• downthetubes.net news blog: Agent Fireball: Debriefing A Cold War Spy
  Blast from the past: BULLET comic.
  (tags:comics )
• The Digital Innovator Interviews: James Bridle on E-books, Google, and ?The Long Prose Curse?
  ?There?s still an incredible lack of understanding about e-books,? says Bridle, ?and the people who are doing the educating are Apple and Amazon, which means they are taking the market very quickly and we?re kind of letting them do that.?
  (tags:books )

In the few quiet moments during the general horror and mess of this week, it’s been sort of dawning on me that I could, as a comics writer, go pretty much all-digital for new releases at this point. (With a few outstanding exceptions.)

FREAKANGELS has been a successful project, doing what lots of people told me (and Avatar!) couldn’t or shouldn’t be done — paying creators to make a weekly webcomic and then making the money back on the (re)print collected editions. It must be doing okay, because every six months I hear from the Avatar compound that William’s rubbing money on his chest and giggling as he drinks gin from an athletic Brazilian girl doing a handstand.

Online, FREAKANGELS gets between 30 and 40 thousand readers a week. (We’re on a veeery shallow constant upward trending curve, but the actual count is a bit more jagged.) I don’t have solid numbers on the book collections, but, like I said, there’s rubbing and crimes whenever a new volume goes out, so I guess they do okay. I know there have been occasions where we’ve done 5K copies of a FREAKANGELS book on release month, and have been continuing to move at least 500 copies of that same book per month several months later. We do okay. We earn out and go into profit.

If this were a print periodical, 30-40K a pop for an indie book about weird kids in London would be kind of a big deal. Not least because forty thousand readers for a monthly comic about people building greenhouses and jabbering about the true shape of the mind would be, in this market, close to impossible.

The stores obviously like selling the collections, though. More than they’d like selling the singles. (And if that were untrue, THE WALKING DEAD would be the best-selling comic in English. As it is, THE WALKING DEAD, probably the best longform serial in American comics today and about to become a prestigious tv series, has taken 77 issues to wrestle to an audience of 27K per month. Its collected editions do extremely well, as they should.)

Which gives one furiously to think.

Which I will be.

(Not fully baked. Must go back to work. I’ll end up with a coherent thought, though. Really.)

Cat Valente:

I was thinking the other day about the whole horrifying Elizabeth Moon situation.

She refers to sf novelist Elizabeth Moon, who outed herself on her own blog recently as a racist idiot who appears to get all her information about the world from Fox News.

I don’t like to just watch bad things happen and make outraged noises and then go back to reading the intertubes like nothing happened. I always want to do something–something positive, something that stands on its own and says something good just by being. I can’t do anything about Moon or Wiscon or any of it. I’m not on the concom and I’m not a habitual buyer of Moon’s books.

What I am is the editor of Apex Magazine.

That’s sf magazine Apex, generally considered to be having a bit of a renaissance since Cat took over as fiction editor, and available in very handy digital editions for various devices.

And I have the Wand of Editorial Oomph.

I would like to announce that the November issue of Apex will be an entirely Arab/Muslim issue. It will be beautiful. It will showcase writers of Arab descent and Muslim writers. (I am aware that many folk not of Arab descent are Muslim, that’s why I’m structuring it this way, so that writers from either culture or both can be part of the issue.) It will show how Islam is as much a part of the human experience as any other faith or story system that writers of the fantastic draw from. It will be a small thing, in the grand scheme. It will not save the world. But it will exist, and perhaps in its own way can stand beside the recent ugliness in the SFF world as something bright and good.

I am looking for material, but most especially poetry, from Muslim authors and authors of Arab descent. Let’s make it easy: if you think you might “count,” then you do. Southeast Asian Muslims, yes. American Muslims, yes. Anybody with a connection to the cultures of Islam, yes. The subject of your works can be anything you like, but I am only looking for authors with connections to Islam and/or the Arabic world. Please do not send reprints, we have that covered.

Excellent plan.

see, the guy on the left is all “well, hi mister big brain futurist” and Jamais Cascio is on the right giving it “excuse me a moment while I KILL YOU WITH MY MIND” and then the guy on the left just fucking died

Astra 3B undergoing testing in the anechoic chamber at EADS Astrium, Toulouse – image by Simon Norfolk, found at CR.

"New supercomputer simulations tracking the interactions of thousands of dust grains show what the solar system might look like to alien astronomers searching for planets."

My name’s Warren Ellis. I write comics, graphic novels, journalism and anything else that people pay money for. I live in south-east England.

I’m the writer of the graphic novel RED, the film version of which (starring Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman & Helen Mirren) is out in October. I’m the writer of the GRAVEL graphic novels, under development for film by Legendary Pictures. I also wrote the novel CROOKED LITTLE VEIN. I extrude a monthly column for WIRED UK magazine.

I write here almost every day. A collection of the writing I’ve done here and elsewhere on the internet, SHIVERING SANDS, was published last year.

Quick links: Whitechapel (message board) – Twitter – MySpace account – an Official Warren Ellis Page on that Facebook thing – a store of Things at CafePress.

(I do have a personal page on that Facebook thing, but I only add people I know, really)

For people wanting to send me to their sites, wanting to email stuff or tell me about new music or send me tips or whatever, I’ve set up a Gmail account that I check once every day or so: warrenellis@gmail.com. This isn’t, I stress, my main email account, and it’s not for asking me when some comic’s coming out (there’s a FAQ for that). Always interested in new music, new art, new connections, dirty pictures, madness etc.

