Introducing two of the four NIGHT RADIO serials.

150 WEST: Antony Johnston

You've never heard of it. You won't find it on a map. No-one will admit to its existence. But somewhere in the Pacific is an island known only by the line of longitude it sits on - 150 West.

Owned and operated by the mysterious voodoo king Papa Jumbo, 150 West is a place where everything you never really believed in is true. Ex-Government assassins, vampires, magicians, a shadowy cabal of businessmen who rule your lives... Papa's sanctuary is where they come to hide from a world that doesn't understand them. And stuck in the middle is a small police force, charged with keeping the peace in a place which redefines the word 'conspiracy.'

But the cops have a problem. Last night, someone killed the Sheriff.

Six hours later, as dawn breaks across the ocean, ex-Seattle cop Elizabeth Lynch is flown to 150 West and sworn in as the new Sheriff. Elizabeth is going to have to deal with a new home, a new life, and a new way of doing her job; all while trying to solve the murder of her predecessor.

Welcome to 150 West.

150 WEST (c) Antony Johnston 2002

Antony Johnston is an author and graphic designer living in London.

* * * * *

ANODYNE: Matt Fraction

I'm trying to write ANODYNE for me, ten years ago. I was sixteen and I felt like a bottle rocket; I was saying 'okay' instead of just saying 'no'; I had absolutely no control over how I was responding to the stimulus from the world around me. I wasn't walking into walls, I was running
into them as hard as I could, because there wasn't any way to move other than fast...

ANODYNE is about a guy trying to leave his hometown any way he can. It's about broken hearts and bad brain chemistry and not being able to control how you feel because you're sixteen and everything is just so fucking new. It's about being out of control, gloriously, as you race head-on towards or away from the future, just as long as you're moving and the music is loud enough.

The thing that excites me about the anthology format is that it lends itself to experimentation, to the unconventional. The best anthologies are like great mixtapes that were made ten years ago and forgotten, played loud through bad headphones. Wait a minute and there's a whole new song recalling your soundtrack to sex, drugs, violence, and bad youth...

ANODYNE (c) Matt Fraction 2002

Matt Fraction is a web designer and filmmaker living in Kansas City.

* * * * *

NIGHT RADIO is a four-issue anthology series edited by Warren Ellis and launching in 2002 from Avatar Press, containing four serials written and created by Warren Ellis, Matt Fraction, Antony Johnston and Micaela Petersen.

http://www.night-radio.com
http://www.avatarpress.com
http://forums.delphiforums.com/ellis

Next transmission: February 2002

NIGHT RADIO is an limited-series anthology edited by Warren Ellis; four 48-page issues, without ads, in black and white, to be published by Avatar Press in the late summer of 2002.

Matt Fraction is a webdesigner and filmmaker. Antony Johnston is an author and graphic designer. Micaela Petersen is an artist and musician. They all write comics. It's just that not many people know that yet. Warren Ellis wants to change that. NIGHT RADIO is four four-part serials. One by Warren Ellis, one by Fraction, one by Johnston, one by Micaela.

"New voices seem to be emerging much more slowly, in the last couple of years," says Ellis. "Too many of the new writers on my end of the business seem to sound like the old writers, and seem interested only in talking about old things. That's not why I got into comics writing, and those aren't the sort of comics I want to read. But, as we're all aware, the majority of publishers won't look at new writers until they're published somewhere else first; the long-standing Catch-22 for the new writer. It takes a publisher with the guts and madness of Avatar to say, okay, fine, we're going to take these new writers and we're going to treat them like professionals and give them creator-owned deals and do the job right."

Collapsing over his whisky and setting fire to his beard, he continued: "I associate night radio with newness. Back in my youth, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, late-night radio was the time when new bands were broken, new musical forms were allowed out, and novelty was the point and not the exception. NIGHT RADIO is me trying to broadcast future music."

NIGHT RADIO will make transmissions on a monthly basis from now until the book's launch, providing new information on the title and its creators.

An announcements-only email list has been set up to broadcast: go to http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nightradio/ or email nightradio-subscribe@yahoogroups.com to receive the monthly NIGHT RADIO updates.

Further details will emerge in January's transmission.
[ posted Wednesday, January 02, 2002 3:25:23 PM  |  permanent link to this item ]