Is it socially acceptable to watch Green Lantern in the cinema but socially unacceptable to buy a Green Lantern comic?

There is a divide between ‘let’s go to the cinema and see the big summer blockbuster’ and ‘let’s go to the comic shop and buy an issue of Green Lantern’. There’s still a bit of a stigma there. Which suits me, I wouldn’t be caught buying a copy of Green Lantern either. But Marvel experienced an upturn in sales of Iron Man after the film came out.If it’s a decent film I’m sure Green Lantern will become part of the cultural conversation the same way Iron Man has. It’s a harder sell for DC than Iron Man was for Marvel: ‘Building a giant robot suit to kick the s*** out of terrorists’ is a much easier sell than: ‘Given a magic ring by an alien.’

From today’s Metro.

The BBC are building a mythology engine. What a great name. Kinda surprised they didn’t call it the iDigger or some such shit:

The R&D Prototyping team has recently built an internal prototype for BBC Vision called the Mythology Engine. It’s a proof-of-concept for a website that represents BBC drama on the web letting you explore our dramas, catch up on story-lines, discover new characters and share what you find.

One to watch this. The iPlayer sounded exciting for a while and then the BBC fumbled the birth/abortion and we ended up with bucketware (they keep emptying it for us).

Doctor Who is the obvious choice for a prototype – if anything it’s too rich a vein to tap. I can see it getting picked apart ruthlessly when they open it to the public, but it’ll be interesting to see how the bells and whistles here stack up against the mostly text driven wikipedia entries. And what happens when they start digging into shows that are less well documented and (hopefully) have a pop at expanding this framework to news. Of course, for this to get really interesting it needs to be bolted on to the actual content itself at the point we consume it.

My real interest here though is fictional archeology. Something I’ve been thinking about since I first started talking iPhone apps with Sleepydog and began working out the backstory of Slingers (I can give you a timeline for the show that runs from 2020 to 2267, but the bit you’re concerned with kicks off in 2263). In fact we now have a couple of physical artifacts from that future’s history:

But I can’t talk about that just now.

All the cool stuff I have currently loaded onto my iPad are surface applications. They allow me to experience media in a handy, shiny format, but they don’t let me dig too deep. If you ever read Warren’s Fell on its original run you’ll have seen he stuffed the thing with back material (preliminary sketches and information on the real world incidents that inspired some of the comic’s content). Now imagine that on an iPad. The Marvel style interface is very cool, but what I’d like to see is a secondary series of gestures that allow me to peel back the panels. I want to see the original art work, the pencil drawings etc, but also the history of the story.

Enhanced editions of novels are doing a wonderful job here too. But so far whether it’s a novel or a TV show the glop attached to the content are secondary to the content itself.

Keep an eye on Blacklight to watch this kind of transmedia evolve. I sat down with them in LA earlier in the year and they have some very cool stuff in the pipeline. And then there’s Jesse Alexander’s Day One.

Though Day One’s prime time adventures are simple and compelling, its mythology is vast and designed to be experienced across multiple media platforms. A new kind of transmedia epic.

We’re getting to the point now where if you watch this kind of stuff on the right device you’ll be able to do the lean back experience as before, but leaning into the device should give you vertigo.

Of course, we still have to get the story telling part right, but thinking about this stuff up front actually helps build a much richer writing experience and you can avoid the kind of post-it note crap that has me reaching for the bottle, mumbling about fucking ‘star whales‘.

Ok.

So this has actually been floating on a few industry sites already so it was only a matter of time before it got linked to. Warren Ellis did that today and kindly christened it “Your favourite new TV show“. That, as you can imagine, sparked a little bit of new interest. Stuff like this and John Rogers exclaiming “JESUS. MURPHY” give me faith that we’re on the right track. Thanks guys!

So the version that got linked up was a tad small and only in .mp4 format over on Steve’s website. I’ve had a lot of requests for a more blog-friendly version so here you go:

Comments, email and Twitter chatter is coming in loud and clear. I’ll get back to you all asap, but feel free to embed and chat about the sizzle as you see fit.

This is actually the second sizzle reel for SLINGERS. There’s one that’s a tad longer with a slightly different voice-over from Sean, but this is the one we really like.

It’s directed by Steve Barron and stars Sean Pertwee, Adrian Bower, Tom Mison, Margo Stilley, Haruka Abe, GUN and JUNIOR. The outstanding conceptual design was by Arran and Corran Brownlee. The music is by The Mummers. And yeah I’m the creator/writer/idiot who came up with it. Sleepydog are the guys running the show.

To quickly answer the most obvious question, we’re hoping to shoot the pilot in 2010. We have a few more meetings to get through before that happens, but we’re still heading in the right direction. In fact we’ve had a lot of good news since the last update on here, but I don’t wanna jinx anything just yet.

More stuff when I have it, but as ever I’m overwhelmed for the love SLINGERS seems to generate. We’re doing our very best to make a proper sci fi show and those of you that came here via Warren already have very high expectations that we’ll make every effort to meet. Early support at this stage is not only crucial, it’s a nice reminder of why we we’re doing this.

You all fucking rock.

Future travel plans aside I wish I’d been in Toronto on Saturday for this:

Steven Shaviro’s presentation “’You Will Never Own a Jetpack’: Warren Ellis’ Science Fiction Comics”:

This paper looks at the science fiction comics of Warren Ellis: Transmetropolitan, Global Frequency, and the currently ongoing series Doktor Sleepless. These comics are about the social effects of new technologies. They bring us a wavering and uncertain vision of a highly technologized future, and ponder the possibilities of change in a world pervaded by a sense that the future itself has largely been played out.

I was lucky enough to meet and catch a talk by Steven Shaviro at Goldsmiths a while back. Parts of my brain still hurt.

Warren Ellis is partly responsible for the way I look at and more importantly use the Internet. I met Warren four years ago at what I think was London’s first flash mob. I also interviewed him a while back when Desolation Jones first came out. I’m not gonna mention the Japanese ass eels.

Meeting Warren (kinda indirectly) lead me to hanging out with John Rogers who still makes my fucking head spin (and for some reason known only to him continues to send too much traffic my way by mixing my name with Warren, David Brin, John Scalzi, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow over in the sidebar on Kung Fu Monkey). He of course worked above and beyond the call on the doomed Global Frequency TV show (giving, I think, Michelle Forbes a push into BSG along the way).

Warren’s Global Frequency is still a touchstone for me and the way I work. This month I finally get to work on a project that has Miranda Zero as a kind of guardian angel.

Oh… Warren was the one who called me “nine kinds of wrong” and if you ever read the twisted stuff that Warren comes up with you’ll understand that that’s why it’s on my Moo card. Likewise it was John who outed me as a “tech hipster“. I think those lines in conjunction with Saying The Wrong Thing have landed me a lot of work.

I probably owe the bastards 10%

But seriously, with these guys still churning stuff out we don’t need no stinkin’ jet packs…