I have become a complete fiend for design books. I dropped two hundred quid at magmabooks.com this month on design books. Typography, graphics, website design, CD and record covers, flyers and stickers. Design fascinates me. From objects to pixels. It's tuning the environment until it strikes a new tone. Guerrilla mind surgery.
Brian Wood understands.
PUBLIC DOMAIN is a landscape-format book containing everything that built his near-future political sf graphic novel Channel Zero. From the copyright-free propaganda material designed to be photocopied and fired into walls and lampposts like broadside-ballad sigils to the early comics work that formed the foundation of the book, it's the spent shells and cordite traces of one angry man in Brooklyn. He sees a very clean future coming towards him like a police cruiser driven by a fundamentalist Christian with road rage, and these are his bullets.
Catch.
Warren Ellis has written around thirty graphic novels, comics, prose fiction, journalism, videogames and screenplays. Sometimes he take photographs. He also creates and co-creates websites, including this one. He has awards and stuff, he's been in big magazines and newspapers, and he's been published in Nature, which he always mentions because it makes him laugh. He's on the web at warrenellis.com and diepunyhumans.com.
