An Oral History Of The Warren Ellis Forum
January 3, 2019 5:47 PM Subscribe
An Oral History Of The Warren Ellis Forum -- Kieron Gillen: It was like the CBGB of noughties comics.
Matt Fraction: It was a very micro-focused tribe in a lot of ways.
Kelly Sue DeConnick: Micro-focused tribe is the most Warren Ellis thing you've ever said.
Chip Zdarsky: Warren has changed so many lives just by the act of maintaining that forum for us.
Heidi McDonald: Warren was essentially inventing how people build their brands online.
Christopher Sebela: It was just like—the internet could be good sometimes.
Bryan Lee O'Malley: He's a visionary, and he brought people together basically to complain about stuff, but also, so that they could talk about the future and have a future.
Fuck I miss forums. I especially miss having a decent comics forum. The only one I know of that even *exists* is the Spiderforest forum and its kind of completely quiet.
posted by egypturnash at 6:57 PM on January 3, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by egypturnash at 6:57 PM on January 3, 2019 [5 favorites]
limeonaire - Santa, NO! lived on for years on tumblr - pretty sure it was Matt Fraction himself who kept running it.
Even post tumblr purge it is still quite NSFW. The sexteenth of every December was always particularly so.
posted by thecjm at 8:23 PM on January 3, 2019 [2 favorites]
Even post tumblr purge it is still quite NSFW. The sexteenth of every December was always particularly so.
posted by thecjm at 8:23 PM on January 3, 2019 [2 favorites]
I was a regular there the last couple of years, and for a while my best friends online were people who I met on the WEF. But they're being terribly euphemistic about the end of the forum, which was about 99% down to Ellis' ego and how it manifested itself through both his own posts and the actions of some of the "filthy assistants", i.e. the mods. I'm really not interested in rehashing old dirty laundry, but it's led me to reflect how many of these oral histories are really nostalgia exercises for the people who did well as a result of involvement with the subject at hand.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:11 PM on January 3, 2019 [8 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:11 PM on January 3, 2019 [8 favorites]
*Post read edit: This is just a rant about how I imagine how things used to be. Totally skippable. I have a paper due and it's time for me to set up stayfocusd on metafilter.
Fuck I miss forums. I especially miss having a decent comics forum. The only one I know of that even *exists* is the Spiderforest forum and its kind of completely quiet.
Yes! There's something deeply sad about all that energy that used to go into esoteric forums, now being funneled into FB Groups, Twitter and Reddit. There's still a deep sense of specialization in some forms, but maybe too much cross pollination or focus on the outside world that somehow diminishes the sense of a shared cohesive community? I'm not sure. Something about a "likes/retweet" based economy that has changed the reward structure for how we behave and interact in forums.
I feel like that language about online world has changed. I'm sure people have studied this, but the shift from consciously logging on to ubiquitous, always on connectivity seems to correlate with a reduction in treating the internet as a location one travels to.
What I mean is that we use fewer spatial/geographical terms to talk about the internet. Talking about cyberspace is a laughable anachronism. The ways we use the current, mobile app-centered universe is as a sort of augmented reality. Twitter is essentially a 24/7 pop up video-style commentary on everything but it's not a separate place. The subject matter is too ephemeral. It's completely reflexive to what's happening in the real world. This is true of Metafilter as well.
It seems to me that we no longer think of the internet as a separate place, with separate towns, blocks cul-de-sacs etc. Everything teleports to everything else and there are fewer back alleys. We are all omnipresent. Perhaps more importantly, it was nice to have forums that focused on one thing. It gave forums a sense of gravity. "This is where I go to nerd out on this thing."
I know it's just me off-lawning the next generation but I do miss how limited the old internet was. There was something to be said about having a finite chunk of available minutes, available phone lines, available bandwidth and logistical considerations of lugging a PC around with you everywhere that made all the old nooks and covens feel more special.
I might start LARPing 1996 internet technology person. If people can get really into renaissance fairs or living like cavemen or backyard apiaries, then maybe it's time for me to get back into dial up and BBS and 20 hour/month packages on AOL. The problem is of course that you'd end up being a burden on your friends.
