. Your preferred music dealer should have it handy, too, obviously.

Links for 2010-11-11

Stockists : Article Magazine
Nice looking magazine, apparently distribbed for free. "Article is lovingly distributed by hand from a vintage Volkswagen Scirocco. One day it will stop working in the Pennines and we?ll probably die."
(tags:magazine )
The Insanity Virus – Mental Health – DISCOVER Magazine
"Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person's DNA."
(tags:med )
Aaron Sorkin?s Four Big Problems With the WGA — Vulture
"….Phillips notes, "All I've gotten from the Writers Guild is gotten fucked"…"
(tags:video writing film work )
A renaissance rooted in technology: the literary magazine returns
"Thanks to the internet, which has eased the burden of print and distribution costs, literary periodicals are flourishing anew"
(tags:magazines )
Katie West – Trying to explain. Simply
"I make people happy. I go out of my way to make people happy. If the reason I do this is to make myself happy, so what?"
(tags:writing )
Evidence that we can see the future to be published – life – 11 November 2010 – New Scientist
"Extraordinary claims don't come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven't yet happened can influence our behaviour."
(tags:sci mad psych )
The Mire : Lords of the new church
"…moving contemporary experimental music into a church setting is tantamount to an admittance of failure, a betrayal of its original revolutionary stance, an acknowledgment that the old order is still standing so we might as well give up and move right on in alongside it."
(tags:music rant )
rejectamentalist manifesto: "Global Recession in Century 21″
Wonderful little piece from China Mieville: "The first major international organisation to fall victim to the global recession was WASP, the World Aquanaut Security Patrol. Funding cuts saw it broken up into smaller national units, many of which were immediately disbanded. Marineville, that icon of postwar internationalism and sixties design, was auctioned off to International Leisure, a division of Tracy International. It now combines a high-tech gated community with an exclusive resort…."
(tags:fiction )
ISVOLT Compilation Tracklisting and Preorder Link …
This witchhousey compilation looks rather lovely.
(tags:music )
DEXTR ? Twitter for your second screen – Blog – Really Interesting Group
"DEXTR is a full screen Twitter client. It shows one tweet at a time, filling the screen. And it accelerates and decelerates depending on how fast your Twitter stream is going."
(tags:comms )
Near Future Laboratory : Blog Archive : Volume Issue on the Moon
"The issue is focussed on the Moon which is a wonderful topic. Included are a photo essay on a lost astronaut and an insert product catalog of fictional/speculative objects, magazines, gifts and other items that might be appreciated by people who live on the moon."
(tags:magazine )
Future Perfect : Territories Expanded
"The interesting thing here is not that you can pay for vending machine goods with your travel card; or that you can check the balance of that card against any similar vending machine (think displays everywhere), but rather than this SUICA/PASMO compatible card is no-where near a station. The technology extends its reach out of its traditional homeland of train stations.

"When a vending machine can decide where it wants to be, where will it want to be?"
(tags:cities comms )

This week's artist's design game/challenge thing is up at...

This week's artist's design game/challenge thing is up at my message board, and it's the daftest one I've yet come up with: UCHRONAL ILLEGAL CHARACTER COVER REMODEL ENGINE: The Steampunk Batman. All are welcome to play.

Dark Dark Science

Before I forgot: Lenora Claire's curating a lovely-looking exhibition in LA that opens this Saturday at Dark Dark Science.

Also, I should give a line to the gorgeous witch house compilation ISVOLT from Robot Elephant Records in association with Disaro. It's out on December 1, but I got a listen to it last night and it's a lovely bit of curation for those of you who like the drag and groan.

I was explaining witch house to Drew Pearce earlier, and I realised I have no idea how to pronounce oOoOO. Is it "ooOOooOOOOOOH"? Like a theremin horror-movie sting? Or Oh OH oh OH OH? Which sounds like… something else entirely.

Today I have to go through a list of artists for a Secret Marvel Comics Project that probably won't happen until next summer, and break some more of the script for weird comics thing Project Blacklight, and finish a WIRED UK column that's a couple of days late because I simply didn't have a good idea, and poke at the episode breakdown for the suddenly possibly-alive-again tv idea Project Plato. Yesterday vanished in a hail of phone calls and emails with producers and agents, including a lovely congratulatory phone call re: RED from Lorenzo diBonaventura, which was also odd because I didn't do anything and he's the one who should be getting congratulated on the movie's almost supernatural staying power — $73.5M in the US and counting.

Heh. Just got an email from Colleen Doran containing this news story: "Japanese 3D singing hologram Hatsune Miku becomes nation's strangest pop star." Very IDORU, and, of course, very (disturbingly) SUPERIDOL. Especially "World Is Mine." Brrrr. Dark, dark science indeed.

FREAKANGELS 0114

In which we finally stop and take a breath, and yet time perceptibly moves forward for the first time in about 200 pages.