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  All we know about Shipwreck, the new AfterShock book from Warren Ellis and Phil Hester is that is concerns “a very unusual and very secret shipwreck. Which, given the work of Warren Ellis is enough for me. Throw in Phil Hester and it’s a pre-order must. The book comes out in October and has […]

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Welcome Karnak back to the Marvel Universe in style.

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Dynamite has launched a line-wide sale at Dark Horse Digital, allowing fans to finally try out the first few issues of coveted new series James Bond 007: Vargr for $.99. The entire line is discounted, including J. Michael Straczynski’s excellent Twilight Zone run, David Walker’s Shaft, Gail Simone’s Red Sonja, a couple of graphic novels from Neil […]

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After making his presence in the comic book industry felt in a big way on a run with Warren Ellis on Moon Knight, Declan Shaley moved over to creator-owned with the writer. They set off on a series more complex and less marketable than one about a white-caped crusader, to great results. I spoke to […]

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Since her beautifully delicate line-work graces the cover to the latest issue of Swords of Sorrow this week, we shine a light on the work of “renaissance woman” Tula Lotay! Working up her artwork in multiple layers of hand-drawn, hand-painted art, along with digital color/inks, Lotay spoils comics readers with an extraordinary amount of moody texture. She’s been contributing cover art and interiors to many books the past few years including Elephantmen, Zero, Rebels, American Vampire Anthology, The Wicked + The Divine, and Dynamite’s Swords of Sorrow.

Lotay is probably best known for her recent collaborations with writer Warren Ellis(Supreme Blue Rose, Blackcross; as cover artist, and their upcoming book Heartless), and her role as founder/organizer of the yearly Thought Bubble Festival in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, which celebrates sequential art in all its forms.

If you like what you see, you should go follow Tula Lotay on her twitter page here!

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates

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Last year, Dynamite Entertainment and Ian Fleming Publications Ltd. announced a new partnership to create several new products centered on the legendary James Bond. The two companies recently announced that Warren Ellis has been hired as the writer and Jason Masters has been brought on as the artist for the James Bond 007 comic book series.

Here’s more from The Hollywood Reporter: “The first six issue arc of the series will be titled ‘VARGR,’ and feature the return of a young Bond to London after a mission in Helsinki, only to inherit a mission left incomplete after the death of a fellow agent. James Bond 007 will launch in comic book stores and digitally in November.”

According to Comic Book Resources, some of the other Bond-related projects in the pipeline include adaptations based on Ian Fleming’s original books and a James Bond origin story. The origin story project will take readers to a time prior to the events of the Casino Royale novel. (via io9)

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by Harper W. Harris

Certainly one of the busiest artists at HeroesCon 2015 was Tula Lotay, who has burst onto the mainstage of comic artists in the last year, working with Warren Ellis on Supreme: Blue Rose as well as the unique Vertigo title Bodies written by Si Spencer in which each issue shared four different artists. Her art recalls classic illustration, and is visually lush with gorgeous character work and fascinating design. We got a chance to speak with Lotay to hear about her interesting path to being a professional comic artist, her experiences working with Ellis, and a little about what’s coming up for her.

 

Harper W. Harris: I’m here with Tula Lotay, who is working hard to finish up coloring some beautiful prints on the last day of HeroesCon, have you had a good time at the con so far?

Tula Lotay: It’s been amazing! I love the show, it’s just wonderful. Everyone is so friendly and there’s such a nice atmosphere, I’ve just been so unbelievably busy. I haven’t had time to stop and eat for two days. It’s wonderful though, I’m having a great time. I love Charlotte, too, and Sheldon and Rico do such an amazing job. They must work so hard all weekend…I know what it’s like running a festival because I run one in the UK called Thought Bubble, and it’s just so wearing and these guys–this is like four times bigger than ours so I know they must work so hard. So thanks to them!

HH: That’s a perfect transition, I was going to ask you about Thought Bubble! Can you tell us a little bit about what Thought Bubble is about and what’s going on this year–it’s coming up in November, right?

TL: Yeah, we’re a comic art festival so it’s very similar to this. A lot of the comic conventions around do mainly media and film stuff…we don’t do any of that. We’re just like Heroes in that we focus just on artists and writers. The convention runs over two days, but the festival lasts over a week, and in the run up to the convention we have a series of free writer’s workshops, screenings, lots of special events. We try to make a lot of them free as well and educational in relation to comics. On the Friday before the show we always do a big book crossing as well where we give away thousands of graphic novels for free around the area. We try and have as many events as we can for children, too, to kind of inspire the next generation, get them to appreciate comics and have fun with it as well.

HH: You have a really interesting story about how you came into the industry as an artist, moving into that from running the festival.

TL: I’ve worked in comic shops all my life really, and so I got to know so many people in the industry and then after a while I thought it would be wonderful to start a very small event, just get people to come along for small signings and a few panels, like industry stuff to find out how people work, where people can learn, how to get into stuff. From there I got to know so many people in the industry. I had an Instagram account at the time, and I started posting bits of my work, because I’ve always drawn and illustrated. A lot of people that I knew in the industry started to see it and they were like, “Oh, you can draw?” and a lot of them started liking what I was posting. I started getting lots of job offers and people wanted to work with me. I kind of knew Warren as well, I met up with Eric Stephenson and he said, “Warren’s got a new project and I really want you to draw it.” Warren asked me to take a look at the script and see what I thought and it just kind of snowballed from there! It’s all down to a mix of working hard, just practicing with my art all the time, posting it online so people could see it, and then knowing people in the industry and just having them be really kind about what I do and kind of liking it.

HH: I definitely want to talk a bit about Supreme: Blue Rose that you worked on with Warren Ellis–what was the process like working with him, and was it challenging to visually illustrate such a complex story?

