Comics artist Francesco Francavilla’s hobby appears to be slinging gorgeous illustrations up on the web for the fun of it.  Check this recent gem from his Pulp Sunday artblog:

Go on.  Tell me you’re not just the least bit amused by that.

Brian Churilla’s THE SECRET HISTORY OF D.B. COOPER plays like Mike Mignola at his most hard-boiled adapting every goofy film about dreams that you ever sat through. If you love Mignola’s HELLBOY, you’ll find a lot to like in Churilla’s comically grim, energetically cartooned tale of an oneiric sniper scowling his way through Lovecraftian mindscapes.

Also, Occult Mutilated Teddy Bear.  Money in the bank.

There’s a fuller preview of the first issue at this link here.  I think COOPER will develop into an entertaining genre mashup in the mode of THE SIXTH GUN.

It comes from Oni Press (who sent me PDFs of the first three issues, so I know whereof I mumble), and launches on March 14.  You can contact your local comics store and give them the Diamond order code JAN12 1215.

Earlier today, Eric Stephenson at Image Comics kindly flowed me along an Advance Reading Copy of the first issue of Brian K Vaughan (Y THE LAST MAN, LOST) and Fiona Staples’ new comics series, SAGA.  Below, a section of the first issue’s cover, which got some idiot cheesecake painter all aerated because it’s apparently disgusting and  “shock value†and The Reason Why Kids Don’t Like Comics No More:

Yes.  Drawn Lady is drawn nursing Drawn Baby.  Presumably the real thing reduces persons of delicate sensibilities to projectile vomiting.  (He’s since removed his post because so many people shouted at him.)

And, of course, it’s not a comic for kids.  Defining “kids†as, I dunno, under twelve.  Because there’s childbirth and swearing and alien sex in it.  None of which was new to me when I was twelve, and I didn’t even have the fucking internet, but whatever.  That’s not what we’re here for.  I’m just making the point that this is clearly a sf/f book for non-infants.  It is, I think, a very good comic, and one that will prove something of a barometer for the maturity of the current commercial comics market.

First things first: this opening issue of SAGA is the first chapter of what will clearly be a very longform sf serial about war and politics, magic and science and love and sex.  The clue is kind of in the title.  Brian, an extremely gifted author, has written a clever and charming script, and Fiona Staples, whom I’ve previously seen very little by, is demonstrably a very intelligent artist who creates warm and characterful performances for her actors while spinning out perfectly weighted storytelling that puts me in mind of experts like Steve Dillon.  It’s a little like listening to an orchestra tuning up and running through the early phrases of a big symphony, sounding the main themes and hinting at the complex beauty to come.

Romeo and Juliet up there are Marko and Alana, from either side of a war that has no good side.  And what they did – having her umbilical gnawed off there – was something that apparently never should have happened.  And it’s her story (or will be):

Because, you see, the book is shot through with panels like this, and lettering like this, as if from a children’s book.  And that’s the baby’s narrative.

You can almost guarantee that someone or other will complain about one juxtaposition of elements or other.  That the perfectly lovely children’s-book bits and the cherished violent bits should not be seen in the same place as baby-feeding and robot fucking.  Or that the robot fucking is excellent and the character writing just gets in the way.  Or that the whole thing is too slow and “decompressed,†or that the swearing distracts from the magical bits, or, I don’t know, babies disturb their wanking or something.  Either people will recognise this as the opening notes of a rich and extended piece that contains much, as a novel should, or they are going to find a panoply of bad reasons to complain about it.

None of which feels right to talk about, in a way.  I’ve talked about all these poisonous suppositions I have, instead of focussing on the work itself, which is bad form.  But I want to be true to the feeling I had on closing the issue, which was, simply: god, what if the commercial comics market in 2012 might not support a novelistic longform serial written by Brian fucking Vaughan?  As with much to do with comics lately, I would like to be wrong.  Because I would like to read a lot more of SAGA.

It’s a terrific book, and another sign of the new resurgence at Image Comics.  It is a wonderful thing to welcome Brian back to the medium, and a wonderful thing to discover the art of Fiona Staples.

SAGA #1 is released on 14 March 2012 from Image Comics.  It will cost USD $2.99.  You can contact your local comics shop and give them the order code JAN120485, if you want to arrange your copy in advance.  Which I would recommend.

Related articles

I wrote a foreword for a previous collection of Antony Johnston’s sf comics series WASTELAND, then illustrated by Christopher Mitten, and a bit of it went like this:

A lot of you know Antony, because a lot of you played the DEAD SPACE games, for which Antony has been the chief writer.