I've been thinking a lot about conscious adoption of technology like the Amish do, and also a bit about Stephenson's Anathem. It's got me to think about the wisdom of self denial found a lot of religions. I don't want to get all Jordan Peterson-y, because I imagine he probably has a schtick like this, though I wouldn't know. Anyway, 2006+ Or 1AI+ (Anno iphone, maybe how we should start measuring time.) has been a weird experiment and I think things have gone a bit screwy. We can't put the genie back in the bottle, but we need to start coming up with adaptive policies/manners/norms to make the world a bit less crazy.
I'm a sucker for Marvin Harris-inspired Cultural Materialism. He essentially espoused that a lot of rituals/religious beliefs were just a superstructure to keep everything running smoothly on the material level. IE It makes sense not to eat cows in India because Indian cattle are more valuable for milk, digestion of cellulose into manure for fuel/fertilizer/garbage reduction, and other things than they are for meat. I know that's a bit old school deterministic in some circles, but I think it's a useful model to have in one's pocket. There's so much appeal to adopting a Sabbath-style technology free day; it seems more adaptive than ever. Sort of wish we had a priest class who turned off the non essential internet off around sundown every day.
Anyway, we have all this access to everything at all times and people are more miserable than ever. We need to start creating new norms for how to limit our use of this stuff. Sort of how you don't call people after 8 pm unless you're really good friends or how you wouldn't show up to an acquaintance's house unannounced. It's not a law, but breaking these norms might lead to social ostracization etc. I think that ubiquitous internet was an inevitable path but we need to figure out how to limit us gorging on it. We don't eat candy at all meals, or only eat cheese even if we want to, or drink 3 bottles of wine every day even if it's fun. I think most decisions are largely driven by structural cues, not sure how we could nudge people into using the internet less.
< / rant >
Not really sure where that came from. Really enjoyed the FPP!
posted by Telf at 10:09 PM on January 3, 2019 [10 favorites]
Fuck I miss forums. I especially miss having a decent comics forum. The only one I know of that even *exists* is the Spiderforest forum and its kind of completely quiet.
Yes! There's something deeply sad about all that energy that used to go into esoteric forums, now being funneled into FB Groups, Twitter and Reddit. There's still a deep sense of specialization in some forms, but maybe too much cross pollination or focus on the outside world that somehow diminishes the sense of a shared cohesive community? I'm not sure. Something about a "likes/retweet" based economy that has changed the reward structure for how we behave and interact in forums.
I feel like that language about online world has changed. I'm sure people have studied this, but the shift from consciously logging on to ubiquitous, always on connectivity seems to correlate with a reduction in treating the internet as a location one travels to.
What I mean is that we use fewer spatial/geographical terms to talk about the internet. Talking about cyberspace is a laughable anachronism. The ways we use the current, mobile app-centered universe is as a sort of augmented reality. Twitter is essentially a 24/7 pop up video-style commentary on everything but it's not a separate place. The subject matter is too ephemeral. It's completely reflexive to what's happening in the real world. This is true of Metafilter as well.
It seems to me that we no longer think of the internet as a separate place, with separate towns, blocks cul-de-sacs etc. Everything teleports to everything else and there are fewer back alleys. We are all omnipresent. Perhaps more importantly, it was nice to have forums that focused on one thing. It gave forums a sense of gravity. "This is where I go to nerd out on this thing."
I know it's just me off-lawning the next generation but I do miss how limited the old internet was. There was something to be said about having a finite chunk of available minutes, available phone lines, available bandwidth and logistical considerations of lugging a PC around with you everywhere that made all the old nooks and covens feel more special.
I might start LARPing 1996 internet technology person. If people can get really into renaissance fairs or living like cavemen or backyard apiaries, then maybe it's time for me to get back into dial up and BBS and 20 hour/month packages on AOL. The problem is of course that you'd end up being a burden on your friends.
I've been thinking a lot about conscious adoption of technology like the Amish do, and also a bit about Stephenson's Anathem. It's got me to think about the wisdom of self denial found a lot of religions. I don't want to get all Jordan Peterson-y, because I imagine he probably has a schtick like this, though I wouldn't know. Anyway, 2006+ Or 1AI+ (Anno iphone, maybe how we should start measuring time.) has been a weird experiment and I think things have gone a bit screwy. We can't put the genie back in the bottle, but we need to start coming up with adaptive policies/manners/norms to make the world a bit less crazy.
