Reality kick

Every so often these days, somebody suggests using Kickstarter to fund one of my comics or gamebooks. I expect it was similar in the 1930s – “You just need to put it on the wireless.” Did Caxton tell Malory that the printing press would make him rich?

I’m no expert on crowdfunding. In fact, so much not an expert that I’m not even sure about the “crowd” part. Most projects seem to get off the ground because less than a thousand people stump up an average fifty dollars apiece. Those T-shirts had better be stunning.

But let’s say you put your comic or gamebook on Kickstarter and you raise $100,000. Whoop! Quit your day job, right? Well, no… Because you now have to print, parcel and post about six thousand copies of the book. Plus some T-shirts and a free lunch for the rich kids. A conventionally-published book doesn’t get onto the bestseller lists by selling six thousand copies.

Admittedly, by using Kickstarter as a publishing platform you cut out the bookseller. So that’s 50% of the cover price that you don’t have to give away. But you do have all the manufacture and fulfilment issues to take care of.

What’s the profit margin on a Kickstarter campaign? I haven’t looked (see Not An Expert disclaimer above) but I’d expect them to vary wildly. By profit, I mean the money you’re left with when the last cheque clears and the last book goes sliding down the chute at the post office. With that you have to cover all your fixed costs – writing, art, typesetting, leaving aside the risk of running the Kickstarter in the first place.

This is why I’m sceptical when somebody tells me how easy it would be to fund an entire book through crowdfunding. I can do all the writing for nothing (I didn’t pay myself a penny for all the work I did on Mirabilis books 1, 2 and 3, including layouts and lettering) but there’s still artwork costs. Editing, if you care about quality. Lettering. Typesetting. Printer set-up.

I’m pretty versatile. I can do about three-quarters of that stuff myself. But I still have to pay artists and colorists. And at the end of the rainbow I’m even hoping there might be a few coins left to pay for the thousands of man-hours I put in along the way.

Kickstarter is a way of raising a subscription to print books. It also serves as a great way to enthuse a core of fans who will hopefully spread the word about your project. But it is not a viable way to raise development funds – unless you are super-famous to begin with, in which case you probably don’t need the development funds that badly anyway.

But Kickstarter as a publishing platform? That’s something else. Now you have to make enough on sales to cover costs from scratch. I’m often asked about gamebooks because I wrote a lot of them in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A gamebook takes about four man-months to write. (My interactive adaptation of Frankenstein took nearly eight months, but that was much bigger than a regular gamebook.) Interior art, call that a man-month. Cover, editing, typesetting, another man-month. So a minimum of six man-months for just a black-and-white gamebook. For a full color graphic novel like Mirabilis it’s getting on for twice that.

Writers and artists do need to eat. (Nobody in the movie or publishing industries believes this.) No executive wants to pay them as much as you’d get for flicking paperclips around an office and setting up PowerPoint presentations, but even so that Kickstarter-based publisher will need to find some $23,000 to fund the gamebook, $46,000 for a graphic novel. If you build in a 20% profit on sales, that means the campaign will need to hit a quarter million to get the OGN paid for.

That’s not how it works, of course. I didn’t go out and get investors to do Mirabilis. We had some money in the early days from David Fickling and Random House, but when The DFC (blessed be its memory) had to fold, we didn’t shut up shop. I continued writing for nothing. I went out and found supporting jobs that would pay for Leo and Nikos. This is how most creators have to work. Kickstarter may be a shiny new thing, but it’s not going to change that.

Storytelling with pictures

Still on writing tips today, but this time specifically how to tell a story with just pictures. The starting point, surprise surprise, is no different from prose: you need to make an emotional connection with the reader. In novels we have voice as the primary and most powerful tool for this. British publisher David Fickling, creator of The DFC in which Mirabilis first appeared as well as the upcoming Phoenix comic, talks about a warmth that is to be found, in various guises, in the voice of all great kids' writers.

Not just kids' writers, in fact. Even when a writer like Graham Greene tells a story of corruption and genocide, or Nabokov invites us to share the viewpoint of a paedophile, what comes across in the narrative voice above all is humanity. Contrast that with supermarket crime novels, where brutal events are described with no trace of human feeling, like a sales rep describing the Holocaust. If the emotional connection between writer and reader is missing, the novel loses its grip. It becomes a mere Powerpoint presentation of plot. The author's voice is what encourages us to strip off the armour of disbelief, expose ourselves to the dangers of the journey, and come away changed by the experience.

