Warren Ellis's Blog, page 50

Dear Comics Industry: This Is How Social Media Work

Basically, it’s like this: people can see your public activity on Twitter.  Yes, even when you use your publisher’s official account.  And while you yourself might believe that book publishers go around publicly supporting tweets that denigrate authors from other publishing houses, I have to tell you that that’s not really the way it is.

GUEST INFORMANT: Chip Zdarsky

Cartoonist and escaped science experiment Chip Zdarsky has an open invitation here.

God knows why.

 

GUEST INFORMANT is where I ask friends and acquaintances to write about whatever they feel like discussing today.  And now you know what Chip wants to say.  He has a Wikipedia entry and everything.

GUN MACHINE Sold To TV

The news popped yesterday evening, while I was at dinner. This is one of the things I’ve been working on for the last few months, and it eventually all happened last week (and then I took a long weekend to rest). Deadline.com has the press release: Fox Buys Thriller From Chernin’s Company Based On Upcoming Warren Ellis Novel.

Basically, this happened: Chernin Entertainment (in the form of a relentless and charming lady called Lauren Stein) bought GUN MACHINE pre-emptively, sight unseen, half a year before its publication.

Then we went looking for a showrunner, which we found in the body of Dario Scardapane. I went with Dario because he got the themes of the book immediately. Dario, with me mostly just sort of getting in his way, came up with a take on the book as a series. We got in a room with Fox Broadcasting (who partly arrived in the form of Jon Wax, an acquaintance and supporter) and told them what we wanted to do. And the next day I got a phone call telling me that we had successfully fooled Fox into buying it for development.

It’s important to note at this point that I take the credit for none of this. This is down to Dario, and Lauren Stein and Katherine Pope, and my agent Angela Cheng Caplan and my patient lawyer George Davis of Nelson Davis Wetzstein. And I have to take this opportunity to thank all of them. Particularly Angela and George, who save me from myself on a regular basis. Also, Lydia Wills, without whom none of this would have happened at all, and John Schoenfelder and Michael Pietsch for believing in the book at the start.

There have, of course, been a lot of jokes about Fox cancelling their series. I loved PROFIT, and I, too, would have liked to have seen that second season of HOUSE. Anyway. It’s all the luck of the draw, and I’d rather be in this position than not.

As I learned on GLOBAL FREQUENCY way back when, tv is a series of hurdles, and nothing’s a locked deal even when you’re actually out in the world shooting the thing. There are no guarantees in television, just like any other commercial creative art. But we’re in good shape at this point. Dario and I are talking a lot and agreeing on stuff. Next up, Dario writes the script, with me sitting on his shoulder screeching. Actually, trying not to screech, because if you don’t want your book adapted, you shouldn’t sell anyone the right to adapt it. At this point, though, I’m pretty involved in the adaptation, and having fun.

All of which is pretty good for a book that hasn’t been published yet.

You can pre-order GUN MACHINE at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.

(At a later date I’ll assemble links for other bookstore services.)

THREE PANELS OPEN: Francesco Francavilla

This week, one of my recent favourites, award-winning and incredibly busy artist Francesco Francavilla.  You should click on the art or here for the embiggening.

 

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.

Well, Yes, And Here We Go Again

I finally broke proper ground on New Novel, after a few false starts.  This one’s fighting me, and I imagine it will continue to kick and bite through all projected 80000 words.  (Projected 80000 – I think GUN MACHINE ended up somewhere over 85000.)

This means that this goddamn thing is back for a few months.

DEATH BAR

In which I exercise some thirteen-year-old memories of beautiful Trieste and do a bad George Orwell metaphor that will not survive the second draft.  But when the book’s fighting, the important thing is to keep moving.

The book has a name, but I’m not allowed to say anything about it yet.  So, for a few months, it will simply be Next Novel. 

More news to come soon.  But for now, I simply note that Next Novel is properly begun.

Away For The Weekend

Preparing For The Weekend After Days Of Battle

SF MAGAZINES: For Old Times’ Sake, 2012

From Gardner Dozois’ summation of the 2011 field in his 29th edition of The Year’s Best SF, available from bookstores and Amazon in the US and soon in the UK.

ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION is doing very strongly in digital editions.  Overall circulation is 22593, up by about 1500 units or 7.3%.  7500 of that overall number is down to digital subscriptions, and an average of 290 digital units sold per month on top of that.

That’s a terrific thing for them.  A 7% increase in circulation is something of a turnaround.  And suggests that the increase is down to new (or returning) readers, rather than a migration to digital from the existing base.

Their print subscriptions are at 12469.  Their average newsstand sale is at 2334.

