Garen Ewing’s retro ligne claire-style webcomic series THE RAINBOW ORCHID is going to print. Read much of it here.

2.

Rich Barrett is 16pp into a creepy online graphic novel called NATHAN SORRY that looks like it’s going to turn into something fun.

3.

ELLERBISMS has been on a roll lately.

4.

My favourite comics-related blog is probably still Brandon Graham’s because it’s so beautifully random.

This is the first edition, which he’s calling #0 because he can’t fucking count. The same kind of mental disability that leads to watching LABYRINTH and cooing over David Bowie’s wig rather than watching THE GODFATHER like a real man.

Whenever my fiancée catches me glowering at some irritating dickwit (a chronic snot-sniffer, let’s say), with that special “Oh God I Haaaaate You” glare – the one that comes naturally to Jack Nicholson, Maths Teachers and all Russians everywhere, but just makes me look constipated – she tells me off and asks how I’d feel if it turned-out I’d accidentally given Said Dickwit a dose of Psychic Cancer. To which I dutifully have to lie that I’d be mortified – oh yes, guilty as sin, sob – then go back to industriously setting fire to kittens or whatever I was doing before the HATING first took hold.

Quite how “Psychic Cancer” transformed into “Comedy Bum-berries” in my dream, I don’t know…

Photo by Dave Walsh.

Several years ago, I had done an over-the-phone college radio interview with a couple of guys in Vermont. Chat went fine, I remembered to mention what a genius Alex Ross is the requisite nine times, and we probably moved some trade paperbacks in the process. So once the interview was done, one of them explained that they ran a store in one of Vermont’s largish towns and asked if I’d be interested in doing an in-person signing. “Sure,” I said…

And, obviously, I need one. See to it.

For entirely understandable reasons, MonkeyBrain has decided that they won’t be able to publish my Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes.

So I’m looking for a new publisher. I expect the book will be picked up by someone, somewhere.

Bah.

I shall be at the launch party at the Architecture Association in London on July 7 to buy my copy from the AA shop downstairs. But you needn’t wait. You need this book. Geoff Manaugh writes and thinks like some unholy hybrid of Umberto Eco, Paul Morley, William Gibson and an unhinged ayahuascero dressed only in pages from a furniture catalogue dated 10 December 2012. The book is a mad wunderkammer of mad and lovely things, making the real world into science fiction and making science fiction into the real world. The great joy of BLDGBLOG is when a discovered thing sends Geoff’s brain into some lunatic alternate world of possibility, and then folds the whole the back on to the present day.

I worked out on a calculator that Geoff is approximately eighty times smarter than I am. But I don’t know how to use the more complicated-looking buttons, so it could turn out to be more.

Most people consider the "Taliban" an ideologically and hierarchically cohesive movement ala 20th Century insurgency. It’s not. Instead, it’s fragmented, highly entrepreneurial, tribally cohesive at a local level, and open source in structure.

I know I’ve recommended reading Robb before, and he appears on the sidebar of People Much Cleverer Than Me, but I would commend his site to your attention once again for these wonderful little bomblets of clarity he produces.

Good night, internet.

Download audio file (03%20Lullaby.mp3)

(link degrades in seven days, mp3 provided for review purposes only, contact if you need it removed)

Shownar tracks millions of blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, and finds people talking about BBC telly and radio. Then it datamines to see where the conversations are and what shows are surprisingly popular. You can explore the shows at Shownar itself. It’s an experimental prototype we’ve designed and built for the BBC over the last few months.

Obviously less useful for my Foreign Johnny readers, unless you’ve worked out how to access the BBC from abroad.

Aha. Can you hear that? It’s the Villain’s soundtrack. That awful whistling sound. A sound that comes from before recorded time itself. It is the sound, gentle reader, of Stan Lee’s ocarina…

1. bump, 2. wonderland, 3. the swan whisperer

TAG is a project where every week, a theme is chosen, and every day, one of our artists creates something based around that theme, using a variety of mediums from prose to audio to video to images and so forth.

And it’s actually rather good:

This is “Wipe,” from his album “7.”

Good night internet.

Download audio file (Philip%20Jeck_7_03_Wipe.mp3)

(link degrades after seven days, provided for review purposes only, contact me if you need it gone and it’ll be removed immediately)

* Post your Dr. Sketchy’s Artwork - The boss herself, Molly Crabapple, comperes a thread where Dr Sketchy’s visitors and customers show off their work. Join in.

* REMAKE/REMODEL: International Patents, Inc. - the weekly space where I call out some ancient character from the public domain and have artists reinvent it for the 21st Century.

