warrenellis's posterous

Everyone's At San Diego

Except me. I've been to the San Diego Comic-Con maybe four times in the last fourteen years, and the last time I was there for less than a full day, doing RED movie stuff.

San Diego: the comics business goes dark for a week. I used to look forward, a bit, to this week. With no-one around, I could sit and think about what was next, and it always felt like I was stealing a march on everyone else.

Now, of course, I'm barely writing any comics at all, and I have sixty thousand words of novel left to focus on getting written. (I'm behind where I wanted to be, it's been a shitgrinder of a month.)

Eric Stephenson of Image Comics wrote this very kind little note the other month --

http://it-sparkles.blogspot.com/2011/06/missed.html

-- about how I'm not really present in comics anymore. And it's true enough. Even that bloody documentary makes me feel like I'm sitting in at my own funeral. Are they screening that at San Diego? I think I heard something about a panel on the subject, anyway. That and getting the Eagle Awards Roll Of Honour gong were clear signals that my time in the medium was done, I think. I thought only dead people got that award. I'm mostly joking.

But that post of Eric's did put me to thinking: this is the first year in a very, very long time where I'm not using the San Diego week to think about comics. It's a strange thing, for me, to be done with comics. Especially when there's so much left to do, that I will probably never be able to do. And on weeks like this, I wake with frustration, that I'm leaving the field with all the things I wanted to achieve half-done.

Oh, and: if you see Templesmith at San Diego, go easy on him. He's been down in Perth dealing with some tragic family matters, and it's been a really rough year for him. FELL #10 will be here when it's here. If you want to buy a comic whose greatest virtue is that it's really on time, buy a DC comic in September.

One last thing: if your SVK torch arrived inoperative, BERG have written this post --

http://berglondon.com/blog/2011/07/19/svk-torches/

-- to apologise and explain why. We did tell everyone this was an *experimental* publication...!

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SVK Is On Sale

SVK is now on sale at http://www.getsvk.com .

(Am sending this from iPad - if that link doesn't work, the one in this page's top bar will.)

SVK is a 40-page comic book available via mail order only.

SVK is an experimental publication, conceived of and produced by the design and invention group BERG.

They came to me with the idea and asked me to help them make it work. I drafted in my old friend Matt Brooker, better known to a legion of comics readers as the artist D'Israeli, to illustrate it and help me solve it.

SVK comes packaged with a UV torch. Because a lot of it is printed in invisible UV ink, and therefore elements of the book can only be seen by shining the torch on the pages.

Why is it only mail order? Because BERG wanted to solve their own supply chain. They want to make more things and sell them themselves. SVK is a test article for that process. They're publishing it: they decide how to distribute it.

Why is it expensive? It's a short print run, printed in UV ink that they had to pass security tests in order to get their hands on, enclosed with a UV torch with custom printing, and wrapped in custom packaging. This isn't a standard comic.

SVK comes with a foreword by William Gibson, and articles by futures expert Jamais Cascio and comics historian Paul Gravett.

SVK was the hardest thing I've written in years. I think it's also the best thing I've written in a few years. And, without offense to my other collaborators, I've known and worked with Matt for twenty years, and that means that not only does stuff appear on the page exactly as I imagined it would, but that it'll also be better than I imagined it.

At some point, once the book's circulated a bit, I'll talk about the horrible technical difficulties Matt solved without breaking step. Suffice it to say that this book very probably would not have happened at all if Matt Brooker had not been onboard.

And, finally, I need to thank the whole BERG team, who have worked like demons on SVK. The book itself is only the iceberg tip of the machine they've had to build to make this work.


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