ANALOG is at an overall of 26440, which is a rise of 0.2% on the previous year. 4100 digital subscriptions, and an average of 150 digital units per month in addition.

This tends to suggest that in a couple of years’ time, ASIMOV’S numbers will be on parity with ANALOG’s.

FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION’s overalls dropped from 15172 to 14162.  They don’t release digital figures.

INTERZONE’s numbers are clearly not available to Mr Dozois, as he has forever stated that INTERZONE circulates 3000 copies per issue.  This is obviously nonsense.  Either INTERZONE have found three thousand people who cannot die, or he just doesn’t know the numbers.  Although the former explanation would further illuminate the mystery of how INTERZONE keeps on keeping on without any visible means of support.  I have always had a fondness for INTERZONE, but I am (pleasantly) baffled by their economics.  A recent post on their forum indicates that they’re looking at a format change that will put a spine on the magazine, shrink the page size a little bit – and add many more pages and more content.  Which sounds a bit like a magic trick.

It still seems to me like a space ripe for disruption.  Take a look at these reach numbers for online sf magazine CLARKESWORLD.  (Get well soon, Neil, by the way.)

You can compare these to 2009’s figures, if you’re interested.

My public email address is warrenellis@gmail.com, and I'm @warrenellis .

THREE PANELS OPEN: Fábio Moon

Fábio Moon is the co-creator, with his brother Gabriel Bá, of the multiple-award-winning graphic novel DAYTRIPPER, and together with Matt Fraction they make CASANOVA.  You can find Fábio and Gabriel at their blog, and Fábio’s on Twitter as @fabiomoon.

 

 

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image towarrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.

The Great British Newspaper Adventure Strip

Yes, of course other countries have their own adventure strip tradition.  But I’m British. And this has been stuck in my head since a friend of mine told me he was going to have a try at doing one on the web.  Moving newspaper strip traditions to the web isn’t new either, naturally.  But the great majority of such instances have been in the mode of the comedy strip.  I don’t remember too many instances, and even fewer successful ones, of trying something like this:

Written by Peter O’Donnell, and, in its classic era, illustrated by the magnificent Jim Holdaway.

Newspaper strips were where the great comics artists lived.  GARTH, which I think was originated by Stephen Dowling and Gordon Boshell (some places cite only Dowling), rejoiced in the linework of legends like Frank Bellamy and Martin Asbury.

These all issue, of course, from a time when people read a newspaper every day: by which I mean reading through an entire and single disposable compendium of information.  And once you got through the news and features, you reached the entertainment part of the object, where these lay.  And you did that every day.  So it was possible to do a flavour of serialised storytelling.  Especially when, as in the Bellamy example above, the single strip was a little bit of art in its own right.

Sydney Jordan’s JEFF HAWKE (with, in its classic period, writing by Wiliam Patterson) helps me emphasise something: these strips tended to be a bit weird.  MODESTY BLAISE was, as spy/crime dramas go, a bit baroque and quirky.  GARTH was a time-traveller. JEFF HAWKE was a space pilot who ended up as a sort of unofficial ambassador for Earth in a universe gone mad.  Because British popular culture supported that even in the days of black-and-white.  HAWKE and BLAISE, particularly, were relatively sophisticated stuff.

In the modern day, it seems like a hard thing to pull off.  It’s not just there in your chosen news and information provision.  You’ve got to go out and select it, and you don’t get a big chunk every day.  It actually brings me back to the thinking about webcomics I did back in May, because of the obvious comparison between these shapes above and:

The example above being from Rucka & Burchett’s LADY SABRE.  The above is a single piece.  Each new episode of LADY SABRE is in fact the rough size of two newspaper strip episodes.  But it’s not daily.  It’s Mondays and Thursdays.  In theory, then, one weekday of LADY SABRE provides four days’ worth of newspaper strip content.

The fact that they use the larger block, roughly commensurate with half a US-standard comics page, does let them do things like this:

And that is also suggestive of the larger-sized “weekend” episode you’d see in the States.

This all circles around, really, to the nature of serialised fiction in the contemporary: also, I think, there’s something in here about the ways in which serial drama comics lost their hold on the mass audience by moving into the monthly form.  Weekly and daily is how television does it.  Books and films have their own special nature.  Monthly kind of flops down with magazines, which are disposable in a different way to newspapers.  They’re not a constant heartbeat presence in our lives.

A newspaper-style strip has long been on my list of Things To Do One Day.  I did, after all, get to scratch my Weekly Science Fiction Comic Serial off that list.  It wouldn’t necessarily even have to be in classical strip format.  But a daily strip in that general mode.  Story as pulse.

Related articles

THREE PANELS OPEN: Paul Pope (warrenellis.com)
Some Notes On THE NEWSROOM (warrenellis.com)