In which things start to break apart.

The Twitter account of industry magazine PRODUCTION WEEKLY just posted on teh twittarz:

The CW will again try to adapt Warren Ellis’ comic book "Global Frequency," this time Scott Nimerfro will script the pilot.

Which I discovered because half a dozen people retweeted it at me within about thirty seconds of it landing.

I haven’t been cleared to comment yet, so I can’t really add anything to this. I’ve spoken briefly to Scott Nimerfro — by which I mean I threatened to have him stabbed, and he thanked me and told me a funny story about how he’s had worse threats — and he is Okay.

Anyway. Yes. Shouldn’t say any more until I get the nod from the studio. But yes.

(Also, yes, I did tell John Rogers. But John, you know, has his own hit show LEVERAGE these days. One of his temple houris told me that John, from the depths of the bed made of golden vaginas that they wheel him around in, wishes me luck.)

TOTW is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull each week in our joint guise as the International Electrophonic Unit. Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you — this week by popular request on Twitter — T-Shirt Of The Week #004: SPACE BASTARD:

We also offer a couple of perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

So, one week later. Copies of SHIVERING SANDS are now starting to arrive with people — I found this on Kat Foisy’s blog this morning:

(If you want to send me a photo of you posing with SHIVERING SANDS? Email it to my dump address at warrenellis [at] gmail dot com, along with your website address or twitter ID or whatever, and I’ll run it and your link here)

A week since launch of the book. We’ve sold, I believe, a little over four hundred copies. Given that the production of the book involved 1) me culling from seven years of jabbering and sticking it all into a couple of RTF files 2) Ariana flowing all that into a single file and spending a couple months’ worth of spare moments fiddling with it 3) Ariana uploading the thing, ordering a proof and spending an hour checking it over… we were well into any definition of profit by the end of day one.

It is, of course, the long game that pays off. It’s interesting to look at the first week, but it’s not defining.

A persistent criticism of my interest in POD has been that only writers at my level of cultural awareness can make any kind of success out of it. And some of them will now be saying, well, even Warren Ellis can only move 400 copies in the first week of a POD project. But, for one thing, it is about the long game. For everybody. The book doesn’t go away. And, for another, if I’m not aware enough of you to order that POD project — whose fault is that, really? Because, I’ve got to tell you, I wasn’t born with a book deal in one hand and an exclusive comics contract wrapped around my other flipper. Hell, when I was starting out, there wasn’t even an internet.

SHIVERING SANDS is published through Lulu.

People often ask me what comics scripts look like — or, at least, what my comics scripts look like, as there is no industry standard for comics scriptwriting. I have a few scripts up here on the site, and you’re welcome to download them. I write in OpenOffice and save in RTF. Beginning writers may find it instructive to compare the scripts with the published work.

(Please, don’t ask to be shown other scripts instead. These are the ones I have available. Okay?)

MINISTRY OF SPACE #1.

DESOLATION JONES #1.

DESOLATION JONES #7.

(Yes, JONES will be back one day.)

FELL #1.

(And so will FELL.)

At Bleeding Cool. The comic’s out from this Wednesday.

TOTW is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull each week in our joint guise as the International Electrophonic Unit. Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #003: FUCKABLE ZOMBIE:

We also offer a couple of perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

In which I make a case for Paul Morley as national treasure, champion of music journalism and the oldest digital pioneer in newspapers. And also I make a pitch for a TV job. And a statue:

I think we can all agree that I should have been given The South Bank Show after Melvyn Bragg retired from it. If nothing else, it is way past time that the serious arts media gave coverage to those elements of the Japanese film industry that produce such inventive, beautifully designed and thematically muscular works as The Octopus Invades the Vagina, The Fish That Has is Crunched And The Wound is Received [sic] and The Eel and Loach to Attack in Lasciviousness are Insane [sic].

You don’t really want to search those terms from work. Which is why one requires the piercing artistic gaze of a South Bank Show to discover and present such items for the engaged viewer’s consideration. Frankly, I’m the only real choice to replace Bragg when he retires…

Today I release SHIVERING SANDS, a book containing a selection of essays, articles, columns, rambles and jabberings that were written in various places on the internet over the last seven years or so. I publish it, with trusty mechanic Ariana Osborne, as the International Electrophonic Unit through the print-on-demand house Lulu. Regular readers will know that I’ve been talking about POD for months, and I thought it was time to try it out. This work has not been collected in one place before, and I think pretty much none of it has ever been on paper.

