People who make print magazines! I would like to be told about your magazines now.Any kind of PRINT magazine is fair game, though obviously I’m most interested in people starting up their own, people publishing through POD, people trying something new, etc etc.

STEAMPUNK Magazine counts, because it has a print component as well as the free download.

Speed ye to Whitechapel, to this thread, to tell me about your magazines. Don’t use the comments section here. Ta.

EDIT: SEE WHERE IT SAYS “DON’T USE THE COMMENTS SECTION HERE”? CAN YOU SEE THAT? Well, so far, two editors couldn’t.

Some pages from ANNA MERCURY 2: ULTRASPACIAL DREADNOUGHT VANAHEIM #1 can be seen over here.

The order code for this issue, by the way, which you can drop on your local comics pusher, is: APR090683

The guts of this went out as a Bad Signal earlier.

So, yes, been busy. Have kept half an eye on things like Diamond changing the way in which they select comics for distribution, people screaming, books failing to get distributed due to above, people choking, bleeding out, etc etc. (Much-compressed version of a Very Big Thing. Googling "diamond comics benchmarks" will get you lots of reading on the subject.)

I am lucky. It is highly unlikely that any book I do in the next three to five years will fail to meet Diamond’s cash benchmark for distribution. Many people — people reading this — may not be so lucky.

So I have this online community, as you are sick of hearing about. I’ve deliberately run it as a quiet operation, just a bit of fun. As noted, it averages 2500 unique member visits a day, and that spikes when supported by warrenellis.com, Bad Signal and Twitter. (Twitter can seriously move some fucking traffic these days.) (Thought for another time: Twitter can move 1000 people from there to here on a quiet day. Much underestimated as a traffic engine, poss. because people are distracted by the way it’s killing blogs and looming over search)

A lot of these people read comics. A lot of these people would like to read comics, but honestly don’t know how to find the stuff they’re interested in. Many have problems actually getting their hands on comics (which is prob another discussion, but still). (And one to have, not just because of the digital implications, but also because comics are a bit shit at search tools, and also because of POD – ref. The DFC, too)

I’ve resisted making Whitechapel too comics-centric, because I like sitting around talking about music and mad science and many other things. But I’m thinking maybe the people reading this who do comics might want to think about putting their comics in front of the
people on Whitechapel, getting some conversations going, seeing if we can generate a bit of electricity here.

It was always a hard slog on The Engine: comics people have resistance to promoting their work, weirdly, and making them do something as minimal as telling people they have a comic out this week was something stupidly hard work. But I have to say that now, when not wanting to tell strangers about your work is not only courting low sales and cancellation, but now also courting not getting your book distributed at all…? Now’s the time to get the fuck over that, really.

Thoughts from the comics creators onboard are welcomed.

A short, excellent video presenting Rushkoff’s new book. I understand the book is also to be serialised somehow on BoingBoing, but something lurking inside BB always forces a launch of Adobe Reader on my machine for some reason…

* For Pay Artists and Graphic Designers: Portfolio Advice? – way out of my field, can anyone help the guy out?

* FOUND: Excitement for the Comic Medium

* STEAMPUNK Magazine #5 is out.

* Avatar’s July 2009 Previews Pages – Online

* PHONOGRAM 2: The Singles Club

* The Self Portrait Imagethread (May09) continues to be mildly scary.

Probably more to come — may well be a busy day there.

It’s going to be all tumbles today, as I feel like shit, I’ve got tons to do, and I’m setting up loads of new threads at my online community Whitechapel today.

So: Webcomics Week.

You do a webcomic? Tell me about it over at Whitechapel. Not more than one or two images, please, or else the thread takes forever to load. Don’t forget the bloody link.

Relax. There are only 6200 members of Whitechapel, plus god knows how many drop-ins who aren’t registered members. Only around 2500 of those members per day visit Whitechapel, on average. Except when it’s busy, or when I run links from warrenellis.com and Bad Signal. Plus, as I say, the drop-ins.

And they all want to read webcomics.

Please feel free to spread the word.

Webcomics Week at Whitechapel.

At my internet hole tonight:

* REMAKE/REMODEL: The Octopus – this is where I nominate some ancient character that’s either in public domain or a pit of obscurity just next to public domain, and anyone who can make some form of art can have a go at reinterpreting it for the 21C. Sometimes Pia Guerra comes in and blows everyone away.

* Cosplaying Freakangels Characters - yes, I am scared.

* David Lapham coming to Avatar- – I don’t know, is he? People seem to think so.

* The Comics Covers Thread (May 09) – Back on The Engine, we used to have a regular thread where artists showed off the covers they were working on. Those threads were both fun and instructional. Perhaps the comics artists who can see this message would like to come and play again.

• BBC NEWS | UK | Stanford drug informer role claim
  "…It was drug money originally paid in to Stanford International Bank by agents acting for a feared Mexican drug lord known as the 'Lord of the Heavens'." Research this guy. The Lord of The Heavens.
  (tags:crime drugs )

The History Of Ska was a documentary series written and presented by Linton Kwesi Johnson for BBC Radio 1 around 1983, if memory serves. I’d really like to hear that thing again. There are a couple of bits of it on YouTube, of all places, but I’d love to listen to the entire series once more. I will gratefully accept any leads in the comments section.

Odd thing I found on blip.fm today. No atttribution. Any idea what recording it’s from?