If you need to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you need to contact me about anything involving film, tv, games or other things that move, please contact my agent Angela Cheng Caplan using the link in the righthand menu bar.

If you (for god knows what reason) wanted to send me something physical… um, well, you can’t, right now. My book agent has gotten flooded with stuff of late, and I feel terrible about drowning them in things like that. So I’m going to sort myself out a PO Box here in the UK soonish. (Bit busy right now.)

• 3:AM Magazine – The Haunted Room: Atomanotes
  Describing two things I need to look into later, "atomanotes" and ?The Language of Invisible Worlds?
  (tags:books )
• Charles Stross: Books I will not write, #1 (of an ongoing series)
  "These are book proposals that caught my attention for long enough that I made notes on the topic, in some cases pitched them at my agent or a passing editor or even a potential co-author. But for one reason or another, the opportune moment never came; or the editor was less than interested, or whatever. So it's about time I cracked the covers on a few of the concepts that didn't make it into my production queue."
  (tags:books peopleiknow )
• IDEO’s Future of the Book – Core77
  "Today IDEO released a five-minute video exploring the future of digital books. Their illustrated concepts highlight some interesting opportunity areas in the publishing industry through three distinct reading experiences"
  (tags:books )
• Mystery Cells – Andy & Zeus
  ambient space drone
  (tags:music )

The second of these notes I’ve been asked to do about the closure of the Wildstorm imprint has gone live at The Beat. Covers different stuff to the other one.

Once again, I hope that everyone at the La Jolla office is okay.

The next piece of Kim Boekbinder’s new album. Features a song called "Sex, Drugs And Nuclear Physics." Therefore you must listen to it, because, damn, how can you not love that? Click through to give Kim money for the pretty sounds, or pre-order the CD, or buy a t-shirt or even the mad Impossible Paper Doll that Molly Crabapple designed.

Susannah Breslin on how she did not get a tv show on HBO. Funny and also kind of horrible. Which is Susannah’s metier, really.

I was to pitch the show. This wasn’t something that I really wanted to do. I called Lev, and it was pretty clear that he had not read the treatment. It sounded like he was at a kid’s birthday party, which made talking about a show about porn awkward, what with small children screaming in the background and such.

(Don’t read that site’s comments, they obviously have a very specific kind of shithead there)

First of the solicited thoughts I’ve written about the closure of the Wildstorm imprint has gone live at Newsarama.  Sometimes it’s nice to know the comics news sites even remember me.

If you’re buying comics at online retailer Khepri — they have copies of my DO ANYTHING, which I know some people have had trouble finding — be advised that using coupon code BANEONATREX at checkout will get you 10% off everything.

Remember the MAKING FUTURE MAGIC video from BERG and Dentsu London that I showed you last week? The boys from the BERG are not done with it yet:

There were an awful lot of photos taken for the Making Future Magic video …Timo reckons he shot somewhere in the region of 5500 shots… a lot was left on the cutting room floor. In addition, we amassed a stack of incidental pictures of props, setups, mistakes, 3D tests and amphibious observers during the film’s creation. Clicking through these pictures, it was clear that a book collecting some of these pictures, offering little behind-the-scenes glimpses alongside the finished graded stills used in the final edit, was the way forward…

And so, in softback and hardback, there is now MAKING FUTURE MAGIC: THE BOOK. In a Print On Demand edition from Blurb, just like Liam’s book in the previous post. Not that I’m pointing out patterns or anything.

A POD book of art by auld acquaintance Liam Sharp, comics illustrator, film/tv visual designer and fantasy artist.

A selection of work by artist and writer Liam Sharp – culled from a career spanning 25 years – with comments from friends and peers, including Dave Gibbons, Kevin Eastman, Warren Ellis, China Miéville, Tim Lebbon, Garth Ennis, Chris Weston, and many others.

This image from Veronika Von Volkova came with a note reminding me to eat properly.

So I have mostly been writing obituaries for Wildstorm Comics at the behest of comics news websites this evening. I’ll link them over when they go live, presumably some time tomorrow. But it would seem that the old firm is done. I assume that either my Wildstorm-published work will be allowed to go out of print, or it’ll be reprinted with a big DC logo instead of any Wildstorm mark.

Wildstorm Comics, and its various editors and operators, were very kind to me, way back when, and it’s a shame to see the imprint go. Equally, it’s strange to see it go, just when the Wildstorm-published RED is on the cusp of its film adaptation’s premiere.

I do wonder where new creator-owned work will go, at DC, especially given Vertigo’s obvious contraction. (Although that imprint’s rumoured new focus on more hook-y, commercially-rugged material may make it look more like Wildstorm than itself, in a few years.) Six months ago, I was more worried about Vertigo than Wildstorm. Shows what I know.

Just wrote the skip week text for this Friday on FREAKANGELS – with everything going on here over the last several days, I didn’t have a prayer of getting coherent pages out. Not that FREAKANGELS has appeared coherent lately, I’m sure.

You’ll notice — unless you’re reading this on the Livejournal feed, or possibly on RSS — that there are special sharing buttons at the bottom of every post now, more magic by Ariana. Press them, wildly, so that I may put my disease in people.

• Data clippers set sail to enhance future planetary missions
  "A new golden age of sailing may be about to begin – in space. Future missions to explore the outer planets could employ fleets of 'data-clippers', manoeuvrable spacecraft equipped with solar sails, to ship vast quantities of scientific data to back Earth." A sort of early ACCELERANDO vibe.
  (tags:space computing )
• KANYE WEST, MEDIA CYBORG
  "Media lets you clone pieces of yourself and send them out into the world to have conversations on your behalf."
  (tags:media net culture )