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Seifert emerges from the core of his satellite house into bright, bright sunlight. The spherical 6000-cubic-foot core is the innermost level of his home. He steps onto the core’s outer surface, which is the floor of the next layer of his home: the space deck. The third and final layer is above his head: a mostly-invisible energy shield that ionizes to keep him from going blind or burning to a crisp in the sun’s light and, of course, keeps atmosphere inside.

He carries his breakfast to his lawn chair, which is maintains itself at such a heading that it’s always facing the earthset. This is his morning ritual. Today he cues the agitators to create a refreshing breeze. The microspeakers in his ears respond by producing the sound of wind blowing through trees overhead. Seifert has never seen a tree, but he found the recording browsing a random aural archive and finds it inevitably helps set him at ease.

After breakfast he returns to the core. His Best Friend™ Rachel greets him on the door. She’s an AI tailored to be his perfect companion. Seifert had been unable to afford the hard-light hologram feature, but arranged the next-best thing: every surface in the house—from walls to dishes to knick-knack and books—was coated in a transparent photoresponsive material. Rachel could appear on any surface in the house she chose. He liked it best when she was on the bathroom mirror. It felt the most like there was a 3-D person in the room. Someday soon he’d mirror an entire wall of the living room.

This morning she is wearing soothing green and speaks gently. She’s right. He has been feeling a bit depressed this morning. “Maybe we should go visit the Kanes today,” he says.

“That sounds fun,” she replies. “I’ll just call and see if they’re free.”

“Sorry I’ve been down these last couple days.”

“It’s all right. We all get down sometimes. Can I help in any way?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure what’s bothering me.”

“I think….Oh, the Kanes say they’d love to see us. They’re about an hour up the elliptical. I’ve set the nav. I think you feel stuck. Short term, maybe another Martian vacation’s in order. Long term, it might finally be time to start actively looking for that new job.”

“You’re a smart girl, Rachel.”

“I’m just designed that way to keep up with you, my friend.”

An hour later his home energy field is fuzzy-docked with the Kanes’. He transfers Rachel to his shirt and heads next door. She had succeeded in getting him out of his funk on their way over and now they are laughing over memories of their last Martian vacation.

In that moment of weightlessness as he adjusts from one home’s gravity field to the other’s, he smiles down at her. She winks and makes a funny face, which starts him laughing again.

His Tuesday isn’t shaping up to be such a bad day after all.

The trick of complex comics–and this is something I learned from 80s publisher and comic activist Paul Gravett, later reinforced in a long conversation with Bryan Talbot while he was producing The Tale of One Bad Rat–is knowing that the hardest thing to do in comics is tell a story with absolute clarity. The point of experimentation is to find new ways of telling stories that people can understand. It doesn’t matter how cleverly you can jabber if, at the end of it, no-one’s understood a word you said. It’s not about dumbing down–it’s about speaking clearly. It’s one of the reasons why Alan Moore does his serious novels in the 9-pic grid (which One Bad Rat also riffs off of)–it imposes a cadence on the work. I tend to avoid anything other than 6-grid or 3-grid–I like a sound that’s a little more garage-y, a bit more clang and thump than Alan’s little symphonies.

–Warren Ellis, Bad Signal, April 22, 2002

I have a lot of projects close to the edge, they just need a litle nudge. After that, their own momentum will do a lot of the work. I have decided that this week, starting today (Small Step 22 – 60% of the way through My Leap Year), will be the week I do all that nudging.

The first major development of My Leap Year happened last week, but I can’t talk about it yet. A mini-series I’m writing for a publisher I like. There will be a preview book out for SDCC, and when the project’s officially announced sometime between now and then I’ll be able to tell you more.

It’s hard to do melody in comics. I’ve ben messing around with it for years, trying to duplicate My Bloody Valentine or Pixies effects in comics, and it’s hard, verging on the impossible. I got close to it sometimes in The Authority: there’s a point in an old Dr Feelgood song where Lee Brilleaux yells “Eight bars on the old joanna” and Wilko Johnson’s guitar clangs like a fucking fire alarm for thirty seconds, and I got close to that in the second story arc–just closed my eyes and ran with it and cannabalised poor Hitch. But rhythm is easier. My basic trick is working three balloons or captions a panel, five panels a page. Bang bang bang. Five panels makes the page just slightly asymmetrical, puts a little flourish in there. Drop back to four/four. Nine-panel grid becomes breakbeats, if you cut the text back. Half the toolbox is in Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright. I stole all my pauses from manga. There’s a trick they use, that Scott McCloud explicated best in Understanding Comics–when they pause, they whack at least two of the panel borders out to bleed, so the picture extends off the edges of the page and is no longer contained by gutters or panel flow. It says that, in this panel, time has stopped. Sticks down. Pause. It’s the long second in the back end of my current favourite single, Queen Adreena’s "Pretty Like Drugs," where the music stops and all you can hear is Katie Jane Garside saying “Pretty Like Druuuugs” and everything else is frozen around that moment and you stop breathing.