SHIVERING SANDS is 176 pages long, and costs USD $15.54. Go to http://www.electrophonic.net and click on the book title to be taken to the order page. Or, hell, just click right through to the Lulu page. You’ll also find a book preview there, a dozen pages or so.

All books are sold through and mailed by Lulu. We touch nothing. This is the most useful thing about POD houses like Lulu: they handle everything once we upload the book file. So any questions about shipping will have to be handled through the Lulu FAQs. We can tell you that Ariana, in California, got her proof copy within five working days. We’re printing with an international standard size that means your copy will be printed as physically close to you as possible, rather than everything being shipped from the States.

Ariana — who designs much of my Avatar Press work, like AETHERIC MECHANICS — has outdone herself on the book. It’s beautiful. Even though making a collection like this beautiful is like being presented with a young and very well dressed mental patient.

Brief notes: no plans yet for a digital edition: no, it won’t be in bookstores: no, I can’t sell or send you a signed copy: I have no copies of the book, they’re all sold through Lulu: we don’t set shipping prices: no intent to sell it through Amazon. There. Thanks for your attention.

Blogging, reblogging and twittering is encouraged, if not openly begged for.

The GI JOE miniseries thing what I wrote is out on DVD in the USA today, apparently. This was serialised on the web (you can probably still find all the episodes on YouTube) and broadcast as a whole piece on Adult Swim over there. It’s a weird sort of telepod fusion of the cartoons and the comics, filtered through whatever I found interesting about the franchise. I altered a fair amount of stuff, including characters, to amuse myself and to meet the brief of producing a slightly more adult-oriented piece that used the franchise without being beholden to its other iterations (including the recent live-action film, completed and released after I finished writing this). Lots of people hated the changes I made, and many didn’t understand that I’d actually specifically made changes and moaned that I’d got the characters wrong. Hasbro, the client, have told me that they were very happy with RESOLUTE. So screw those other people. Heh.

TOTW is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull each week in our joint guise as the International Electrophonic Unit. Basically, we take some of the stupider things I’ve said on Twitter and elsewhere, often in a state of extreme alcoholic refreshment or severe sleep deprivation, and put them on a t-shirt. Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, once a week, here we are.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night — midnight UK time, more often than not. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #002: HUMAN BACON:

We also offer a couple of perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

THE CLOCK IS TICKING.

I swear, these stories always break when I’m least ready for them. From Variety this morning:

Newly minted banner Vigilante Entertainment is launching operations by developing Warren Ellis’ comicbook series "Black Summer" with Ryne Pearson ("Knowing") tapped to adapt.

"Summer," published by Avatar Press in 2007, centers on superhero team the Seven Guns, a group of scientist-adventurers who modified their own bodies for street-fighting in order to take back their West Coast city from a corrupt police force, criminal local government and rapacious private security forces.

BLACK SUMMER remains available as a single graphic novel collection from better comics stores and, of course, Amazon.

Because it’s Friday.

At Newsarama.

Approaching the end of the first volume, now:

From up here, maybe we can see what we’ve been talking about this whole time. A world that, from up here, looks like Jack Kirby’s Ego The Living Planet, but instead of its face being a wizened old man, it does of course strongly resemble the robot head of Jack Kirby.

Our parachute opens, billowing, capturing the air of comics and slowly bringing us back to this strange earth. From up here, we get the overview, and descend and decelerate into the details.

From up here, you can only see the geographical details of Jack Kirby’s face. There’s no sense of what weather cut those features into the topography, those lines and trenches and pits.

Since I began writing this, other comics creators have come to me with stories of Jack. Jack the angry man, Jack the wall-puncher, Jack the bitter man, Jack the betrayed. Jack the furious, who never raised a hand to anyone but never left any building he resided in without the pockmark of fist-shaped holes…

I has a scheme. Or, more properly, Ariana and I has a scheme. On Twitter, I’ve been joking about turning some of my stupider comments into t-shirts. And then I thought, hold on, there’s only one way to make this joke funnier. And that’s to actually do it. So Ariana set up a Cafe Press store (because this is a joke and engaging with a serious maker of t-shirts would be less funny to us), and… well, this is what we’re going to do.

