Warren Ellis's Blog, page 31

(Some Of) My Favourite TRANSMETROPOLITAN Covers

We had great cover artists on that book.  I mean, in a perfect world, Darick would have done them all.  But it’s not, and so we had some of the greatest artists in comics taking turns with him.  Not a bad cover in the lot.  I was just thinking about it today.  Some of those covers live with me still, and never got the kind of applause they deserved.  Here are a few of those.

John Cassaday.  We worked together on PLANETARY for years, where he amazed people with his covers.  But, weirdly, I still think this is the greatest cover he’s ever done.  It’s just too exquisitely imagined for words, really.  A beautifully drawn and incredibly simple, incredibly clever piece of work.



Well, it’s Moebius.  Therefore your argument, if you had one, is invalid.

Moebius was the pen name of Jean Giraud, one of the very best comics creators and artists France produced ever.  He was one of those rare people who genuinely deserved the tag “genius,” as far as I’m concerned.

I’m fascinated by how raddled and awful Spider looks under Moebius’ ink, too.



Jaime Hernandez.  Therefore, the comment above mostly applies here too.  How the hell my editors convinced these people to do covers is beyond me.

What interested me here was that artists usually went to the frenetic or the scowly with Spider Jerusalem, but Jaime Hernandez cages up this moment of quiet desperation that I love.



There is something purely Tanino Liberatore about JG Jones’ cover.  I don’t know what Jones is doing these days, but I presume it’s not kinky Euro-style science fiction, and I am sad for that.  Because this picture is just beautifully set up, and I like how it communicates Spider’s relationship with his “filthy assistants” – that they could basically kill him any time they liked because he was a physical wreck with all the implicit fighting ability of an old dishrag.



My favourite of Darick’s own covers.  Pure joy, and yet, at the same time, pure Id.  Spider’s expression says “I am alive and having great fun” and somehow also “I just shat on somebody’s baby.”

GUN MACHINE: iBookstore US Editor’s Choice

Crop of a screenshot that Pamela Brown at Mulholland sent over, because I’m in the UK and therefore cannot access it.  But, this week, GUN MACHINE is Editor’s Choice on the Apple iBookstore, and if you’re in the US, you should be able to see it with this direct link here – as well as, of course, on the iBooks front page.

The book also made the Barnes & Noble, and ABA independent booksellers’, best-sellers lists last week.  It seems to be doing okay. 

booklist 2013: STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN’S GRAVE, Ian Rankin

Ian Rankin’s Detective Inspector John Rebus has long been the strongest of Britain’s crime-fiction police protagonists.  Ian’s determination for unsentimental reality in the Rebus books meant that, in 2006, the old bastard aged out and had to retire from the Edinburgh strength.  Here in 2013, though, retired coppers can work for cold-case squads in a civilian capacity, and so, like it says on the cover, Rebus is back.

He shares the book, though, uncomfortably, with Ian’s most recent protagonist, Complaints (“Internal Affairs”) plod Malcolm Fox.  In previous books, Fox has seemed compassionate and self-controlled.  Here – perhaps simply in contrast to Rebus? – he comes off as chilly and childish.  That said, they were never going to get along, especially as Rebus gets into full swing once more.  Loosed on the whole of Scotland, the reprehensible old git gives a good account of himself, and maybe even learns a new trick or two in the doing of it.

It’s not the very best crime novel Ian Rankin’s written, I don’t think.  But I do think it’s a really good novel.  It’s a novel about Scotland, its geography and its people, and the things they hide. It’s a late album from a rock act who have suddenly realised that, yes, they have all this to say, too.  It’s a magnificent read.

FAQ: How To Write A Comics Panel

This is something I get asked A LOT.  It seems to be a thing that really paralyses a lot of first-time comics writers, particularly ones coming from other media. What is the picture?  How do I find the right panel to describe?

A useful starting place might be something the actor and comics writer Nick Vince said, back in the early 90s. It comes from cinema, as did Nick, and it goes like this: imagine the panel as your “print moment.” The frame that captures the essence of the moment. Imagine, say, thirty seconds’ worth of film, and that your job is to overlay those thirty seconds of dialogue over a single frame pulled from that ribbon of film that best encapsulates what’s going on.

That’s a very mechanical way of looking at it, but it might get you started. You’re looking for the image that captures the moment.

You’re also, wherever possible, looking for an interesting image. But don’t confuse “interesting” with “splashy.” You’re still trying to serve the demands of storytelling, telling the story as clearly and simply as possible.  In most forms of narrative, each panel must have a relationship with the panels on either side of it.  You’re plotting out a sequence of motion in a series of stills.  Imagine it like that, and you may be able to get a better sense of how a story in comics might flow.  It’s not a perfect analogy, but it might be worth considering if this is something you’re having trouble with.  You’ll develop your own view, approach and methods as you go.  Everybody does.

