The Longbowmen

Warren Ellis is a writer who has done a good bit of work in graphic novels. METROPOLITAN, PLANETARY, and NEXTWAVE: AGENTS OF HATE are aall his creations. I like Ellis' style; his plots are intricate and his characters are always amusing. Warren keeps up a long disconnected rambling commentary on his own blog on warrenellis.com. The Ellis blog is usually good for a few nuggets, like yesterday's commentary on archery and being English. I liked it. Words and copyright Warren Ellis.

bad signal
by WARREN ELLIS

Hopefully THIS one won't get re-sent by the system five times.
If it does, just delete the others -- I get sent these too, so I always
know if it's repeated, usually before you do.

DEAD CHANNEL got mentioned in Variety this morning, as part of
AMC's development slate. This STILL doesn't mean it's going to
get picked up, remember. I'm working my way through the first
draft of the pilot -- currently trying to save an image I liked in the teaser
despite it not quite fitting now, cursed by the old admonishment
that writers must kill their darlings.

I'm having an attack of Englishness and thinking about enrolling my
daughter and myself in an archery course. I love using longbows.
Proper handmade wooden ones. None of your artificial shit. Longbows
are very English. (Welsh, too, but mostly you people had sheep.)
Time was that every English child would be trained in the longbow
for two hours every Sunday -- which meant that at any given time
the English could amass an army of expert bowmen.

They're just gorgeous machines. And people forget how terrifying
they were en masse. A thousand average bowmen could put ten
thousand arrows into the air inside one minute, with an extreme
range of some three hundred yards. The strong goose feathers the
arrows were fletched with put a spin on the arrow, and the arrowheads,
held on with a drop of wax or spit, had barbs on either side of the tip.
The arrows screwed into you, and the arrowheads broke off in the
wound. At a hundred yards, you took off the arrowheads and put
long metal bodkins on instead, which burst through armour and
skewered organs.

And when it went to swords, the English had a terrible habit of
wiping their blades in piles of theirown shit, to ensure even a light
wound got horribly infected.

And you wonder why all Hollywood villains are English.
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