* The LongBox Digital Comics thread - this one’s going on and on. Will Longbox be the iTunes for comics? Will Longbox kill the comics shop?

* Whitechapel UK Midlands Meetup - where they will all huddle in some shitty pub and mutter together in their funny accents

Monthly reboot in a couple of days’ time.

From: Warren Ellis
To: Bad Signal mailing list
Subject: [Bad Signal] Steam
Date: June 27, 2009 - 7:17 pm EST

Back in my hotel room to write this talk, and I put
Glastonbury up on the tv while I write. Springsteen’s
on. Not a huge fan of the man, though I admire
his industry. The man puts in a day’s work on stage.
And he’s sweating, working hard. Got his foot up
on an amp as he sings. It’s just him, right now, the
stage is blacked out, and there’s one spot behind
him. And he’s hot, and it’s cold night out there, and
he’s steaming. And he’s just blown the authenticity
thing and gone into supermystification, because it
looks like he’s got an electromagnetic halo, curls of
glowing, pearly white light rising up from and playing
around his head and shoulders while he stands there
in near-silhouette….

He looks like he’s The Last Rock Star, the Ascended
Master who glows in the dark.

Home now. Will post the notes that I based the talk on later in the week.

Here’s the link to the programme and other information.

As you’ll see, I’ll be signing books at sometime around six pm, and a while later I’ll be talking about god knows what as the final keynote speaker.

Pray the weather’s good, as I don’t have a smoking hotel room and will therefore have to work outside for two days.

Hopefully I’ll see a few of you in Dundee. Otherwise, I’ll be back here Monday. I imagine I’ll be on twitter the whole time giving my usual terrible Narrative of doom.

Behave yourselves and don’t break anything.

And of course all this bollocks is written by an idiot who has polished his image as an existentialist, atheist hard-man and anti-mope, forever sneering at the tribes who wallow in self-pity — the gothers, the emo kids, the Smiths fans — the whole 900-block-wide marching band composed entirely of the white male urban middle classes who are convinced that (as the most affluent and pampered human beings who have ever walked the planet) theirs is a story worth hearing. Blissfully unaware that they are but a few generations away from regular visits to the doctor who would wind parasitic worms from their beer bloated assholes using sticks.

You could blame this fallacy on poor education, cultural deterioration, or simple moral decline.

Me? I blame it on sunshine. I blame it on the moonlight. I blame it on the boogie.

Proper fucking writer.

The 2008 sf magazine numbers as per Mr Dozois’ discovery:

ASIMOV’S SCIENCE FICTION drops 2.7% in circulation, to a hair over 17000 copies. In the previous three years, it had dropped 5.2%, 13.6% and 23%. That’s 500 missing readers in 2008.

ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT drops 5.1%, to a hair under 26,000 copies. 1400 missing readers in 2008.

MAGAZINE OF FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION drops 2.7% to 16,044 copies. Again, around 500 missing readers in 2008.

REALMS OF FANTASY is awaiting revival, I believe.

Mr Dozois continues to peg INTERZONE at "2000 to 3000 copies," which is what he says every year, and I would love proper figures on INTERZONE’s circulation. And, in fact, I think it would be a wise thing for INTERZONE to release such, to combat this constant carping that it’s a "semi-professional" magazine.

Notes: all of these must be selling digital copies that aren’t getting factored into the circulation. Some of those missing readers must have been converted into digital customers. Those numbers would tell a tale. No, print is not dead, and neither are periodicals. All the magazines save INTERZONE are in the middle of format and/or frequency shifts.

I said last year that I wouldn’t run these numbers. That said, I expected the last year to show these magazines display no response at all to their numbers. Instead, one went bimonthly and two changed size and cut some content. Neither of which strike me as proportionate responses. I could almost understand a resolute "we ain’t changing nothing. This is what we do and we’re going to sit here until they prise our red pens from our cold dead hands because we’re providing a service for the fans who like it old school." I could respect that. I’m glad they don’t have guns and stockpiled foodstuffs, but you know what I mean. I’m not sure that actions commensurate with cutting bits off themselves and cooking and eating them to stave off starvation is really due the same kind of nod.

The 2009 numbers, which Dozois will publish in the summer of 2010, will show how practical these moves proved to be.

"Sf magazines" is the string to use in the Search box to find all my other reports and thoughts on this topic over the last three years. Some of them started some arguments. Can’t imagine how. I am, as you know, the very soul of joy, and filled with light.

My favourite sf magazine? FLURB, without a doubt. Richard Kadrey, Kek-W, Simon Logan, Rudy Rucker and John Shirley in the same place? Beat that with a stick.

1. stranded, 2. toys get bigger, 3. holding down the lakefront