SCATTERLANDS

Late February.

Jason Howard can be found at @theJasonHoward.

EVENT: Me At Foyles Bookshop In London, 26 Feb 2013

From the event page at the Foyles site:

Twisted, gritty, spiked with mordant wit, Gun Machine is the latest bullet from the brain of Warren Ellis. It’s the kind of dark detective thriller you won’t have read before, but exactly what you’d expect from the award-winning creator of Transmetropolitan, Planetary and Red. Come and hear more from Ellis at Foyles in conversation with journalist and author Sam Leith.

Click through to buy tickets: a fiver, or three quid concession.  (I don’t charge or set prices, so don’t even think about complaining to me about it.)  Starts at 630pm.  By 730pm, the strain of having had to be coherent on stage for an hour will probably have killed me.  Come to see that!

GUN MACHINE: Book Trailer 2, by Clayton Cubitt, with music by Meredith Yayanos

As hosted by Vulture, to whom I am indebted.

(Ignore the blurb at the page, it’s all wrong and there are no devils.)

Director: Clayton Cubitt

Editing, Compositing, Effects: Jeff Dragon

Soundtrack: Meredith Yayanos

Grooming: Katie Wedlund

Wardrobe: Signe Yberg

The Hunter: Joe Heaps Nelson

Additional audio effects: CGEffex via Freesound

booklist 2013: THE HUMAN DIVISION #1 – The B-Team, John Scalzi

So John Scalzi’s doing this thing with publisher Tor where he’s releasing a weekly serial. It’s a novel, but designed to be experienced episodically. Scalzi:

The only problem is, the story I wanted to tell wouldn’t exactly work in straight-ahead novel format. Or more accurately, it could work as a novel, but it would (work) better as episodes.

The first episode, THE B-TEAM, popped just after midnight.  I read it in a single sitting.  I’m not incredibly au fait with John’s OLD MAN’S WAR science fiction setting, having read only one book in that sequence (THE GHOST BRIGADES), but I wasn’t in the least bit lost by this latest addition to the series.  I’d go so far as to say that you don’t need to have read anything in the sequence thus far to understand THE HUMAN DIVISION.

It’s a thing hard to talk about without spoilers, this story.  But let me try and frame it like this. Perhaps you remember one of Iain Banks’ impetuses for beginning to write military science fiction/ space opera.  I can’t find the exact quote right this second, but it was something along the lines of wanting to rescue a genre he loved from a bunch of American fascists.  The phrase “American fascists” is his, I’m pretty sure.  Anyway.  You get the idea.  From Heinlein and Campbell through to Niven and Pournelle and the current-day state of that end of the field, it’s a pretty flat and reactionary field, full of flat and reactionary characters.

What Scalzi does in these books is take the second strain of military sf, the more liberal and literary works like Joe Haldeman’s THE FOREVER WAR, and sew it into the classic form.  What comes out is rich and smart and funny – still very much a good-time rollercoaster entertainment, but also pleasingly human and self-aware as it rattles along its tracks, scattering spaceship wrecks, lethal diplomacy, species dieback and interstellar spookshow paranoia in its wake.

This first episode was basically a really good laugh, and I’m looking forward to the following episodes appearing on my Kindle.  As far as I know, all forms of ebook reader and retail can get you a copy: Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iBooks etc.  99 cents in the US, 64p in the UK.

Don’t Fire Walk With Me, Because Look FIRE

At the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve, I walked across this.

I was in the Los Angeles Times yesterday.  Probably some other things have happened too, but here in the second week of Book Launch I am frankly pretty fried, and am looking forward to taking some time off and hiding somewhere at the end of the month.

Almost all writing stopped when the book launched, and I’ve been a professional emailer for ten or eleven days at this point.  I’m getting itchy: to go back into GAZE, to develop whatever SPIRIT TRACKS ends up being called, to work up some graphic novel ideas, to kick around a couple of notions for other media.  Or even for the time to finish reading this excellent Ian Rankin book before we interview each other next week.

I’m hoping that today is the day that everything calms down and I can get back to making things.  Which is probably ridiculously optimistic.  But my fingers always crackle a bit at the top of the year, wanting to write new things down and start some changes.

(This could be psychosis brought on by quitting Red Bull.)

This was today’s post.  One every weekday until I get all the way back on the horse.

GUN MACHINE Is Now A New York Times Best Seller

By the skin of its teeth, after five days of sales, at least four of which were without any stock on shelves in Barnes & Noble stores and other locations, and selling out on Amazon twice.

(It’s been a bit of a week.)

That is a strange thing to see.

Thanks to all who pre-ordered it and sought it out on its first week of release.