Fonografiks is busy re-imagining popular comics as second-hand paperbacks from the Sixties and Seventies.  Wonderful stuff at the link.  Also, these two obscure works:

• BBC News – North Wales hillfort test of Iron Age communication
  "An experiment has shed light on how Iron Age people communicated from their hilltop homes 2,500 years ago."
  (tags:history comms )
• A Shelter in Bolinas | je suis le petit chevalier
  "Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier is collecting psych gems for your shrunken ears. Based in the north of Europe, the lonely knight uses woods, electrics, naked elbows and fire."
  (tags:music bandcamp )

No, really.

The stuff in block caps there is the dialogue.  The comic is going to be lettered in upper case, so I write the dialogue etc in upper case, which gives me an idea of how it’s going to look when it’s lettered.  Which is important.  Some text effects in sentence case simply don’t translate to upper case.  I indent it for ease of reading and also for the same reason as above – I can kind of squint at it and guess roughly how the balloons will look.  Also, I have a rule of thumb – if one of those pieces of dialogue had run to a third line, then it’s getting a bit long for a single balloon.  If it runs to a fourth line, then it’s going to need cutting, or be the only balloon in the panel unless it’s a really big panel.

• Listen Closely: Broadcastr Brings You An Audio Guide To The Whole Wide World
  "a new platform that allows anyone to record or upload audio, and then “pin” it to physical locations. Broadcastr then indexes and curates that audio for playback via Web or smartphone, where it can be filtered and shared in the usual ways."
  (tags:cities net audio )
• Music bloggers move from touting bands to booking them
  "Blog-sponsored shows mark a shift in the music marketing industry, which has been transformed by the Internet. The shift from major-label marketing to building a devoted core of fans through word-of-mouth promotion is fueled by bloggers who champion their favorite artists."
  (tags:music net )

The Capital from sean mccann on Vimeo.

• God’s Wife Edited Out of the Bible — Almost : Discovery News
  "God had a wife, Asherah, whom the Book of Kings suggests was worshiped alongside Yahweh in his temple in Israel, according to an Oxford scholar."
  (tags:history cult )

Brilliant find at Found Objects:

So every few weeks I do a game on my message board where I set up the conditions for doing a visual revamp on an old character or title from books and comics and let artists go at it for one week. This week I said this:

You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for a comic called THE FANTASTIC FOUR. It is issue 1 of this book.

You have been told that the comic is about four people who steal a spaceship, fly into space, get heavily irradiated by cosmic rays, and return to earth weirdly altered by their experience.

And that’s it. The bastards haven’t told you one more damn thing than that. Not a clue. They might all be women. It might be about the Indian space programme twenty years from now. For all you know this is a JG Ballard story, for christ’s sake…

It’s up to you what kind of company you’re at. What kind of comics you make. How you translate that description of The Fantastic Four. What era you’re in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.

A couple of examples of what’s happened so far.

Chris G’s brain caught on fire.

And Paul Sizer went uberSizer.

And, um, Chip Zdarsky, aka Canadian National Post cartoonist Steve Murray, went… there.

It runs until Sunday. Go and look at all the other wonderful takes in the thread, and join in if you feel like it.

Really, really wish I could make it to this.

Finally finished this wonderful book on the flight back from Galway.  I’m a sucker for BBC music documentaries, and this scratched exactly the same itch.

It’s the story of British folk music over the last hundred years or so, essentially.  Which sounds dry as dust. Except that Young convincingly positions British folk as our visionary music, the true sound of mad Albion. From William Morris and song collector Cecil Sharp, through Vaughn Williams and Peter Warlock, Seeger and McColl, scattering through the explosion of the Sixties and out to the complex obituaries of the Seventies (taking in The Wicker Man and hauntological touchstone The Changes), it’s an absolutely fascinating journey.  There are some confusing gaps towards the end – I’m still unsure how you spend so many pages on Talk Talk (the drummer used to live down the road from me when I was a kid) and manage not to address, say, XTC or Billy Bragg.  But that’s an entirely personal caveat (if I played Devil’s Advocate I could probably see an argument against including Billy, but I think Mr Young may have missed a trick in not using him to unify and tie up so many of his themes) and doesn’t deserve to be held against an immensely impressive, clever and thoughtful piece of work, superbly researched and very well written.  If you have any interest at all in British music, native musics or mad people, then you want a copy of this.

People are telling me that Mark Waid is taking over the writing of the venerable Marvel title DAREDEVIL, and are assuming that Mark will be writing it in a mainline superhero-comic way, with lots of brightly-lit Silver Age swashbuckling and normal straight spandex-fiend tropes.

And I’d just like to note that Mark Waid is a very intelligent man, despite his taste in shirts, and so NO of course he won’t. The last time an approach like that was tried on DAREDEVIL, the book crashed so badly that the Marvel powers-that-be just handed it over with a what-the-fuck shrug to the production pod of two ambitious artists-turned-editors named Jimmy Palmiotti and Joe Quesada. Which led to things like Kevin Smith writing comics, and then the career of Brian Michael Bendis, and the ascension of Joe Quesada to Marvel EIC and then Chief Creative Officer And Olympean Presence or whatever the hell his title is now.

The time before that? Way back in the dim and distant past? The book was so crocked that they tried out a new guy called Frank Miller.

So, no, comics fans, don’t start railing about how Mark’s going to do a happy bouncy daylight Daredevil who hugs other superheroes and shit. Mark has some really terrible shirts, but he’s really not that stupid. If Mark knows anything, he knows his comics history.

So my friend the artist and teacher Laurenn McCubbin had a cast made of her face, and today she has posted to her tumblr the photo explaining why and yes this WAS the first thing I saw thank you very much.

Warren Ellis dot com: spreading the pain over the interweb since the 1990s.

So I found this on Facebook.

So now the demise of Western civilisation is my fault.  Great.

(It’s a book partially about my work, apparently. In which I imagine it’s explained in detail how everything is my fault.)

My friend Laurie Penny joins the Libyan exiles and activists who have taken over Saif al-Gaddafi’s London mansion:

We drink stewed tea from Saif’s best china and eat cheese sandwiches using his silver cutlery, while the young man, Abdulla, tells me about how his uncle was "disappeared" by Saif’s father. "In Libya, people disappear all the time. There was a prison massacre where 1,200 people died. They poured cement over the bodies." Abdulla nervously adjusts his glasses. "It’s important that people know we’re not creating a civil war for no reason."

THE MINISTER OF CHANCE is an audio serial – a “radiophonic drama,” in the creators’ term.  They let me listen to the prologue the other day, and it was actually terrific.  There was the friction between two very different cultures that put me in mind somehow of Iain M Banks’ science fiction.  The acting was great – as you’d expect from a wonderful cast that includes Paul McGann and the sainted Jenny Agutter — and the production values were inventive and pin-sharp.  You can get the prologue for free on the iTunes, and the first full episode goes on sale via the iTunes on the 17th.  Check out the site and give it a listen.  I was honestly impressed.

(link)

Heavy work day for me today – I have a new bathroom, a new downstairs ceiling and a new house’s worth of plumbing to pay for — so today the site is just going to be a tumble of links and photos and things.  Friends and neighbours should take this as a cue to send me anything they want people to see.