WHERE THE MANY WORLDS OF COMICS COLLIDE
Warren Ellis had this great thread recently over at The Engine.
He asked people for their nominations for the greatest single panel in comics and started things off with this one:
Some of the entries are serious - lots of Sandman, Preacher, Watchmen, panels from Batman: The Killing Joke.
But the best ones were just hilarious. Some of my favorites below (with some subtitles for people who aren’t comics geeks):
Warren Ellis’ first novel, Crooked Little Vein, is coming out in August. The advanced praise is in, the ads have been created and I have my copy pre-ordered.
A couple of things about this ad:
1) It’s hard for me to remember a time when I was this excited for the release of a book. This is how Harry Potter people feel, why they gather at Barnes & Noble at midnight.
2) “The Man Who Doesn’t Sleep” — I wanted that nickname. Damn it.
3) When William Gibson says you’re scaring him you should be careful. You’re likely to try jumping off buildings and taking flight next.
4) Getting Joss Whedon to do a blurb on the back of your book — especially as breathless a blurb as this — is brilliant. Those Whedon fans are many and rabid. If a quarter of them get interested enough to pick up the book you’ve done well.
5) I’m really interested in the crossover of comics fans and fans of novels. When best selling thriller writer Brad Meltzer began writing the Justice League comic there was definite interest because of his novelist pedigree. But they also ran pieces of his next novel, The Book of Fate, in the back of one of the issues. When the book was released it became his first #1 New York Times best seller and he credited that, at least partially, to support from the comics community.
Neil Gaiman has certainly parlayed his comics career into a successful career as a novelist, though you could argue he was writing prose well before he was writing comics. Greg Rucka went from being a thriller novelist to the Eisner Award winning comics scribe who created Queen & Country and the gritty Gotham Central.
With the success of recent comics movies the studios are giving non-superhero works a go from Sin City and 300 to Brian K. Vaughan now writing the screenplay for a big screen adaptation of his Y: The Last Man.
It’s an interesting time to be a comics fan — and an even more interesting time to be a comics writer.
