Yes, of course other countries have their own adventure strip tradition.  But I’m British. And this has been stuck in my head since a friend of mine told me he was going to have a try at doing one on the web.  Moving newspaper strip traditions to the web isn’t new either, naturally.  But the great majority of such instances have been in the mode of the comedy strip.  I don’t remember too many instances, and even fewer successful ones, of trying something like this:

Written by Peter O’Donnell, and, in its classic era, illustrated by the magnificent Jim Holdaway.

Newspaper strips were where the great comics artists lived.  GARTH, which I think was originated by Stephen Dowling and Gordon Boshell (some places cite only Dowling), rejoiced in the linework of legends like Frank Bellamy and Martin Asbury.

These all issue, of course, from a time when people read a newspaper every day: by which I mean reading through an entire and single disposable compendium of information.  And once you got through the news and features, you reached the entertainment part of the object, where these lay.  And you did that every day.  So it was possible to do a flavour of serialised storytelling.  Especially when, as in the Bellamy example above, the single strip was a little bit of art in its own right.

Sydney Jordan’s JEFF HAWKE (with, in its classic period, writing by Wiliam Patterson) helps me emphasise something: these strips tended to be a bit weird.  MODESTY BLAISE was, as spy/crime dramas go, a bit baroque and quirky.  GARTH was a time-traveller. JEFF HAWKE was a space pilot who ended up as a sort of unofficial ambassador for Earth in a universe gone mad.  Because British popular culture supported that even in the days of black-and-white.  HAWKE and BLAISE, particularly, were relatively sophisticated stuff.

In the modern day, it seems like a hard thing to pull off.  It’s not just there in your chosen news and information provision.  You’ve got to go out and select it, and you don’t get a big chunk every day.  It actually brings me back to the thinking about webcomics I did back in May, because of the obvious comparison between these shapes above and:

The example above being from Rucka & Burchett’s LADY SABRE.  The above is a single piece.  Each new episode of LADY SABRE is in fact the rough size of two newspaper strip episodes.  But it’s not daily.  It’s Mondays and Thursdays.  In theory, then, one weekday of LADY SABRE provides four days’ worth of newspaper strip content.

The fact that they use the larger block, roughly commensurate with half a US-standard comics page, does let them do things like this:

And that is also suggestive of the larger-sized “weekend” episode you’d see in the States.

This all circles around, really, to the nature of serialised fiction in the contemporary: also, I think, there’s something in here about the ways in which serial drama comics lost their hold on the mass audience by moving into the monthly form.  Weekly and daily is how television does it.  Books and films have their own special nature.  Monthly kind of flops down with magazines, which are disposable in a different way to newspapers.  They’re not a constant heartbeat presence in our lives.

A newspaper-style strip has long been on my list of Things To Do One Day.  I did, after all, get to scratch my Weekly Science Fiction Comic Serial off that list.  It wouldn’t necessarily even have to be in classical strip format.  But a daily strip in that general mode.  Story as pulse.

Related articles

• THREE PANELS OPEN: Paul Pope (warrenellis.com)
• Some Notes On THE NEWSROOM (warrenellis.com)

I’m so sorry

Fell ill Weds night/Thurs morning.  Still ill.  Was invited by BBC Newsnight to watch the Olympic opening ceremony and then comment on it.  Couldn’t get out of bed.  Very sad.  Live-tweeted it instead.  Back Monday.

PAUL POPE is one of the most significant American comics creators of the last twenty years.  You can find him at his blog, and on Twitter as @PULPH0PE.

THREE PANELS OPEN is an open invitation.  Perhaps you’d like to do one.  A comic that is three panels in duration and 640px wide.  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid. However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  You can email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.

Attempting to post with an image from the iPad. The iPad WordPress app seems oddly less smart about this than the iPhone one.