TIMEFRAMES: Narrative and Sequence in Comics

Sunday 28th June 2009, 11am – 6pm

D’Arcy Thompson Lecture Theatre Tower Building, University of Dundee

Timeframes, the third annual Dundee comics conference will be held in association with the Dundee Literary Festival on Sunday 28th June 2009. It will explore how the medium of comics bends, distorts and manipulates time, and the representation of the past and future in comics, and how the comics form relies on sequence. The speakers include prominent comics writers Warren Ellis and Alan Grant, artists such as Keith Robson and Emma Vieceli, comics editors Bill McLoughlin and David Bishop, and comics scholars Julia Round, Peter Hughes Jachimiak, and Ian Hague. The conference will also feature a workshop on writing for comics and graphic novels, and the opening of an exclusive exhibition of artwork from DC Thomson’s science fiction comic Starblazer. All are welcome. The conference fee is £10, which includes refreshments.

For more information contact Chris Murray (c.murray@dundee.ac.uk), or consult the Dundee Literary Festival webpage:

Session Four:

Keynote Presentation II

5.40pm Warren Ellis, Title TBC

6.20pm Questions

Edited to add: Em’s schedule:

1.50pm Emma Vieceli, Approaching Sequential Art and Adaptation
2.10pm Questions
2.20pm Break/Opening of Exhibition

As the token soft Southern bastards, we will stick together. We will also have knives.

I knew these shirts were out in the wild, but I didn’t think anyone was actually buying them.

And then:

• Possible site of free will found in brain – life – 07 May 2009 – New Scientist
  "Free will, or at least the place where we decide to act, resides in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex, new research suggests." I don't see how this can end well.
  (tags:med doom doooooom )
• YouTube – Bloksky

  (tags:film )

• 13 things that do not make sense – space – 19 March 2005 – New Scientist

  (tags:sci )

• Has the ?Anime Bubble? burst? | Japan Probe
  "An interesting graph from an Asahi Shimbun article reporting that industry insiders are claiming that the ?anime bubble has burst?" (via Jean Snow)
  (tags:anime deathofmedia )
• Should Creative Workers Use Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs? | Open The Future | Fast Company
  "If I drink a cup of coffee, I perk up, stay awake a bit longer, and (seemingly) think a bit faster. We call this tradition. If I take a modafinil (Provigil), I perk up, stay awake longer, and (measurably) think a bit faster. We call this cheating…"
  (tags:med future )
• Under The Spire Recordings on MySpace Music – Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures & Music Downloads
  Just listened to the piece "Pan Novak" by Coldstream, and it's wonderful. If only I had a working PayPal account, I would give this label much money. So you should do it instead.
  (tags:music label )

And we’re back.

(I am constantly forgetting the title of this piece of music. So I place it here to remind myself.)

• BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Hobbits ‘are a separate species’
  "Scientists have found more evidence that the Indonesian "Hobbit" skeletons belong to a new species of human – and not modern pygmies."
  (tags:sci history )
• aM laboratory
  "Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map, which makes it more cute."
  (tags:music toy web greatest+thing+ever will+never+work+again )
• Morgenrat
  "..this remarkable film, ?Morgenrat?. It was directed by Jeff Desom and features the haunting music of Hauschka (Volker Bertlemann), an experimental musician/composer who lives in Dusseldorf. Apparently, the entire film was made using vintage photographs from the Library of Congress."
  (tags:film )
• Doing Fine: THE BEAST MOTHER
  Preview of a comic by Eleanor Davis
  (tags:comics )
• YouTube – EURYTHMICS – ‘Sex Crime’ (Extended Mix)
  Was reminded of this today. Used to have this on vinyl. The original is not terribly inspired Eurythmics, with Annie Lennox doing David Bowie at *his* most uninspired, etc etc… but the extended remix was always weirdly fascinating.
  (tags:music video )
• Underground Examiner: Georgia candidate for governor says sex with mules, watermelon behind him
  "I landed an interview with the Georgia Creator's Rights Party candidate for governor, Neal Horsley, who is running on the secessionist platform. During the course of my research, I stumbled upon the fact that Horsley had screwed a mule"
  (tags:pol sex crime sexcrime )

• Could flowers bloom on icy moon Europa? – space – 05 May 2009 – New Scientist
  "Physicist and futurist Freeman Dyson says we should search for extraterrestrial life where it is easiest to find, even if the conditions there are not ideal for life as we know it. Specifically, he says spacecraft should look for flowers ? similar to those found in Earth's Arctic regions ? on icy moons and comets in the outer solar system."
  (tags:space )

IGNITION CITY #3 will be in better comics stores from May 27. For your instruction and viewing pleasure, here are the three available covers for the book (I’m not going to go into why Avatar produce variants and how people need to be made to stop buying them if you want publishers to stop making them again. Except it looks like I just did. Shit).

If you want to be sure of getting IGNITION CITY #3, you can just give your retailer the order codes for the version you want.

The regular cover has order code: APR090693

The Wraparound cover has order code: APR090695

The painted vintage cover has order code: APR090694

And larger versions can be perused here.

Out from Weds (North America) and Thurs (UK/elsewhere), the first GRAVEL volume, collecting issues 0 – 7 of the series. In which Sergeant Major William Gravel, black sheep of the SAS and dodgy black magician on the side, goes on leave to discover that some of his even dodgier acquaintances thought he’d died in action and therefore cheated him out of a nice weird little earner.

It is, in fact, just as goofy, over the top and gratuitously violent as it sounds. Mike Wolfer really has the worst job in the world. I write GRAVEL as "scriptments," long rambling documents with bits of dialogue shoved in them, like short stories written by someone who nods out every ten minutes or so and then jerks back to consciousness with no idea where he is or what he was doing. And then Mike Wolfer has the task of turning those into actual comics scripts, without any further input or collaboration from me. It’s a terrible thing to do to someone. If you see him at a convention, give him a hug.