nixsight

The Ministry #5 by Warren Ellis:

The above is, in part, what Grant Morrison’s talking about when he starts declaiming about the DC Universe as a live thing. Since it grows and makes connections while under the command of forces almost totally invisible to the populations within the comics, it fulfills one of the conditions for life inside a creationist universe.

This is one of the reasons why people think Grant is mad.

It’s been a pretty mad couple of weeks at work, and I’ve been doing more thinking about writing than actually writing (plus, you know, annihillating the Spanish… perhaps I’m getting a sense for the long game).

In lieu of a proper post, I just wanted to point you in the direction of Warren Ellis’ current column at The Pulse… sadly, because the site seems to be frame-based, I can’t point you directly to the new one, but if you go to the front page, which is here: www.comicon.com/pulse, you should be able to find it. It’s The Ministry #5.

If you’re reading this after the piece has left the front page, I don’t know how you’ll find it… The Pulse has some lovely stuff on it, but it seems to be designed with the express intent of making your eyes bleed. Fair warning.

You should be reading The Ministry each week anyway, because Ellis is, as far as I can tell, writing each one as close to deadline as possible, on a diet of desperation, Red Bull and nicotine, and this seems to be when he gets his really big thinking done.

Today he is talking about the comic book as data node, and the potential it has for being part of a larger data structure… a comic book that speaks to the internet as well as the reader, and has an instant and evolving context within that larger arena. Or, maybe, he’s just talking about a pre-constructed fan-based wiki community, like the one he says Lost has, but consciously designed. But that doesn’t sound as cool.

But he says some very interesting things about early Marvel comics, the beginnings of a continuity, and… like that.