Comics are drums. When I read a new comic, I want to hear the drums.

–Warren Ellis, Bad Signal, August 12, 2002

We had to submit one page of art with our original 1-page pitch. The art that they all (including Marc Silvestri) mention liking so much was this page, by the talented Ryan Sergeant:

Don’t worry. This project is still happening. That somewhat beleaguered hat I’m wearing was a hand-me-down from my dad. For a couple years, I used it and another thrift-store hat similar to it in an experiement to visually brand myself when I went to cons. Apparently it worked, because last month at NYCC I still had people I couldn’t remember recognize me as the “guy with the hat”.

Ultimately, I’m quite glad Comic Book Challenge didn’t work out, because I wouldn’t own SMOKER if it had. This is a pattern I’m noticing. I think maybe signing away something (even partially) will be worth it in terms of exposure, but as the reality gets closer and closer I cringe more and more until I can’t really do it. I simply believe too strongly in owning my won work. Case in point, I’ve been developing a Zuda entry. My friend David Gallaher was the first winner with his and Steve Ellis’s comic High Moon, and when I talked to him at NYCC he had nothing…nothing…bad to say about them. But still, as I develop the project, now I want to take it to Image instead. We’ll see. It may still need to go somewhere like Zuda so my artist can get paid…

Having dipped my toes into film and telly recently, I’m struck by how different we are from other writers. Most TV people spend all day sitting around in wine-bars and talking about a project they’ve had in development for three years. Comics are the modern-day pulps. We work ten hour days, five or six days a week and see our work in print only weeks or months after coming up with the idea. We’re more prolific and have a wide-ranging imagination TV and movie people can seldom match. Maybe it’s because we’re never restricted by budget. Comics are also, on the whole, much better than books, TV or movies. The percentage of comics I read every month as a fraction of the overall market far outweighs the number of other media worth paying attention to. There’s a lot of high quality products out there.

–Mark Millar

I like comics because they still retain an outlaw nature, because they’re not quite acceptable. I like comics because they pay better than novels and they allow more creative control, in most cases, than “big media” like films or television. I like comics because they’re rife with untapped potential.

–Steven Grant

Comics are harder to write than TV, radio, prose or film, and pay at least 10 times less. In many ways, though, they can be more satisfying because it’s your story, and it’s all on paper, nothing about having to wait for over 50 people to get it done. And the Punk rock philosophy of comics — that anyone can do it — is nicely democratic

–Adi Tantimedh

What other medium offers a writer the joys that comics do? I can write a story and see art a few weeks later. Then a few months after that a finished product. I can write a story in one day and get the whole thing out of my system. Or take a week or more if I feel like it. Spend a year on a screenplay? Five years on a novel? You’re kidding, right?

In other mediums you’re dealing with roomfuls of idiots who all have an opinion. At the absolute worst you’ll deal with a single idiot in comics.

I love this medium and it more than satisfies my every desire as a writer. My imagination is encouraged to run as wild as it can. I can write an SF story one week and a crime story the next and (God willing) a western every once in a while. I like the pace and I like the characters and I like the people I work with. It simply doesn’t get better than that.

–Chuck Dixon

I love the fact that unless you’re working for the X-office, ninety-five to a hundred percent of what I write is what actually shows up in print. Unlike in movies and television, there are fewer morons between me and my audience and less chance for what I write to get watered down. Moreover, but on a related note, there’s very little if any writing on spec in what I do now–I write a comic, I get paid–and ELSEWORLDS 80-PAGE GIANT aside, everything I write gets seen by an audience, which is also not something you can count on in any other medium. I could actually make much better money in other fields writing material that may or may not ever be actually read, but that holds no appeal for me. Yet.

–Mark Waid

Nothing compares to the comics medium when it comes to the immediate communication of stories, ideas, whatever. If you can navigate the waters of the industry correctly, the amount of control you ultimately have over your own work puts it light years beyond most other media. Comics also allow you to be as prolific as you want to be, which is always good if you’ve got a lot of stories to get out of your system

–Joe Casey

Given a modicum of aptitude and a lot of application, you can take a few pennies worth of materials and make stories containing anything you want. The other visual storytelling media, film and TV, offer fantastic possibilites, but also make huge demands in terms of resources. And the more resources you need, the more compromises you’ll have to make to get them. Harlan Ellison famously said that making a TV series is like trying to carry a rose to the top of a mountain of shit; even if you can get there, you won’t be able to smell the rose.

