Crooked Little Vein
It's getting close to a very important date: July 14th, 2008, when the Spank The Monkey new media empire will have been in operation for exactly ten years. This is a birthday that needs to be celebrated: and as you'll see in a few days' time, those celebrations last for the whole of July. So technically, this is the last piece you're going to get before the birthday blowout.
What to write about? Well, there are patterns to be followed here. The first review I ever published on the old site, back on July 14th 1998, was of the comic book Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson's epic tale of Spider Jerusalem, The Hunter S. Thompson Of The Future. On the site's fifth birthday, I reviewed another of Ellis' works: Global Frequency, a series of adventure comics that worked like a TV series.
So it would make sense to hit the runway for our tenth birthday celebrations with another piece of work by Warren Ellis. His comics output continues unabated, with a huge number of series in progress at the time of writing: Doktor Sleepless, Black Summer, Fell, Anna Mercury, Gravel, plus Astonishing X-Men: Second Stage due any day now and FreakAngels turning up free and weekly on the intarwub. But I'm going to go back to a work of his that was first published last year, which goes into paperback in a month's time. And it's the first book of Ellis' without any pictures in it.
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