Huh. Heard this was coming, but, still… it’s a weird thing for me to read, and a weird thing to do.

After taking the comics scene by storm nearly 20 years ago, the WildStorm Universe titles will end this December. In this soft marketplace, these characters need a break to regroup and redefine what made them once unique and cutting edge. While these will be the final issues published under the WildStorm imprint, it will not be the last we will see of many of these heroes. We, along with Geoff Johns, have a lot of exciting plans for these amazing characters, so stay tuned. Going forward, WildStorm’s licensed titles and kids comics will now be published under the DC banner.

By my friend Anna Young Kelland:

Mythological artwork in a dark vein. Handmade sculpture, painting and mixed medium based on mythical and fantasy themes. Crucifairies, Fetish Fairies and Spooky Sprites are free-standing or wall-mounted sculptures and art dolls putting otherworldly creatures into unusual contexts. Some may be quite innocent, others are somewhat twisted. Clinging to a bottle of beer, naked in chains, nailed to a cross, or dead in their coffins. Paintings range from dreamlike impressionism to an exploration of the boundary between mythical archetypes and erotica.

A tile coaster.

And a framed tile.

Nice interview with China Mieville by Laurie Penny.

"As readers and thinkers, we may want to celebrate some aspects of storytelling, and we may find some of it dangerous," he says. "Even if you say the human mind is addicted to storytelling – well, humans get addicted to all sorts of things that aren’t good for them."

(Also amusing to see Laurie, who is basically Yelena Rossini from TRANSMETROPOLITAN, being so professional and restrained.)

Matt Jones of BERG with "windfarm ivory" at the Centre for Alternative Technology.

This is warren ellis dot com. We’re moving slow today, but we’re moving.

Our three cats were basically rescues: we bought them to get them out of a shitty garden centre that was storing them on cold dirty concrete with an upturned rabbit run over them and no food that we could see. The smallest of the three ended up being rushed to the vet the next day, who told us that if we’d waited another 24 hours he’d be dead. I was writing a character who was small and crap, at the time, and so this small crap cat got his name: Anton.

Anton lived a little over sixteen more years. Today, while everyone else was out, I got the vets to come and see him, and they told me that it was sudden kidney failure and he was beyond treatment. So I sat with him, and thanked him, and told him we love him and that he was a good boy while they carefully gave him the injection, and as I stroked him he gave me that half-lidded look that meant it was good, and then he was asleep. And I’ve just finished burying him in the back garden.

And I’m getting these notes down now because first he was my friend who travelled around the house in the palm of my hand, and then he was my daughter’s best friend for very many years, and because he came out into the back garden with me three evenings ago (he was a housecat who didn’t go outside) and stood at the edge of the path, facing the garden, and gave five or six loud shouts into the twilight, as if to say “I was here. Know me. I was here.”

And he was, and it was good. And he deserves for someone to know he was here.

And now comes the hardest part, of waiting for everyone to come home and telling them. But my little man is asleep in the garden now, next to my late father’s poppies, and so with that, and this note, I have taken care of him as best I can.

Regulars will have noticed two things. One, I haven’t been around much, and two, comments are gone.

Second one first. Comments here have, by and large, been a bit dull for a while. Some nice surprises sometimes, and some smart people, but also too often falling into the “I don’t really want this on my website” bucket. This isn’t going to fall into the slightly barbed mea culpa about switching comments off that the act seems to usually entail — no discussion of the “blogs are conversations” bullshit. Whenever I kill comments, I invariably decide to try again several months or a year or two later, and I’m sure that’ll happen again. But, right now, it’s time for them to go. (That time being usually indicated by my having to go into a comments thread, ask people to read what I actually wrote instead of what they think I wrote, and then explain the whole thing again in simpler language, very slowly and loudly, as if trying to direct a foreign tourist to the train station.)