Storytelling in comics is often compared with storytelling in film or animation, but comics offer the possibility of greater density and complexity; after all, the reader can choose to spend more time studying one panel than another, or even to go back a few pages if they realize they’ve missed something. And, being a “literary” medium, comics are far better at portraying the internal life of characters than performance media such as Film or TV.

In short, comics are a democratic medium, available to all at some level, the only real limitation being the skill and industry of the creator(s). It offers many possibilites, and far more creative control than other visual storytelling media.

–Matt Brooker, AKA D’Israeli

Quite simply, there is no other medium in which your vision can come to life (and print) with as little interference. The various other options open to artists just don’t have the same freedoms.

Comics are the only field where you can semi-easily create a story of your own from scratch and control every aspect of its design, where creator-owned work is becoming more and more common, where there isn’t a commitee to stomp your vision into a nice, mainstream, bitesized nugget of fluffy nothingness if you don’t choose to allow that. One can still, occassionally, create whole worlds, characters that live and breathe and a story that can directly communicate to the person who picks it up and reads it.

–Jacen Burrows

They’re so easy to do. A few pennies worth of paper and ink are all you need to get working. Oh, and a good idea. That’s the only not-so-easy part. And some talent (optional).

They’re direct. From my head to the page to your head. No fancy projection or sound systems needed, or standing in line and putting up with popcorn munchers. You can read them at your own pace, go back to things you’ve missed or want to look at again, at the flip of a page.

They’re low rent. No executive producers breathing down your neck. No rewrite because the director wants his girlfriend’s role expanded. No backers to convince before you can put the show on. Of course, not much rent money either, but you can’t have everything.

They’ve always had the possibility of being REALLY FUCKING GREAT. And, once in a while, they are.

–Dave Gibbons

I’m warning you right now, before you feel the need to point it out, that this is me thinking out loud. It is not necessarily a proclamation of Truth, and it is probably a half-congealed concept at best.

The worst part is this is not really a new idea, just an amalgam of plenty of stuff that’s gone before. I think maybe all I’m adding is a name. But it’s a flashpoint in my thinking right now, thinking about my future as a comics creator, which is what my entire Leap Year project has been all about. So here it is, and I make no guarantees about how coherant it will be.

Pop Culture is short for Popular Culture. Comics are not popular. People in comics wet their pants if an issue sells a measly 150,000 copies. Terrible, terrible movies show on more screens than excellant, excellant comics can sell copies of in a month.

Comics are not Pop Culture.

Comics are better. Comics are Seed Culture.

Comics is the place where people can try, creatively, whatever they want with a minimum of interfereence and a minimal investment. With POD printing, you can be selling on Amazon with zero monetary investment. Just the time it takes to create your story. Here’s where I give you the quote I searched so diligently for:

The reason I write comics is that, 1) it’s the cheapest and most effective visual narrative medium in the world, and 2) no-one cares.

Which sometimes works in our favour. Because it allows us freedom. The freedom of the loser, sure, but nonetheless… We can speak our minds like no other medium, because we don’t labour under the heavy corporate control of a successful medium, and the consequent demands of a mass audience.

I can say what I like, and say it in one of the most accessible media there is. Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.

–Warren Ellis, FTDO 1/23/99

I love movies. I would like to write a few. Maybe even do more than write. I live in LA. I worked in the industry for years. My wife’s career is in the industry. I’ve seen behind the cameras, the screenplays, the notes and the meetings and everything I see makes me want to make sure that, no matter what, I never stop making comics. Where I can do anything.

I was talking to John Rogers (writer of the Transformers movies and DC Comic’s Blue Beetle) last week. “I have a new idea for a screenplay,” he said, “but why on earth wouldn’t I do it as a comic first?” Where you can control the story’s entire development and, essentially, storyboard the film while you’re at it.

Comics are Seed Culture. We’re germinating the Ideas. And Pop Culture comes to us for those Ideas so it can fuel its franchises. Hollywood has caught on to this. They basically treat comics as R&D. A far more cost-effecive and innovative version of their very expensive, clumsy and thousand-cooks-in-the-kitchen development process. I walked out of Iron Man a couple weeks ago and literally half the posters I passed in the theater on my way out were comic books first: Wanted, The Incredible Hulk, The Dark Knight, Speed Racer, Hellboy 2. These are movies coming out in a single summer.

