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Category: the republic of newsletters

the Republic of Newsletters

My Nightmares Are In Nine Panel Grid

Published October 30, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Notes on the nine-panel grid in comics. Free to subscribe and read.

…when Dave Gibbons asked Alan Moore if they could do WATCHMEN in nine-grid, it was, among other things, a significant callback to old comics language.

The thing about the nine-grid to that point is that it was essentially invisible. It was the equivalent of the invisible word “said” that the conscious novelist uses. You don’t look at the scaffolding, you look at what’s inside it. Like “said” instead of “yelled” or “wept” or “honked,” it doesn’t call attention to itself.

Or didn’t. Until Alan, Dave and John Higgins got hold of it...

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Published October 2, 2024 by Warren Ellis

A piece just slotted into place for the new newsletter shape I’ve been working on for the last few weeks. I need to be not doing the letter at the last damn minute every week.

I remember when Si Spencer was editing DEADLINE magazine and his insistence that it always needed to be done at the last minute before the print deadline because it was right there in the name. But my little weekly magazine is called ORBITAL OPERATIONS and it’s taken me this long to understand that it needs to be an operation, with planning, emanating from a Mission Control that has its shit together.

https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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On The Morning Post

Published June 27, 2024 by Warren Ellis

There was one thing that no one at the institute wanted to miss: the arrival of the morning post. Letters from parents and friends were always welcome, but it was correspondence from far-flung colleagues and the journals that were seized upon for the latest breaking news from the frontiers of physics.

From QUANTUM by Manjit Kumar. In the above, he’s writing about the 1920s. Times long gone. Out here on the Thames Delta, we don’t even get the physical post in the morning any more. In the 1970s and 1980s, we had first post in the morning and second post in the afternoon. I remember having to wait in for second post when an expected letter (or an unemployment Giro) didn’t arrive in the first post.

Now we send email and texts that are rarely much longer than a telegram, and they get peppered across the full 24-hour spectrum. I like that. Imagine telling someone in 1924 that all their post and telegrams will be sent instantly to a piece of glass you keep in your pocket, powered by electrickery and radio (and costing the same as a house in London in 1924)? I am happy with this and look forward to the future.

That said: the pang I got when I read that paragraph the other night was real. The book is littered with extracts from long letters sent between peers in the emergent field of quantum physics, the last hurrah of the Republic Of Letters. The pang wasn’t necessarily nostalgia. I have never trusted nostalgia. Desiderium, maybe? But certainly also that I’m as bad as anyone else at writing letters. I remember long letters from and to peers, and I got out of the habit of writing them when email properly kicked in.

And the journals thing. I remember the rush and joy of the new magazines related to my work and interests arriving, when I was young (and I suspect that’s the defining thing here – both my youth and the slowness of information): a new Comics Journal, for example, a publication I owe a great deal to. I have, of late, been unsubscribing from newsletters. Not entirely of my own volition – I had a weird glitch with Substack and had to delete my account there, which meant losing a dozen newsletters. I’m in the process of adding those into my RSS feed instead. But the newsier stuff is getting dropped. It all tends to be a bit flat and a bit samey.

Some newsletters are good because they’re long letters from friends or peers, some are good because they bring knowledge and ideas like journals. But there aren’t enough of them, for me. I wonder today where I should be looking. I wonder if this is even a thing worth yearning for (yearning may be too strong a word, but clearly it’s been bugging me). But it’s an interesting thing to think about, for me.

(I also do a weekly newsletter, which is currently on pause til July 7 because of work and etc.)

Vaguely related, maybe: years and years ago, we used to have conversations about the social letterbox, part of which conversation turned into the Little Printer, which I still think was a brave thing. I distrust the social-network aspects of things like Substack. My letters do not need a public web-end comments section. Email should perhaps have been our social letterbox. Probably it once was. Maybe it can be again: I can spend a day hitting it with a couple of tools and end up with the sense that, when an email app does ping at me, there’s a better than fifty-percent chance that it’s something I want to read or need. And it will ping less. And most of the time I’ll be able to wait until I have the space to write a long reply, rather than just triage and tie something off fast.