The other thing: Lili’s cat’s dying, and I’m currently the only one in the house in a position to check on him regularly. Therefore I don’t have a lot of focus right now. I don’t think he’s got more than a couple of days in him, poor little bugger. We saved his life, sixteen years back, but I always thought that the damage done to him might have an effect on his life expectancy, and now he’s slowly winding down. I call him Lili’s cat because they became best friends when she became old enough to eat solid food. He’s always liked his food, and Lili went from “that small loud thing I avoid” to “that small loud thing who — hey, she’s offering me food. I like food. This small loud thing isn’t so bad.” And they’ve been inseparable ever since. So, yeah, the next week isn’t going to be fun, and there may not be a lot happening here, not least because I’m having to get up hourly to see to him, which I’m about to do right now. G’night.

MASSIVELY RAMIFIED

If anybody does say they have all the answers, they’re either full of shit, delusional or Warren Ellis.

– comics writer Jason Aaron

When creators who matter to me start really thinking about the in-app or cliented digital comics form of Comixology or graphic.ly, and start doing, say, 10 or 12 page comics (with whatever notational stuff shoved in the back that they feel like adding) and releasing them for 99 US cents every two weeks or so, I’m going to get interested really fast. And so will you. Particularly when these services perfect series-specific subscriptions that sideload the books automagically into your client locker or push an alert to your device.

That could even loosen up to, say, buying a subscription to a graphic novel, and having the discrete chapters pushing to you as they’re completed, on an entirely irregular schedule that builds up to something of not fewer pages than you signed on for, within an acceptable plus-or-minus of a previously announced timeframe.

(Small print, it say “if the artist gets the Mongolian Terror Trout Flu the whole thing could end up two months late, we’ll keep you posted with alerts and send you twitpics of the artist’s pustules”)

(random thought ends)

A Highlight and Note from Warren Ellis(Twitter:warrenellis)

Above six hundred and fifty, the clicks dissipate into a thin, pervasive noise, like dust. Discharges break across this: distant lightning, Aurora Borealis, meteorites. Their crashes and eruptions sound like handfuls of buckshot thrown into a tin bucket, or a bucketful of grain-rich gravy dashed against a wash-boiler. Wireless ghosts come and go, moving in arpeggios that loop, repeat, mutate, then disappear.

Note:the ghost space of early radio.

Shared on September 16th, 2010 from Kindle

C

byTom McCarthy

See this item on Amazon.com

This is basically a joke that Ariana and I pull regularly 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.

Previously, this was a weekly gag. Summer was a bugger, and made us shift to monthly, and autumn is only looking slightly better. So we’re shifting to fortnightly. Until I either run out of dumb ideas or Ariana’s brain explodes.

So, at the top and the middle of the month, 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 the sentiment I wake up with on most mornings: T-Shirt Of The Fortnight #002: LIFE:

This will go very nicely with our LOVE t-shirt, offered again.

We also now offer, at the same link, a great many perennial "legacy" items, which will be added to on a largely random basis. For instance:

Thank you for your kind attention.

Yeah, everyone’s sick of dubstep now.  That fucking wubwub sound on every bloody record.  ADVENTURES IN DUBSTEP AND BEYOND, an excellent compilation curated by music journalist Joe Muggs, reminds you why you liked dubstep in the first place.  And if you think you don’t like dubstep? This might just convince you.

Graphic.ly is a digital comics store. The desktop edition is built on Adobe Air. It also has iPad/iPhone apps. On installing and first launch, it’s a little memory-greedy on my laptop — I imagine that if I did a restart and then launched it, it’d even out just fine. Haven’t given it a good roadtest yet, but the install was so smooth, and the first look at the thing so promising, that I thought I’d bring it to your attention.

EDITED TO ADD: Guess they haven’t got the payment system worked out properly yet. Payment does not lead to comic appearing in collection. This can be annoying. It can take a while for it to occur to you to quit the app entirely and relaunch it, whereupon you find the comic you bought in your collection. Not hugely impressive user experience.

(Click through to pick up the 14-piece album as a USD $10 download or CD from Bandcamp. Also on iTunes. Meredith Yayanos plays violin and theremin on several tracks)

• Bus-Tops: London, screens and the Olympics | booktwo.org
  "we?re putting screens on the top of bus stops across London, and we?re going to let people play with them."
  (tags:design art cities )