• 10am. Last day of show begins. I’m just a sort of bag of pain at this point. Recharging, then out to begin signing books. Showtime, folks. #
• Rain in Rosemont, thank god. Recharging in hotel, back on the front lines in 20 mins. Nearly there. Have signed approx one godzillion books #
• And I’m done. These are the red pisshole-y eyes of done. Thousands of comic books defaced by the shaky hand of DONE. End of show. #

Cover art by Felipe Massafera:

• i do not know why i am awake #
• i cannot feel most of my body. was onstage for 3.5 hrs last night. #
• insert fork in comickybook writer, for he is done for the day. And no, I cannot feel my arms, why do you ask? #
• Good people in the signing lines today, though. Many of them were even sober. #

Seriously, I’m not sure what day it is. Yesterday I signed for six hours and did at least an hour’s press and then was onstage for three and a half hours and this morning i cannot brain or use many of my bodily… bits. Cannot remember words or operate speech or some parts of head. Must start signing again in 40 mins or so. May be late. Legs not completely obeying commands yet.

What day is it?

• Back at Mission Control. I have whisky. #
• New FREAKANGELS: http://www.freakangels.com/?p=43 #
• Friday signing 1 down. Can still see and move. Result. #
• @irisseale - no, I am not going to start licking people in the signing line. I would end up with mange. #
• @fallenbutterfly - Signing just gets really tiring. I’ve done half of my 5-hr stint today, about to do press, then taking for 2.5 hrs tnite. #

Am awake way too early, barely alive, but my love for you is such that I bring you free comics even in these last moments of my life: FREAKANGELS 0018.

• Put my hand out the window. Sun seared flesh off my bones. Fuck you, Rosemont. I stay indoors and cheat your death rays. #
• Chicago Day 2: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=6080 #
• sitting down at avatar booth for signing hell 1 #
• never met so many people called todd in my life #
• gggaaaahhh #
• death approches on sweaty paws #

I have to start doing press in about forty minutes. Got about five hours sleep and then just laid there in bed until noon, wondering if I’d turned into the guy from The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, only able to communicate by pressing the channel-change button on the remote. "Look how angrily he seems to mash that button when CNN Headline News comes on. Is he trying to tell us something? Look… I think he’s spelling out a sentence by flicking from MSNBC to that crappy Matthew Perry movie and back again."

Went out to dinner with William and Ariana last night at a remote and relatively ancient steakhouse, which was offering dinners-for-two for $39 to celebrate their 39th year in business. Across the road, next to the Des Plaines Chamber Of Commerce, were stores called THE BAREFOOT HAWAIIAN and REBEL’S TROPHYS (sic). The air’s like soup. I stuck my arm out of the window earlier. First, my flesh took on the consistency and moistness of crushed watermelon. And then it caught fire anyway.

American news is as bad as ever. Top stories — Washington DC residents can buy monstrous rhino-killing handguns again (CNN actually called the overturned ban "unAmerican") and some nutbag in Iowa has built his own personal levee around his floodbound house (and is nonetheless sending his wife and kid out to work across the water while he stays to guard the threshold. And fish). Penetrating reportage: "Where did all the sand for the levee come from?" "Well… I bought it."

I also think I hallucinated a show called CASH CAB, where a cab driver appears to abduct New Yorkers and ask them gameshow questions. If they get the questions right, the ceiling of the cab lights up, the cabbie gives them cash money, and they leave the cab, where local criminals are lying in wait for them because let’s face it it’s not hard to spot the Cash Cab when it’s lit up like a 70’s disco floor inside. If they fail the quiz, the Cash Cabbie dumps them on wasteground in Brooklyn in the middle of the night to get sexually assaulted and skinned. I’m pretty sure I made this show up during some early morning fugue episode. I mean, The Discovery Channel would never fund something like that. Right?

Once again, I cheat the hopes of many and actually gain access to the United States.

In fact, everything so far has gone disturbingly smoothly. Fastest transit to Heathrow ever, zipped through security, landed at Chicago O’Hare early, and it took ten minutes from getting out of my plane seat to lighting up a cigarette outside the airport.

And now I am installed in a large hotel suite full of Red Bull, cigarettes (Avatar bought me about a hundred packets of my brand), whisky and wine. And a sinister stack of boxes, which I believe are full of things I have to sign. Wi-fi’s on, we’ve set up Mission Control on the main table, the speakers are running, and basically everything is good.

Makes you wonder what’s going to go wrong, doesn’t it?