Jotter notes are not fully baked.

Connected:

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A PDF Broadsheet Newsletter

Published February 22, 2024 by Warren Ellis

Via Jay:

Paul’s made no commitment to posting new issues with any regular frequency, the offer simply is this: I have a broadsheet newsletter, pay me a one time fee and get ‘on the list’. I presume he’ll raise the price once there’s a bit of back catalogue.

It all feels very simple compared to running a Substack or other contemporary subscription model which results in the need to grind out regular posts down in the content minds.

I have no interest in gaming, but Jay feels correct in saying:

Paul’s newsletter feels like a little weak signal, a light in the dark, a step along the road to the sort of culture that I want to be a part of and participate in.

We live for the small lights out there in the dark of the personal web. The little radio stations and so forth.

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Secret Oranges

Published August 2, 2023 by Warren Ellis

Famed graphic designer in the comics field and elsewhere, Steve Cook, has his own newsletter, SECRET ORANGES, and it’s amazing. Graphic design history, comics history – as I noted elsewhere, I actually owned this comic he still has when I was five years old:

For those not aware, US comics were repackaged in various European markets in local formats. In Britain, that was a roughly A4-sized weekly black and white or two-colour magazine with a colour cover. SPIDER-MAN was all newsprint, but THE AVENGERS has a glossy cover, as I recall: This sent me off to Google, because it made me suddenly remember something weird. British comics made their circulation stick by adding free gifts to the first couple of issues. Issue 1 of THE AVENGERS had a little set of transfers. The second had this:

A little cardboard catapult that used a rubber band to hurl little cardboard discs. But look at what some wit at Marvel UK called it. Wonder-Weapon. Or, as Nazi Germany’s ministry of propaganda had it, Wunderwaffe. The programme of fast-prototyping exotic super-weapons in the last act of World Wat Two. “Wonder-Weapon” is a very specific term, and I assume someone in that office was darkly pissing themselves with laughter at distributing cardboard Wunderwaffe to little British kids. Who probably spent weeks happily trying to blind each other with tiny cardboard discs before the Wonder-Weapon inevitably bent or tore.

Comics in the dark ages, people. Bring back the free gift!

Anyway. SECRET ORANGES is your new favourite newsletter, so go and take a look.

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Newsletter Development: Moving ORBITAL OPERATIONS To Buttondown

Published June 21, 2022 by Warren Ellis

This year, I moved the hosting of my free weekly newsletter ORBITAL OPERATIONS from its longtime home on Campaign Monitor to Buttondown.

Campaign Monitor’s service is superb. However, it’s a massive Swiss Army Knife of a thing, and does more than I need it to do. I would recommend Campaign Monitor to anyone. Their performance over the years has been literally flawless, and worth the expense.

But I chose to simplify. I realised that I just didn’t need all CM’s bells and whistles, and wanted to focus purely on personal publishing. So I moved the newsletter to the very well regarded Buttondown system – which, I have to note, provides excellent service and support right from the start. Which is even more amazing when you realise it’s run by a single person.

Buttondown works off the Markdown text protocol. Markdown is designed to elegantly present plain text with a little styling, no more and no less. Buttondown’s system allows you to add a little HTML to that, and there appears to be space to dress the overall newsletter with CSS, which I know nothing about. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re coming from CM or Mailchimp, Buttondown will feel and look basic. You will try to make it do things that it simply isn’t designed to do because Markdown simply wasn’t built to do them. I spent a few months beating my head against it, and, unless you have some significant web-fu that I cannot conceive of, so will you.

Accept the limitations. Use them. Creative limitations can be a good thing.

The writing window in Buttondown gives you two options – write in Markdown or write in a WSYWYG “Rich Text” window that lets you embed images and the like. Here’s a rub I found (am working in Chrome on Windows): if you start in Markdown, and then switch over to “Rich Text” and embed a picture or add a link, some of your formatting, and any HTML you may have placed in your Markdown work, will get mangled. Before you send, you’ll have to click back into the Markdown window and fix stuff up. I find myself adding < br > a lot to restore line spacing.

