COMICON.com: WARREN ELLIS' THE MINISTRY - "The Single"

COMICON.com: WARREN ELLIS' THE MINISTRY # 1:

"Yeah, mummy and daddy used to go out and hunt their food when they were your age, you bluetooth-earpiece-wearing Star Trek-looking fucker...

(Isn't anyone bothered that that piece of telephonic fashion makes everyone look like a stand-in for Lieutenant Uhura? Are people going to get SMS-ready fashion ridges for their foreheads next?)

In my position as The Minister, I believe that there should only be two kinds of singles. The kinds that tell a self-contained story without the necessity of reading eighteen other comics to understand it, and single-to-collection, the graphic novel serialised in chapters. The latter is the early-adopter form -- if you're paying for cable and watching BATTLESTAR GALACTICA each week instead of waiting for the DVD, you're a cultural early-adopter.

This is the way things should be. This is my Proclamation. And understand, I'm only talking about singles here, not comics in general -- OGN, for Original Graphic Novel, was another of my terms. Sorry about that.

The Single's never going to go away. I would like there to be fewer of them, and for them to be better-considered objects, but that is outside my control. For the moment. The tentacles of my Will extend further every day, like a Japanese monster groping blindly for schoolgirls. It's never going to go away because it's an entry-level format -- small, portable and relatively cheap. The standard graphic novel size isn't something you can shove in a pocket or a small bag, really. This is one reason why manga's finally taken off so big -- the small format makes it easy for a kid to shove a book in a backpack or a coat pocket, like a paperback novel."