Supreme Blue Rose

Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay's Supreme Blue Rose is the kind of comic that makes my head hurt in a good way:

Warren Ellis on Black & White Comics

From his Orbital Operations email newsletter which you should be getting and reading every week:

And it'd have to be black-and-white. Black-and-white is part of the grammar of large rambling graphic novels, in my head - FROM HELL, CEREBUS, THE LAST KINGDOM, add your own here. Also, it's the grammar of literary graphic novels -- MAUS, PERSEPOLIS, etc etc. So I could fool myself, as all pulp writers who finally give up on plot and just drop their bowels in public do, that I am being all literary and clever. Black-and-white always had the mad things in. Now that I reflect on it, I think most of my fondest memories of comics come from b/w books: 2000AD, WARRIOR, LUTHER ARKWRIGHT, ESCAPE, the undergrounds, the independents, the early Anglophone graphic novels...

Warren Ellis & Grant Morrison at The British Library

Found at Bleeding Cool.

Warren Ellis on Story

From Warren Ellis' Orbital Operations weekly email (a must read for creatives):

I have most of the internet turned off right now, because, as mentioned above, WRITE ALL THE THINGS. I zeroed in on a series idea earlier this week – or was it late last week? – and am writing it all down as quickly as I can between other things, because clearly I want to make myself go blind and die. Blame an excessive rumination on genre, Cormac McCarthy, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett. It will eventually look like none of those things. It doesn’t matter where you start. It only matters where you end up. And sometimes it’s ideal that the latter looks nothing like the former. I suspect that the end result will be greatly tiresome to anyone who isn’t me, but, luckily, I’m really only writing it for me, to see where it goes and what it turns into. “To see where it goes” may be the entire metaphor of the project. The director Allison Anders once said of storytelling that story/plot is a clothesline, with things pinned to it, and she’s more interested in the things hanging off the clothesline than the clothesline itself. It’s one of those. The clothesline is very simple, and extends off into the distance, and the piece itself just stops and examines each item hanging off it. It’s what people mean when they talk about “story engines.”
Here’s the simplest story engine:

The Fugitive, a QM Production—starring David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble: an innocent victim of blind justice, falsely convicted for the murder of his wife ... reprieved by fate when a train wreck freed him en route to the death house ... freed him to hide in lonely desperation, to change his identity, to toil at many jobs ... freed him to search for a one-armed man he saw leave the scene of the crime ... freed him to run before the relentless pursuit of the police lieutenant obsessed with his capture.

It’s a bit flowery, because it’s the narration William Conrad read over three seasons of THE FUGITIVE. You could cut a line or two out of that easily. But that’s the story engine. That’s what activates and closes each episode of the series. You can approach something like that quite mathematically: plug in the variables like location, new characters, job, turn the engine on and generate a plot. You could, I’m sure, name several other story engines.
Story engines are, of course, very dependent on intent, otherwise they just pump out bad sausages. Years and years ago, I was struck by something the author David Morrell said at the end of an interview, when asked about marrying his intellectual background with the “carnographic” literary pulp he was writing. He said something very similar to, “perhaps I’m just trying to find how what John Barth writing ‘Creature From The Black Lagoon’ would have looked like.”
(Morrell, by the way, is much overlooked today, unfairly contaminated by the film versions of his John Rambo character. Anyone interested in thriller writing should investigate Morrell – he’s got some good tricks, like interpolating literary mirroring into action narrative, and a clever time-delay thing for concussive events.)
This is a huge intent. Barth, a core professorial postmodernist who’s stated before that his own intent is to imitate an author imitating a novel – but strongly influenced himself by the attack of Borges’ short fiction – has long been involved in a sort of circular duel with narrative. He said something once, that I associate both with self-identified novelists and experimenters, which was “the process is the content.” Put that next to people like William Gibson, who start a book with nothing more than an opening image to guide them, and say things like “I find out how to write the book as I write it” (bad paraphrase).

Warren Ellis At Cognitive Cities Conference

Warren Ellis at Cognitive Cities Conference from Cognitive Cities on Vimeo.

