A new side of I††, Chris Hopper and Ultima Esperanza.  A sideways escape out of witch house, for the most part, into a grimly psychedelic industrial space.

I seem to have joined the UNDER TOMORROW’S SKY think tank.  More on this soon.

• HubbleSite – NewsCenter – NASA’s Hubble Shows Milky Way is Destined for Head-on Collision with Andromeda Galaxy (05/31/2012) – Introduction
  @juhavantzelfde: NASA's Hubble Shows Milky Way is Destined for Head-on Collision with Andromeda Galaxy http://t.co/0b1JXwIg #facingforward http://twitter.com/juhavantzelfde/status/208260083413565440
  (tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )
• “Citia” apps from Semi-Linear; a whole new way to present high-concept non-fiction – – The Shatzkin Files The Shatzkin Files
  @sarahw: On Citia, hi-concept book distiller. RT @MikeShatzkin Inventing a new way to present high-concept non-fiction books. http://t.co/UVqg2MBe http://twitter.com/sarahw/status/208168537548783616
  (tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )
• Reform of the Outer Space Act 1986: Consultation | News | BIS
  @spacegovuk: Reform of the Outer Space Act 1986: Consultation http://t.co/ssMLIHHP http://twitter.com/spacegovuk/status/208161511217168385
  (tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )
• Pictures and vision
  @moleitau: [whoa. read this. #mirrorworlds] RT @robinsloan: The futures of Facebook & Google are embedded in these two images: http://t.co/PtpT0US0 http://twitter.com/moleitau/status/207965616366292992
  (tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )

(Mary Nir)

• Home – fieldpapers.org
  @neb: and of course there is the continued reveal of @stamen awesomeness with a new angle on digital/physical map fluidity: http://t.co/pWTOGSiG http://twitter.com/neb/status/207764886137212929
  (tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )

Both Mark Waid and John Rogers have commented that the thing that bugged them most about FREAKANGELS was that you had to scroll the pages, on most screens.  Also, that we just posted print-ready pages.

The idea, you see, was to Keep It Simple, as much as possible.  We missed a few tricks, but it was mostly about ease of experience and ease of transition to print (where the money was).  Yes, you had to scroll.  On the other hand, you have to scroll most everything you want to read on the internet. Even on a tablet, unless the content is specifically designed to page-turn-swipe only.  (FREAKANGELS was developed pre-iPad, of course.  And I still get a lot of content on my iPad that scrolls.)

That’s why I developed the two-tier structure of FREAKANGELS pages.  You go left to right, then down and left to right again.  The two-tier structure makes it easy to scroll down to and easy to figure out, without elaborate coding.  On my iPhone, I found that one regular-sized panel (the page was usually quartered) filled a screen nicely.  

(The example page I use above does of course give the lie to that.  But it’s one of my very favourite pages by the artist, the brilliant Paul Duffield, and the amazing colour artist Kate Brown.)

But, anyway: easy.  FREAKANGELS was an experiment, but I was mindful that Avatar were gambling money, so I usually erred on the side of frictionlessness.

The full page bugged some people, is what I’m saying.  As did scrolling.  So the new crop of high-profile webcomics projects are all about eliminating the scroll.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m acquainted with, like and respect all the writers here, am impressed by all the artists, and think that all three projects are fun and worthy works.  Indulge me as I take a look at something about them that struck me earlier this week.

Here’s a “page” from Rucka & Burchett’s LADY SABRE AND THE PIRATE OF THE INEFFABLE ETHER.

And one from Waid & Krause’s INSUFFERABLE.  This comic is quite ingeniously coded.

And from Spurrier & Barreno’s CROSSED: WISH YOU WERE HERE.

Each “page,” each screen as Waid thinks of them, is roughly half the size of a regular comics page.  Creating a future print object, then, involves assembling two screens into one page.  Fitting them together, basically.  Which is not as easy as what I did, but pretty easy, and there are any number of ways to skin a pixellated cat.

What else do we notice about these three screens?  Two-tier storytelling.  Isn’t it strange how all three teams have gone to two-tier, independent of each other?