WASTELAND has a new artist, Justin Greenwood, and the next issue, #33, due out on January 18, is a new start for the series.  There’s no better point to discover WASTELAND.  A preview of issue 33, selected and provided by Antony, can be found by clicking for more.

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I should have titled this “non-predictions about comics in 2012.†

Predictions are, by and large, a mug’s game, and some if not all of what’s below falls under the rubric of The Bleedin’ Obvious, but I wanted to get it out of my head and down on a screen in any case.

This year should be the year where a wide swathe of established comics creators go “digital-first†with a broad variety of projects.  However, that should also have been last year.  Which leads me to wonder whether or not there’s really a taste for it among the creative community.  (Aside from me: but I’m not certain I’d have the time or access to the artists that’d really make it work for me.)  So I’m going to go ahead and say this isn’t going to happen this year, and won’t until it’s really too late – and just hope I’m completely wrong about this one.

This year, at least three groups will offer indie comics creators a “roll-your-own†digital service allowing them to ready and upload their own comics into storefront apps.  It will be absolute chaos, and will create the sort of curational crisis you see when you browse for Kindle books by genre.

A corollary to the above, though: I expect to see more new comics creators bypassing the standard model of comics publishing entirely this year, and going straight to book publishing houses and crowdfunded self-publication and direct-to-digital using one of the services mentioned above.

For those who care about the big commercial comics companies: DC will continue to cede market share to Marvel during 2012, until they launch another round of issue 1s in September.  But the bounce from that won’t last as long as the New 52.  At which point, sadly, I think we’ll see the first signs of exits and exit strategies from DC staff.

More of this: Oni, Viz, Avatar, Boom, Archaia, Fantagraphics and a few actual publishing houses having less share in the direct market than Eaglemoss, a company that packages partwork magazines with little Marvel and DC character figurines.  A less perfect illustration of what comics stores are actually interested in selling, I cannot find today.

Ed Brubaker was kind enough to shoot me an ARC (Advance Reading Copy) of his new comics series with illustrator Sean Phillips, FATALE, the other week.  Ed was kind of freaked out when I said “this is a lot of fun.”

“You never call anything ‘fun,’” Ed said.  ”Never!  You hate it, right?”

Nope.  It’s fun.  It’s Ed and Sean mixing up crime and horror in a big tub with a bloody great bit of wood, which would be entertaining enough in its own right: but there’s deep barbs sunk in the big stick, with a sharp steel shine that promises more than you see on the surface.

I must have convinced him, because he’s given me a five-page preview of the first issue of FATALE to show you.  It’s out in comics stores from this Wednesday, I believe.  (Probably a day later in Britain.)  Please click through to see them, and the alternative cover to issue one that for some reason cracks me up every time I see it.

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Produced on an iPad, of all things.  (WhatNot)

Annie sometimes has work for sale at this link here.  She posts new stuff at this link here when she remembers.

I am presuming this woman is making many thousands of dollars somewhere, and keeps a dA profile just for fun.

From the WhatNot group sketchblog, a wonderful piece by Bill Sienkiewicz, one of my first favourite comics artists.  In fact, I’ve loved his work for so long that I can spell his name without having to check it.  Loads of other great stuff at WhatNot, from people like Mark Chiarello and Becky Cloonan and Mike Oeming and Duncan Fegredo and and and…

PROPHET was a comics series by Rob Liefeld in the 1990s, from Image Comics.  I’ve never read it.  It ended at issue 20.

Recently, Rob Liefeld licensed a bunch of his old properties, including PROPHET, back to Image, where Eric Stephenson began matching them to creative teams with carte blanche to reimagine them.

I was, shall we say, skeptical.  And possibly slightly scathing.  Then Eric emailed me and told me exactly who he’d convinced to reinvent these properties.  Which did actually shut me up a bit. 

(these images are screenshot off a PDF advance reading copy, so don’t mistake them for print quality)

Brandon Graham is the writer/artist of acclaimed comics like KING CITY and MULTIPLE WARHEADS.  Simon Roy is the writer/artist of the justly applauded JAN’S ATOMIC HEART.  Both of these are off-kilter, very modern urban science fictions.  In PROPHET, Brandon writes for Simon, and what is produced is something as close to classic French science-fiction comics as I’ve seen in a long time, with a hard edge of contemporary strangeness ground into it.

And it’s very, very good comics.

