A Sense of Doubt blog post #1432 - Already Behind The Moment - OO 20 Jan 2019 - Ellis
I need to get down to BOOKS WITH PICTURES in Portland, again. When I called Proprietrix Katie Proctor last week, she offered to help me find a copy of Friendo #1 from Vault, which is sold out in first and second printings. She is actually contacting the publishers to get them to do a third printing because she is AWESOME!!
So.... Just found this. http://www.skindeepcomic.com/archive/illumination-page-1/
Because... Portland.
Also, reminding myself (AND you) to read this:
https://www.paulduffield.co.uk/firelightisle/1
AND THIS:
FINALITY by Colleen Doran and Warren Ellis
OH AND THIS:
http://www.golobthehumanoid.com/vintagepix.html
Looks like the Ellis newsletter has padding on the left margin, and I am too tired to fix it. More or less it's readable through my usual right-side blog column. Sorry. I am not feeling very expert at HTML today.
So, here's Warren's newsletter because it's awesome.
Already Behind The Moment - OO 20 Jan 2019
Behold! Your weekly letter from me, Warren Ellis
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ORBITAL OPERATIONS
Hello from out here on the Thames Delta, where I am, yes, already behind the moment. Everything is in the saddle, I'm spending a lot of time on the phone, I had back to back meetings in London on Tuesday and am fearing that juncture where somebody says to me. "Well... you're going to need to be in Los Angeles for this next bit."
Just got Becky Cloonan's digital pencils for the 10-page piece we're doing together for DETECTIVE COMICS #1000. Still puzzling out the middle beats on a season outline. I need to get back on PROJECT TRICORNER in the coming week, as well as get a little further ahead of Jon on WILD STORM (though I suspect issue 20 kind of killed him and I should get the poor guy a day off), poke the office about PROJECT JUVET and fiddle around with some random ideas that have been occurring to me.
I have decided to send this edition a few hours early to confuse everyone's email filters. Hi.
ABOVE: the variant cover to THE WILD STORM #20 by Yasmine Putri.
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I am buying physical DVDs.
And I may have to get a "Blu-Ray" player.
I am offended by this.
But I have been arriving at a point where some of the things I want to watch obsessively and study are simply not available on streaming or even pirate services. One thing I want to pick apart - 24 FRAMES - is in fact apparently only scheduled for a Blu-Ray release over here.
So, you know, it's not just that I'm An Old. It's that streaming services don't have what I want -- and in a few cases where what I want to see has been available, it's been cheaper to buy the DVD than to buy the stream, which is kind of insane.
Therefore, as the writer and co-producer of a streaming show, I'm taking another step away from digital services. This feels weird. But there's been a pleasure in uncovering boxes and piles in my office to find all my old DVDs and pulling them together. I'd totally forgotten I owned a copy of Chris Morris' MY WRONGS. (And, Drew Pearce, wherever you are, I still have that DVD of NO HEROICS you sent me, way back when!) There's a sense that 2019 is taking on its own shape. I'm looking at a smallish stack of notebooks yet unmarked, a work schedule on the whiteboard that will be intense but largely free of weekly milestones, the scraps of paper with kernels of ideas scrawled on them, and thinking, yeah, I'm okay with watching films on DVD, replenishing and provoking my visual vocabulary, and getting on with making new things.
There's a shitload going on in my head right now. I'm going to sit back with a notebook.
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Someone jokingly asked me the other day what I'd do if I were running a comics publishing company. They meant Marvel or DC. But that's not me.
This is me:
That is 5.25 inches on one side and about 7.7 inches on the long side. It contains 96 pages within its perfect-bound card covers, and in this book 94 pages of them are comics.
And it's black and white.
This is the old Paradox Mystery format, which, to my mind, did everything right. Except that each book was a three-part serial, released monthly. And bookstores, the natural audience for these works, do not accommodate monthly serials. Even Stephen King couldn't make it work. Each one should have been a 96-page standalone work.
It is otherwise very nearly perfect as a format. All Andy Helfer had to do was to push back against everyone who wanted serial works, and say, no, these are going to be self-contained books for reading in a single sitting, like Georges Simenon's MAIGRET books.
But it was not to be. Though I should note that this line produced A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, which became the film directed by David Cronenberg.
The Paradox books had a roughly unified trade dress, but it needed something just a little more flexible and a little more eyecatching. It needed Romek Marber, frankly. I've talked at you before about the Marber Grid, the template created in 1961 for Penguin Books.
I can daydream about setting Rian Hughes to generate his own Hughes Grid, right? And Rian styling them all with his own typefaces?
