Warren Ellis Frustrated With Social Media; Highlights a Feature/Bug

Writer and internet presence Warren Ellis recently posted his observations regarding current social media: http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14404

His complaints aren’t unfounded, and his observations are as ever, spot on.

What is interesting is that perhaps he’s coming up against are not failing of social media, but instead are the result of truly social networks. Facebook, Twitter, even Google+ basically exist to make one-to-one connections. Things start trending, peaking, hyper-sharing, whatever, when it grabs the public and the public movies it.

Warren’s big issue was numbers; too few people actually seeing his content in social media, compared to the much larger amounts of people subscribed to his accounts, pages, etc.

But that’s because he’s looking for a broadcast result in a medium designed to diffuse the content down to individuals interacting.

FIGHT COMICS! An introduction

FIGHT COMICS: Opening Jab

The title comes from Warren Ellis. He mentioned Fight Comics as a concept years ago on his now-closed Bad Signal mailing list.

As he described it, Fight Comics is a concept where the the fight itself is the point of the story. A fight told in an interesting way. Making the battle compelling and not as filler between dialouge.

Which hit me right in the brainstem. I’ve been a lover of well-done action for as long as I can remember, and this concept all of the sudden gave me permission as a storyteller to focus on what I was already passionate about, and on what many consider the sauce on the story, not the meat of the narrative itself.

So I’ve come up with five stories, a different artist collaborating with me on each(plus a cover artist!). They’ve been a blast to write. I’ve tried to keep each story distinct from each other, including a bare-knuckle boxing fight, a swashbuckling duel, a high-tech story of rebellion, a conflict amoung techno-gods from the distant future, and a kung-fu tale.

I hope to have the anthology ready by the 2012 Calgary Comics Expo, but check back here for details! I plan to get a few preview images up in the next few days.