(2018-09-30) Ellis Thought Bubbles Talk

Warren Ellis' Talk at the Thought Bubbles conference, 23 SEPT 2018. It took people a long time to notice that most of the famous cave paintings from the period show sequences of events. That they are in fact sequential art. Some of them were found surrounded by so many stone lamps, which would have burned tinder or fat, that it became obvious that the flickering light would have isolated pieces of the sequence in the viewer’s eye as they traversed the image.

The Bayeux Tapestry. Two hundred and thirty feet long, and one single work of sequential art.

Comics are everywhere, from airline safety cards to Ikea construction instructions to propaganda pamphlets and dissent teaching.

The Rest Of It - OO 7 October 2018

All those other artforms that grew out of and around comics? Comics sucked them back in and chewed them up and used them to grow new organs. Comics are not like film. Comics take things from film, but the two cannot be interchanged. Comics became a hybrid artform.

And what’s even weirder is that there’s no one agreed format for writing them

Comics are a place without a lot of rules. I think that’s why it’s attracted so many mavericks, eccentrics and straight-up mental people over the decades.

Time in comics is completely elastic

There's a scene in Bryan Talbot's LUTHER ARKWRIGHT where the protagonist slows down the time perception of a group of men in order to kill them more efficiently

I've seen comics that have run two different timestreams on the same page. Recursive comics. Pages containing flashbacks to three different timeframes as well as moving forward in the present while making complete sense. Richard McGuire did a famous short comic in RAW that featured several different historical periods in the same room in the same page while maintaining a linear story flow.

Sequential art creates a suspension of disbelief and pulls you into its world. Television, you have to sit there and let it do it to you. Comics are a window you step through and act behind.

Also: a curling, snarling Peter Kuper piece can sear the page with its anger in a way that no photorealistic artist will ever be able to communicate. Any single page by Julie Doucet was grimier and sleazier and more frightening and infinitely more real and true than the whole of Martin Scorcese’s back catalogue.

Comics are not film. We have a far larger toolbox. Tools borrowed from everything else, rooted in the original human expression of time and space and memory. We have the tools to do whatever we want.

Make new sounds. Make new things. I was ranting about all this twenty years ago

My work here is done. AND I’m still poor.

Digital didn’t work the way anyone expected it would. I knew people in the US whose nearest dedicated comics shop was a 12-hour drive away. Digital should have bridged the gap for a lot of people. But digital got slowed down by weird technological and commercial impediments

*Digital is a secondary system to mainstream comics publishing so far.

But webcomics! Webcomics are the global small press.*

You won’t see what works and what doesn’t until it’s out in front of you. And your mistakes are more valuable than your successes

Oh, and for the sake of completeness, I should add that crowdfunded sales and micro-patronage systems like Patreon are supporting a lot of interesting work, beautiful and often experimental books, and valuable creative voices. Self-publishing has always been important to comics.

And in the comic shops? Like everything else, it’s a cyclical business

Comics are always going to be here.