I'm a sucker for Marvin Harris-inspired Cultural Materialism. He essentially espoused that a lot of rituals/religious beliefs were just a superstructure to keep everything running smoothly on the material level. IE It makes sense not to eat cows in India because Indian cattle are more valuable for milk, digestion of cellulose into manure for fuel/fertilizer/garbage reduction, and other things than they are for meat. I know that's a bit old school deterministic in some circles, but I think it's a useful model to have in one's pocket. There's so much appeal to adopting a Sabbath-style technology free day; it seems more adaptive than ever. Sort of wish we had a priest class who turned off the non essential internet off around sundown every day.
Anyway, we have all this access to everything at all times and people are more miserable than ever. We need to start creating new norms for how to limit our use of this stuff. Sort of how you don't call people after 8 pm unless you're really good friends or how you wouldn't show up to an acquaintance's house unannounced. It's not a law, but breaking these norms might lead to social ostracization etc. I think that ubiquitous internet was an inevitable path but we need to figure out how to limit us gorging on it. We don't eat candy at all meals, or only eat cheese even if we want to, or drink 3 bottles of wine every day even if it's fun. I think most decisions are largely driven by structural cues, not sure how we could nudge people into using the internet less.
< / rant >
Not really sure where that came from. Really enjoyed the FPP!
posted by Telf at 10:09 PM on January 3, 2019 [10 favorites]
Halloween Jack wrote:
...it's led me to reflect how many of these oral histories are really nostalgia exercises for the people who did well as a result of involvement with the subject at hand.
This is a fantastic comment that I try to be conscious of all the time. Such a seductive bias to fall into.
posted by Telf at 10:11 PM on January 3, 2019 [1 favorite]
...it's led me to reflect how many of these oral histories are really nostalgia exercises for the people who did well as a result of involvement with the subject at hand.
This is a fantastic comment that I try to be conscious of all the time. Such a seductive bias to fall into.
posted by Telf at 10:11 PM on January 3, 2019 [1 favorite]
Warren Ellis blocked me on Twitter and ever since I've never liked the prick.
But the WE forum was sort of important not just for what it did, but also because it was part of the moving away from usenet + mailing lists as the gathering spaces for online comics fandom. At the same time you CBR and Bleeding Cool and the like starting up their websites, who had been previously doing the same schtick in rec.arts.comics.misc and ultimately it led to the slow bleeding to death of comics usenet.
And really, the WE forum was just usenet with pictures and a lot of what's mentioned in that abstract above happened on usenet first.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:01 AM on January 4, 2019 [2 favorites]
But the WE forum was sort of important not just for what it did, but also because it was part of the moving away from usenet + mailing lists as the gathering spaces for online comics fandom. At the same time you CBR and Bleeding Cool and the like starting up their websites, who had been previously doing the same schtick in rec.arts.comics.misc and ultimately it led to the slow bleeding to death of comics usenet.
And really, the WE forum was just usenet with pictures and a lot of what's mentioned in that abstract above happened on usenet first.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:01 AM on January 4, 2019 [2 favorites]
I feel like that language about online world has changed. I'm sure people have studied this, but the shift from consciously logging on to ubiquitous, always on connectivity seems to correlate with a reduction in treating the internet as a location one travels to.
I've never thought of it that way before, but now that I have, this seems totally obvious.
I specifically remember the "Santa, NO" thread, but I came in very late and I mostly recall just reading the forum.
The Sinister list in '97. Barbelith, the other great weirdo comics-related forum, in '98. ILX in '02. Probably others I've forgotten or never knew of. Really a great era for esoteric fan forums.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:12 AM on January 4, 2019 [4 favorites]
I've never thought of it that way before, but now that I have, this seems totally obvious.
I specifically remember the "Santa, NO" thread, but I came in very late and I mostly recall just reading the forum.
The Sinister list in '97. Barbelith, the other great weirdo comics-related forum, in '98. ILX in '02. Probably others I've forgotten or never knew of. Really a great era for esoteric fan forums.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:12 AM on January 4, 2019 [4 favorites]
Hello, fellow former WEF (and assorted Delphi spin-off fora) folks. I made the yappy bastard list a couple times but mainly lurked in the chat.