They recommence the series with issue 21, as if it had simply paused for years.  I’ve never, as I said, read a copy of PROPHET before, and had no idea what the character or the central idea was.  I wasn’t lost.  It sweeps you right in, as if it were the start of a brand new series.  Very densely populated with ideas, very readable, very accessible.  Very clever.  And very beautiful.

John Prophet is a cryogenically-stored agent, periodically disgorged from the bowels of the Earth to be dispatched on a mission.  This time, he’s been underground for a very long time.  Possibly too long.

So begins a journey of deep weirdness – and I’m trying not to spoil it, so I’m not showing you the bit that made me laugh and sort of twitch and retch all at the same time, or even the most wonderful pieces of invention.  I’m hoping this little taste will be enough for you to at least look for it on the week of January 18, 2012, which is when it’s released to comics stores.

What PROPHET by Brandon and Simon is, for me, is the best new science fiction comic since CASANOVA.  It’s more linear than that book, and not as highly compressed, but it is rich, highly inventive, lustrous and a completely entertaining reading experience.  I really hope it finds an audience, because I want more of this book, and I recommend it to you without reservation.

Comics stores can still order more copies of PROPHET #21, using the Diamond order code NOV110358 – if you want to make sure your local store gets a copy for you, quote them that code, as it’ll make it easier for them to do it.  Or, hell, just tell them you want one, if need be.

I hope that when you find it, you enjoy it as much as I did.  Thanks to Eric Stephenson for sending the ARC over.

…more than one in every two comics sold by Diamond in October was a DC comic.

Okay, that’s more like a fight.  I wish that many of the New 52 DC comics were more creatively compelling and less editorially pissed-in, and I wish DC had dealt Marvel a nutpunch right out of the gate, but I do really like this performance by DC. 

It’ll make Marvel work harder.  And then, maybe, just for a short while, commercial comics will be less ugly and stupid.

This on the same day that Marvel are letting a bunch of TPBs go out of print just-because.

Dear Tor.com, you seem to have forgotten that you do comics for about a year, and have walked away from the powerful web-to-print model you were presumably exploring with Dan Goldman’s RED LIGHT PROPERTIES.  Given that you are clearly funded for comics work, since I can’t imagine the likes of Mike Mignola and Craig Thompson work for free, and have begun commissioning anew… can I expect to see another, more sustained stab at a disruptive presence in the comics medium by a noted sf prose publisher (publisher, in fact, of my daughter’s current favourite author, Cherie Priest)?  Or are you just farting about?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

I remember my dad bringing it home for me when he returned from work one night.  I know I also read TV21.  But it’s COUNTDOWN that sticks in my mind for some reason.  It was a science fiction anthology comic wherein all the stories were licensed from TV shows of the period, with one main exception.  That exception being the series within COUNTDOWN that was also titled COUNTDOWN, which licensed design work from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY:

The art on that strip, as you will have noted, is by the great John M Burns, one of the real unsung heroes of British comics.  As is this panel to the left.  For those of you who study comics, let me reiterate: this is commercial British comics art, mainstream sold-on-the-newsstand comics art, from 1971.

Below is another bit from COUNTDOWN-the-series, a recap block from a later episode.  This is the bottom half of a single page, and I cropped it so you can also see the page furniture.  The pagination on COUNTDOWN counted backwards, from 22 to 1.  So 6 was towards the back of the book.

A cheerful moment from the DOCTOR WHO strip that ran in COUNTDOWN (these were the Jon Pertwee years).  It was a mild curiosity of the strip that it always called him “Dr Who,†not “The Doctor,†something that I think only other happened in the Peter Cushing film versions.

A piece of a UFO episode, based on the Gerry Anderson series.  They did like their jagged layouts – I’m not sure if that’s a Frank Bellamy influence or not.  There’s certainly still some of the British newspaper strip style in it.

Ah, but the other thing they did in COUNTDOWN…

…was articles.  I’m sure I wasn’t able to understand much of what was going on.  But somehow I think some of it sunk in…

And the problem with webcomics, as people said over and over again, was that there was no way to monetise them.

Way back in the day, in fact, people talked about how what the medium needed was an iPod for comics.  I, and probably others, countered that what was in fact needed was an iTunes for comics.  The delivery system, not the device.  Comixology, Graphic.ly, iVerse and all the others are in the business of trying to provide the iTunes for comics.  But, of course, with the iPad, we got the iPod for comics, too, the perfect device for reading them. 

(I am, for the purposes of this thought, ignoring the Kindle, and also Android tablets.)