Buttondown appears to enjoy less “sending authority” than other newsletter providers at the moment. “Sending authority” is, basically, does your email provider recognise that your newsletter is coming from a respectable source? I see enough unconfirmed subscribers to guess that confirmation emails are going straight into spam, especially on Gmail. Buttondown combats this in the only way it really can – it has an extremely sensitive filter for bounced subscribers and what it calls “spammy subscribers.” If you’re moving from another provider, sending your first email from Buttondown will immediately dematerialise a chunk of your subscription list. I don’t mean sudden unsubscriptions: I mean, in the first few seconds after you hit send, Buttondown will identity a whole bunch of subscribers as evil ghosts and exorcise them. This is fine.

What you may like, however, is that Buttondown doesn’t track email opens. If you’re an absolute growth hacker, not knowing your open rate will probably drive you mad. I, however, decided that I don’t need to know.

I like Buttondown a lot. It’s a little fiddly, but it doesn’t hurt to have to think twice about what you’re doing when you’re writing a public letter. It’s not as fancy in the end product as other systems I’ve used, but that’s because Buttondown is built with the intent to serve text and images with simplicity and function. If you’re looking for a paid, supported service – especially one that, with the Buttondown Pro option, will allow you to charge for newsletter subscriptions – this is what you should look at first. It’s not as slick as others, but it has intention.

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Zdarsky/McKelvie

Published August 31, 2019 by Warren Ellis

Two new newsletters to note, one live, one not:

Writer/artist Chip Zdarsky launched a weekly newsletter a few weeks back, and it’s really very good. Chip is extremely smart, but he’s also nuts, so, you know, take a look. Scroll down to the bottom for the subscription link, apparently, because i dunno life isn’t hard enough or something.

zdarsky.substack.com

Writer/artist Jamie McKelvie just finished WICKED AND THE DIVINE, and is planning new things. He’s created a newsletter to talk about all that, but he hasn’t sent one yet, because he has a hangover because he’s waiting for the right moment to announce his new plans. Sign up now. You will get good art soon.

mckelvie.substack.com

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Newsletter Development: 5

Published June 2, 2019 by Warren Ellis

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Newsletter Development

So, I finally – after completing the Three Month Work Sprint From Hell And Back Again – have a little more time to think about my newsletter, and newsletters in general. As I said at the top of the chain:

“I need to think about what kind of thing it is, and how I should develop it going forward. It needs different voices in it — I’ve tested that in the past with good effects — and it needs to be a bit less work for me.”

None of this has gone well. I managed to convince Lordess Foudre, bless her, to let me run four pieces of new art across four editions of the newsletter, to publicise her online print shop operation. Matthew Naftzger kindly did me a WORKSPACES piece. All other attempts to convince people to let me catch a break have not worked out.

What even is the newsletter, in my conception of it?

Let me tell you a thing that defined the way I operate in public, long before we had the idea of agalmic internet attention economies.

When Alan Moore was writing the lead comic for a Marvel UK magazine called THE DAREDEVILS, he also convinced the publisher to release space for a page where he could review fanzines and stripzines – what are now called mini-comics. He did this on the following understanding — if, for whatever reason, he’d been given a position where people were going to listen to what he said, then he should use that to direct attention to people who didn’t have any. You don’t pull the ladder up. You reach over and help the next people.

And early teenage me, reading Alan Moore comics and devouring Jack Kerouac novels, learned from that page Alan wrote every month that there was a comics creator in the town down the road from me, Southend, doing comics like Jack Kerouac. And that’s how I discovered the work of Eddie Campbell.

So if I can introduce you to one new thing you might like, every week, from somebody who may not otherwise have the ability to get your attention, then I’ve done one good thing that week.

It would be nice for that to be easier. But, you know, maybe it’s not supposed to be.

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