Anyway. I broke ground on my end of WASTELANDERS last night. Which was mostly about getting used to Final Draft again, a screenwriting program that I haven’t spent time with in a while. Also, there’s still some comfort to be found on writing on my new laptop, which is one of those widescreen jobs with a chiclet keyboard. I still feel like I’m missing some screen real estate, and the keyboard is a bit odd (and a bit weird in its layout — the Return key is relatively tiny.) It’s the Lenovo IdeaPad Y580 with the i7 chipset, the FHD screen and the SSD memory cache on top of the 2TB HDD, for those who like to know such things. It seems reliable thus far aside from an occasional issue with the pointer — for some reason, new Lenovos and Flash (and perhaps Chrome) don’t play well together. But it’s better than the complete crash I was getting every time I played YouTube videos on the old machine.

I did leer at Joss’ MacBook Air last week, just because it’s so thin and tiny. But that screen would wreck my eyes in the end. I’d previously considered a Zenbook, for the same reasons, but discarded it, for the same reasons. Also, the demonstration machine crashed when I touched it.

And I’ve just realised that this app isn’t going to let me post the goddamn picture. Maybe when I get past this screen? We’ll see.

So, for the next few weeks, I’m in WASTELANDERS and a couple of other projects that won’t get announced until next year. And pacing around the opening of Next Novel, which is still giving me some trouble. And still peering at comics a bit, in the distance, because I can see one or two things I’d like to do in the future, should I ever find amenable artists. But thinking about that is mostly just mental play, the thing you toss around early in the morning or late in the evening to sharpen the edges of your brain on.

Also keeping half an eye on Thrillbent (which, as a title, still sounds to me like an obscure British gay porn magazine from 1980, sorry guys) and Monkeybrain, which both look to become major webcomics portals over the next year. I find it particularly interesting — and honestly a little odd — that Thrillbent’s teamed with Top Cow to present new work from that publisher, but if it injects new money into Thrillbent so that they can do new and more peculiar work in their free-to-air model, that’ll work out fine for me as a reader. Very curious to see what my old mate John Rogers, of LEVERAGE, eventually does in that comics model. I’m still not sold on The Thrillbent Way, but if they can make it a success, I will happily shut up and read comics.

Okay. Back to work.

Thank you, Marie.

A couple of times over the last year, I did a thing for people who make comics called Three Panels Open.  Literally, a three-panel comic.  The only rules were that it had to be legible at a width of 640 pixels, which is the width of the content bar on this site, and that it had to be three panels long.

Perhaps you’d like to do a three-panel comic to be posted here.  If so, email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.  Same rules apply: three panels, and it can’t turn to mud when I run it at 640px.  Ideally, it’s a piece of new work, and not just a clip from your current comic. (Though obviously I’m happy to plug said current comic as thanks.)  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid.  However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  Three Panels Open will be a semi-permanent element of the site.

My name’s Warren Ellis. I write books and comics and articles and other things. 

I live in south-east England.  My next novel, GUN MACHINE, is due January 2013 from Mulholland Books.  The film RED 2, sequel to RED, based on the graphic novel I wrote, is due autumn 2013.  A film version of my GRAVEL graphic novels is in active development at Legendary Pictures.  I have author pages at Amazon and Amazon UK.  Right now I’m co-writing a thing called WASTELANDERS with Joss Whedon and working on my next novel.

My most recent original comics work was SVK, produced in partnership with the design & invention unit BERG.

If you want to contact me about writing for print or web, please contact my agent Lydia Wills – her email’s linked in the righthand menu bar, too. I’m currently looking to write more articles and the like, to help keep me sane during the writing of this novel.

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

Sometimes I speak at conferences, or do other kinds of talks and appearances.  I’ve previously been a columnist for WIRED UK and Reuters.  You can contact me directly about everything else, including interview requests, at my public email address: warrenellis@gmail.com (gets checked daily.)

I have a weeklyish newsletter, MACHINE VISION, which you can sign up for at this link.

@warrenellis on Twitter. I have an Official Facebook Page. Username warrenellis on Instagram (for as long as it lasts!) and This Is My Jam. I keep a notebook at Tumblr. I occasionally podcast.

I can next be seen in public in Brighton, UK, on September 6, speaking at Improving Reality 2012.