But no-one seemed to have cracked the Season Pass yet.  I’ve talked to a few digital-comics services about this: if your service doesn’t allow you to buy a subscription that has your favourite comics automagically download to your device or your in-service locker, then I think you’re missing a huge piece of potential.

Of course, that function doesn’t strictly exist in webcomics.  For two and a half years I was doing this nearly every week:

And I think it was Tom Spurgeon who commented that the closure of my long-running email blast BAD SIGNAL meant that he wasn’t getting a notification in email every Friday that the new episode of FREAKANGELS was up, which made it the easiest webcomic for him to keep up with.

It occurred to me today – and my mind’s mostly been elsewhere – that digital comics and webcomics are not the same thing at all, and are not the same thing in ways other than the obvious.

There is no experience of broadcast in digital comics.  Digital comics are, in fact, the closest digital emulation of the store experience: they’re flung up on a virtual shelf.

Webcomics are broadcast.  From the moment they’re uploaded, they’re surrounded by an expanding sphere of URLs and shortcodes, of RTs and Likes and +1s, and are being opened on desktops and laptops and tablets and phones.

Yes, they’re hard to monetise.  Yes, you’ll probably have to sell something other than the comic, and hope that someone notices you and offers you a book deal of some kind, and that’s a high bar because chances are that you’re not as good as Hope Larson or Kate Beaton, and placing advertising is always dodgy (even Avatar Press, who funded FREAKANGELS, put Google Ads on the site in the last few weeks of the run.  And FREAKANGELS made a profit in print).

The focus is off webcomics right now.  People are looking at how to get into the digital comics services.  And quite rightly: they offer the possibility of bypassing the zero-sum game of serialising new and original material into the direct sales comics store market, a market that’s frequently been quite adamant about how it doesn’t want to sell new and original material.  If I had the ability to go into digital comics right now and attempt to access a paying audience for new work, I absolutely would.

(I’ve run out of both available collaborators and tolerance for the toxic shit of the business.)

But webcomics are where the reach is.  Webcomics are not the inferior option just because there’s not a payment system in place.  Webcomics, for some little time to come, are where you’re going to hear about new things first.  Not least because it’s tough to bit.ly or t.co into an in-app purchase.

(I can get you to Comixology’s webpage for CASANOVA: AVARITIA 2, but that doesn’t give me a buy link for the digital comic.  For that, I had to go into the digital-store website and do a search to find the comic’s digital-store page.  I’m not singling out Comixology: I use their service more than any other, in fact.  I’m just saying, this ain’t solved yet, even by the designers I like the most.)

Also, it’s a hell of a lot easier to take your time telling a story when you’re not charging people.

And, while there’s a smile in that comment, there’s also a degree of truth.  Compressing comics down to twenty pages, nineteen pages, probably eight or ten or twelve pages when people get to producing original material through digital comics services… while it’ll certainly make a nice change for a lot of people, after a decade of spacious and airy commercial comics, I’m compelled to point out that the crushed-in nature of commercial comics in the 1970s was one of the driving forces behind the big changes to the commercial medium that came in the 80s.  People were desperate for longer episodes and arcs that allowed them to tell stories more novelistically – and, in large part, they did that by using the then-new process of selling to the direct sales comics store market.

We’re all looking at compression techniques now, because we need them for commercial comics and we’re going to need them for digital comics.  Look at this Howard Chaykin page from AMERICAN FLAGG! in 1983, for instance:

In going back and studying this – for the millionth time since I bought this comic in 1983 – I found that I had somehow forgotten one thing about it.  This comic is 28 pages long.  The first 12 issues of AMERICAN FLAGG in fact form one graphic novel of some 330+ pages.  (And I’m telling you now, if you’ve never read AMERICAN FLAGG!, and you’re interested in comics and science fiction, then you need to sort that shit out, because this is the great lost commercial graphic novel of the 80s, and it should be racked with WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS everywhere.)

Some things work at a smaller page count.  FELL was 16 pages an episode, but those were just a string of little one-act plays.  People want to be able to do more than one-act plays in the medium.  People also forget that the Anglophone medium’s greatest graphic novel picaresque, some 6000 pages long, was serialised in monthly 20-page parts:

CEREBUS was a direct-market publishing phenomenon because, really, there was nowhere else Dave Sim and Gerhard could have done it.  The idea of the direct market supporting something like CEREBUS now is laughable.  The only place you could do something so massive and foolhardy would in fact be in webcomics: the lesson of the Foglios and the only comic sf fans seem ever to have heard of, GIRL GENIUS, now in its 11th volume, somewhere over 1000 pages in total by now.

AMERICAN FLAGG! is to digital comics – compression, jamming in as much material as possible to justify a purchase that still may not appear as valuable as an mp3 or a TV show episode while costing comparably much because people are fucking idiots – as CEREBUS is to webcomics.  CEREBUS, before many of us had seen manga, introduced us to new conceptions of pause and space.  It took its time, wandered and rambled (much as I am here, but I have the excuse of incipient senility).  Even then, the series’ audience was split into two overlapping sets: those early adopters who bought the book every month, and those who waited for the hefty “phonebooks†that collected the series every twenty-five episodes or so.  The entirety of FREAKANGELS would not quite fill two CEREBUS phonebooks.

FREAKANGELS’ audience came in three parts.  People who read it every week online.  People who’d come back to the site every few weeks to read a bunch of episodes all at once.  And people who didn’t read it online at all, and just bought the print editions every six months.  All of which allowed me to tell the story at my own pace – for the people who liked the pace and came in weekly, for the people who liked a bigger chunk, and for the people who wanted a sixth of the story all at once.  The free-broadcast to paid-print model let me tell a story any way I wanted.  There’s a degree of possibly unfounded trust that the nature of broadcast will allow the story to (eventually) find the people who like it, but we got away with it.

But, as I say, the focus is off webcomics.  Everyone seems to be eyeing the digital comics services, and I suspect that within six months it’s going to be a lot easier to get on to a digital comics shelf.  (Just as, right now, it seems to be very easy to get on to a Kindle.)  Which makes sense.  People like to be paid.  My concerns are that if you make it harder to look at something, then you’re making it harder to access the full set of people who might be prepared to spend money on it.  That, and…

…this is harder to make sense of, perhaps?  It may just be a weird personal tic masquerading as a concern, that is meaningless to everyone else?  But I always saw webcomics as the place where people could do huge, sprawling picaresques.  I thought webcomics had a great potential to be the place where you’d get graphic novels that read like Pynchon or Neal Stephenson or add your own discursive, meandering and circumlocutious author here.  And certainly some people got close to that – we could both write our lists of Really Good Graphic Novels Done On The Web here, although mine might have less of the “funny†stuff than yours.  But I have a feeling we may not see many more.

I’m sure it can be made a meaningless stat, but check out Wikipedia’s list of notable webcomics.  Look at the bulge, and look at how the list shrinks off by 2011.

I wished for an iTunes for comics.  And that was probably my first mistake.  For now I seem to have very few broadcasts to pick up for free on my iPod for comics, and it seems that there may be fewer by the day.  And I can’t help but think of that as another missed opportunity.

Luckily, ideas don’t die.  They just cycle around and come back again, like nineteen-page comics and doing things the way we did in the 1970s (when comics were shit).

If you made it this far, I apologise for how much closer you are to your death from old age now.

So DC Comic’s media-blitzed massive relaunch of its entire line in September got them this:

A half-point lead in dollar share over Marvel Comics (who had one high-profile launch in the September frame).

A five-point lead in units sold over Marvel Comics.

But all those units DC sold are returnable.

Thank god all those DC execs told everyone they weren’t interested in market share.  Otherwise someone might have come away with the notion that DC really intended to give Marvel a fight in the marketplace and make Marvel sort their own shit out.  What a stroke of luck for everybody.

Random and ultimately conclusionless jottings on the notion of rhetorical comics.

Which is an inexact and probably not useful term, but polemical comics seems even worse.

It’s an idea I’ve been interested in for years, but somehow never had the time to fully develop. It comes from having grown up with the extended televisual essay, also sometimes referred to as rhetorical television. The first one that really impacted me was James Burke’s CONNECTIONS:

You can throw THE ASCENT OF MAN into that bucket too, and probably COSMOS if you feel like it. And, most recently, the work of Adam Curtis, including this summer’s ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE.

The text overlaid on the image is termed a super, for superimposition. A fusion of the intertitle, the text card between sequences in the silent movie, and the lower third or chyron, the explanatory text overlays most often found in the lower third of the screen in news broadcasts. (“Chyron” comes from “Chyron Corporation,” the company most associated with their generation.)

I have a habit of staring at things until they unpack in my head.

It’s an awkward tool to adapt for comics, because it kind of relies on the motion behind it to ensure the whole thing doesn’t stop dead. I tried floating supers on a Marvel comic called ULTIMATE HUMAN once, just because these things should be used to try stuff out on.

