A Sense of Doubt blog post #1299 - Comic goodness - Ellis/Doran Finality - Duffield the Firelight Isle and PODCASTS!

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1299 - Comic goodness - Ellis/Doran Finality - Duffield the Firelight Isle, Oeming, and PODCASTS!

Hi Peeps, I considered a 9/11 themed post today, but you can get that elsewhere.

Today is about comic books.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I love comic books. I love other things, too, and probably have more posts about music (because of Musical Monday) than comics, but currently 95 posts out of 1299 are about comics, which is not bad given my dedication variety. There are 266 posts about music.

As I shared the other day, I spent most of the weekend at the Rose City Comic Con and given that I have been reading over Previews, as well as the usual comic reading, my attention has been more laser focused on comic books lately than usual.

Today is a conglomeration of juicy morsels of comic book goodness, especially some new PODCASTS that I learned about at comic con (and one I didn't).

I just want to say quickly right here THE FIRELIGHT ISLE!!

MICHAEL OEMING IS ON PATREON and golly gee is he active...

Oeming sends A LOT  of posts, but if you're into that, for only ONE DOLLAR, you can get access to work and Michael's newsy and frequent updates on his work process. It's really great stuff. Check out his latest work there.

In PODCAST news, my old friends from the fanazine APA Titantalk, Charles Skaggs and Jesse Jackson, do a TitanTalk podcast. Recent episode:

TITANTALK 007: "F#@% Batman" is Up!

And I learned of another Titans themed podcast at RCCC called Titan Up The Defense, in which the hosts focus each episode either on a New Teen Titans comic from the 1980s or a Defenders comic from the 1970s. It's great stuff.

But at RCCC, I met two gents doing podcasts that became instant favorites.

First off, COMIC REFLECTIONS, which is billed as a weekly reflection of Gold, Silver, and Bronze age comics.

I have already listened to the previous episode and most of the one just released yesterday. It's fun stuff.

Recent episode - Batman 237

I also learned of UNPACKING THE POWER, a podcast about the classic 1980s Marvel Comics series Power Pack.

I am excited to listen to the June Brigman interview.

Great stuff for comic fans EVERYWHERE.

I will probably share more about the RCCC in my Throwback Thursday weekly stream of consciousness tumult.

Below, you will find thoughts on a new project with Ellis and Colleen Doran (see cover image above).

There's also a lot of text from Ellis' newsletter (subscribe link to follow) with great quotes about comics and some analysis. Thanks Warren. You brighten my Sundays.

Most notably, Ellis announces a new project by Freakangels collaborator Paul Duffield, whom I have now backed on Patreon and with whom I have exchanged some messages. Thanks for all the AWESOME stuff, Paul.

If you have never read Freakangels , uh.... GET ON THAT RIGHT NOW.

Teaser image...

From Ellis - here's his "bio" and newsletter pitch.

If you're just joining me and have forgotten why you subscribed: I'm Warren Ellis, author, comics writer, public speaker, screenwriter, producer, Doctor of the University of Essex, visiting Professor to York St John University, Patron to Humanists UK and writer/co-producer of CASTLEVANIA on Netflix.


Please add warrenellis@orbitaloperations.com to your address book so I don't keep getting marked as sp7m just for sending you an email with four fucking links in it.


If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you'd like to infect your friends with it, by driving them to http://orbitaloperations.com and forcing them to give me their email address.
Piece on Forbes about FINALITY and the other Line Webtoon comics coming soon.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2018/08/30/stan-lee-warren-ellis-fabien-nicieza-highlight-new-webtoon-series-launches-this-fall/#70ecf2c3a30a


October 5: Finality by Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran. Acclaimed writer Ellis and artist Doran weave a  crime drama about Felicity Rockall, the world's greatest criminal investigator, and Amy Ash, the young DCIS special agent assigned to try and control the eccentric genius, as they deal with a frightening murder mystery that may prove to be Felicity's final case.

I hope this GIF works, because it's amazing.  From THE FIRELIGHT ISLE by my old comrade Paul Duffield, who funds his work and disseminates wonderful new things through his Patreon.  Three bucks a month, and you get to see the whole art process, too.

I have to think of a closing keynote speech for Thought Bubble on September 22nd. I haven't had to give a talk around comics since Dundee in 2009.

This is the bones of the talk I gave at Dundee University. Didn’t have time to write a full formal paper. I get massively extemporaneous when I do these things from a sketch like this, moving in and out of the notes, so this isn’t everything I said. But what the hell. I was writing on the assumption of a mostly academic audience, so I recapitulated some old thoughts and re-used the old Harvey Pekar line I’m so fond of trotting out. Also, this was all written in pencil, in my hideous chickenscratch, in a notebook, a couple of hours before I took the lectern. Anyway. Here it is.