Maybe not.  You’ve cut the print page in half.  If you want each screen to make sense as a discrete entity, you have to respect the cut.  If you want each screen to contain enough information to make it worth reading, you need a strategy to maximise your panelling.  And if you want to be able to stretch out and get a big picture in there while still maintaining storytelling coherency, you’ve kind of got to go wide on the page.

I’m not saying OMG NO-ONE HAS EVER USED THIS FORMAT IN TEH WEBCOMICS BEFORE.  I’m saying it’s interesting how all three went to it.

They all break two-tier occasionally (just as I occasionally, for strong effect, broke the FREAKANGELS method).  INSUFFERABLE more than the others.  I don’t want to be accused of cheating – the most notable breaks in INSUFFERABLE, for instance, tend to constitute a spoiler to my mind, so I didn’t use them.  But I don’t think it’s unfair to say they all default to two-tier.

And it would seem to be an inevitable consequence of the comics “screen”.

On a full page, that is obviously four-tier work.  Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS is a four-tier, or 16-panel, book.  Hitch made the early decision to put THE AUTHORITY on four-tier, and here’s a page of it that I just yanked off Google:

You can see how that would work as two screens.  But the lower half becomes serious use of real estate, an entire screen in an episode that’s only ten or twelve screens long.

The other argument that I made with FREAKANGELS was, basically, if you don’t like it, then I refer you to the fact that I’m not charging you money for it. That was my license to do what I liked with the storytelling.  Which, for me, meant that I could take the story at whatever pace and in whatever tangents I desired. That obviously also holds for the three webcomics I’m talking about, too.  Going forward, I like to think that that is what will eventually differentiate webcomics from paid digital comics, which will have to be structured to deliver instant and weighty bang for their iTunes buck.

So, losing an entire screen to a single shot probably isn’t so bad.  It may, however, reinforce the imposed limitations of the format. 

Last year, I had the interesting experience of an artist attempting to re-panel an entire comic to get rid of the double-page-spread I’d written.  When I asked him what he was doing, he told me that he’d heard from a friend with an iPad that it was hard to view a DPS on them, and that since that was Teh Future, we should get rid of the DPS.  I explained that the book was written for print-first, and that in this instance digital readers would just have to cope with going to landscape and zooming.  If I’d been writing the book for digital, I very probably would have agreed with him, and found a way to do the image as a single full page image, or even enquired about coding the digital object to give me a swiping/tapping slippy screen in landscape, not unlike the recent “Marvel Infinite” object.

Accepting and exploiting new limitations is always part of a new format.  These three projects, though, can’t produce even a full-page spread without some serious scheming and dancing.  That bottom half of that AUTHORITY page is as big as a single image will get in this format.  That’s a lot to give up for the sake of “free” and notionally “more readable.”

Looking at these three comics this week, I’m wondering this: will we be able to tell the popular mainstream narrative comics of 2011-2012 by their slightly homogenous look?  Is this the aesthetic that will stick enough that we’ll be able to point at a page and say, “four-tier – must’ve been a webcomic first”?

I look forward to seeing how all this works out.

Aaron Gulyas is a historian, teacher and writer in the middle of writing a book for McFarland, and he’d like to talk to you a little about the subject he’s writing on:

Lately I’ve been immersed in 1950s extraterrestrial contact narratives: blonde, blue-eyed space brothers coming to save humans from themselves.  While most historians see these stories as indicative of nuclear fears and anxiety, I see it differently.  I see the phenomenon representing an intensive, species-wide self loathing.  Adamski, Van Tassel, Menger, and their compatriots told tales of space humans who got it all right millenia ago.  Earth humans, divided by racial enmity, class difference, and spiritual depravity may destroy themselves before reaching the level of their interplanetary peers.  Science fiction writers painted a future of techno-ease, the ET Contactees taunted us with the notion that such peace and leisure existed in the now—just not the here.  Magical technology and perfect peace existed, literally, everywhere but Earth.