The WEF was fun, I don't regret my time there, or the people I've met IRL from my time there, generally the Kansas City folk. I wish I could have made it to the anniversary meetups last year -- FB just doesn't cut it for keeping up.
But, yes, it decayed in the end, as all things do. Except the Neopet that the WEF inspired me to get, that thing is surely still there. Hungry, but still there.
posted by rewil at 8:14 AM on January 4, 2019 [2 favorites]
The WEF was fun, I don't regret my time there, or the people I've met IRL from my time there, generally the Kansas City folk. I wish I could have made it to the anniversary meetups last year -- FB just doesn't cut it for keeping up.
But, yes, it decayed in the end, as all things do. Except the Neopet that the WEF inspired me to get, that thing is surely still there. Hungry, but still there.
posted by rewil at 8:14 AM on January 4, 2019 [2 favorites]
Weirdly, reading this makes me think about how much I miss the comics forum/community at Barbelith in the 2000s. Before that wound down, it was like an early run at grad school. I remember being aware of the Warren Ellis Forums at the time, but staying away because I was kind of wary of Ellis as a self-promoter.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 8:23 AM on January 4, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by the phlegmatic king at 8:23 AM on January 4, 2019 [1 favorite]
I miss the old comics blogosphere too, I fell out a few years ago when I couldn't keep up weekly with comics anymore. Part of me dreads going back to look at everything because I don't want to find out that old favorites took a turn during that comicsgate nonsense but I'm curious how many are still going strong... at a quick glance I see Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin is still chugging along!
posted by jason_steakums at 3:14 PM on January 4, 2019
posted by jason_steakums at 3:14 PM on January 4, 2019
There was a comicsgate? I don't even want to wade into what that must have been...
posted by Telf at 7:58 PM on January 4, 2019
posted by Telf at 7:58 PM on January 4, 2019
Pretty much exactly what you'd think, it was alt right hot garbage.
posted by jason_steakums at 8:30 PM on January 4, 2019
posted by jason_steakums at 8:30 PM on January 4, 2019
I wonder if being interviewed for this article, and seeing the final article, is making any of the pros in it think about setting up their own forums. That’d be nice. I’m sure they could acquire some volunteer filthy assistants to help moderate it; putting their name on it and using their social media presence to send people to it would go a long way to getting the critical mass to actually have something *happen* for a while. Zdarsky mentions being on some private Slacks and feeling kind of guilty that all their conversations are private, so maybe?
I was on the Ellis forum intermittently and I recall it had some good recurring challenges to get people coming back and interacting. The only one I can actually remember was “here is a public domain comic character, how would you reboot it for modern audiences?”, with a new thread for a new character every month or so. I think there was a monthly “show off cool stuff you’re working on” thread too? That’s a pretty obvious one, a FB comics group I’m in has a weekly one of those but it kinda sucks what with FB strongly discouraging multi-line replies and limiting you to one image per reply.
posted by egypturnash at 4:35 AM on January 5, 2019 [1 favorite]
I was on the Ellis forum intermittently and I recall it had some good recurring challenges to get people coming back and interacting. The only one I can actually remember was “here is a public domain comic character, how would you reboot it for modern audiences?”, with a new thread for a new character every month or so. I think there was a monthly “show off cool stuff you’re working on” thread too? That’s a pretty obvious one, a FB comics group I’m in has a weekly one of those but it kinda sucks what with FB strongly discouraging multi-line replies and limiting you to one image per reply.
posted by egypturnash at 4:35 AM on January 5, 2019 [1 favorite]
God I miss this era of the Internet.
posted by lownote at 1:16 PM on January 5, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by lownote at 1:16 PM on January 5, 2019 [3 favorites]
octobersurprise, I never felt like I was twee enough to be part of the in-crowd on Sinister, so I mostly just read - that, and a couple of Yahoo groups where I would argue about Dave Eggers. I wasn't into comics much then (I would see volumes of Transmetropolitan in my local library, but never, never 1 and 2) but reading this reminded me of the joys and messy demise of almost all internet forums I've been involved with.