Through this website and this Cafe Press store, we’re going to release one t-shirt a week. It’ll go live on Monday… and it’ll die Sunday night. Each one lives for a week, and then it’s replaced by the next week’s shirt. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, every Monday, I’ll post the new shirt here, and you can peer at it more at http://www.cafepress.com/electrophonic.

Anyway. I present to you T-Shirt Of The Week #001: LOVE:

Also, for this first week, we’re also offering a couple of other things that will be perennial items. Mostly because I wanted one of these for myself:

(And also a MAN COOK MEAT WITH FIRE "splatter-shield", because Ariana’s crazy)

Thank you for your kind attention.

Commencing Book Four.

"Do you know where you are?"

Skip week for the serial: instead, a short article and pretty things.

For the last several months, Ariana and I have been picking at the great volume of stuff I’ve written for the internet over the last seven years or so, on this site and elsewhere. And we’ve hacked and hammered and crammed until it fills about a hundred and seventy pages of your actual printed paper.

It will be available for ordering soon. But I’m so pleased with the cover Ariana built that I wanted to show it off in advance.

Yes yes god damnit the constant fucking ringing of the doorbell and the constant fucking ringing of the phone means I’m awake after basically no fucking sleep at all this is Warren Ellis Dot Com fuck you all to hell

Oh. Wait. Pupcake wants everyone at her Washington comics store to know that ANNA MERCURY 2 #2 is out today. What with the delays as Avatar switched printers, I’d forgotten that myself. How lovely.

Spiralling towards the end of the first sequence of these "comics and anything else that vaguely occurs to me in the writing of them" columns:

Bugger the robot head that steals my cigars. I love these Gil Kane BLACKMARK pages. It’s pretty generic post-apoc barbarian fantasy. Archie Goodwin, once again writing for Kane, does his best, but he had to follow the genre (”Obey and enjoy the genre,” Michael Moorcock once said), and, you know, it was the 1970s… it’s pretty prog-rock purple…

I haven’t been cleared by Legendary Pictures to talk about this yet, but since the news made VARIETY this morning, I guess I can at least link it up:

Legendary Pictures plans to delve into the world of the occult with "Gravel," picking up the rights to the comicbook series created by Warren Ellis and published by Avatar Press.

Project revolves around the character William Gravel, a soldier in the British S.A.S. who uses his skills in dark magic to moonlight and battle supernatural beings for clients in order to make some extra cash.

Ellis introduced the character in a 1999 limited series of graphic novels published under the title "Strange Kiss."

He will pen the initial draft of the screenplay for the pic and serve as executive producer on the project.

(Once I’m cleared to talk about it, I’ll post more here, and probably discuss it a bit on Whitechapel.

Concluding Volume 3.

While I seem to have suffered from somewhat overmedicated subeditors more than usual, here it is, my most recent WIRED UK column, from the issue that came out in print today:

Listen, I know there’s a recession on and that by Christmas we’re all going to be living in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and viewing infants as a renewable, organically-farmed food source, but I really need to borrow 8,000 Yankee dollars. Just hear me out.

I want to launch a TubeSat…

MEANWHILE, IN THE FEVERPITCH WANKPIT OF PHILIP K DICK’S ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS NESTED INSIDE THE ROBOT HEAD OF JACK KIRBY:

Bang.

The usual:

Alf Tupper, Tough Of The Track, welder and Olympic-level runner, powered by fish and chips and genetic-level hatred of coppers and the upper classes, overcoming constant crushing hardships to win every race and rub posh people’s noses in it. HOOK JAW, possibly the only shark with its own anti-corruption comics serial…

In which things get worse.

A thousand words sketching connections between two dozen people, and half a dozen different terms for "comic," and probably only this bit makes sense:

(1976 soundtrack: “Anarchy In The UK”; “The Boys Are Back In Town”; “Oxygene”: Bowie’s STATION TO STATION. Joy Division have formed. Black Flag have formed. Throbbing Gristle have formed. Brian Eno’s all over the place, recording, producing, collaborating. Eno on his art education in Ipswich, sixty miles northeast of me: “Everybody thought they could do anything.” Things are in the saddle.)