These men and — less often — women continue to spin tales of worlds far away from Cold War tensions and 21st century fears.  Looking at our planet through their eyes, our wars become even less meaningful; poverty and want sink into incomprehensibility.  We haven’t failed to obtain a better future: we’ve failed to create a liveable present.  And through it all Orthon, Firkon, Ashtar, Hatonn and the other Space Brothers orbit the planet.  Still mouthing their platitudes about the Cosmic Law, smiling their inscrutable smiles, and watching us fail. 

Late at night, listening to the snow and ice pound the side of the house and sitting alone with the Space Brothers, I wonder if the emergence of the blank-eyed Grays, abducting and probing the unwary, was an unconscious reaction against the sweetness and light of 1950s contact narratives.  These people, watching us founder, are not our friends or brothers.  They’re vampires, feeding on our love and hope.

Thanks, Aaron.  You can find him on Twitter @firkon.

By Nick Donald, who adds:

I had this running as part of the display cycle in the Kiosk (the venue’s main hub) at King Carnival (Mandurah, Western Australia) for 24 hours. And I got paid for programming the display for them. Ahhh… abuse of responsibility, is there anything more fun?

A very evocative collection of glitchy witch-ambient from Australia.  G’night.

• Protoarchitecture Analogue and Digital Hybrids
  "Designing has become a liquid discipline pouring into domains that for centuries have been the sole possession of others, such as mathematicians, neurologists, geneticists, artists and manufacturers. Post-digital designers more often design by manipulation than by determinism, and what is designed has become more curious, intuitive, speculative and experimental…"
  (tags:magazine )
• The Influencing Machine | Strange Attractor
  @markopilkington: First round of Mike Jay's 'Influencing Machine' orders heading out now – it's a beauty of a book – http://t.co/tTEDtfeP http://twitter.com/markopilkington/status/207444932221337600
  (tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )
• Warp Drives May Come With a Killer Downside
  "When the Alcubierre-driven ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles its bubble has gathered are released in energetic outbursts. In the case of forward-facing particles the outburst can be very energetic — enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship."
  (tags:space )
• THE NEW AESTHETIC – A VISUAL DISCUSSION on the Behance Network
  "A Book exploring the State of The New Aesthetic as it stands. Intended as a starting point for discussion and a snapshot of The New esthetic as it stands"
  (tags:newaesthetic books )

Editor and writer David Hepworth:

You can’t hide. I was talking to somebody in the record business recently who pointed out, rather mournfully, that it was no longer possible to hype people. What he meant was that it was no longer possible to convince them that something was more popular or widely adopted than it actually was. You no longer went into Radio 2 and told them that they should be playing a record because it was going to be popular among this or that demographic. You simply sent them a link to the You Tube page where they could see how many people had streamed the video. Digital is its own audit. This is something magazines are going to have to get used to.

“Digital is its own audit.”  That’s really kind of interesting to me.  I’m used to unique counts being obscured and lied about.  But I hadn’t considered the open-count public services.  And, of course, this is what Likes and RTs and +1s lead to.  A world where we encourage everyone to vote on everything (an element of more than a few sf pieces).

Cultural voting, of course, leads to the triage suggested in the quote: following counts leads inexorably to media that play only the things they already know people like.

Which makes me prize things like Mary Anne Hobbs’ Saturday night show on XFM all the more: because I know that for three hours I will hear things that I have never heard before.

Still.  Interesting point.

An experimental comics-like thing by Olivia Fox.  Start at the bottom.

It took some 10 million years for Earth to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time, latest research has revealed.

So.  Yeah.  That’s how long it takes a planet to recover from an apocalyptic sequence of massive physical environmental shocks.

We often see mass extinctions as entirely negative but in this most devastating case, life did recover, after many millions of years, and new groups emerged. The event had re-set evolution. However, the causes of the killing – global warming, acid rain, ocean acidification – sound eerily familiar to us today. Perhaps we can learn something from these ancient events.

(Valentina vonAsh)

(Station Ident images can be sent to me at warrenellis@gmail.com.  Anything you like, so long as you made it and it has the words THIS IS WARREN ELLIS DOT COM on it.  Tell me what link I should add for you in your credit.)

Some Arctic ambient from Russia to close with, complete with sparkling ice winds and strange digging machinery excavating graves in the snowfields.  G’night, folks.