(If you like these covers, Joe Kral's collection is still up on Flickr.)
I could happily have spent much of my life just writing three of these a year. 90-page black and white stories in a comfortable format that makes you want to curl up with them for an hour or two. I could have had a rack of them like Ingmar Bergman movies by now.
The Paradox Mystery books are, of course, from the mid-Nineties. Before manga exploded in the bookstore market. What were outliers back then are possibly right in the zone today. Nobody's listened to me about this over the last twenty years and nobody will listen to me about it now. And quite rightly, because I'm entirely mad.
I would only publish three kinds of graphic novels. Fiction, Documentary and Theory. I would go bankrupt in about eight minutes. I would love every second.
(Also. yes, I have had that copy of HUNTER'S HEART to hand since 1995. It's a lost future.)
NOCILLA LAB finally arrived and I've been devouring it. This final part of Agustin Fernandez Mallo's NOCILLA trilogy is not like the others. It presents, in fact, as an explanation of the approach to the first two books. I've been highlighting like a motherfucker:
...the time had come to generate an inhospitable space of my own, a ruin, a place whose only function was to exist in people’s dreams, a place at the margins of planet Earth and its fascistic mechanical, ethical and biological functions...
And check this out:
...when I was a teenager and found it impossible to read comics, I could make neither head nor tail of them, found it impossible to follow the thread, I did buy some and I did try, I even went so far as to sketch out some illustrated stories of my own to see if this might lead me to the secret heart of their mechanism, but it didn’t, and then a friend of mine, an illustrator named Pere Joan, told me the important thing with comics was to know how to read the white spaces between the panels, These silences are what you have to learn to read, he said, they contain everything you need to understand, those were his words, and since then I have been reading comics...
You may notice something about both quotes. Yes, the first large section of the book is written as a single run-on sentence.
...and so, bored and lacking company, 9 years before, I opened The Monkey Grammarian that June afternoon when the woman I was living with had gone to New York to do I don’t know what, and the first thing I noticed was its strange structure, fairly indefinable, fragments followed by more fragments, prose poem-like things, and I was especially drawn to one in which the resounding claim was made that all words are metaphors, standing in for things that in turn stand in for others, and those others for others still, and so on until one alights upon the arbitrary nature of a no less metaphorical nucleus that will forever remain a mystery to us...
And so, no, it is not the easiest of books, not least because there are no silences to read.
And then the thing gets darker. And then the thing shatters apart. And you realise that the book might be less about the trilogy than it is about what work does to relationships, and what obsessive focus does to your head.
And then the thing becomes a black and white graphic novella. In paperback book size.
See? Sometimes I have a plan.
NOCILLA LAB is a glorious, chilling summation of the entire Nocilla project. I have previously implored you to read NOCILLA DREAM and NOCILLA EXPERIENCE. If you read those, you need this. If you haven't read those, probably don't start with this. Or do. It bears no relation to the others beyond its place as a capstone.
Mallo is one of the contemporary greats. He captures 21st Century life in ways I can only dream about being capable of.
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Someone asked what system I use for this newsletter. It is Campaign Monitor. They are very good.
Well, this is odd: a "newsletter" that is just a regularly updated Google Doc.
"The Back Alley" by Mending - this song will wreck you.
++ MORNING COMPUTER
I also note that comics great George Perez has now fully retired. Good for him, I say. He and his wife were very kind to me, years ago, and he is an immense talent. I'm not sure I ever really understood how good he was until I saw his pencilled pages on a job we did together. I wish him many, many peaceful years of relaxation.
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@
If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you'd like to infect your friends with it, by driving them to http://orbitaloperations.
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Okay, that's probably enough of my babbling. I am going to leave you with a quote from that great sage of the British Isles, Professor Bernard Quatermass:
You will overcome this evil. Without you it cannot exist upon the earth – it can only know by means of your knowledge – understand through your understanding... With all your power – and mine joined to yours – you must dissever from it! Send it out of earthly existence!
Hold on tight. I'm right here with you. See you next week.
-- W
Warren Ellis
represented by:
Cheng Caplan Company
3863 Grand View Blvd., Suite 2
Los Angeles, CA 90066
represented by:
Cheng Caplan Company
3863 Grand View Blvd., Suite 2
Los Angeles, CA 90066
I'm afraid you subscribed to this at orbitaloperations.com on purpose
Amazon Affiliates links included to offset some of the costs of producing this emanation
Amazon Affiliates links included to offset some of the costs of producing this emanation
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1901.22 - 10:10
- Days ago = 1298 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.
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