(image by Katelan Foisy and Lux Berlin)

• glycon: Fossil Angels – Part 2
  part two of an Alan Moore essay on the occult
  (tags:occult writing )
• glycon: Fossil Angels – Part 1
  part one of an Alan Moore essay on the occult
  (tags:occult writing )
• The School of Night – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "The School of Night is a modern name for a group of men centred on Sir Walter Raleigh that was once referred to in 1592 as the "School of Atheism." The group supposedly included poets and scientists such as Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman and Thomas Harriot."
  (tags:history occult )

* Steve Lieber: Weirdness with my book and 4Chan. (comics artist Steve Lieber gets a lesson in Comics Economics 2010, freaks the shit out of /co/)

* Kody Chamberlain’s PUNKS comic moves to MTV

* T-shirt Of The Fortnight #003: BEER IS MY TOTEM ANIMAL

* Musicians, Bands And Noisemakers: Work, Sites & Gigs

* Create A List Of Artists For Warren

It appears that Kevin Thurman is writing a book entitled Voyage In Noise: Warren Ellis and the demise of Western Civilization. The Facebook page says:

We are progressing into a future of ubiquitous noise made up of poor choices and an overload of information and entertainment. Ellis’s work reflects this change and the need to progress intellectually.

I suspect this is a sign of my old age. Apparently it’s out April 2011.

VERTIGO: RESURRECTED is out today in North America, tomorrow in the UK. This collection contains, among other supposedly obscure bits from the Vertigo imprint of DC Comics, the story "Shoot", which I wrote and Phil Jiminez drew (superbly) and which never saw print because it was about schoolyard shootings in the States and Columbine happened a couple of weeks before publication.

Being an episode of longrunning supernatural series JOHN CONSTANTINE, HELLBLAZER, it’s a horror story. At the time — and since then, as "Shoot" leaked out to become something of an internet samizdat text — people didn’t necessarily get that. Some people think it’s a sociopolitical tract. Some people think it’s making a single statement intended as uninflected truth. It’s a horror story. It’s intended to chill and disturb. It was, I was told, a little too chilly and disturbing for the time. I disagreed, and still do.

It’s very old work to me now, and I don’t intend to look at it for fear of wincing at all the bad writing. I mean, god, it was written in 1999. But you may find it interesting.

(My actual published HELLBLAZER work was collected into two volumes: HELLBLAZER: HAUNTED and HELLBLAZER: SETTING SUN.)

UbuWeb is back up after being hacked. UbuWeb is a vital cultural resource, and I’m delighted to see it return intact.

(image by Maciej Grodzicki)

So I finally saw RED tonight, in the company of my daughter, at the European premiere in London.

As I’ve said before, RED-the-book is a short story, and unfilmable as a direct translation. But the rough structure, intent and themes are still there, and I saw little bits of the book scattered around in it. Most importantly, it’s a hugely entertaining movie. Lili laughed her way through it and so did the audience — who also reacted nicely at the little shocks and the bursts of violence. Robert isn’t a very showy director, but it’s clearly his most cleverly shot film yet. Also there’s a bit where someone gets exploded into two distinct pieces. I always appreciate that kind of attention to detail.

The organisers were brilliant, it was really nice to see Mr Willis and Helen Mirren again (who, onstage before the film, couldn’t resist stamping it as a Southend-On-Sea production), and, generally, it was a fine night that I think rounded off Lili’s fifteenth birthday very well. Complete with a glass or two of champagne at the afterparty.

And now, I have some emails from my agent in my inbox about the Next Things. And tomorrow? I honestly think I might take the afternoon off.

• somefield
  the art of Barnaby Ward. This guy is very good indeed.
  (tags:art comics )

(image by Gonzoe)

• A Farewell Note From the Publisher
  REALMS OF FANTASY magazine dies (again).
  (tags:magazines sf )
• NASA Ames? Worden reveals DARPA-funded ?Hundred Year Starship? program
  "NASA Ames Director Simon ?Pete? Worden revealed Saturday that NASA Ames has ?just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,? with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA. ?The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,? he explained. ?Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.? (Worden was in fact fired by President George W. Bush, he also revealed.)"
  (tags:space )
• Moombahton, Boombahchero and 21st-century genre meltdown – The Arts Desk – Arts Reviews, Features and News
  "Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music producer in Rotterdam, with some remixes of his work, saying ?There was this dude called DJ Orion and this dude was working in his lab on his freak creation. Mixing Moombahton with Footwork and Guarachero at 140 bpm. He named it: Boombahchero.?" Joe Muggs ftw
  (tags:music writing )

http://www.whatthefuckismytransmediastrategy.com/

Out in the early part of next year. Paul just finished the cover.

Zo designs. Zo speaks:

The new Wiloh line launched on 10.10.10 as promised! If you’re just tuning in, Wiloh is a neat-o company that donates a T-shirt for every T-shirt sold toK.I.D.S.-KidsIn DistressedSituations – in a ‘Tee for Tee’ Initiative. Here’s my contribution to this project,Dissociation:

This is the link to the shirt. And this is the art:

Information can be transmitted to me via warrenellis@gmail.com.

SPIKE magazine has always been a source of excellent features. Some madness has gripped them, though, and now they’ve folded all their best stuff into a 600-page, 10MB PDF that is completely bloody free. This will destroy them. You should help.

If I tell you that the collection features interviews with William Gibson, JG Ballard, Jeff Noon, Iain Banks, Tony Wilson and Ralph Steadman, you should understand that this barely scratches the surface of what’s there.

I’ll be in Friday’s edition of The Guardian newspaper, in the film section, with an essay about “the allure of the retired operative movie.” Don’t know if it’ll be online or not.

It’s funny. Must be steam-engine time, as Charles Fort put it. I’m working on a short book about writing comics, and then comes Hitch with a marvellous guide to drawing, and working in, commercial comics. Bryan Hitch’s ULTIMATE COMICS STUDIO can be inspected and bought via this webpage here.

(image by Jennifer Erickson-Brown)