Hello. Forgive me from working from notes. No time to write a full talk in the end. Because I’m a working writer in a deadline business. Which is why I’m here.

I think I’m supposed to be talking about my career in comics, providing some kind of summation to a conference about the relationship between comics and time. To which I’d first offer this, inscribed on a stone plaque embedded in the courtyard wall of the hotel across town I’m staying at:

"God give the blessing to the paper craft in the good realm of Scotland."

That stone was cut in 1870.

120 years later, I’m in Glasgow with Scots comics writer Grant Morrison, who’s just scored some brown acid off Bryan Talbot and is explaining to me how time works in comics. He explains to me his discovery that any comic is in fact its own continuum, an infinitely malleable miniature universe from Big Bang to heat death, and that in reading it you can make time go backwards, skip entire eons, strobe time itself, re-run geologic-scale periods in loops… reading a comic is in fact controlling time from a godlike perspective.

He was, of course, very full of hallucinogens at the time. This is why people were warned about the brown acid at Woodstock.

That said, we can now thank Grant for solving the mandate of this conference while in the grip of profound psychotomimetic hubris, and move on.

What I do is the Paper Craft, and there are few better places to talk about it than here in Dundee, where ink has run in the town’s blood since even before 1870, but thick and dark since 1905, when DC Thomson was founded, Britain’s oldest continuous publisher of comics… making this place the storied city of Jam, Jute and Journalism.

I’ve been writing comics since the 1980s — grew up reading Alan Grant (who was in the audience) — and doing it full time for approaching twenty years. I do a lot of other things too — first novel a couple of years ago, journalism, animation, anything that looks like it’ll pay a bill. Because I’m a working writer. But comics were my first love, and I still spend most of my time writing them. I love visual narrative, and comics are the purest form of visual narrative.

I’ve worked in television, and there are a hundred people between you and the audience. I’ve worked in film, and there are a thousand people between you and the audience. In comics, there’s me and an artist, presenting our stories to you without filters or significant hurdles, in a cheap, simple, portable form. Comics are a mature technology. Their control of time — provided you’re not intent on reversing universes (or even if you are) — makes them the best educational tool in the world. Hell, intelligence agencies have used comics to teach people how to dissent and perform sabotage.

When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you’re being shown, along with what’s being said, along with what you’re being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure… Comics require a little more of your brain than other visual media. They should just hand them out to being to stave off Alzheimer’s.

Although I think a headline of "Grant Morrison staves off dementia" might be a little premature.

The line I always quote in talks like these, the one I want you to take away with you, is something the comics writer Harvey Pekar said: "Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures."

And the nice thing about comics, the blessing of the paper craft, is that there’s really no-one to stop you.

++

The worst thing is that I have this voice in my head whispering "you want to do another long-running comics series."  And no, I don't!  I will die!  

(Oh, talking of comics, here's Declan talking a bit about our run on MOON KNIGHT. FAQ: INJECTION will be back next year, Dec needed to take time off to do other things. Which coincided nicely with my spending all year on (redacted television project).)

Where was I?  Oh yes I WILL DIE. Filling a notebook with notions about what a twenty-page container could and should and should not and can't hold is obviously stupid and insane. It is, however, a big part of the job of doing serial comics.  Which I still occasionally do, and of which I apparently suffer a permanent infection.

Sooner or later it'll turn into something.  Something nobody will want to draw or read. I don't much care about that at this stage. You have to spread the shit before you grow the food.

This thing we do is not in the nature of a service industry. As a creator, please yourself first. An audience will show up or they won't. That's their call. It's on you to produce the kind of work you want to see in the world.

Classic David Simon interview:

Fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Old Takashi Miike quote I'm fond of and have used before:

We have to change the negative things into positive. In today’s Japanese film industry we always say we don’t have enough budget, that people don’t go to see the films. But we can think of it in a positive way, meaning that if audiences don’t go to the cinema we can make any movie we want. After all, no matter what kind of movie you make it’s never a hit, so we can make a really bold, daring movie. There are many talented actors and crew, but many Japanese movies aren’t interesting. Many films are made with the image of what a Japanese film should be like. Some films venture outside those expectations a little bit, but I feel we should break them.

SOME EXTRA COVER GALLERY AND ART GOODNESS

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1809.11 - 10:10

- Days ago =  1165 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.