• Fascinatingly ugly people in BA Club World lounge. It’s like the waiting room for Hell’s Circus in here. #
• I am in Chicago, with my monolith of Red Bull and eight thousand cigarettes. Mission Control is up and running. #

• Have to start packing for Chicago. Where it will be 86F with lightning. Not taking the suit. May pack inflatable boat. #
• For your amusement, the performance artists of Twitter: @zdarsky , @dcurtisj , @rstevens #
• And a very happy birthday to my lovely magic genius Meredith Yayanos, @theremina , currently out on tour with Faun Fables. #
• I have to be awake at the crack of sparrowshit in the morning, so I’m bailing out. Tomorrow, Chicago. #

Note: any of these signings may run anything up to 30 minutes short. Also note: this schedule does not include press sessions, meetings and other appointments. I’m booked solid for the duration of the show.

All these signings take place at the Avatar Press booth on the convention floor.

Thursday July 26

4:30 pm - Warren Ellis signing (4:30 to 6.30 approx)

Friday July 27

9:30 am - Warren Ellis signing (9:30 to 12:00)

3:00 pm - Warren Ellis signing (3:00 to 5.30 approx)

9:30 pm- 12:00 am - Warren Ellis panel

Saturday July 28

11:00 am - Warren Ellis signing (11:00 to 1:30)

4:00 pm - Warren Ellis signing (4:00 to 7:00)

Sunday July 29

10:30 am - Warren Ellis signing (10:30 to 12:30)

3:00 pm - Warren Ellis signing (3:30 to close)

YES I AM GOING TO DIE WHY DO YOU ASK LITTLE FUCKFACE BOY

I mean. Ahem. Looking forward to seeing some of you this coming weekend.

I am using this mandated re-test of the post-by-mail system to tell you of
something wonderful.

With the aid of the Colleen Doran Creator’s Grant, Kieron Gillen and Charity
Larrison have completed their darkly magical graphic novel BUSTED WONDER,
which you can read in its entirely online for free at bustedwonder.com.

You must go and read it now.

Have you ever shaken hands with a thousand people in a day? And signed a thousand books at the same time? Then done it all again the next day? Then tried to type something? I have.

Heroes Con in 2006 was the first big comics convention I’d done in years — the first since 1997, I think, when I wasn’t really as well-known in the field as I am now. Towards the end of the second day, after my second or third signing of the show, a book editor I know caught me as I was leaving the building and shook my hand. And I yelped.

Did you ever see that episode of THE WEST WING with Alan Alda as the presidential candidate whose paw got crushed to pulp by repeated handshakes? They weren’t making that up.

I don’t do these big American shows often — one a year at most — and so I tend to have a lot of signings scheduled for me. Two a day, two hours apiece, often running over that time. And, for some reason, everyone sticks out their hand when they turn up with their books. Now, trust me, signing books for two and a half hours is rough enough on a hand. I’m not saying it’s like breaking rocks or something. But if all you usually do with that hand is type all day, it’ll cramp after a couple of hours of sustained handwriting. And if you’re using the same hand to shake with a few hours’ worth of punters… well, I was icing that hand down on the Saturday at Heroes Con, and keeping it in my pocket when I walked around the floor (which was another weird event in itself).

I’ll post my signing schedule for the Chicago con when I get home. Five hours a day minimum. I’m the show’s guest of honour, and they figure there’ll be a lot of books for me to deface.

So Avatar Press tell me they’ve gotten me a hand brace for this show. Which makes me feel like a cripple, frankly. But when I got into this business, I never thought I’d be shaking more hands in a long weekend than a presidential candidate does in a month.

So, yes, I’d love to shake hands with you at the signing table. But if I do, my hand will fall off. And I’m not having you bastards eBaying my hand.

• In 48 hours I’ll be airborne. #
• List all the internet-based tv shows you’ve ever seen. Now list the ones you’ve watched more than 1 episode of. How short is that list? #
• My own list, by the way, pretty much stops dead after Xeni Jardin’s BoingBoing TV, these days. #
• Fuckit. I think my knee just did its annual blowout. Was really hoping it’d hold until past the Chicago convention. #
• I could use a decent twitter client for the Nokia 810 tablet… #
• Sometimes shots and “Deanna” played loud are the only way to get the leetle grey cells sparking. (”Deanna” = like radio from Hell. Still.) #
• Oh my god. “Deanna” is by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, you scary little children you. (Yes, I know, it’s 20 years old now, shut up) #
• Where is the special Twitter button that lets me set light to people’s eyeballs when they displease me? click whoosh aaagh sorrywarrensorry #
• @Rantz1 -No, *I* knew it..! Got a hail of twitters from people who didn’t know it. One seemed to think I was talking about Deanna Durbin. #

Bottom left — that’s futurist Jamais Cascio, DIESEL SWEETIES cartoonist R Stevens, and Valleywag columnist & sex writer Melissa Gira Grant.

1. Private, 2. Vinegar, 3. Hulk loves donuts, 4. DSC_0811 (1 of 1)ASM, 5. Westside Shocker, 6. CIMG4393

This week (Wednesday in North America, Thursday in the UK), NO HERO #0 is released. It is the first, short chapter in an eight-chapter serialised graphic novel. Its retail price is one dollar. The idea is that it gives you a cheap entry to the serial — we figure that, since it’s only a dollar, you may be convinced to give it a try, and if you don’t like it… hell, it was only a dollar, right?

We just got the numbers on NO HERO 0. The initial orders have come in at 18000. That’s the same number we had for initial orders on BLACK SUMMER 0, a project on which we did the same thing. The reorders on that book were so massive that we eventually sold twice that number — and that’s before we did the special reprint book that contained 0 and 1 because the reorder action on issue one also wiped out the overprint (copies printed above and beyond the order number). So we did a 100% overprint on the issue 0 unit and still couldn’t meet the eventual demand.

NO HERO appears to be following the same pattern. Now, how does this affect you, the potential interested party who’d like to read it?

It means that your local comics store is likely to burn through their copies pretty fast on New Comics Day. Remember, 0 is the start of the story, the first chapter, the cold open before the credits if you like.

If you want a copy, let your local store know, or make a point of getting in there this week, because odds are that it won’t be there next week. Give them a call, drop them an email, stick your head around the door.

And if you get there and they don’t have a copy — you now know that Avatar have something on the order of 20,000 extra copies sitting in warehouses ready to be sent out to shops like yours whenever they ask for them. So don’t be afraid to ask your local store to order you a copy.

I’m making headway with this new wave of projects through Avatar — CRECY continues to sell at an absurd rate, and I found out today that sales on ANNA MERCURY 4 actually went UP, which, on the fourth issue of an opening five-issue serial, is unusual. (And I feel a little more justified about hiding the reveal at the end of the first issue now).

I could go into a rant about these books continually being underordered and stores having to meet double their estimated demand through reorders. But it’s tough times out there. I saw a retailer talking about cutting out midlist orders completely in order to stay afloat in the bad economy, not so long ago.

• @laurennmcc You find ONE thing your dog won’t eat — & then you train the dog to eat it. Your headstone will read TRIED REALLY HARD TO DIE. #
• WHERE ARE MY MONKEY SANDWICHES #

Unbelievable. Once more, my requirements for staying conscious during convention signings have been supplied gratis by Red Bull North America, Inc. Thank you all so much. This monolith of caffeinated elixir is, I am told, now en route to my hotel suite in Rosemont in time for my arrival at the Wizard World Chicago convention.

Temp tattoos commissioned for giveaway at next weekend’s Chicago comics convention, where I am guest of dishonour:

(not my hand)

• Journalist ‘reported own murders’
  “Police in Macedonia have arrested a journalist on suspicion that he is behind three murders he reported on”
  (tags: crime)

• @mckelvie Thank god @templesmith passed out first. Incidentally, all, Australians did NOT invent the longbow. #
• @fauxred you get a lot of 100%-humidity days in the Bay Area? On those days, If we bump into hard surfaces, our flesh dissolves. #
• Rosemont weather forecast for the day I land: 81 degrees and thunderstorms. Great. Someone is pressing the HOT HAIL button again. #
• @Bklyncookie I always said LA was hell on earth. All I need now is a gasoline can the size of Staten Island to empty over it. #
• @lenoraclaire I just want a sandwich. (A MONKEY SANDWICH) (no, I didn’t say that.) (MONKEY SANDWICH NOW) #
• @ELROSS I didn’t invent “shooting parties” in CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. The Vegas scene in the book was actually based on a real event. #

Promo video for the new tv show by my friend John Rogers. (Who struggled so mightily with GLOBAL FREQUENCY.)