ASCENCION is four billion miles away from home, and that’s the way she likes it. She’s seen the stained egg of Haumea, and the misty red lump of Makemake, and dozens of other things that no-one had ever laid eyes on before. Ascencion dives the deeps of the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune and Pluto. It’s the graveyard at the end of the solar system. Failed planets, dead comets, lost moons and all the strange dark rubble left over from the formation of the worlds we know. She’s out among the spectres, flying through ultimate history to places where, quite literally, there have never been eyes before. The Kuiper Belt is vast. She wants to see it all. She wants it all to herself, in a way that no-one else has ever been able to understand. She never wants to go home again.

[larger image] [original size image]

DEEP MAP PILOTS: A Series Of Five Pictures From Words
MARENKA – REHANI – CAMEO – JINJING – ASCENCION

[process: I wrote five flash fictions for Eliza Gauger to produce a piece of accompanying art for each. The idea was to produce five little portraits of women in space, in art and words.]

Art © Eliza Gauger 2012. Words © Warren Ellis 2012

And I won’t return until after the bloody Olympics.

So, two days of hitting things with hammers, and WASTELANDERS looks solved.  Dinner last night with Natalie Haynes and her man Dan, Anthony Head and his daughter Daisy, Bryan Hitch and some nice man whose name I barely caught because I was leaving as he was coming in, because I was friiiiied.  I was taking two days off to work on WASTELANDERS, but the film, tv and book industries weren’t, so I was operating on an overclocked brain and nowhere near enough sleep.

(Bryan and I talked briefly about his future comics work, for those who follow that: soon he will finally be writing for himself, a thing that is about ten years overdue.)

There was a very funny and sweet moment where Joss and I, pacing around Covent Garden in search of a solution to a hurdle in the fourth act, were stopped by a charming young woman who was literally physically shaking at having recognised Joss.  She was very nice, and kindly indulged us as we pretended not to be staggering around London in search of a plot.  Or even the plot.

So that was that.  And now my city, from whence my forebears emanate, is overrun by pay-cops and the military and the moneysuckers, I shall struggle mightily to avoid it until after the farce in Stratford is over.

I noticed today that the standard digest-size comics page fits quite nicely in the content stream width here.  Not that I can really do anything about that, but it was an interesting thing to me.  I am probably the last comics guy who doesn’t have a problem with scrolling.  You know, since the rest of the fucking internet does it and all.

I have another speaking event coming up in Britain this year, which I’ll give its own post tomorrow.  For now, I’m just going to note that I’m back by the sea, I have some things to do, and I may even add a few more.

We’re getting there. Even though I am slightly hungover due to the hospitality of 300 producer Gianni Nunnari last night.

Robert Scoble is a well-known internet writer and videomaker whose chief skill appears to be the almost childlike, obsessive early-adoption of new services.  He was bitching for months about not being on Twitter’s suggested-users list because he followed tens of thousands of people, and currently has more than a million people in Google Circles or something.  In a recent post about “scalable living,” he linked to a statement he made on Facebook, of which this is the relevant chunk:

Compare my profiles at https://www.facebook.com/robertscoble to https://profiles.google.com/scobleizer and you’ll see the benefits of frictionless sharing on Facebook. On Facebook you can see a LOT more about me. My Quora questions. My foursquare checkins. My Spotify music. My Pinterest repins. And a lot more.

Google, on the other hand, hates automatic sharing of who you are. I believe this puts Google at a huge strategic disadvantage.

Interesting word, there.  “Benefits.”  He’s told Facebook probably tens of thousands of things about his life and economic activity.  Robert Scoble is, in fact, one of Facebook’s most delightful products.  He’s turned over his short-term memory and the digital wormcast of his waking hours over to a company that sells advertising space on the basis that their products – also know as “their users” and their tracked activities – can be induced to spend money through targeting.

Put another way: there is, in fact, a little bit of Robert Scoble’s brain that is now the Facebook Cortex.