Still sad I missed the heyday of Television Without Pity, especially when I was trying to ignore a miserable living situation by watching tons of half-remembered 90s sitcoms a few years back.
posted by mippy at 9:48 AM on January 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
Still sad I missed the heyday of Television Without Pity, especially when I was trying to ignore a miserable living situation by watching tons of half-remembered 90s sitcoms a few years back.
posted by mippy at 9:48 AM on January 8, 2019 [1 favorite]
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Zdarsky: I was just going through a divorce, and I think I found the Warren Ellis Forum like right around that time? The Chip Zdarsky persona was tied into both of those things because I never existed online as myself, as my real name or my real thoughts or ideas. So it was fun to have a place where you saw people being characters and you could be a character as well. I went so far as to have a fake name to go with it, but most people didn't because they were actively promoting themselves.
I feel like I still learn new things all the time about how to be a creator and an online persona from some of the major players in this group: Warren Ellis, Chip Zdarsky, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Matt Fraction. In something I wrote last week, I just quoted one of my favorite bits that Fraction has said in the Milkfed Criminal Masterminds newsletter. And Ellis' weekly exhortations to hold on tight and stick together have kept me going many a dark day.
Fraction: "In my day, there were only four manga. Two of them were Akira, and you already read it.”
This dovetails with a train of thought I had yesterday, which is that I'd like to make a list at some point of things that subcultures have developed specific preferences for specifically due to scarcity (e.g., anime fansubs, specific types of hard-to-find reggae that a certain DJ played on radio shows in a certain city at a certain time, etc.). Comics and manga are definitely like that, too, for the generation of comics artists and writers who are basically like big-brother or big-sister age for me.
Fraction: I remember one day, again, Always-On Internet, being in one ramshackle office about to move into another one. In between packing, where we were just waiting, I would remember you and I writing haikus back and forth.
Some of this was in the early MK12 days, perhaps?! Not to be too fangirl about this, but they were doing stuff like this, and I remember being so blown away by the motion graphics they were making at the time (back in my first days of always-on internet in college). That font, Ultra Love Ninja, also went on to be everywhere and I think influenced a whole generation of graphic artists' font choices. I know I downloaded it back in the day. It also just felt so great that this was a Kansas City firm doing all this cutting-edge stuff.
Sebela: “Santa No” was the picture thread I remembered the best, which was where we just started posting inappropriate photos of Santa. It always started right or sometime after Thanksgiving, and it just became this brinksmanship game of who could find the most fucked-up photos of Santa Claus on the internet.
Definitely needs to be a subject I pursue with friends at some point.
Sebela: My favorite thing was when people started developing their own side forums. I was just fucking around at work one day, and I started the Matt Fraction Forum just as a way to annoy him. And then suddenly, that became its own thing. Like our version of /b/.
I feel like these days, this would be a Slack instance. Maybe it already is?! So many Slacks...
Zdarsky: ... I belong to three different Slacks now, and they're various comics people, and some of them are from the forums. A lot of times I just wish people could see what we were saying. It was nice to be able to have these conversations that were in the public, how people would be able to read them and participate if they're good.
Haha, called it.
Gillen: Warren gives back much more than he takes, I think. And it's a weird thing to think about Warren. I do not think Warren is aware of what a big deal Warren is. I'd say Warren's the most influential writer of the noughties, and it’s literally a disgrace he's never got an Eisner. It's genuinely... I cannot explain how wrongheaded that is.
It is a disgrace. A friend gifted me the beginning of Transmetropolitan, I want to say, and then I think I ended up buying the rest of the collected volumes, and that in itself was life-changing, mind-altering. Same for Sandman, for The Unwritten, Sex Criminals...those are from different people than this group, except for Sex Crims, but to me they're all from the same era of comics reading and education. I used to meet up with an editor/comics writer/artist friend once a month, on new comics day, to exchange comics and geek out about that week's/month's pulls. (We still meet up once a month, but we geek out about comics a bit less of late.)
Ugh, OK, feeling inspired, yet again, to keep working on my own comics and book projects! This is such a good post. Thank you for this!
posted by limeonaire at 6:40 PM on January 3, 2019 [3 favorites]