1. Collapsed bridge 2, 2. In The Dark., 3. MPITA, 4. Untitled, 5. scavengers, 6. why you have no second dates

One of my main gigs, these days, is as a contract writer to Marvel Comics. The job is two-fold — part of the time, I’ll lead out big projects for them, like the relaunch of IRON MAN and THUNDERBOLTS, or the second stage of ASTONISHING X-MEN. Part of the time I am, as one of my editors once affirmed, their mad scientist in the basement, performing experiments on moribund old properties.

This is actually an important part of the job, for them. Marvel Comics publishing stands or falls on their creative library being ambulatory enough to earn money or status.

So I spend part of each year doing research. Trawling through the net for information on old Marvel properties, getting the office to send out photocopies from the archive, researching backgrounds and the roots of concepts. Mining out the Marvel library.

So yesterday I jokingly gave my fellow writer Brian Reed some shit about his currently trying to do the same thing, finding a property with some legs on it. The worst part of the joke being that I wasn’t really lying about madness lying in wait for him.

Because the Marvel library has largely been mined out of the useful stuff. I think I snagged one of the last ones (it hasn’t been announced yet because it’s been in production for the last year by a very slow, meticulous and wonderful artist — we’ll call it out when all five issues are in).

This is actually good news for Marvel. They’ve gotten all their viable creative properties up on their feet and earning money. It’s bad news for me because I have to produce a certain number of comics to meet the provisions of the contract, and because I was hired to be the mad scientist, and there’s really not much to be done with, say, the BROTHER VOODOO villain who dressed as a giant occult chicken. Or, indeed, Brother Voodoo himself, whom I presume was intended as the black Dr Strange but whose appearances that I can find tend to cast him as the literal Magic Negro to a white lead.

This is, as I said to Brian, where the madness lies. You dig and dig and drill down into Wikipedia and MarvUnApp and exhume ever more obscure and justly-buried characters, and the constantly diminishing returns and increasing desperation bring you to a point where… well, I think there was a reason why Joe Straczynski pitched me on his idea about reviving The Spectacular Spider-Ham that year…

You find yourself thinking, yes, this character here who appeared once in 1981, attempting to trap Captain America in the radioactive pasta extruded from his eight nipples, that guy’s got some fucking MILEAGE there. Because you’ve spent six hours looking through all this monstrous shit and you’re just aching to latch on to something remotely useful to stop the pain.

And then Nick Lowe at Marvel phones up to see if you’ve got anything and you find yourself pitching a grim political post-BATTLESTAR GALACTICA take on Rocket Raccoon. And then he tells you that someone else is already doing Rocket Raccoon, because the situation is just that bloody awful.

This is what I was warning Brian of. I don’t want to see him end up like me. Because I’m sitting outside the pub with Wikipedia loaded on my phone, wondering if there’s a revisionist take in Monark Starstalker and his robot bird…

Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

"It must be ice," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do that."

Phoenix Mars Mission - Bright Chunks At Phoenix Lander’s Mars Site Must Have Been Ice

• tywanna jo baskette - Tennessee - Indie - www.myspace.com/tywannajo
  start with “Valentine’s Day”
  (tags: music)
• UN classifies rape a ‘war tactic’
  The UN Security Council has voted unanimously in favour of a resolution classifying rape as a weapon of war.
  (tags: crime war pol)

• @BrianReed Unearthing old characters for Marvel to see if they’re worth reactivating will clip five years off your life. Trust me. #
• Because six hours later you’re all “ah, yes, Flying Coyote Whore who some drunk invented for Luke Cage to fuck in 1975, I see potential..” #
• And a day later you’re, “geezer, that guy who used to deliver the mail to The Fantastic Four, there’s totally a miniseries there…” #
• And then your kid starts calling you “Scary Daddy” and your girl won’t let you touch her and you see Stan Lee when you try to jerk off. #
• But you can’t jerk off and suddenly you’re living in the woods and you don’t remember why and someone seems to have pissed in your clothes. #
• But you really want to write that story about the voodoo chicken guy from those old Marvel comics but old women are flinging turds at you. #
• And cops are beating you up every night and you get raped by a hobo with a face like Roseanne who keeps saying “Cough on it, John.” #
• And why? Because you decided to research old Marvel comics. Just walk away, Reed. Or you may never walk the same again. #
• 4634 people following me on Twitter. Watch that number fucking plummet after today’s little digression…! #

1. flying octopus devil, 2. Flight, 3. reader, 4. (Guatemala) Self-portrait test with RCA Small Wonder minicamcorder, 5. Untitled, 6. Day 220: Teiresias

We dropped this into the background of DOKTOR SLEEPLESS #7. Pirate Utopias are very interesting.