And, through his usual hyperactivity, he’s become an even better product: there are 350,000 people following Scoble on Facebook, clicking Like on his Foursquare checkins and Spotify reports – and by those actions Facebook can compile consumer profiles on each of them, too.  That little chunk of brain that Scoble has turned over to Facebook is helping to make all his readers better products, too.

Scoble’s looking ahead to contextual computing, and the idea that putting all this data into Facebook will eventually make his life easier because other services will be able to extrapolate it into daily-life informational aid.  Because, of course, Facebook is all about you being able to take your data out of it.

Oh, hey, here’s Scoble in 2008, being kicked off Facebook for scraping his contacts data out of his account.

Services, of course, may be able to pay Facebook for the use of Robert Scoble’s Facebook Cortex, and of the products who’ve been pulled into his pseudo-social wake.  Scoble may even wish to pay services to use widgets powered by his own data that the service has paid Facebook to access.

Perhaps there will be tangible benefits (for values of “tangible”) for allowing Facebook to colonise a tiny corner of our brains, in the future.  If we continue to report, we get things.  Amusingly, Bruce Sterling suggested in Eindhoven suggested that something like that could be a condition (or even the condition) of a citizenship that allows you access to basic social services.  Perhaps, once again, Robert Scoble is the canary in the coalmine of social media.

Him and his little blue Facebook Cortex, automatically reporting away in the social dark.

(Disclosure: yes, I have a small Page on Facebook.  It’s an aggregator.  You know what sort of thing gets posted here.  If someone releases jenkem as a retail product, I’m sure Facebook will be the first to inform my Facebook readers.)

Everyone loves Chip.

A couple of times over the last year, I did a thing for people who make comics called Three Panels Open.  Literally, a three-panel comic.  The only rules were that it had to be legible at a width of 640 pixels, which is the width of the content bar on this site, and that it had to be three panels long.

Perhaps you’d like to do a three-panel comic to be posted here.  If so, email the image to warrenellis@gmail.com, and please include your name and the website and/or twitter account you’d like it to be associated with.  Same rules apply: three panels, and it can’t turn to mud when I run it at 640px.  Ideally, it’s a piece of new work, and not just a clip from your current comic. (Though obviously I’m happy to plug said current comic as thanks.)  I’m only going to run the ones I like best, I’m afraid.  However, there’s no time limit on submissions.  Three Panels Open will be a semi-permanent element of the site.

Spread the word, please.

Chip is on Twitter as @zdarsky

Joss, on Friday at San Diego:

Whedon also said he is going straight from Comic-Con to London to meet with Warren Ellis about another project.

Yes.  This week I am in London, working with Joss on this damn thing again.  You want to know how good a friend I consider him?  I have to be working BEFORE ELEVEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.  I am rarely awake before eleven.  In order to do this I will have to be on a train before ten.  This is tantamount to asking me to chew up an entire sheep and spit out a woollen blanket before I am allowed coffee.

I’m preloading a few pieces in the system, but consider me gone until Thursday.

Still here. Took delivery of a new laptop yesterday — the 15-inch Lenovo Ideapad Y580 with the FHD screen and the i7 chip, for those who care — so I should be productive again shortly. Although I’m writing this on the iPad, because I won’t be productive on the Ideapad until the gel tape I ordered from Amazon arrives. Because the Ideapad has sharp edges. On the leading edge, where my wrists sit when I type. Which is why I have red grooves in my wrists, like a very tired cutter armed only with a butter knife, this morning. So I have to put gel tape over the edges. Other than that, it doesn’t seem like a bad machine, the usual Lenovo and Win7 crankiness aside.

The really nice thing, of course, is how quickly I can get a new machine up and running these days. I use a service called Ninite, that creates a loadpoint for new machines — a little executable file that contains the installation commands for the programs I need. Start it up, and it goes off and downloads and installs every program I selected (from a long list on their site). There were, I think, only four things I needed that they didn’t have on their list. And all my work lives in Dropbox. So, within an hour of taking delivery of the machine, I was away, with Chrome and 1Password all synced, iTunes library recompiled and entirely within my preferred setup.

