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 ]