From Warren Ellis' Ignition City

One of my favorite lines/panels from Ignition City by Warren Ellis:

IndieWeb

Found through Warren Ellis:

"You've not read Borges?"

From Warren Ellis' Global Frequency:

The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges

Thinking Differently: Has the Internet Changed Us?

Warren Ellis: Comedy, Dystopian America & The Space Age

Warren Ellis Talk

"In the intimate surroundings of The Farmhouse Barn, writer Warren Ellis sits down for a State Of The Weird, picking over the radioactive bones of 2013 and gathering the stories for a Briefing on the science-fiction condition of 2014. That night, he will be in the middle of writing a novella about futurists and a non-fiction book about the future of cities — except that they’re both also about strange history and Weird Shit — and he’s here to talk about deep time, storytelling and the weather of tomorrow:"

The Farmhouse : Barn Talks : 1 — Warren Ellis from Shane Becker on Vimeo.

The Farmhouse : Barn Talks : 1 — Warren Ellis Q&A from Shane Becker on Vimeo.

Warren Ellis On Murder

Warren Ellis At Studio X

Crecy by Warren Ellis

Global Frequency by Warren Ellis

Tonight's read and the subject of our next Graphic Panels' meeting at BSI Comics:

Secret Avengers #20

One of the best, coolest, and stylish single issues of comics in recent memory:

Information Apocalypse: Creativity vs The infernal Machine

Guest post by Julian Simpson at WarrenEllis.com:

So we cope with all the information that bombards us by simplifying it down to bite-size chunks, the better to transmit it to others in a form in which it’s most likely to be retained and repeated.

There is an argument that posits that all human beings are is vessels made of information (DNA) and naturally selected for the storage and replication of information. Everything we say, do, wear or make is a form of information, a meme, to be copied by others with variation and selection. Information is king and we are but subjects. That being the case then the handing over of the replication and transmission role to computers could, in a dystopian fantasy such as the one I was dreaming up for a radio play, result in the rapid obsolescence of human beings. Computers process, copy, select and transmit more information than we can and they do it faster. Increasingly, we help them along by buying into the reduction of information; by retweeting and reposting pieces about “scroungers” and “fundamentalists” and “corrupt politicians” and by accepting the boundaries defined by these reductions as the ones within which we’ll frame our arguments (“Are the unemployed scroungers or not?” rather than “Is it useful to make a judgement on any human being purely on the basis of his or her employment status?”).

We also assist in our own reduction through our use of social media; a 160 character biography becomes the sum total of who we are to thousands of strangers. A 140 character tweet or short Facebook update becomes our definitive opinion on a complex subject. Tone of voice, body language, grammar, even vocabulary itself; all the things we used to employ to illuminate and elaborate on the information we transmit, to give it nuance and texture and, for the love of God, to indicate irony, are falling away in favour of reducing information to binary components of love/hate, good/bad; the better to pass more information faster.

Are we playing into the hands of the information itself? Have we created information technology (or been party to its creation – surely all we did was help transmit the memes that led to this) to perform the task for which we came into existence, thus negating the necessity of our own survival?

Warren Ellis on Holy Motors

"HOLY MOTORS may be the most French French film I’ve seen since the 1980s.  I found I needed to watch it twice to really get hold of it.  Afterwards, it haunts the mind: you can sit there and construct science-fictional or supernatural narratives around the thing, to pull it together.  From some angles, it’s hard not to conceive of it as a film about cinema and actors.  From another, it’s clearly a story of the surveillance society and the inexorable march of machinery towards the invisibly vigilant.  (And perversely miraculous.)  At four in the morning, it somehow seems obviously the third part to Wenders’ WINGS OF DESIRE and FARAWAY SO CLOSE, set in Paris after the end of Time and following the works of disintegrating angels. 

Time is a thing I’ve been interested in, this past year."

- Warren Ellis from his newsletter Machine Vision

Tokyo Storm Warning

Re-read Tokyo Storm Warning last night:

Nice warm up for Pacific Rim.

Clayton Cubitt Gun Machine Trailers