(All I really have to do is puzzle out my Livedrive instance — I have two external drives hooked to Livedrive, but Livedrive won’t recognise them as anything other than new drives, because they’re piping through a laptop with a new name. So I may have to re-upload 35GB of ripped CDs to keep everything straight, which is a little irritating, but still…)

Anyway. No heavy writing until the gel tape arrives, but I’m around, on a machine that won’t (so far) crash if I cough on it.

I was trying to work out something for myself.  Amount of pages done in creator-owned comics work.  This’ll be easier if I get it out in front of me. All numbers very approximate. Just looking for a rough count:

*  TRANSMETROPOLITAN, 1300.

*  FREAKANGELS, 850.

*  GLOBAL FREQUENCY, 250

*  the “superhero comics trilogy” at Avatar, 400

*  the 5 three-issues miniseries at DC Wildstorm, 300

*  SCARS and OCEAN, 300

*  CRECY, AETHERIC MECHANICS, FRANKENSTEIN’S WOMB, 150

*  ORBITER and MINISTRY OF SPACE, 200

*  LAZARUS CHURCHYARD, 150

*  IGNITION CITY, ANNA MERCURY, CITY OF SILENCE, 300

*  FELL and DESOLATION JONES, 250

*  all the GRAVEL stories… 400 pages?

I’m pretty sure I’m missing a bunch of stuff.  ATMOSPHERICS was around 32pp?  I don’t remember how long DARK BLUE was.  Pretty sure I’m over 5000 pages.

(CEREBUS was 6000 pages long. But I didn’t have to draw them all.)

CAMEO is a rock dancer. Not everyone wants to make the run to Ceres. You have to like scientists, for one thing, because there’s nothing inside Ceres but hermit physicists and their weird globular microgravity labs. You also have to like dancing with rocks. On a good day, Ceres is riding between Mars and Jupiter with a family of a thousand other objects. On a bad day, it’s like being shot at by seven armies. Shot at with asteroids. It takes a lot of craft and more art, and no-one gets through even the first month without picking up some bulletholes and powder burn. They say that, to do the Ceres run, you either have something to prove or you want to die. Cameo says she just likes dancing.

[larger image] [original size image]

DEEP MAP PILOTS: A Series Of Five Pictures From Words
MARENKA – REHANI – CAMEO – JINJING – ASCENCION

[process: I wrote five flash fictions for Eliza Gauger to produce a piece of accompanying art for each. The idea was to produce five little portraits of women in space, in art and words.]

Art © Eliza Gauger 2012. Words © Warren Ellis 2012

In 2005, Bruce Sterling, in his role as Visionary-In-Residence at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, worked with students to generate a bunch of design looking forward to 2010.  I just found some shots of their work hiding in the back of my Flickr stream, and they’re kind of interesting to look at from here.

Don’t pay attention to the Arnie thing so much.  Look at the smaller headline in the left, and the slugline above the logo.

Copying these from the notebook before I lose it.  I want to come back to a bunch of these: one of them led to a long Twitter conversation between Deb Chachra, Eleanor Saitta and myself that I need to return to soon.  So, anyway.  Jottings for the outboard memory.

Notes I worked from:

*  What is the legal status of the weather?

*  Are we in fact tending to imagine a city-state?  A city that borders on a closed and self-sufficient (resilient) energy state?  Singapore rather than Brussels?

*  Sonic architecture – footfall energy harvest – road energy harvest

*  Repurposed ambient urban drones

*  The ethics of machine reportage

*  The lessons of archaeo-acoustics – can cities be designed for sound?

*  acoustic mirrors in architecture

*  Buildings that breathe

Notes from things Simon, Rachel and Bruce said:

*  Futurism as radical reductionism

*  Capital as simplification – human life happens in the friction

*  To be an ecological human means understanding our bacterial nature

*  Dematerialised Urbanism

*  Predator Lidar

*  Cities as habitats that domesticate the human

*  Architecture forces solutions on materials

*  It costs $1000 to grow three inches’ worth of tissue culture

[top image cropped from a bad iPhone shot of one of Rachel’s slides]