Warren Ellis's Blog, page 45

currently reading 1oct12

UK – US
UK – US

SPACEGIRL And Why Your Funny Webcomics Bore Me

I’ve mentioned Travis Charest’s SPACEGIRL here a couple of times over the years.

2nov10:

I loved the idea of SPACEGIRL. Newspaper humour strips transferred to (and were exploded/deconstructed by) the web, but the old drama strips… not so much. SPACEGIRL was just the daftest thing in the world to do – revive the newspaper science fiction strip serial, and not even do it on a daily basis — and I loved it for that.

If I knew anyone who’d fit it and would do it for free, I’d do one here on the site like a shot. (Or at least as soon as I thought of one.) Give it its own category. It’d still be nigh on impossible to read back effectively. But, you know, what the fuck. You do it for the idea. It’s nice when ideas are pretty and so simple the cat can operate them. But it’s not always necessary.

I did actually talk to a friend, in 2010, about trying just this.  I think I wrote 15 panels to be going on with.  That friend’s life got crazy and difficult soon after, and it never happened.  (I never pushed, either, as they had quite enough going on without adding this to it!)

24apr10:

So I’ve been thinking about the newspaper adventure strip, that superquick blast of art spectacle and an idea. Which, as I said on Whitechapel, didn’t seem to convert to the web so well because it’s a form that finds it harder to capture eyeballs than the humour form.

And then I thought, on the other hand, if something like that was nested, as it was in a newspaper, inside a blog that already had a daily audience…

And then I thought, well, a proper and useful newspaper-width strip is actually a bit wide for a blog, which tend to containerise inside 600, 700 pixels or so. And maybe it’s the concept and intent of the thing that matter, not slavish replication of the physical object, because this is after all the web and we don’t have no laws or wear no stinkin badges and all that. Maybe your "strip" is the size of a card CD sleeve, or a horizontal half of a manga page, or (name your own).

SPACEGIRL, in some ways, is a pure descendant of the likes of FLASH GORDON. A single beat of plot or action in a beautiful science fiction illustration. And on a daily basis that’s really all you need to provide in a single instalment — something lovely, that frames a nice little idea. Makes pleasant electrical things happen in your brain for a moment. So you come back tomorrow to get that button pressed again. And, if the creator(s) is (are) lucky, you stick around long enough to see that this cascade of little sparkles are actually strung together with auctorial intent, and it assembles into something that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

SPACEGIRL publishes at a width of 860px, which is why it looks a little squashed here.

As I may have mentioned – I know I mentioned it on Twitter – a couple of friends of mine are planning a newspaper-adventure-strip for the web, and I’m sick with jealousy.  Not least because, as noted above, I Had A Plan Damnit, years ago, and I don’t get to play.

Warren can be shouted at about being crazy or cryptic @warrenellis or warrenellis@gmail.com

But, honestly, wouldn’t it be nice if a bunch of people started to bring strange ideas and new thinking to the dramatic form, in a low-impact serialised form like this?  What if, just for the hell of it, the next 18000 webcomics weren’t about funny animals or core nerd wanking?

On second thought, hey, that’s not going to happen.  And webcomics are a very important venue: as George Burns said about vaudeville, it’s the place the kids go to be lousy.  It’s a learning space, and a play space.  It’s important that it remains that way.  But no-one could change that if they wanted to, and but it shouldn’t be just that.

Wouldn’t this be a demented, lovely, quixotic thing?  If a bunch of people said fuck all you people who do nothing but newspaper comedy strips on the web, we’re going to do newspaper dramatic strips and do crazy stuff.

Obviously, that’s what my friends are going to do.  But I wish more of you would join them.  I’d dearly love a bunch of new panels to read every day, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Station Ident: Patrick Delaney

And we’re off.

(Patrick Delaney)

No Day

It’s turned into One Of Those Days, if not One Of Those Weeks, so we’re skipping today.  Back Monday full force, as I continue to add more posts per day, and probably a SPEKTRMODULE on Friday.  Have a good weekend.

Do me a favour?

