“Pilot Season” is a Top Cow competition in which six one-shot comics compete for the right to be “greenlit”. Readers are able to vote online, and the two highest votegetters will become an ongoing series.

scans_daily: Pilot Season – vote for Genius.

I discovered this on Warren Ellis’ blog and as he says:

[T]he idea is so simple and crystal that I could spit.Every generation has its own naturally gifted brilliant military mind. Some people just have a genius for military thinking. What if this generation’s natural military genius was a seventeen-year-old girl living the gang life in the middle of South Central LA? And what if she had, since she was old enough to fuck shit up, been connecting people and laying plans for the only war she’d ever want to wage?

Next: an extraordinarily large pile of dead LAPD.

It was funny, it worked visually and musically and Robert Downey Jr. pulled it off marvellously. Marvel must be pleased with their first release where they’ve had full creative rights throughout the process and have already signed up all the cast for two sequels with the next one slated for 2010. Stark will also make a brief appearance in The Incredible Hulk.

I originally thought that Marvel would end up shooting Ultimate Iron Man, after all, one reboot should lead into another. Oh no. I read through a copy of UIM in Waterstones on Sunday and it is god-awful. No, instead large reams of plotting are sourced from Warren Ellis’ reboot, Iron Man: Extremis which actually looks quite good.

Slowly but steadily I’m discovering the occasional thoroughbred in Marvels stable, which I still believe mostly consists of nags.

DR. WILLIAM FINK:
Would you call your work a hostile work environment?

HOWARD CAMPBELL:
Of course. It’s advertising. We’re the meme generals fighting the most publicized war ever fought.

Originally sourced from Mass Persuasion & Social Engineering.

After years of self-imposed exile from a civilization rife with degradation and indecency, cynical journalist Spider Jerusalem is forced to return to a job that he hates and a city that he loathes. Working as an investigative reporter for the newspaper The Word, Spider attacks the injustices of his surreal 21st Century surroundings. Combining black humor, life-threatening situations, and moral ambiguity, this book is the first look into the mind of an outlaw journalist and the world he seeks to destroy.

Since the news broke that Warner Bros will offer the unaired AQUAMAN pilot on iTunes, I’ve been pelted with emails asking if the same thing will happen with the unaired GLOBAL FREQUENCY pilot (based on my books).

I strongly doubt that this version of GLOBAL FREQUENCY would ever be made available for purchase. Which is a shame.

So there you have it. I didn’t think it would be released and the only people unhappy about it, apart from old Warren, are the ones that probably saw a “evaluation copy”.

Japan plans to build its own island Great stuff! Naturally, the point is to “preserve the island” and nothing to do with the “162,000-square miles of ocean that occupy a crucial strategic position.”

Vomit–filled bags keep turning up in same area. “We have done everything short of surveillance out there 24/7,” Wesely said. “We have no ideas right now, no leads or anything about where to
look.”

Romania Legalizes Witchcraft “Romania’s first official witch was registered Monday after months of negotiations with the government that finally introduced witchcraft as a legal occupation.”

Secret rivers found in Antarctic “It was thought the sub-glacial lakes had been completely sealed for millions of years, enabling unique species to evolve in them.”

My god, I sound like a pretentious film student! Noooo!

Anyway, moving onto comics/graphic novels/[insert newest term here]. Last night I read the much sought-after Signal to Noise, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean. Both writer and illustrator and people whose work I like a lot so this was something I’d been hunting for some time. Unfortunately it is out of print and and second hand dealers were asking a fortune for it. So when I found it on Ebay, I was much thrilled and hastily clicked the ‘Buy it now’ button. It arrived in short order, read it last night and it was worth every penny. A dying director ‘films’ his last movie in his head. That’s the whole story, but it all hangs together wonderfully. Gaiman and McKean do their thing very well together.

Right, next I bought the first two copies of Desolation Jones, the new comic by Warren Ellis. In this world, there a bunch of ex-spooks in the world and when they get to be a problem they are ‘imprisoned’ in LA. They have freedom of movement of the city and immunity within it’s boundaries, but that’s it. Jones is a British ex-spook, turned private investigator, specialising in dealing with problems that have arisen within the intelligence community. His first case is, quite literally, hardcore. It’s a good story, though Ellis is prone to throwing loads of interesting tidbits into the first episode (“look what interesting fact I found on the internet!”), but by the second episode things settle in a bit more and take on some life of their own. It was a good read.

Ellis seems obsessed with the whole fallout of the global intelligence community. It was first touched upon in Global Frequency and now in DJ. I have no idea why, but it does make good stories.

technorati tag: comics