TL: It was amazing working with Warren. I get on with him so well and I really love his writing. On the first issue he was giving me lots of pointers and I was running all my pages by him, but as I got to know his writing and he got to know my art a bit more he kind of just sent me scripts and left me to it and I could do whatever I wanted. I really felt there was that trust there from him, that he would allow me to take panels in a different direction if I felt they needed to be or add panels or lose them. With that trust and the freedom that he gave me, it was just such an amazing story to work on because I could really put myself into it and I was servicing these wonderful pointed words that Warren had as well. I love working with him, and I think that’s why we’re choosing to work together again on a creator owned project because we like working together so much.

HH: You have a really unique art style with really beautiful character work and then a lot of times you’ve got these really interesting kind of design elements added on top of it. What are your influences for your art style, and where does that design part of it come from?

TL: When I studied fine art at University I was always really interested in a lot of design work, so I studied some graphic design as well. I’ve always been really into design work by people like Chip Kidd and stuff, Saul Bass–I absolutely love the kind of stuff he did, he was a massive influence. I guess that’s where the design stuff came from. In terms of my illustrative style, I really love the old Saturday Evening Post illustrations, illustrations from the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. Robert McGinnis, Robert Maguire, Bernie Fuchs all those people are just incredible, like Mitchell Hooks, I’m a big fan of him. You get these scratchy styles, and rather than showing a wardrobe they might just have an angular line to suggest it and then the faces are really detailed. I tend to look at that stuff more than anything else really. But then I’ve always been a massive fan of comic art, so when I was growing up I was reading like Kent Williams, Jon J Muth from Meltdown, Dave McKean. I always tended to go with the more painterly stuff like Jon J Muth and John Bolton, Bill Sienkiewicz’s Elektra: Assassin, so I think a lot of that kind of stuff has influenced me as well. A lot of the European greats as well, like I love Bernet and obviously Mobius. I just really like really good art, so when its done well in any style really it tends to inspire me.

HH: So I love that I’m asking this as I’m watching you color a print–it seems like you color most of your own work, what do you find are the advantages or challenges of doing the whole process yourself like that?

TL: I think that’s the only way I want to work, really. I just came off working on Bodies, the DC/Vertigo title, and they had the same colorist Lee Loughridge throughout the entire story. His work’s absolutely incredible, but for me I find it quite–it’s not natural for me to just do bold line art and have someone else color it because I don’t just do finished line art. I tend to do my line art and then put the color on and work into it again, and put more color on and work into it again, and so on with textures. I feel like I only really feel satisfied with my art at the end when I’ve been about to go through the whole process rather than just doing one aspect of it. I think for the future that’s probably the way I need to work, really. It’s really nice having a great colorist color your work because you get to recognize things about yourself more and, like, Jordie Bellaire has just colored me on Zero, which is amazing seeing her stuff, she’s mind-blowing. So it is nice to have that, but I want to do it all myself really.

HH: So you’re a a bit of a one-man band! So what have you got coming up that you’re really excited about?

TL: Zero is going to be out soon and it’s the last issue so I hope people like that, it was really nice working with Ales Kot on it. I’ve just done an issue of Wicked and the Divine the tower issue which is #13 I think that will be out in August which was just amazing to work on. Kieron Gillen’s a brilliant writer, I loved working with him on that. In two weeks Warren and I are announcing a new project at Image Comics and I’m super, super excited about that. I can’t say anything about it because we’ll be announcing it at the Image Expo, but that’s coming up and I’m just so excited to get started on it, I can’t wait!

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Jason Howard is a prolific illustrator whose work has been featured in a number of hugely popular titles such as Superior Spider-Man and Invincible.  He’s currently the series artist on Trees, collaborating with writer Warren Ellis to tell a uniquely human science fiction story.

When a group of monolithic alien towers, colloquially referred to as Trees, touch down around the world, people prepare for war.  To their surprise, nothing ever emerges from these Trees, and humanity is forced to reconcile with the idea that their existence is not even worth the aliens’ time.  Through this premise, Ellis and Howard tell the affecting stories of people who are forced to alter their lives in the face of their own smallness.

In the run up to issue 10 of Trees, which releases on June 17th, I took a moment to speak to Howard about his working process and favorite moments throughout the series thus far.

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Alex Lu: So currently, we’re up to issue 9 of Trees.  How long do you see the series running for?

Jason Howard: We thought the series would go somewhere between 13 and 23 issues.  It’s one of the stories that has a lot of threads, so we’ll keep it going for a while.  Personally, I’d like to get at least three trades out, since all my prior series had at least three trades.  Things are going well, so I’d like to keep things rolling.

Lu: I remember an end date being set, is that no longer the case?

Howard: I don’t recall…maybe Warren said something, but we never had a firm end date and the story was always a little wander-y, so we might go down some of those stray threads if Warren has ideas for them.

Lu: How did you come to work with Warren on Trees?

Howard: We did a webcomic together called Scatterlands, and while I was working on Super Dinosaur it was a fun side project to do.  Later on, Warren was getting pretty busy with TV stuff and I was nearing the end of my Super Dinosaur run and I was looking for something else to fill my time so I contacted Warren and this is where we ended up.

Lu: What’s your collaborative process with Warren like?  Does he like to direct you with firm scripts or give you a wider berth to explore and wander on your own?

Howard: He writes a full script.  At the beginning of Trees, we talked a lot about the nature of the series and the different ways we were going to touch on the themes of the title.  From there, it’s been a pretty normal collaborative process.  I get a script from him and then I start drawing it and do the script justice.

Lu: The art of Trees is quite soft despite the series’ grim tone.  How did you nail the art style and how do you design the color palettes for the series?

Howard: I’m always trying different things with the colors.  I like mood coloring where you get a sense of place and time.  Depending on what’s happening in the scene, I want the colors to play with that or play against it.

With the linework and inking, I’m going for something scratchy, broken, and dirty.  It expresses the tone of the world and that the earth isn’t quite right anymore.

What’s been your favorite thing to draw in the series?

Howard: I love drawing snow…or not drawing it depending on the situation.  The snow scenes are definitely some of my favorites.  There are some pages in issue 11, which aren’t out yet, that are some of the most fun I’ve had on the series so far.  One of the storylines in the second arc takes place in New York City and we touched on a couple of characters in volume one that we’ll be spending some more time with there.  That post-tree New York City is really fun, and I love drawing environment and world stuff in general.

It’s been fun because Ellis is placing the story in actual locations or places extrapolated from actual locations, so I get to spend time looking for cool references.  There’s a part of the first arc that takes place in a town in Italy, so I got to look at all the pictures on the internet, people’s vacations photos in Italy, stuff like that.  It gives you a real sense of place in the story.

Lu: What kind of references did you use for the scenes set in China?

Howard: I pulled a lot of different stuff because Warren envisioned that city as a sort of artistic community.  There’s an oppressive government in our China, but they let this flower bloom.  I looked at a lot of photos of Chinese cities and photos of different kinds of art communities.  I mashed them together and this is what we ended up with.

That stuff was kind of hard because sometimes the schedule of monthly comics means you just have to get pages done.  Meanwhile, the designer in me would have loved to have spent a month just really sinking into the various elements of the city, but, well, I just have to draw those pages.

Sometimes I feel like I’m really successful, but other times I want another shot at it because I think I’ve come up with some better ideas.  Ultimately, that setting was complex for me so that’s one of the things that I’d like another crack at just to have the opportunity to push my ideas a little bit farther.

Lu: Personally, I feel like those scenes were some of the most fully realized in the series.  The way that ChengLei’s scenes were framed really encapsulates some of the overarching themes of the book.  As an artist, he more than most realizes how small the human race is in the face of these trees, so he decides to live life the way he wants to and experience everything he can.

Howard: I liked the scene in the art studio they found…that was really fun.  I found lots of old warehouses for reference and tried to artsy them up.  I thought that that storyline was one of the ones in the first arc that really hit home for me.  I got some of the scripts from Warren and told him, “Oh, you’re really breaking my heart.”

Lu: Are you clued in to the greater scope of the story?  Do you have full knowledge of what the trees are and what they do?

I know what our intial talks were.  I don’t know where Warren has gone with it creatively since then.  Trees is ultimately more about the characters surrounding the trees than the trees themselves.  What would a normal person like us do after a big world event like the landing of the trees.

You know, something might be happening overseas or in Washington D.C. and we might be aware of it and how it affects us, but we don’t really know all the details.  We’re worried about what’s happening today with this girl we like or this job situation.  I think Warren is trying to focus on the stories of the individual characters as they’re affected by the trees.  We’re getting hints of the greater scope along the way that hopefully start to paint a big picture in someone’s mind.

Ultimately though, I don’t think there’s ever going to be a big action team that goes and attacks the trees to kill the aliens.

Lu: I hope not!  That’d go against the whole tone of the series so far.

Howard: Maybe that’ll be the last volume.  It’ll just be a huge shift in tone and become a dumb 80s action movie to wrap it all up.

Lu: Well, that’s actually what The Wake did, though!  

Howard: That book was crazy!  It was super entertaining, but it started off as horror and suddenly became a totally different post-apocalyptic story.  It felt like he was intentionally using genre tropes from horror and sci-fi to tell different parts of the story, so it was really cool, but reading it was pretty jarring!

Lu: Did you like the shift, though?

Howard: Yeah, I liked it in the story.  I don’t know if I’d like everything like that, but I think [Snyder] pulled it off pretty well and it was gutsy move to suddenly say “Alright, this part is done, but the story’s not done.  We’re going to jump forward in time so we see the beginning of the big event and its end.”

Lu: Would you like to try something like that in a series?

Howard: I don’t know.  As a creative person, I want to try out everything I see.  I’ll read an auto-bio comic and want to do that, but then I’ll see an action movie and want to make something really dumb with big guns and cool visuals.  Trees is a thoughtful book that has a slow-burning plot and a lot of environments, and that’s been a lot of fun, but on the other hand I also had fun doing Super Dinosaur.  That series was something for my kids.  Big cartoon in-your-face dinosaurs and robots.  It’s as opposite in tone as you can get from Trees.

It’s all great, and ultimately, I just hope to get a chance to stretch all those creative impulses.

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Warren Ellis is having a crack at reimagining the Project Superpowers universe, and Blackcross #1 hits in March. We’ve had an advance peek and it’s not what might be expected, with a strong horror bent. Here’s some brand new pages of Colton Worley’s art to give you a  taste, as well as variant covers by Jae Lee, Gabriel Hardman, Declan Shalvey and Tula Lotay. 

 

All small towns have secrets. All small towns have ghosts. Blackcross, in the Pacific North West of America, has more secrets than most. And it is being haunted by something impossible. BLACKCROSS, a supernatural extension of the PROJECT SUPERPOWERS mythos, is a ghost story about something reaching out from the other side of the night, through the forest and mist of this remote town, to grasp at the hearts of a handful of people who may not find out that they’re the targets of a strange killer until it’s much, much too late.

 

 

 

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And here’s another second look at a comics property that already had a time at the dance—Global Frequency, already the subject of a failed project way back in the prehistory of 2005, is getting another look as a TV show, with Jerry Bruckheimer once again leading the way.

The comic book Global Frequency came out from Wildstorm during the days when it was edgy and daring.. (For those of you who came in late, Wildstorm was once an imprint of DC Comics that put out more wild and crazy adventure themed stuff. It was shut down a few years ago and its remaining properties were folded into Vertigo.)

Written by Warren Ellis and drawn by a bunch of artists including Garry Leach, Steve Dillon, David Lloyd and Gene Ha, it followed a high tech privately sourced elite crime solving organization—an idea that has kind of been done to death since then but it still works when done well. (Person of Interest?) A pilot was made starring Michelle Forbes and Josh Hopkins in 2005 but it went nowhere. But those were the days when comic books were just things printed on paper and not idea space thought peaches.

Now it’s back with Bruckheimer producing and Rockne S. O’Bannon writing a new pilot. O’Bannon is well known for creating Farscape, and he’s also working on Constantine, but don’t hold that against him.

As Deadline helpfully points tout, this is part of the EXPLOSION of WB TV projects based on comics, joining the on air Arrow, Gotham, Flash and Constantine, and the upcoming iZombie and Supergirl, which has a series commitment at CBS, and Lucifer, also at Fox.

Whoever is doing TV development at DC Comics—you rock.

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You ever see The Raid? It’s this Indonesian action movie. It (and its sequel) is probably one of the best action movies in recent memory.

The plot of The Raid is ridiculously simple. One cop, in one building, against an army of criminals. It is an hour and a half of dudes wrecking shit. It’s eighty minutes of brutal martial arts. It’s something that’s been done lots–you can describe a ridiculous number of movies that way, thanks to Die Hard–but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s absolutely thrilling, a marvel of craft and assured filmmaking.

Moon Knight #5 is pretty much The Raid, but as a comic book.

A gang has kidnapped a girl who was on her way home from a school event at night. They hold her hostage on the fifth floor of a building. Moon Knight spends all twenty-two pages wrecking dudes on his way to the girl.

That’s it. That’s all that happens. It’s not much.

But it is so, so good.

How much you’ll agree with that will depend on your attitude towards plot. As I hinted at by opening this column by talking about an Indonesian martial arts film, a film or comic doesn’t necessarily live or die by how clever its plot is. Tired or thin plots can still result in an exciting story–you’ve just got to make damn sure your execution is stunning.

And Ellis, Shalvey, and Belliare continue to impress. Warren Ellis’ continues his less-is-more approach to story, with almost no dialogue outside of the opening and closing pages. He doesn’t really need much in the way of words, anyway–Moon Knight #5 is a lean, violent, action story that’s mostly carried by Declan Shalvey’s art, which gives Marc Spector’s Mr. Knight persona a slow relentlessness as he tears through thugs. He doesn’t use stealth, nor is he built like a truck. Shalvey draws Mr. Knight in a way that conveys pure surgical finesse, taking on people who can clearly see him coming–just the way he likes it.

That last bit warrants circling back to Ellis’ script. Spare as it may be, it effectively reinforces the notion of who Moon Knight is in this series. He’s a protector of those who travel by night, a hero whom the bad guys can see coming. There’s not too much in the way of new insight into the titular character, but a brief scene towards the end does give readers a bit to mull over and wonder just what exactly Ellis, Shalvey, and Bellaire will choose to explore for their final issue before the book changes hands with #7.

Color artist Jordie Belliare brings just as much to the table as she always has , working with a tight color palate that never strays too far from the cover’s rusty gold, expanding to include the browns and greens of a dilapidated tenement. Also striking is the color work on Mr. Knight himself–close ups on his biker-gloved hands and exposed forearms give a peek at the man beneath the mask, highlighting how inspired a decision it was to portray the whites of his costume by leaving them devoid of any color.

Last week, I was pretty hard on Superman #32, and comics like Moon Knight are the reason why. While Moon Knight has the luxury of not having to be too heavily serial in its storytelling and is more or less continuity free, it isn’t really doing anything groundbreaking either. It’s just a good story well told.

One commenter last week pointed out that last week’s Superman had a lot of work to do–that what I had seen as a drag was in fact some necessary housekeeping, clearing out poor story decisions made in prior runs. And that’s fine. It doesn’t change my criticism all that much–which is that the book hardly bothered to tell a story.

That, in essence, is why I wanted to do this column in this specific way. I happen to believe that a comic book should tell a story. However spare, however short–it can even be a subplot. Not trying to tell a story is a cardinal sin, something I can’t look past. I buy the comics I review in this column with my own money because I think reviewing comics you get for free makes it easy to forget how damn expensive they are, and makes you more prone to be forgiving of creators content to ship a book that only has the slightest suggestion of a story.

I review single issue comics here, not arcs or trades. And in short, I don’t want to settle for less.

A good story well told. That’s all I want for me, and for you.

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The founding fathers would turn in their graves. The British Library is hosting an exhibition of publications in a medium once accused of undermining literacy, decency and the very establishment itself: comics.

I haven’t yet visited Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK, which has been curated by Paul Gravett, author of Comic Art, which I reviewed last month, but I have a shrewd idea of much of its contents because of my own involvement in the industry from the 1980s and ‘90s.

Deadline 3 - which published Jamie Hewlett's Tank Girl

Previously I’ve been at pains to emphasise that comics are about much more than men in lycra, but we can’t ignore the lycra or the science fiction and fantasy, which is in strong evidence here. What deserves wide recognition, however, is the role of attitude in providing the energy of iconoclastic creativity that has seen so many writers and artists whose target audience was originally children become internationally hugely influential.

British comics and their creators have an anarchic spirit. In the late nineteenth century the 'Penny Dreadfuls' were sometimes considered so subversive and dangerous to the Establishment (in fomenting an industrial dispute) that at one point printing presses used for printing them were destroyed by the authorities, as documented in Martin Barker’s book Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics.

There is a direct line from these through Fleetway’s Action comic to 2000AD, which in the late ‘70s and ‘80s saw the work of Pat Mills and John Wagner produce strips such as Nemesis the Warlock, which satirised corrupt organised religion, and Judge Dredd, which satirised just about everything including a corrupt totalitarian state (although sometimes Dredd seemed as though it was applauding the very summary dispensation of justice which it avowedly condemned).

Action was created in 1975 by Pat Mills for publishing house IPC. Soon banned for its violent content it nevertheless spawned 2000AD, the home of Judge Dredd.

Jamie's Tank Girl - whom he called a female Judge Dredd with bigger guns on speed.

2000AD could have been deliberately designed to be the kind of left-wing comic imagined by George Orwell in this fascinating article he wrote about the heavily middle and upper class boys’ comics like Gem, Magnet, Hotspur, Wizard and so on.

These class-ridden, patriotic comics were produced by the ultra-conservative family-owned Scottish DC Thompson publishers, for much of the twentieth century - up until the days of punk rock as staple fare for boys, a deliberate antidote to the previous, anarchic Penny Dreadfuls. Orwell describes them in depth in the article and observes their propaganda value as follows:

“the stuff is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party.”

The cover of Revolver 1, which serialised Grant Morrison's deconstruction of Dan Dare

That aside, there is another ideological gradation that has Leo Baxendale’s Bash Street Kids (also published by DC Thompson in the Beano) and 2000AD at one end - produced by angry, anti-authoritarian working class writers and artists - and the middle class Frank Hampton’s neo-Imperialistic Dan Dare at the other.

Common to both is the preoccupation with slapstick humour, fantasy and science fiction as a way of boggling minds and examining present-day trends taken to extremes.

Orwell himself notes the value of Sci-Fi (which he calls Scientifiction) in this fascinating sentence:

“Whereas the Gem and Magnet derive from Dickens and Kipling, the Wizard, Champion, Modern Boy, etc., owe a great deal to H. G. Wells, who, rather than Jules Verne, is the father of ‘Scientifiction’.”

You can even position later writers, influenced by these earlier names, on this spectrum, such as Alan Moore and Grant Morrison on the left, and Neil Gaiman more in centre-ground. Grant slyly subverted Dan Dare himself , imagining him as an older man sadly looking back on the glory days of space empire in the pages of Revolver in the late ‘80s.

The ‘80s was a key time, because it was then that the kids who had been brought up on the Beano and 2000AD hit adulthood and it became cool to continue reading comics. Inspired by Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and the American Frank Miller’s Batman: Dark Knight Returns, younger artists and writers gave birth to an explosion of creativity.

The cover of Crisis issue 3 - probably the closest ever to Orwell's dream of a left wing comic.

Pat Mills' and Carlos Ezquerra's Third World War deliberately made very cool heroes out of disabled, black, gay or female characters.

Eight years after my own story in Marvel's Captain Britain about the Northern Ireland Troubles was censored, Fleetway felt able to publish, in the overtly political Crisis comic, Garth Ennis' True Faith, (but even that graphic novel was scandalously withdrawn from sale, following complaints).

Crisis was largely Pat Mills' brainchild. Overtly political and radical it ran the amazing anti-American Imperialism strip Third World War, which attacked CIA involvement in central and south American countries, a topic already tackled in comics by Alan Moore's and Bill Sienkiewicz's documentary graphic novel, Brought to Light.

The cover of Doc Chaos 1 by me, Lawrence Gray and Phil Elliott published by Escape

Independent creator-owned comics sprang up all over the place, from my own satirical Doc Chaos, published by Gravett's Escape imprint, to Deadline, from Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon, which came directly from a collision between comics and the new House music club culture, the true star of which was to become Jamie Hewlett's Tank Girl. And most of us know what happened when Hewlett met Blur's Damon Albarn: Gorillaz, the first band in history that was made up of comics characters.

Peter Stanbury's and Paul Gravett's Escape magazine - beautifully designed, arty and hip.

I must given a special mention to Don Melia and Lionel Gracey-Whitman for publishing Aargh!, Heartbreak Hotel magazine with the supplement BLAAM! Because the mere fact that this anti-homophobic publication could be a comic was testimony to how far the medium had come since the days of Wizard and Hotspur weekly comics in which homosexuality was a heavily suppressed element.  Here is Orwell describing a  cover image: “ a nearly naked man of terrific muscular development has just seized a lion by the tail and flung it thirty yards over the wall of an arena”.

Heartbreak Hotel issue 5 cover by Duncan Fegredo

The first comic explicitly for black people, Sphinx

Repossession Blues from the pages of Blaam!

A cover of chaos magick journal Chaos International  which shows the use of comics iconography - the exchange of ideas went both ways.

There was a huge amount of talent around in the ‘80s, much of which will be on evidence in the British Library show, but I find it fascinating that I, along with the far more successful Bryan Talbot, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, (particularly the first two) were also at the time heavily into chaos magick. We’d discuss this when we met occasionally at the bar that used to be at the foot of Centrepoint, near Titan Books’ offices where I worked, and Forbidden Planet bookshop, and at comics conventions.

Alan only went public on this more recently, but Grant overtly used his research in long-running strips such as the intensely surreal Doom Patrol and subsequently The Invisibles, both for DC.

It is not necessary to believe in any of the gods and forces invoked by magical ritual in chaos magick to utilise its effects. The point for all of us was that Nothing is Forbidden, Everything is Permitted, to use Aleister Crowley’s mantra. Chaos magick provided an almost limitless kit of tools to access the far reaches of the imagination. I learned my tricks from a group that met every week in Greenwich, above Bulldog’s café, from the legendary Charlie Brewster, aka Choronzon 666.

I used this massive wellspring of creativity when writing The Z-Men for Brendan McCarthy. Brendan was a maverick comics artist who started work in 2000AD, later becoming like many comics artists a film storyboarder, who was renowned for his psychedelic, mystical artwork.

All of us were also heavily influenced by Dada and Surrealism – this was the premier topic of my undergraduate degree.  It is very obvious in Grant’s Doom Patrol - just read my favourite story The Painting That Ate Paris; and how else could you come up with a superhero who is an entire street (named - of course - Danny)?

Pure anarcho-comics: Hooligna Press & Pete Mastin's Faction File collected from the pages of squatting magazine Crowbar - back full circle to the aims of the Penny Dreadfuls

Arguably, the most successful comics writers working for American publishers in the ‘80s and ‘90s were Neil, Alan and Grant – Brits all. Frank Miller, also a giant, is American of course, and, while anarchic, is sympathetic to the other end of anarchism – right wing libertarian, which approves the right to bear arms and use them against Commie radicals.

I attribute all of their success not just to their supreme storytelling abilities but to their political views and their involvement in anything occult, arcane and extreme, because in these genres of comics, what readers demand is out-there imagination – and it takes some serious head-space distorting tricks to cultivate a mind that can repeatedly and frequently, on demand, to a punishing production schedule, come up with the mind-boggling concepts, characters and storylines required.

These lessons were not lost on the more recent wave of massively successful British writers, such as Warren Ellis and Brian Hitch, the creators of The Authority, (just read Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan for a taste of his brand of anarchy).

And I believe there are lessons here for all writers and artists who aim at children and teens, that most demanding of all audiences, to help them feed and stoke the furnaces of creativity and imagination.

I could even attempt to sum them up in the following seven guidelines. Bear in mind that these are methods I am suggesting, and in no way am I advocating tackling a particular kind of subject matter. These are ways of researching, preparing to write and draw, and of writing and drawing itself:

• Feed your mind with stuff from the far reaches of experience; and apply that to the everyday.
• You can’t be too extreme.
• JG Ballard's maxim: follow your obsessions.
• Never censor yourself – leave it to someone else.
• Boggle minds.
• Maximise drama.
• Above all - don’t take it too seriously.

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You are not dreaming. 
We are trying to communicate with you. 
Local reality has been reinstalled. 
Things have gone wrong. 
The revision has corrupted. 
Finding Ethan Crane is your supreme priority. 
We are speaking to you from the ultimate bunker within the structure of multiversal time.
Do not trust Darius Dax. 
We are all going to die. 

Back in the original days of Image Comics, Rob Liefeld’s Supreme was one of the central characters, a Superman analog who later enjoyed a fantastic run with Alan Moore at the writing helm. And now, with other Extreme Studios character completely rehabilitated (Glory, Prophet) Supreme is getting a new look with Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay (ELEPHANTMEN, The Witching Hour) taking on SUPREME: BLUE ROSE.

“One day I woke up with an idea, that came out of nowhere, for how to extend this most strange and storied of ‘analogue’ properties into a new space. A new floor on top of Alan Moore and Rob Liefeld’s house,” said Ellis. “And, since I had some time on my hands that year, I emailed Image, and we got my friend Tula Lotay involved—and her work will be a revelation to people.”

It’s worth noting that in addition to her busy freelance career, Lotay is also one of the show runners for Thought Bubble, one of the gems of the Caf circuit. So she is a busy, busy lady.

The series debuts in July.

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Well well, Dynamite is putting together quite a collection of creators, aren’t they? Here’s a big one: Warren Ellis will take over the Project Superpowers universe later this year. Just what that means isn’t entirely clear, but according to senior editor Joe Rybandt, Ellis will be given “carte blanche to reimagine these characters and this world.” A reboot revamp then.

Project Superpower, you may recall, is a relaunch of a bunch of public domain Golden Age superheroes originally revamped (in 2008) by Alex Ross and Jim Krueger. Among the heroes, the Black Terror, The Owl, the original Daredevil The F-Troops and so on. Dynamite has been publishing various mini-series since then, but this would seem to be a clean break from the last version.

Just imagine Warren Ellis writing something called The Black Terror—the possibilities are endless.

In a statement, Ellis wrote, “I’ve long been fascinated by the period in comics that produced these characters, and I’m very much looking forward to working out the strange, atmospheric take on the weird thriller that they inspired.  Also, it’s going to be a pleasure to finally do a job through the good offices of my old friend Nick Barrucci.”  

”I’ve wanted to work with Warren for many years, and have approached him more than a few times,” Dynamite CEO / Publisher Nick Barrucci added. “I can honestly say that when his schedule allowed for us to work together, I was speechless.  We’ve been waiting for the right creative vision to bring back Dynamite’s Superpowers Universe, and I can’t think of anyone better than Warren to do so.  I was elated that both came together.  He will make this series his own and will bring a larger audience to Dynamite’s Super Powers universe.  This is truly an honor to be working with him, as Warren elevates Dynamite to a new level.”

If you’ve been following Ellis’s mailing list, he’s been gallivanting all over the world on a bunch of secret projects, some of hem seemingly showbiz related. His novel Gun Machine is being developed for television, and his Wildstorm mini RED formed the basis of two films. Plus he has a new image series, Trees, coming out later this year, drawn by Jason Howard.

Dynamite sent along some art by Ross, Jae Lee and Steve Sadowski from previous versions of Project Superpowers.

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Marvel have released their solicitations for December, including a lot of odd decimal placements, an apparent return for Peter Parker, the finale of Scarlet Spider, and a whole load of other stuff. Here’s a few bulletpoints about what you can look out for over Christmas:

If you want the full set of solicitations rather than this cherry-picking of the bigger details, head to CBR.

It looks as though Peter Parker is returning, as is the Amazing Spider-Man brand as a whole. Five issues will be out this month, lavvelled 700.1, 700.2, and so on. A number of creators are involved on this book: David Morrell and Klaus Janson on the first two issues, followed by Joe Casey, Kevin Grevioux, Jen Van Meter, Tim Green, Tim Seeley, Emma Rios, Clay Chapman, Javier Rodriguez, Brian Reed, Lee Weeks and Sean Chen. Phew!

Kathryn Immonen is returning to comics once more, and reuniting with her Hellcat collaborator David LaFuente for a new one-off story. They’re in charge of Avengers Assemble Annual – one of three annuals out this month – which promises the debut of

Zamira! She’s Meryl Streep with a vengeance!

There is also a Hulk annual, as well as a Thunderbolts annual.

Brian Michael Bendis is bringing X-23 into the cast of All-New X-Men, which basically spoils one element of Avengers Arena. It looks like she has a new costume. Elsewhere in the Bendis World, Kevin Maguire’s issue of Guardians of the Galaxy comes out this month.

Wolverine Origins II starts, with Kieron Gillen and Adam Kubert handling the five-issue miniseries. The first cover will have an acetate cover variant.

After 25 issues Scarlet Spider is ending in December, with Chris Yost and David Baldeon the team for this final issue. Ryan Stegman provides a cover for the issue.

Inhumanity starts, followed by a number of ridiculous tie-in issues like Mighty Avengers 4.INH and so on. This issue will be by Matt Fraction and Oliver Coipel, seemingly leading us towards Inhuman the ongoing series in 2014.

Avengers Assemble brings in co-writer Warren Ellis for a new story arc, working alongside Kelly Sue DeConnick. Art will be by Matteo Buffagni. And yes, it’ll be Avengers Assemble 22.INH.

No sign of an X-Factor relaunch this month, although it turns out that Brian Wood is the creator who’ll be trying to fix the almost conclusively broken Monet, following a dreadful last few months of X-Factor for the character. Monet will be joining the team in X-Men, with Terry Dodson on art.

If anyone CAN sort her out, it’s Brian Wood! Fingers crossed.

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TweetWell, he’s not been away really. He did a one page story with the brilliant Tula Lotay for Thought Bubble’s 2012 anthology, for one thing. But he certainly hasn’t had a major project in quite a while, that’s for sure — and now his novel The Gun Machine is completed, it looks like Warren Ellis [...]

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Somewhere in NYC, a cop is listening to an angry short artist in heels spewing obscenities in four different languages #freemollycrabapple

— Warren Ellis (@warrenellis) September 17, 2012

Artist Molly Crabapple was arrested during Occupy Wall Street anniversary protests today. She recorded her own arrest on Twitter.

The Marvel and DC Comics artist instantly earned responses from writers online, getting online support from Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis and journalist Laurie Penny. Ellis even launched a #freemollycrabapple hashtag on Twitter. Crabapple recently used Kickstarter to fund Shell Game, an angry work dedicated to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Here’s more from Ellis: “Interestingly, what evidently happens is that NYPD insisted everyone get on the pavement, and once they were on the pavement they were arrested.  What I am pleased about is that Molly’s arrest wasn’t one of the violent ones – because nobody in the NYC power structure gives a shit about sending the message that they will beat non-violent protestors to show how devoted they are to preserving the peace of breakfast in the financial district – and that, frankly, she gets to see the inside of a black maria and a cop shop.  Because that is going to give her a wealth of new stuff to draw angry, in the mode of her Shell Game pieces.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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This webcomics thing is heating up!

Actually, what’s heating up is that a new population of webcomics immigrants is moving to this new land and trying to learn the customs and shortcuts of the new society. And the natives—creators who came of age with the web as their native platform—are probably rolling their eyes and going on with business.

¶ Warren Ellis muses on the two-tier format that the immigrants are adapting:

What else do we notice about these three screens?  Two-tier storytelling.  Isn’t it strange how all three teams have gone to two-tier, independent of each other?

Maybe not.  You’ve cut the print page in half.  If you want each screen to make sense as a discrete entity, you have to respect the cut.  If you want each screen to contain enough information to make it worth reading, you need a strategy to maximise your panelling.  And if you want to be able to stretch out and get a big picture in there while still maintaining storytelling coherency, you’ve kind of got to go wide on the page.

¶ Meanwhile, George Gustines at the New York Times has also discovered webcomics, via Mark Waid’s various enterprises.

When reading a traditional comic, the eye cannot help taking in the whole page at once. The digital format and the pace of the Infinite Comic can lead to more surprises. As each successive panel appears on the screen, each tap or click can reveal a new caption, subtly change an illustration or replace it entirely. Focusing and blurring effects can heighten the reading experience or simply allow one to appreciate the artwork, which is richer and more vibrantly colored than the printed page.

Mr. Waid, a celebrated writer for Marvel, DC Comics and small publishers, noted that there were compromises in making digital comics. The Web may be infinite, but the borders of monitors, tablets and smartphone screens are not. Even on an iPad, the “canvas” is about 20 percent smaller than the standard comic book page. But “the trade-off is international distribution,” Mr. Waid said, “as opposed to having to rely on niche hobby shops scattered across the nation.”

Evolution.

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“What else do we notice […]?  Two-tier storytelling.  Isn’t it strange how all three teams have gone to two-tier, independent of each other?

Maybe not.  You’ve cut the print page in half.  If you want each screen to make sense as a discrete entity, you have to respect the cut.  If you want each screen to contain enough information to make it worth reading, you need a strategy to maximise your panelling.  And if you want to be able to stretch out and get a big picture in there while still maintaining storytelling coherency, you’ve kind of got to go wide on the page.”

—Warren Ellis, from a fascinating post on formatting comics for reading in multiple formats, especially tablet, phone, web interface, and of course good old print. Ideas of modularity in comics composition make a lot of sense, when you consider the nested way they’re built fundamentally, in terms of discrete objects: images > panels > pages and on up.

Ellis touches on some recent comics designed for multiple platforms, including Mark Waid and Peter Krause’s new Insufferable, which has gotten some attention for being Waid’s big public splash into making webcomics. While I’m generally suspcious of Big Public Splashes, especially from old media into new media, new thinking is always a good thing. I’m especially interested in Warren Ellis’s ideas on format, as he’s been an early adopter of new formats for years and has a pretty clear-eyed thinking when it comes to what is possible and what should be possible in a given format. 

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Waren Ellis , the acerbic writer and social critic, discusses perhaps reinstating his commenting system, an idea he quickly rejects:

Which brings up another thing, and I’m not going to ascribe it to Charlie, who is a nice man, but it’s real – sometimes, your commenters, by which you often mean your audience and your readership, are really fucking annoying, and sometimes you don’t like them.  Which you can’t say.  Who’s going to pick up another book by a writer who says “My readers are awful pieces of shit and I can think of twenty of them, right off the bat, who should be drowned in hot pig blubber”?  Nobody.  “My audience are all complete pissflaps.  Have you read my website comments threads?  Utter inane gibberish.  I would like to train a giant horse to fuck out all their eyes.”  Who’s going to say that? 

I guarantee you that even the sweetest and kindest writer has thought that exact thought more than once in their lives.  And its corollary: “Oh god, my readers are such horrible demented shitbags, what am I doing so wrong that I attract them all to me?”