With Marvel now producing their own films based on their characters, we’re seeing Hollywood about to be hit full-force with something that’s been a mainstay of comics for decades: the shared universe. These shared universes are mad, sometimes maddening, things, but they’re intricite and complex and literally have a life outside their creators. They’re these self-sustaining pieces of fiction that predate us and will outlive us, and we’re about to watch one formed on film. Captain America’s shield already appeared in Iron Man. Nick Fury shows up at the end of the film and asks Tony Stark if he’s ever heard of the Avengers. Robert Downey, Jr. will appear as Tony Stark in the Hulk movie coming out next month. A Thor script’s being written, Iron Man 2 is scheduled for 2010 and Captain America and The Avengers the year after that.

The Comics Way is like a virus that, once it gets into Pop Culture, infects and alters it.

The visual design of a lot of the movies you love is done by artists who got their start in comics. Hit non-adaptations (The Matrix, Heroes) are also taking their cues (or sometimes entire plots) from comics. Every time an filmmaker makes an aesthetic or storytelling decision influenced by The Matrix, they’re transmitting third-generation comics Seed Culture to millions of viewers.

I work at one the biggest comic shop in Hollywood, and I can tell you the day a comic option is announced because the book suddenly sells out and we get a ton more inquiries about it. And it is happening all the time. Just spend five minutes over at Comics2Film if you don’t believe me. Kick-Ass was bought before it hit stands, and that was even without anyone knowing how Wanted will perform at the box office.

And here’s where this ramble all starts to come together.

Comics, as much as they enable shiny, mad, new ideas, tend to want to stick with old ones. As does any human endeavor, really. And the system reflects it. One of the problems with comics being a Seed Culture rather than a Pop Culture, is that there’s not necessarily a lot of money to be had in Seed Culture. Certainly not compared to the money in Pop Culture.

And the best paying, most steady work to be had in comics is at Marvel or DC, where creators do not own what they create and where stories must be told month in and month out, not necessarily because anyone has a story crying to get out of them, but because a character’s trademark must be serviced. This is why we constantly see some of the most innovative creative voives in comics today doing another retread of Superman or the X-Men rather than something entirely new.

But here’s the thing. Hollywood money is better than Marvel/DC money. I know of a recent series from a pretty small publisher that was optioned after only three or four issues for a million dollars. A smart, savvy comics creator with lots of Ideas can make more selling their work to other media than they can at one of the Big Two. But in order for this to be possible, they will need to own their work.

Yes, I realize I’m simplifying.

But we’re living in a time in comics when not just the creative, but the financial, incentive can be for creator-owned works, rather than company-owned ones.

A Seed Culture, seeded in turn by the Pop Culture it feeds.

Comics are not Pop Culture. Comics are better. Comics are Seed Culture.

Mammals invest a lot of energy in keeping track of the disposition of each copy we spawn. It’s only natural, of course: we invest so much energy and so many resources in our offspring that it would be a shocking waste if they were to wander away and fall off the balcony or flush themselves down the garbage disposal. We’re hard-wired, as mammals, to view this kind of misfortune as a moral tragedy, a massive trauma to our psyches so deep that some of us never recover from it.

It follows naturally that we invest a lot of importance in the individual disposition of every copy of our artistic works as well, wringing our hands over “not for resale” advance review copies that show up on Amazon and tugging our beards at the thought of Google making a scan of our books in order to index them for searchers. And while printing a book doesn’t take nearly as much out of us as growing a baby, there’s no getting around the fact that every copy printed is money spent, and every copy sold without being accounted for is money taken away from us.

There are other organisms with other reproductive strategies. Take the dandelion: a single dandelion may produce 2,000 seeds per year, indiscriminately firing them off into the sky at the slightest breeze, without any care for where the seeds are heading and whether they’ll get an hospitable reception when they touch down.

And indeed, most of those thousands of seeds will likely fall on hard, unyielding pavement, there to lie fallow and unconsummated, a failure in the genetic race to survive and copy.

But the disposition of each — or even most — of the seeds aren’t the important thing, from a dandelion’s point of view. The important thing is that every spring, every crack in every pavement is filled with dandelions.

Cory Doctorow, in his column for Locus Online

Warren Ellis mentioned Sleepbot in a twitter last week and I checked it out because I didn’t know what it was.

So here I am, a week later, totally addicted to writing to the sounds of Sleepbot. Totally.