My name’s Warren Ellis. I write comics and things. This is a one-year work log; what I’m doing, where I am, what I’m thinking and what’s passing across my desk. My desk is kind of a fluid concept, as I’m a mobile writer, working with an internet-enabled handheld computer and a fold-out keyboard. I’m involved with a lot of things besides comics, and have friends all over the world who do all kinds of things. Much of that feeds back into comics, as I try to write comics that are about the world — and comics themselves are part of the world cultural conversation. Stream of consciousness, but rarely completely conscious while writing it. I like Red Bull.

[CIA]

I wrote a one-year column about comics a couple of years ago, called COME IN ALONE, which became a book that was quite successful. I’ve sometimes joked that a sequel to that column would probably be called LEAVE ME ALONE. This isn’t really a sequel. I don’t really want to recapitulate the ideas in that book. They were for a different time, when the Western medium existed at a point of potential which could have gone a few different ways. The landscape has shifted around a lot since then, and there are new concerns in the general conversation — decompression wasn’t considered an issue in ’99, for instance. Hopefully, I’m not now so old and set in my ways that I can’t take a fresh look at the way things are today.

[BRAINPOWERED]

I also run an occasional journal at www.artbomb.net, the graphic novel evangelism site I co-founded with Peter Siegel. Those are complete essays and have absolutely bugger all to do with comics. These are not going to be complete essays. Check out BRAINPOWERED to see how I write when I’m, y’know, awake.

[DECOMPRESSION]

Decompression is a tool I lifted from manga. It describes the process of breaking down a moment into a sequence of panels examining it from several angles, or slowing several moments down for similar consideration. Scaled up, a story that might have been told in eight tight pages in the Sixties can be decompressed into a 22-page unit, prowling around each beat of the story, expanding up dramatic moments into massive panels that carry immense visual punch. It’s the process Hitch and I used on THE AUTHORITY. We weren’t nearly the first Westerners to apply manga-influenced decompression, and creators like Eddie Campbell and Bryan Talbot independently invented decompression tools in ALEC and LUTHER ARKWRIGHT back in the 70s and 80s. Eddie adapted his from comic strips, looking for an organic way to structure stories and time. Bryan adapted his tools from the work of director and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, who did THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH with David Bowie. Scott McCloud has a fine breakdown of the basic manga storytelling effects in UNDERSTANDING COMICS, which any decent comic shop should have a copy of. Decompression is just another tool in the box. Anyone who complains about decompression as a plague on the medium is a retard. Blaming the tool is stupid. If you want someone to blame for a bad decompressed comic, blame the writer.

[CONTAGIOUS]

Popular comics are always going to be copied. If a popular comic uses decompression, it’s decompression that’ll be copied, sometimes without a good look at the specific effects it creates. When WATCHMEN was released, comics companies were deluged with submissions done in nine-panel grid featuring vigilantes who say "Hurm" a lot. Seriously. This was still happening by the time I got into the business, and I saw some. No-one, however, wanted a crack at creating the kind of huge complex structures and relationships of WATCHMEN. No-one used the tools to went their way in and out of people’s lives like Alan Moore, and no-one used the frame like Dave Gibbons. They just lifted the surface. This is how it always goes with the big influential works. Too few people look at the guts of a thing. You don’t get to be Frank Miller by drawing a nice picture of Daredevil. You get to be Frank Miller by spending ten years studying Will Eisner and B Krigstein pages and working out for yourself just what makes them good.

[EXAMPLE]

I met Joss Whedon once. He told me he learned to write comics by studying some Alan Moore scripts his editor provided to him. They scared the hell out of him, as I recall. Alan writes massive scripts. I mean, he’s got his own hole in a forest somewhere, and it’s a mile across and denuded of anything that can be pulped into paper. Now go and read one of Joss’ comics — or use Bit Torrent to steal it off the internet, the way I did. (It’s okay — I was going to get Marvel to send me a copy, so I wasn’t going to pay for it anyway.) (Yeah, yeah. Shut up.) It doesn’t read like Alan’s work, does it? He took what he needed from it — how to pace comics, how to isolate moments, when to punch and when to go quiet — and put his own voice on top of it. That’s how to do it. Joss went on from that meeting to write an introduction to a PLANETARY collection wherein he made fun of my beard. And Alan’s.

[HEADBOMB]

Matt Webb wrote this.. I found it via my friend Matt Jones, who does futurismy stuff for Nokia in Finland. It has broken my little head. Read it. It will break your little head too.

[MACHINE]

Someone needs to break Stuart Immonen’s hands for me. He’s the artist on ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR, and I never seem to get more than a few pages ahead of him. I sent in eight pages the other week and the assistant editor, Nick Lowe, wrote back to say that they should hold Stuart from around 11am until 11.20. Stuart’s stripped his style down to bare lines for UFF. Now, theoretically, that should be a harder gig for him — there’s strain and precision in boiling eight lines down to one line that does the same job. It’s one of the things that slows Adam Hughes down — he draws a complete piece and then takes out every line that doesn’t do work, which is how he gets those gorgeous crystalline pages. But it’s time-consuming. Someone once told me that Terry Dodson gets a similar effect faster by building carefully from the ground up and simply stopping drawing once he’s got the essential line down, and I guess Immonen’s doing the same thing. Whatever. He must be stopped. He is the reason I’m not being interviewed for a TV documentary about I, ROBOT this week. I’m going to be either typing or sleeping for the next five weeks. I hate you, Stuart Immonen.

[BAH]

This is where Stuart Immonen does another LiveJournal entry wherein he calls me names. Go and read his "fifty reasons why I don’t do sketches at conventions." It’s very funny, and it’ll kill his bandwidth. Go on.

[SIN-O-MATIC]

My friend Tristan Risk is my polar opposite. She’s a model, actress, dancer and singer, wakes up at the crack of sparrowshit every day to perform a massive workout that makes my bones hurt just thinking about it, and crams photoshoots and recording sessions and god knows what else into about forty more hours per day than the clock seems to allow. She makes me sick, frankly. She’s starting a weekly burlesque feature, and if you’re in the Vancouver area you should go and see her.

[PLAYLIST]

Chion Wolf, "Sing Swan Songs": DeathBoy, "One Pill": Passiflora, "Nyack": Pixies, "Bam Thwok" (Chion Wolf and DeathBoy mp3s can be found on Mperia.

[COLOPHON]

Warren Ellis’ main site is http://www.warrenellis.com and his research weblog is http://www.diepunyhumans.com. STREAMING is (c) Warren Ellis 2004 all rights reserved.