When there’s a moving image behind the supers, running time isn’t necessarily being eaten. We can process the events behind the super as well as the super itself. Serial comics can’t match that easily. Real estate gets eaten.

Fraction and crew try supers in CASANOVA: AVARITIA 1. The super’s on a repeated image. They match the super with a hard change in visual tone, a stringed soundtrack descending for half a bar into a doom metal chord. It fits the general warm, organic, analogue feel of a CASANOVA comic, but to me it also opens up the path to the adoption of visual glitch for a similar effect.

[x]

Matt’s not going for a rhetorical feel: it’s narrative-diegetic, if you like. It’s in the same bucket, as, say, the end of ANIMAL HOUSE:

Actually, I’m going to correct myself. Fiction-diegetic, perhaps. Because a rhetorical piece obviously has its own narrative. The lyric essay, as pushed a year or two back by REALITY HUNGER, uses all the tools of fiction without being fiction. Which, again, isn’t a million miles away from the tenets of the New Journalism. The supers in CASANOVA don’t pop you out of the story. They serve the story.

In something that is broadly non-fiction, the expectations of being immersed in the text are a little different. A story is being told, but you don’t enter it with the desire to be wrapped up warmly in the internal logics of a new little world. Which is one reason why so many darlings get killed, in the writing of fiction: you can’t always brake to talk about something interesting to you without bringing on that business of “readers being thrown out of the story.” You can’t draw attention to the fact that the backdrop to the car journey really is just two stagehands winding a long paper mural to create the illusion of travel through the landscape.

Except, of course, when you can.

[x]

The essay has a different pact with the reader or viewer. The pact is that you’ll be taken from A to B and that there will be a point to the trip, but also that you’re probably going to get to B via C through Z. And not necessarily in abecedarian order.

Fusing that approach with fiction presumably loses you a lot of readers. People being taken out of the story. People who want the story to be the point. I guess an early Thomas Pynchon novel would kill those people stone dead. The thing to bear in mind is that those people already have lots of other books to read.

(A dozen years ago, I did a comic that was nothing but art and dialogue and brief supers, with the explicit intent of keeping people “inside” the book. No internal monologue, no box captions where I could possibly help it. Some of you will be more familiar with that style from Marvel’s “Ultimate” line, particular “The Ultimates.”)

There is a space where the narrative is the point, and the “story” is just one of the things that keeps it moving.

The examples I’ve used aren’t the only ones, of course. Just the ones that occur to me this afternoon, sitting out in the garden writing this. And there will probably be a few people I’m completely unaware of, working in webcomics or minicomics who’ve solved all these tools.

It’s all unlikely to be something I’ll ever get to fully develop, unless something very unusual happens, like the perfect trusted collaborators appearing out of nowhere and sometimes materialising with open funding. And also a few more hours in every day. But, with all the talk about commercial comics going back to the Nineties, or pricing themselves out of the market, or all the other shit-smoke that gets blown every day to stop people thinking about what their next move really *could* be…

…well, it’s just a pleasant thought to me, that a few people might say, “well, these old paradigms are all well and good, but maybe I just want to find new ways to talk about the things that are interesting to me, and people can either come along with me or not.”

It’s a rough ride. I don’t think, for instance, that as many people are as interested in old Smoky & The Bandit flicks as Joe Casey, but I love that Joe’s just saying fuckit and doing BUTCHER BAKER anyway. That said, BUTCHER BAKER intercut with a visual representation of the backmatter essays Joe’s writing, story interleaved with rhetorical comics, or even studded with supers about what Joe’s *really* talking about… that would have been something to see.

Most of us descend into the pop stuff, like BUTCHER BAKER or CAPTAIN SWING or whatever, because it’s where most of us came from. But it always comes with the auctorial request to the rest of the pop medium, I think: please be less boring. Please be less interested in your rules about what comics can and can’t do. Please just say something interesting.

How the hell did I end up there?

[send]

Over the spring, I invited a few friends and acquaintances of mine in the comics-drawing business to do me Three Panels for the site.  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.

In the general pursuit of keeping the site ticking over while I wrestle with the last chunk of GUN MACHINE, I thought I’d open the idea up.

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.

The ones I like best will be posted here from 12 – 16 September.

Thank you for your time.

Announcement of a new comics project by Rufus Dayglo.  Facebook page.

At Bristolwhip.

Just saw this Wikileaks-released cable flagged on Twitter: