Warren Ellis on his Bad Signal mailing list [my emphasis]:

“As of right now, there are 5400 people on the Bad Signal.
If all of you went to www.e-sheep.com and paid a lousy 25 cents to read a Patrick Farley comic, he would instantly become the best-paid serial creator in indie comics. If half of you went, he’s still be doing pretty well, probably constituting a pro rate for the work he’s doing. For twenty-five cents, microcasting work to an online audience of less than 3000 people would give him a shot at a living gig. Expand that out. Even 25 cents for an mp3 multiplied by half the readership of Bad Signal would mean that that musician is doing better than 90% of professional musicians — that is, earning more than US$600 a month. Seriously.

In fact, to support four artists you like, all you’d have to do is put aside an entire dollar a month to buy their art. And tell your friends.”

I guess this is the telling my friends part. Warren makes a good side-point about the use of tribe.net or other social-network services as markets for what he calls “microcasting” of creative work. There’s probably something to be learnt / crosspollinated from the creative networks around MMORPGs, but I’m not sure what. Anyway – go give Patrick Farley some money…

Alan Moore knows the two score and ten today… it’s his 50th birthday.

“I made it all up, and it all came true anyway. That’s the funny part.”

Whoohoo!

A new installment of Patrick Farley’s “Spiders” is due out on August 8th – and having just read a preview snippet… it’s a cracking spike to the story-arc that began online over a year ago, and made a print appearance in Wired a few issues back:

“You’re telling me the U.S.A. is conducting biological warfare in Afghanistan?…”

“If you define ‘warfare’ as “destroying the enemy’s will to fight… Then yes, Lieutenant. We are.”

“Why doesn’t the world know about about this?”

“Because, Lieutenant….. The world hasn’t asked”

Fantastic art and storytelling, only outshone by even more fantastic ideas; Farley deserves real success and support for his work. Go read Spiders if you haven’t already.

» E-Sheep.com: Spiders

Quite possibly my dream headline.

Here are some snippets of Matthew Maxwell’s coverage of a panel at the Dan Diego comics convention featuring Grant Morrison.

“Of course, all this tied into the concept of emergence. Briefly stated, once a series of rules/concepts/organisms gets sufficiently complicated, a larger pattern emerges out of the whole. This is the concept behind “smart mobs” and beehives alike. There’s a single mind in a hive, but you couldn’t find it in an individual bee. As an aside, that’s the best way I can describe it; if you want more, seriously, Google ‘emergence’ and prepare to be overwhelmed.”

“He went on to talk about The Filth as sort of a vaccine against the very things that the book is about. The Hand is kind of a defense mechanism/antibody for the psyche of the human race, with each of its divisions being modeled after a particular part of the immune system. Continuing, he described how each body is made up of billions of cells, but in and around all of those cells are some ten times that number in bacteria/viruses/other organisms and how they could be an emergent intelligence in and of themselves. Follow this line of thought if you dare, but the ready implication being ‘Who’s *really* doing the thinking in your body?’”

“When asked to talk about The Invisibles, Morrison referred to it as not only a treatise on how to do magic, but as a wider introduction to a different way of seeing things (which is a mild understatement, for any readers who’ve plowed all the way through it). He went into particular detail regarding looking at 4th+ dimensional perception (assuming that we live in the fourth dimension: i.e., the three that we’re accustomed to plus Time as the fourth). As shown graphically in “The Invisible Kingdom”, he talked about how we leave “trails” through time, that to our perception in the present are inaccessible.”

And finally, from a forum posting on this story, a great candidate for a new .sig:

“Folk, like Disco, served its purpose. Folk was there to help question authority. Disco was there to reverse the effect. Punk saved us all from both.”

» Newsarama: SDCC’S GRANT MORRISON PANEL
[via The LMG]

Got my tickets last night for Comica at the ICA on Sunday 29th June.

Fantastic to see the array of “funny books” in the ICA bookstore next to learned tomes on high art and philosophy.

The arresting, iconic Guy Fawkes mask of Prisoner 5, Larkhall resettlement camp should stop a few folk in their tracks…

Good on the ICA for putting the festival together. Only last year we were discussing lobbying them to put something like this on. Hope it draws a good crowd, and good discourse.

Heavens-to-murgatroyd even. Purveyor of fine fictionsuits, Mr Warren Ellis namechecks me during a Slashdot interview in connection to a post I made about notions of “haecceity”.

That’s it… Ne plus ultra. I can retire to a farm. Surely.

Except of course, like anything vaguely-clever I’ve ever said, some one else said it first. In this case, as would be the statisically-satisfying default choice, it was Webb who first mentioned haecceity.

Mentioned Le Parkour as evidence of superhumanity before, and now Mr. Ellis has woven it into the awesome Global Frequency. Dan Hill and Chris Heathcote discuss it here.

In Dan’s post he goes on to mention “The Green Wave”, an almost mythic urban phenomenon, where one catches a wave of green (go) lights at traffic signals driving through central london.

I remember once in the middle of the night in San Francisco, being taken up to the top of a three-stepped hill (near the Mint?) by my friend Nicole, then a designer for WiReD. She waited at the lights, engine revving until the it hit green.

She hit the gas, and we barrelled down the hill… reaching the next set of lights just as it hit green – they were on one of the steps and we got a little air under us… Faster, and down the next set of lights, still on red…

Still on red…

Still on red…

They turned green the instant we passed them, almost as if in doing so we had activated them – and flew…

There I was, fingernails dug into the dashboard, grinning with fear and realization that I was in a thousand films at once. Films that had been born out of a location scout or director knowing that San Francisco allowed you to do this there, if you just let the city play with you hard enough.

Off to SF/Santa Clara tomorrow for O’Reilly EtCon, to meet up with the British Geek Expeditionary Force.

Hopefully see you there.

The all-powerful LMG points to notes on Grant Morrison’s recent talk at the ICA [my emboldening]:

“Among the reminiscences and explainations of technique (“I write the background script, and when I get the pencils back, write the dialogue to match the art. It’s like working with actors.”), he explains why he thinks comics are so powerful as a medium.

“I think comics gain something from being drawn,” he says, “all that meticulous attention focussed on each line, on the pencils, and then the inks, it give them a special power,” and I pretty much miss what he says next while I think about that, and how it ties in with William Burroughs’ idea of energy ground down into and how maybe I’ve been misunderstanding what I’m doing when I draw out my strips (which, yes, I find difficult, frustrating, boring) and how maybe it isn’t about communicating well at all (sorry, Scott McCloud) but about the action of drawing over the story and thereby deepening and reiterating its its existence, making it bigger and more affecting simply by that action of paying minute attention, with your eyes, your hands, your pencil, your pen.

Deepening the groove until it resembles a canyon. I tune back in; he’s talking about sigils and how comics are sigils, or sigil-clusters. A sigil; the image or word which affects reality.”

» Grant Morrison: ten cats mad

” In the comic or ‘graphic novel’ From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, the creation of the uncanny can be attributed to a perfect interaction of certain thematic elements and of visual procedures, including the position of the camera, the repetition of textual and graphic material and the superposition of imagination and reality.”

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