In movies, the writer doesn't have that option. You can have tone (often emphasized by a narrator's voiceover) which quickly serves to assure us that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, say, is not going to be The Salton Sea. Compare the original Blade Runner with the Director's Cut; simply by removing Deckard's voiceover, the tone is altered completely. But tone in a movie is not the same as voice in prose, and in the gap between the two you'll find the reason why movies must have their heroes saving cats and taking care to hit all the beats of the monomyth.

Comics, of course, are not a purely visual medium. The writer is typically more present in the finished work than any director in his movie. Look at Sandman or Swamp Thing. Those are literary works that strongly give the sense that Gaiman and Moore are storytellers speaking directly into our ear. Still more so in the Marvel comics of the Silver Age, where Stan Lee's voice ushered his readers through stories like the patter of a circus ringmaster.

That's not the only way to tell a story in comics, of course. I use no captions in Mirabilis except for Jack's inner thoughts, and those sparingly. I almost never use thought bubbles (unless projected by telepathic brains in jars) because I want the reader to come to these characters as in life or in a long-running TV show: befriending them over time. Still, the author's touch is not and should never be invisible; Hitchcock observes murders in a very different way from Carol Reed. Compare the first ten minutes of The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich. Both were scripted by Launder & Gilliat, both feature Charters and Caldicott as key supporting characters, yet only the former has the warmth that David Fickling spoke of.

Stories are made up of scenes, and the same rules apply at every level. So let's look at an example of how to establish emotional connection using a series of images. This is cinema in its purest form: a sequence of uninflected images that acquire meaning through juxtaposition. And ironically, that pure visual storytelling is best seen these days in commercials. They're selling a product, sure, but they still need to make that direct emotional circuit into the audience's brains. It's all about story.

Take a look at the Virgin Atlantic commercial above. This has a group of Virgin's female cabin crew walking through the terminal attracting gawping looks from men. We see a guy dripping hot dog sauce on his shirt; another forgets all about his videogame. But notice that the commercial doesn’t open on a shot of the stewardesses. Instead, we see a man arriving at the airport. He gets out of the taxi talking on a mobile phone. He looks up, gradually loses interest in the call. The phone slips from his fingers. He sees something that's grabbed his attention, but what? Cut to a reverse shot, past his legs, as the phone breaks on the floor and we get glimpses of the stewardesses walking into shot – and only after that do we get a clear view of them walking towards us, a riot of colour and glamour amid the drab greys of the 1980s.

The commercial is constructed to use both suspense ("What is the man reacting to?") and empathy/identification ("See him? That's how you are meant to feel."). Starting on the stewardesses themselves would give us something to react to, but no viewpoint character to bring us within the story. Of course, we only specifically identify with the man on the phone for a few seconds, then we’re on to a series of loose identifications that gradually diffuse our point of view into the crowd. But in order to place us there as an onlooker in the crowd, the commercial starts off with a perfect little mini-story, complete with lead character, in order to corral our emotional response.

I feel I almost ought to apologize for using a commercial with such an egregious instance of the Male Gaze. There is undeniably a tone in this work, and it is nearer to the sales rep than to Graham Greene. But we can assume that it's male airline passengers whom the ad agency were targeting (apart from the little girl who sadly aspires only to be a honey in a tight red skirt) and, as an example of the visual storytelling craft, this shows perfect construction. But me, I still prefer Air Canada.

From the ashes rises a burnished new bird

Evoking fond memories of Eagle but pointing to the future, it's going to be called the Phoenix. That was the message from David Fickling, Ben Sharpe and their reassembled DFC team at Oxford today. The party was held, not at the old DFC offices but a few doors further along Beaumont Street, underscoring that this is not to be under the wing of Random House, as the DFC was, but an entirely independent venture.

Phoenix will be weekly from January 2012 and is surely going to have a lot in common with the DFC of old, given the familiar faces toasting the glad tidings with glasses of champagne from the Jeroboam that David has been saving on his mantelpiece for just this occasion. Among the assembled terawattage of talent, Leo and I spoke to Garen Ewing, John Aggs, Ben Haggarty, Will Dawbarn, Neill Cameron, Jim Medway, Robert Deas and Philip Pullman (who dropped a remark about ebooks that left me stunned, but I don't think I can say any more about that here). There were a lot more creative folk besides those I've mentioned, but by that time we'd wedged ourselves in a comfortable corner by Caro Fickling's chocolate brownies and we didn't see any reason to move from there.

Most important of all, the funding for Phoenix is secure for three years, giving this new incarnation of the comic time to grow, develop and become self-sustaining. Even though everybody had pretty much guessed the news from the moment we first got the invitation (they didn't exactly try to hide it with all the DFC backronyms) I must say there was a very happy and warm glow in the room when Ben was actually able to climb up on the table and announce it, and I'm certain this goes for everyone there when I say that David Fickling's dedication, persistence and incredible energy are what brought the DFC back from the dead, and this time round it's going to be better than ever! More over on Andrew Wildman's blog.

Faiths and empires gleam

Nabokov describes the writing process as the interplay of inspiration and combination. And that was certainly my experience in creating this scene to introduce the character known as Talisin, aka Gus, aka... (Ah, but that's a revelation we should save for another time.)

The idea of Gus first appearing in a mental asylum went right back to a brainstorming week at Bromfield Priory Gatehouse in 2003 with my wife Roz and fellow Mirabilis creators Leo and Martin. We had gone to fill in the details of our story so we could pitch it to David Fickling on Halloween. Out for a drive in search of jam and scones, we passed a poor, lost, shambling old fellow standing beside the road and I remarked that somebody who at the start of the Year of Wonders was locked up for thinking he was Hannibal or Merlin might very soon turn out to have been right all along.

Five years later, as the first episodes of Mirabilis finally cranked into existence ready for the DFC's launch, I was sitting on the lawn of my mother’s house in Surrey on a very summery spring day, possibly with a cold beer in hand but just as likely with a cup of tea. Leaning back in my chair with the sunlight in the branches, I was building the set of Gus’s asylum cell in my mind while the reality around me was of a warm day with bees grazing drowsily and the scent of blossom in the air. And so the scene became the simple reversal of that: Gus in his cold stone cell was the reality, and the idyllic countryside became what his imagination had painted over it.

I guess the main theme of Mirabilis is that reality and the imagination are part of one continuous spectrum – that reality is actually what happens inside the human mind, in fact. So this scene was the perfect way to mark the appearance of Jack’s unreliable mentor and the start of Jack’s acceptance of “the world turned upside down”. I’m always immensely grateful when the Muse does all the work and just drops the finished idea in my lap like that.

Inspiration over, the combination part just meant swiping a few perfect lines from Shelley (if you have to steal, steal from the best) and some fun research into archaic slang. The title of the episode, "The Wrong Side of Bedlam", was yet another ready-made package from the Muse. On a good day, a cold beer or a cuppa is all a writer needs.

The scene, incidentally, is the opening of Chapter Two in the Winter book and was the start of episode six when Mirabilis was being serialized in the DFC. I had planned to mark the beginning of outright fantasy by having the masthead run sideways down the page, as you can see in my original sketch. But David Fickling had decided as a point of editorial style that mastheads would always run across the top of each strip – or, if not across the top, at least consistently in the same position. So when this episode actually appeared (in DFC #34) the masthead was in its regular position.

This page also happened to be the one we picked for Nikos to try out as colorist. As soon as we saw how brilliantly he handled the contrast between the vernal landscape and the grim stone cell, we knew we had found the fourth member of our team.

To read the whole episode you've got a choice. The web comic on the Mirabilis site, the flipbook on BookBuzzr, the Kindle mini-episode or the EPUB version. Don't say we don't spoil you.

Coming attractions

Leo and I don’t get out nearly enough in a job like ours. So it was nice to have a bit of an outing yesterday, converging from our respective homes in Somerset and London for a meeting at our publisher's offices in Oxford.

As plans for the DFC Library proceed apace it’s all getting very exciting. David showed us cover mock-ups of the first titles due out in spring next year. The series is kicking off with three great DFC strips: Mezolith, Spider Moon and Good Dog Bad Dog. If you subscribed to the DFC you will have seen this material already, but the high quality printing and prestige hardcover editions will make them worth having even so. I loved the Mezolith cover in particular – a dramatic and at the same time contemplative image that expresses the whole central concept of a father passing traditions on to his son.

Think of all the great titles to come: Monkey Nuts, Robot Girl, Frontier, Spectrum Black, Mo-Bot High, Bodkin and the Bear… Oh, too many to mention. And then there are the strips that are on file but didn’t get the chance to appear before the DFC was closed, like Garen Ewing’s eagerly-awaited Tomb of Nazaleod, for example. Where would a UK publisher get an incredible graphic novel list like that? These books are going to prove the real value of the DFC as an incubator of top comics IPs.

And what about Mirabilis? Bless your ‘eart for asking, guv’nor. The first book, Winter, is almost complete. It’s over 200 pages so a fair old stocking-filler, and one that could keep a chap quiet most of Christmas Day. But Christmas of which year? At this stage we cannot say.

After the meeting we had nine hours to kill (the problem of pre-booking to get affordable tickets) but there’s plenty to do in Oxford. We strolled around the Pitt Rivers Museum, took in Bruce Willis’s new movie Surrogates at the Odeon in Magdalen Street, and had a fine meal at the Bangkok House in Hythe Bridge Street – an acceptable substitute for the sadly defunct Opium Den that used to stand nearby. Then back home to work on the last few pages of the Winter book.

The Long and Winding Road

It began, as so many ideas do, with a bottle of wine. Leo had been in London for a meeting and he came to stay over before heading back to Brighton the next day.

“You know what the publisher said they really want?” (I won’t do the voice; he was slurring by this stage.) “Something like Dinotopia. A fantasy complete world that we can present as a big visual feast like that.”

We used to have a notepad to hand whenever we got together. Our record was ten new book ideas in one evening. But this time it was as Aesop said: only one, but a lion.

Mirabilis is our celebration of the imagination. That’s why it has everything from Martian embassies to princes of Elfland. Even the odd dinosaur, though mostly of the Crystal Palace variety rather than what is today regarded as scientifically accurate. Normally we wouldn’t put all these things together, but in Mirabilis they all belong – like in dreams.

We spent hours working out the details and got so excited that we took it first to Leo’s publisher, then to all the others we knew.

Oh, how it rained on that parade.

Typical comments: “But this isn’t about dinosaurs! We told you we wanted something like Dinotopia.” Or: “You’ve got martians in the same world as dragons. That can’t happen.” (They’re right about that last point. I studied physics at Oxford and those things absolutely can’t happen. So I’m glad fiction editors are all fully clued up about that stuff.)

That was April 1997. Next thing you know it’s July 2003 and we have a meeting at David Fickling Books in Oxford, along with Martin McKenna who was working with David on another book. I also knew David from way way back in his OUP days. Like Russian dolls, this book business is.

We talked about a bunch of ideas of which Mirabilis (suitably dusted off) was just one. David liked it but with reservations. Living in the freelance wilderness, we could subsist on a few crumbs of encouragement like that for weeks. We took ourselves off to Bromfield Priory Gatehouse near Ludlow for a week of larking about… er, creative brainstorming. We set a date to go back and see David on Halloween.

This time he was less encouraging – or maybe our rose-tinted specs had slipped. The publishing industry was not what it was when Dinotopia first appeared. He felt that we couldn’t now get the big Mirabilis art book off the ground without first building a following with some novels. I could see his point, but I wasn’t keen to write Mirabilis novels. It felt too big a story to squeeze down to just a few characters. It would need to be the War & Peace of fantasy novels, the Genji Monogatari, the Gone With The Wind. And I didn’t think prose was the best medium for describing the profusion of fantasy - almost ridiculously ubiquitous and varied by midsummer - that we wanted to pour into our world.

The solution was staring us in the face. It only took another three years…

So now it’s June 2006 and the DFC is a glimmer in David Fickling’s eye. Leo and I pitched him a bunch of comic strip ideas and yet again, despite its weighty accretion of dust, Mirabilis rose to the top. This time I wrote an outline of the whole 52-episode story of Will – no, Tim – no, Jack Ember, plus a detailed treatment for the first 13 episodes. David emailed us a few days later:

Dear Dave, Leo and Martin - I read this with mounting excitement on the train to the west country today and half expected a band of elves to get on at Taunton. I think it is absolutely glorious and can't wait to see it visualized. This is just marvellous. I checked the sky for a comet when I got off at Exeter. And I can see how the story will absolutely work.

So… almost there, right? Not quite. We learned a lot preparing the pilot strip for the DFC’s dummy issue. The characters didn’t look quite right – too young, their WW1 style uniforms evoking too grim a period of history. And I was trying to squeeze way too much story into too little space. The same script that we had 6 pages for in the dummy eventually became the first 10 pages that you can see on the Mirabilis site.

David Fickling must have had confidence that we would get it right on the night, because he took the extraordinary step of signing us to a 52-episode deal. Perhaps not grasping yet just how much of a chunk of our lives work on the comic would take, we still held onto the idea of doing a big Dinotopia-style art book as well. In a magnificently generous gesture, David signed that book as well, even though he must have known it would be years before it could be released. In the event, we got a few images done but it was clearly not coming together, and in the end we shelved the art book indefinitely to concentrate on the comic.

And that’s where we are now. Who knows where it will lead in another twelve years, but we're up for finding out.