Just as I know that every writer has dropped the ball at least once and disappointed a reader.  Or exposed themselves as a total prick or a frothing nutter. 

Running a blog puts you a bit more on the front line with readers, but at recent events in which I interacted with real life humans, disparaging remarks about the Beat’s recent comments were frequent and mortifying. For whatever reason, this seems to have become a Newsarama refugee camp and the results are discouraging. Sure there are entertaining byways of history going on here and there, like comics figures Tom Mason and Paul Power disputing something that happened in an auto garage many years ago in the Platinum thread. But so much more of it should be strangled in its crib—the best example being someone who was getting a drubbing in some argument inventing a new screen name and then complaining that the thread was out of control. I can see ISPs, you know.

I’ve never seriously considered turning off comments — the utility of corrections and amplifications still being present — but I’m been thinking of putting in a more robust comment modding system of some kind. NOT FACEBOOK. I would never require someone to be on Facebook to have free speech, no matter how subnormal that speech might be. I don’t really have time to ruthlessly police the comments, and I would rather put resources towards hiring writers than just blocking idiots. But, oh, what a world we live in.

As with many things, however, implementing this will have to wait until the site gets an overhaul in the next few months.

So in the meantime..BEHAVE. And don’t be a subnormal pissflap.

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Warren Ellis has landed a two-book deal with Mulholland Books. The first book, Gun Machine, will be published in 2012.

Ellis is the graphic novelist behind Fell, Planetary, and Transmetropolitan and the author of Crooked Little Vein.

Here’s more from Ellis: “In GUN MACHINE, I’m writing about a disruptive event: a small sealed Manhattan apartment filled with hundreds of guns, each one used in a single unsolved homicide.  But what I’m talking about is money, the acquisition of power, the deals we make in the name of security, the unique soul-killing exhaustion that comes of caring too much for too long, and the faces madness take in our lives … I just have to trust that the good people at Mulholland Books will catch me when I get confused and give my New York City police detective rocket pants and a ray gun.” (Via Sarah Weinman)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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Over at Warren Ellis’s blog a preview of Half Moon, a new collaboration with Michael Avon Oeming that will feature a space girl:

We’re working in realtime on this one. We agreed on the general concepts just a couple of hours ago, and will spend the next few days in development on it, to see what we’ve actually got. So I thought, and Mike agreed, it might be interesting to open the process out and let you see a bit of the sausage-making. As it were

Ellis has a long interest in all things spacey, including his previous gns Orbiter and Ministry of Space. Oeming’s tough brings a whole new look to this however.

Much more info in the link.

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Sequart Research & Literacy Organization is a non-profit organization devoted to promoting comic books as a legitimate artform that has published studies on various topics including Batman, the X-men and Grant Morrison. Now they are promoting “A Year of Ellis” including several books -Shot in the Face:  A Savage Journey to the
Heart of Transmetropolitan and Voyage in Noise:  Warren Ellis and the Demise of
Western Civilization — as well as the movie Warren
Ellis:  Captured Ghosts. However. first up is a study of Planetary — the multi dimensional pastiche on genre fiction bu Ellis and artist John Cassaday — called Keeping the World Strange: A Planetary Guide. Details on the contents have just been released:

Edited by Cody Walker, Keeping the World Strange offers essays that examine the highly-acclaimed WildStorm series from varied, thought-provoking viewpoints:
* We Contain Universes:  The Delicately Spinning Reality of the Snowflake, by Kevin Thurman 
* Surfing through Planetary:  The Characters behind the Fiction, by Andy Richardson
* The Secret History of the WildStorm Universe, by Cody Walker
* When Third is Fourth:  The Mystery of the Fourth Man, by Chad Nevett
* Bleeding Between the Lines:  Planetary and Vertigo, by Timothy Callahan
* “The Hidden Wonders of the World”:  Planetary and Reconstructionism, by Julian Darius
* Archaeologists, Architects, and Acolytes:  Reading Futures Studies in Planetary, by Caleb Stokes
* The Monster Within:  Examining Monstrous Archetypes in Planetary, by Ross Payton
* Planetary and Decompression, by Patrick Meaney
* The Ideal and the Strange:  Order Vs. Freedom in Planetary, by Peter Sanderson
* The Man Who Knows the Game, by A. David Lewis (viewing Planetary as a game that begins with Elijah Snow’s white suit)
* Apocrypha or Canon?  Fitting the Three Crossover One-Shots into Planetary, by Chad Nevett
* Appendix:  Sequencing Planetary, by Julian Darius (a suggested reading order for Planetary’s 31 stories)

Sounds like if you like PLANETARY, you’ll want this book on the shelf next to your ABSOLUTE PLANETARY collections!

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“This is a field that combines, on the one hand, the novel and the poem and the slogan and the news story, and on the other hand every stop from pointillism to cave painting. Understand comics as the marriage of word and picture, as simple as that, and you’ll get a sense of how broad the medium’s reach really is.”

- Warren Ellis » On What Comics Can Do

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Despite worries, RED held its own against the Jackass onslaught this weekend at the box office. The Summit Pictures film — loosely based on the Warren Ellis/Cully Hamner comic of the same name, came in a solid second and appears to have had wide appeal:

Meanwhile, Summit Entertainment was aiming for audiences more likely to break hips than ribs with the Helen Mirren—starring elderly actioner Red. So what if nearly 60 percent of its audience was over 35? The DC cult comic adaptation proved that a fresh idea, well-executed, can be a lively dancer: Box office actually increased markedly from Friday night ($7.3 mil) to Saturday ($9.2 mil), a sign that even if it won’t play as long as its relatively hoary stars — median age: 59 — Red likely has a long life ahead of it in theaters.

We’d heard back at Comic-Con in July that RED had been tracking well, so this comes as no surprise — especially given its extremely veteran and likable cast – Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman.

Warren Ellis was quietly pleased, although ill:

I am sick with the Komodo Dragon Hantavirus, but I am at peace.

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