Hi. If you can see this -- and I have no idea how many of you can -- I'd like to try an experiment. Would you consider adding GUN MACHINE (US or UK edition) to your to-read shelf here on Goodreads? I'd like to get a sense of how the system works. Thanks for reading this.

Infographics in Hickman’s PAX ROMANA

 

As I mentioned previously, Jonathan Hickman, who was an actual graphic designer before he got into comics, has done the lion’s share of the most striking recent use of infographics in comics. Check out his first series, THE NIGHTLY NEWS.  This, which I think was his second or third book, dials their use back – but it’s worth looking at how he uses them here, folding them more sparingly, but more effectively into the service of narrative.

There’s a real fusion starting to happen here.  He could have done this with Google Maps screenshots and some clipart, but the connective marks are clearly from infographics.

I don’t think I have a lot to say about this, as such: it’s more about looking at how he does this, how he creates graphical associations.  It’s easier when you clip out things and place them together.

In this single image, an army is being sent back in time.  The story to this point, and the narrative panels on either side of it, contextualise it so that he can do this work in a single panel.

(There’s probably a whole other conversation to be had about Hickman’s use of colour, too.)

And then, there are the maps.

(larger)

I love books with maps.  One of my favourite things about CRECY was getting to put maps in it.

This map gets repeated later in the book, changed, but that’s a spoiler.  I mention this only because I want to get across that this is a narrative element.  It repeats, with changes, in service of the story.

And then there’s this:

(much larger)

Note how the art element, the jagged stream, associates with the time-travel panel above.

I clumsily whited out a balloon here because it felt like spoiler.  But, again, see: narrative element.

Everything connects, everything reflects something else, and the book develops its own smooth language.  He doesn’t use these elements to jar.  Except when, in my favourite bit of infographic fun in the book, he does.  This still makes me smile.  And, yes, it’s a mild spoiler, but fuck it, it’s glorious:

It’s a single panel, less obviously impressive than many of the pieces above, but this is the audacious bit: it’s beautifully presented, utterly playful superfluous information that yet somehow enriches the panel.  This is the audacious bit, that harks back to Chaykin and Bruzenak, or Talbot in ARKWRIGHT: there is no need for it to be there, but it’s pretty and it adds something artistic and it makes me smile.  There’s a little bit of baroque nuttiness in Hickman’s otherwise clean-lined designer’s mind that I greatly enjoy.

GROUNDED

@warrenellis Blur Studio VFX/CG Sup sharing #Grounded short film with you! Big fan! vimeo.com/32438100

— Kevin Margo (@MargoKevin) September 24, 2012

Kevin Margo, as he notes, comes from my friends Blur Studio.

One astronaut’s journey through space and life ends on a hostile exosolar planet. Grounded is a metaphorical account of the experience, inviting unique interpretation and reflection by the viewer. Themes of aging, inheritance, paternal approval, cyclic trajectories, and behaviors passed on through generations are explored against an ethereal backdrop.

Grounded VFX Breakdowns from Kevin Margo on Vimeo.

Today’s Probably Going To Be A Wash

So here’s a picture of Julian Bleecker poking an Enigma machine.

Back later, after I’ve given all my money to the taxpeople.

Q&A

I thought I'd test the Q&A system here for a month. It's here, or I guess you could search for Warren Ellis Q&A Experiment...? Still learning the system here.

My Tumblr

I think not all of my readers are aware that I have a Tumblr too.  I use it as a visual notebook.  If you’re on my Facebook page, you get most of this automagically thrown into your timeline anyway (at least, I hope that hasn’t broken for everybody there).

In some respects, Tumblr’s been turning into the new LiveJournal over the last year or two: there seems to be a lot more drama and crazy than there used to be.  But it remains a marvellous service.  It’s been weird to see it grow up as a spinoff from the original tumblelogs, and for a while there I wasn’t sure it’d stick around.  Glad it did.

Anyway, it amused me to spend two minutes sticking together a mosaic of some of the stuff I’ve found and pasted into the notebook recently.