And then, before I get insane enough to do it, something wonderful usually happens to stop me.

Poor Charlie Stross.

Much as any artefact exposed to the maw of a small child eventually becomes soggy and turns brown (after it stops working, if moving parts are involved), I am coming to the conclusion that any comment thread on this blog will, between 100 and 200 comments in, circle around to become a discussion of:

* Space colonization

* Automotive technology

* Things that go fast and explode (rockets, military aircraft)

* Alternative energy (from solar through wind/wave to nuclear)

* Libertarianism (and everything is worse with libertarians)

And then he asks his audience – which is a fair bit larger than mine, these days – if he’s doing anything wrong, and wonders aloud how to develop a new audience of commenters.

283 comments (and counting) later, he’s got people ranting about libertarianism, cheap energy (the second comment!) and whores.  Oh, and “secular modern civilisation.”  I get mentioned a couple of times, in regard to the old Warren Ellis Forum and the Whitechapel board (although the poster missed that I turned the latter over to Si Spurrier last year and neither read nor write there).

Charlie’s been writing at his site for a year more than WEF operated, and four years into WEF we’d pretty much mapped out the memetic genome of the self-selected participants.  There comes a time when a hardcore regular attendance dismays new arrivals – as an American put it to me once, “it’s a bit like, ‘really? High school again?’”  And so, even when Charlie says something there that breaks into mainstream consciousness, his commentariat is unlikely to change much.  Also, they are defending that piece of virtual dirt, because they have made it into a place that is comfortable to them.  Charlie’s place is where they come to talk about rockets and whores, damnit.

Which brings up another thing, and I’m not going to ascribe it to Charlie, who is a nice man, but it’s real – sometimes, your commenters, by which you often mean your audience and your readership, are really fucking annoying, and sometimes you don’t like them.  Which you can’t say.  Who’s going to pick up another book by a writer who says “My readers are awful pieces of shit and I can think of twenty of them, right off the bat, who should be drowned in hot pig blubber”?  Nobody.  “My audience are all complete pissflaps.  Have you read my website comments threads?  Utter inane gibberish.  I would like to train a giant horse to fuck out all their eyes.”  Who’s going to say that? 

I guarantee you that even the sweetest and kindest writer has thought that exact thought more than once in their lives.  And its corollary: “Oh god, my readers are such horrible demented shitbags, what am I doing so wrong that I attract them all to me?”

Just as I know that every writer has dropped the ball at least once and disappointed a reader.  Or exposed themselves as a total prick or a frothing nutter. 

The deep interaction between creator and reader that the internet has brought us is not always healthy for either side, nor does it always – or even often – bring out the best in either side.

So I do this: I have a twitter account where people can talk to me, and I have a website where I post my research material and show off interesting stuff I’ve found and talk about whatever’s in my head on any given day.  I feel like, that way, we get the best sides of each other.

(Speculation. The thing about the open house that comments systems constitute is this: you accept my invitation into my house, and then I get stroppy because I want to know why you’re pissing on the floor and refusing to talk about anything other than that one sculpture on my shelf that depicts a whore riding a rocket.  But just maybe you’re urinating in fear because you only came into the house to look at the sculpture and now I’m trying to fit you into the oven.)

Best of luck, Charlie.

Also, buy a bigger oven.

• REAL Voodoo Rituals – YouTube
  @katelanfoisy: Maya Deren Vodou rituals: http://t.co/xQe0l8qL http://twitter.com/katelanfoisy/status/207145792891396096
  (tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )
• Wall Photos | Facebook
  @ma77er: eVolo 5 Teaser ARCHI73C7UR3 X3NOCUL7UR3 :: Act 1 SHOOT :: Nick Cave xefirotarch Perry Kulper Francois Roche… http://t.co/r9QoE3Ms http://twitter.com/ma77er/status/206794775670702080
  (tags:ifttt twitter editmytaglaterwarren! )

This escaped into the world over the weekend – I’m supporting Greg Palast at ULU in London on the 26th of June.  All details live at this link here.

It’s Greg’s book launch, so don’t even ask me about signing heaps of stuff.