Warren Ellis starts up The Engine

September 18, 2005 7:13 AM

For a while now, Warren Ellis has been doing web community stunts, such as the 12 hour forum, Scream talking, The Friday Stunt & probably a few things I missed, to which you can post links to remind everyone.

Recently he started The Engine.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (14 comments total)

I like his Rule 4: And we use full real names: I don't get to hide behind a handle, so neither do you, I'm afraid. I want to know who I'm talking to. And, I imagine, so do you. You own your own words: put your name to them.
posted by LarryC at 9:55 AM on September 18, 2005

Warren Ellis needs more women fans.

The Engine = Sausage Fest.
posted by handshake at 10:31 AM on September 18, 2005

How interesting, handshake, that all his moderators are women.

I found one of the more interesting aspects of Cerebus (tangentially) to be the roughly even distribution of male and female fans, at least as Sim allowed to be represented in the letters pages, and the personal relationships that began as a result.
posted by dhartung at 10:46 AM on September 18, 2005

I hit "Start Reading", and half of the posts in the first thread are by women. I think it's a pretty reasonable hypothesis that Ellis has more female fans than most other comics writers. While more women are into comics today compared to any time in the past, it's still pretty much a boy's hobby.
posted by solid-one-love at 10:55 AM on September 18, 2005

LarryC: "I like his Rule 4"

Then why are you hiding behind an initial?
posted by mischief at 11:18 AM on September 18, 2005

mischief - uh, look at his user page before you snark.
posted by Marquis at 11:34 AM on September 18, 2005

Okay, it's a message board. Since there are so few of those on the internet I guess this is kind of a big deal!
posted by delmoi at 12:06 PM on September 18, 2005

Okay, it's a message board. Since there are so few of those on the internet I guess this is kind of a big deal!

Yah! Kinda like how Metafilter is one of the very few group blogs in existence! Surely they're all the same, right?
posted by freebird at 12:42 PM on September 18, 2005

Ellis needs to quit working on anything that isn't Planetary. I just got back into reading comics after about a 15 year break and this is one of the best series I've ever read. The issues are released very sporadically though. After about 6 years, they've got 23 issues (of a planned total of 27) out.
posted by freshgroundpepper at 1:56 PM on September 18, 2005

Am I the only one who always thinks of this guy when Warren Ellis comes up in discussion?
posted by chrominance at 2:49 PM on September 18, 2005

I thought of him too, chrominance.
posted by kenko at 3:22 PM on September 18, 2005

Looks a lot like Ellis wanted to restart his Delphi forum without the trouble of the Ellis Forum diaspora at Delphi.
posted by aaronetc at 5:33 PM on September 18, 2005

Running everything with real names is certainly interesting. I signed up a few weeks ago for The Engine, since I've been following Warren's stuff for quite a while now and it seemed like an interesting little idea.

Of course, it's all about these 'comic' things he's so fond of...

Incidentally, I've just noticed this script for The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore, linked from The Engine, which is an absolutely great read already.
posted by blacklite at 7:31 PM on September 18, 2005

I'm with Chrominance and Kenko. The other Warren Ellis and The Dirty Three put on the best gig I've ever seen.
It was at South Street Seaport NYC (of all places...) at a "jazz festival" Circa Spring of 1999. I think...
posted by Skygazer at 8:25 AM on September 19, 2005