All Shapes And Sizes

Orbital Operations for 3 November 2024

Warren Ellis
November 03, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. It’s getting cold and I am run off my feet doing stuff and dealing with stuff and thinking about new stuff. How are you doing?

In this letter:

Comics are not just one size
A comic I’m in, among others
The News

Letters about the creative life by Warren Ellis, a writer from England. Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here.

OPERATIONS

COMICS SHOULD BE THE SIZE THEY NEED TO BE

I found this in the office the other day:

It’s six inches by nine, with a thicker stock cover and a newsprint-y interior of 24 pages. IT feels nice. That rough cardstock speaks of “authenticity.”

As you can see here, the art itself occupies something like an A5 space inside that 6×9 page.

The only person I’m aware of who’s doing 6×9 singles today is Craig Thompson with GINSENG ROOTS. Which is very good, if you haven’t seen it. If I’m wrong, please let me know. But there was a time when you’d find singles in different formats - Jason Lutes’ sublime BERLIN comes to mind. As does Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’ BIG NUMBERS, which was forty pages an issue in a ten-inch square format. I remember thinking it’d go next to my ten-inch EPs.

Oh! Talking as we were about grid work last week: BIG NUMBERS was on a twelve-panel grid, and look at how showy and exacting this is:

It’s one big fixed-POV image but time is flowing inside it. And the dialogue still has to flow from left to right, down one row, repeat, down one row, repeat. While the female figure starts at the top left, goes across and then down the right side to meet us at the page turn, and the male figure at the left of the second row gets up and stomps off through the last row. And yet it can all still read as a conventional left-to-right comics page.

That is a fucking terrifying thing to attempt. No wonder it nearly killed Bill Sienkiewicz.

Retailers were unhappy about the size, and I recall Phyllis Moore making an intemperate remark to the effect that if comics retailers wanted only standardised product they should stock cans of beans. And while I am entirely sympathetic to the awkward problems of racking, I think that if the writer of WATCHMEN and the artist of ELEKTRA ASSASSIN want to do a square book, you figure out ways to get that in front of people with cash.

I’m sure there are still some people who think 6×9 is an outlier format, even though it’s the size of manga and paperback books.

What I would love is a world where the formats of singles aren’t constrained to the US standard size. Where once again people can do comics in whichever size suits the work best. Iam told DSTLRY are working in a larger format, which is a wonderful thing. Some Image books have appeared in different sizes over the last several years. More of that. The constraints on format are largely imaginary. I have CD cases in six different sizes up here on the shelf, for god’s sake.

This is where digital comics did some good, and could still do more - THE PRIVATE EYE , using unconventional sizes in its digital serialisation, found a partner in Image to replicate that shape in print. I was delighted to see that, because I had dreamed of doing work in different sizes in digital (The A5 booklet! The Paradox Mystery size! The newspaper strip!) and then finding people who wanted to carry those formats over to print. (I would still love my own digital comics operation, but the logistics are beyond me.)

If you’re ever in a comics shop, look around the shelves for the people who are doing it differently. That’s where you’ll find the good stuff.

I discovered Chester Brown in the early Eighties - he used to send packages of his first zine, YUMMY FUR, to the Fast Fiction stand at the London comics marts. I’m betting I still have a few of those in storage somewhere. I was absolutely obsessed with YUMMY FUR back then.

(Back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we called them “stripzines.” I think they’re probably still called “mini-comics” today.)

I have the collected LOUIS RIEL around here somewhere. Of his post-YUMMY FUR work, I really only enjoyed RIEL and the unfinished UNDERWATER, both of which are worth your attention.

I found this curiosity on Brown’s Wikipedia page:

Brown does not follow the tradition of drawing his comics by the page – he draws them one panel at a time, and then arranges them on the page. In the case of his acclaimed graphic novels The Playboy and I Never Liked You, this allowed him to rearrange the panels on the page as he saw fit. In the case of I Never Liked You, this resulted in a different page count in the book collection than was in the Yummy Fur serialization. The panels were slightly rearranged again when the "New Definitive Edition" of I Never Liked You was released in 2002. Brown depicted himself making comics in this way in the story Showing Helder in Yummy Fur #20 (also collected in The Little Man). Despite drawing his panels individually, he says his "brain doesn't tend to think in terms of one image at a time", so that he has difficulty coming up with one-image covers.

Comics as editing suite.

ORBITAL

LIGHTS OUT, CHEST FACE NOSFERATU

LIGHTS OUT was an American spooky radio drama series, each episode a different creepy little play.

Coming Soon from Rocketship Entertainment and Black Eye Entertainment - the LIGHTS OUT graphic novel revival and remastered original recordings on a 3 record vinyl set.

Rocketship, the 2021 Ringo Award winner for Favorite Publisher and nominee for Best Presentation in Design in 2023 and 2024 is proud to present this horrifically deluxe anthology from some of the greatest minds in comics.

People contributing brand new stories inspired by LIGHTS OUT include Dean Haspiel (see below), Madeleine Rosca, John Bivens, Justin Jordan, Leeanne M. Krecic, and, um, me - finally getting to work with the marvellous Kody Chamberlain, something I’ve wanted to do for probably twenty years. You obviously all know by now that I love radio plays. This isn’t something I’d normally do, but I knew and respected LIGHTS OUT, I’ve known and liked and worked with Tom Akel for years, and I’d always wanted to try and write something for Kody. So here I am.

This book is crowdfunded, and here’s the link.

CHEST FACE is a pulp noir parody about a stand-up comedian workshopping his first comedy special while being hunted by the evil corporation that put his face on his chest.

Created by Ringo- and Emmy Award-winning cartoonist Dean Haspiel, CHEST FACE is the fourth installment in the Dean Haspiel "Deep Cut" Universe. A 24-page, color, limited-edition comic book.

The Kickstarter runs until November 23. Dean’s adventures in Kickstartered graphic novelettes have been a lot of fun.

I had a privileged view of Todd Blackwood’s adaptation of NOSFERATU, and it’s absolutely exquisite.

I’ve not seen Blackwood’s work before, and it’s gorgeous: clean, quirky, expressive and luminous.

This book is now live on Kickstarter.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition