Forced landing among the gods

“Above the May Day celebrations in Worplesdon in Surrey, the clouds part and the halls of Olympus can be seen. Down flies an airplane to land on the village green. It’s the Wright brothers, believed lost several months earlier after disappearing into a thick fog off the coast of North Carolina.”

That’s how it began: a throwaway paragraph from a big brainstorming document that I did years ago, right after we first came up with the concept of Mirabilis. I put down hundreds of scraps of ideas as they came to me, figuring it was the best way to build up a picture of how fantasy flowed and ebbed through the year.

Each month had a little descriptive line. January: “Some rather queer things have been happening lately.” February: “Did I dream that, or did it really happen?” March: “It’s true; my cousin saw it with his own eyes.” April: “There are new things under the sun.” And so on to November ("Half sick of shadows") to the end.

Fast forward a while. It's 2008. Mirabilis is due to appear in The DFC and Random House have commissioned the Gazetteer for rather a tidy sum. So now Martin and I are working on ideas that would make the twelve full-color spreads that will form the épine dorsale of the Gazetteer – and later, we envisaged, comprise a rather nice Mirabilis calendar.

That first version we weren’t sure about for a couple of reasons. The flying machine was based on a real design by Clément Ader from the 1890s. In real life it didn’t fly, of course, but the green comet effect could change all that. Trouble is, it looks too science fictional, and people would think we were trying to do steampunk. The other problem is the placement of Zeus and Hera, who appear to be montaged in rather than directly interacting with the action. Martin and I mulled over it for days. He wrote:

“I showed it to Dave Carson, who knows about the Mirabilis concept, and he had no idea what we were trying to achieve in the picture, and found it confusing.”

So, on to the second version. Now Martin has brought the gods into the picture by moving them across and having the line of Zeus’s arm connect with the action below. I wasn’t happy with the flying machine, though. It looked like a real historical Wright Brothers contraption. Snag is, authentic and all, at first glimpse you’d think it was flying backwards. Martin pointed out that was how it would really have flown. But it forces a double-take about the wrong thing. You want your viewer to be going, “Ooh, that plane has flown down to the village green from Olympus!” not, “Have they got that plane the wrong way round or something?”

Martin wrote:

“I think the machine we need to use is the Model A Flyer from 1907. It was the fourth machine they designed, the first to feature two seated occupants – a requirement to secure a US Army contract. It was the first to be 'mass' produced, not sure how many but they were also built in Europe – so the truly pioneering vibe of the first three Flyers is slightly lost. But it's the first design where we can show two occupants – except the brothers never flew together, at the request of their father to avoid a double tragedy.”

And that brings us to the third version. The line of action is much clearer now, and Martin suggested accentuating that by having the suggestion of a “vapor trail” down from Zeus’s hand. It’s also much more dramatic in the way the airplane is buzzing the cricketers. We discovered that Zeus’s many epithets included Phyxius, god of flight, so it’s reasonable that he might take an interest in Orville and Wilbur’s experiments. (He was also sometimes known as Terminalis, protector of boundaries, which explains why he would be observing a village cricket match.)

We were still not completely satisfied with the picture, and I suspect by this time that Martin was coming to the conclusion that it would work better if he chose what to illustrate, rather than have me foist impossibly complicated compositions on him!

In the end, the concept changed anyway. I felt that Worplesdon was getting enough coverage in Mirabilis (the Sidney Sime connection, you see) and we needed to show more episodes from around the world – specifically, from other parts of the Empire, to show the global transformation of the Edwardian era that Comet Meadowvane was causing. Hence the report to the Royal Mythological Society moved the whole thing over to India:

Dear Professor Bromfield and Doctor Clattercut

An extraordinary event took place during a recent cricket match between the royal court and the local British regiment. The court was 150 for 4 when a great rock slid like a cloud across the sky, and down from it came a buzzing machine made of wire, wood and brown paper.

The contraption landed in the middle of the pitch, driving two deep ruts right across from mid-wicket to the stumps despite the hardness of the ground at the time of year. I barely threw myself out of the way in time, after first giving the propeller a sound clout with my bat, whereupon a young fellow wearing a leather hat and goggles leapt out crying, “For Pete’s sake, mister, why’d you have to go do a thing like that?”

When my temper cooled a little, I discovered the two occupants of this aerial machine were brothers by the name of Wright. Having taken off from a field in North Carolina back in January, they flew into a storm and were forced to land on what they thought was Bermuda, but which turned out in fact to be the flying island of Laputa. The island was carried around the world by the trade winds, and by chance the brothers Wright had completed repairs on their vehicle and were ready to take off again just as they passed over our pitch.

The question is, would you say this occurrence is ground for abandoning the whole game, or did the court (as the umpires ruled) forfeit the match? We cannot resume play now because the monsoon has arrived.

Very truly yours, Prince Duleep Singh,
Lahore

Dr Clattercut replies: Please do not treat the brothers Wright too harshly, your royal highness. Americans don’t understand cricket and so they probably think they've done nothing worse than if they had disrupted a game of baseball.

Prof Bromfield: Yes, and in any case the harm is done. The umpires have the last word, no doubt about it. You’ll get nowhere arguing with them, any more than with the Fates.

Dr Clattercut: It is the Graeae, of course - the three “grey sisters” of Greek myth - who share but a single eye between them.

Stay in your seats

Now that we're gearing up to get the Gazetteer completed before the end of the year, it's an opportunity to go through the files and admire some of the incredible paintings Martin has already done for it. Try this one - an hommage to the classic Dr Who adventure "Talons of Weng Chiang", as well as a salutary lesson to the stage magicians of the Edwardian music hall not to put on too spectacular a performance in a year when the miraculous is as common as card tricks. Derren Brown would get burned at the stake!

Brought to book

Much to our surprise, the Gazetteer has been moving up into pole position this weekend after more than a year of trailing the pack. The idea of doing a Dinotopia or Spiderwick's Field Guide type of book was how we originally conceived Mirabilis more than 12 years ago now, and was the form in which we first pitched it in 2004 to David Fickling, who several years later invited us to turn it into a comic strip for the dummy issue that he was putting together to help sell the idea to Random House of publishing a weekly comic.

The Gazetteer was to be a complete story of the Year of Wonders told through the eyes of many characters whose lives would intertwine throughout. When we got going on the comic, the Gazetteer took a back seat - but it was part of our contract from the outset, and the intention was to release it once the graphic novels started coming out. Not only did Martin do a great bunch of paintings and illustrations for it, we also had the half-dozen standalone comic stories that David Fickling had asked us to prepare for The Guardian, a UK newspaper, but which were never used. The Gazetteer would be the ideal place for those.

The real value of the Gazetteer, I think, will be as an easy-in to British readers who look askance at graphic novels. Indeed, we at Team Mirabilis often speculate that the Gazetteer might be the real money-earner and the 800-page graphic epic might just turn out to be our labor of love. Still, it has languished for about a year now on the back burner, but just recently we started to think that maybe it is the right place to start after all. Or, at any rate, it's worth getting out there so that readers have a choice of starting points.

Our new plan is to get the Gazetteer all ready in time to go to the Bologna Book Fair next March. So it might actually be out early in 2012. Only two and a bit years after the original publication date, but in the mazy world of book publishing that's all too frequent a tale.

Five rounds rapid

Here's another of Martin McKenna's spectacular illustrations that were originally intended for the Gazetteer. I wantonly vandalized this for use as one of our counterfeit Silver Age covers recently, but here it is in all its glory - because, although a firm believer that the future of comics is on mobiles and e-readers, I prefer paintings to have tangible form, and this, like all of Martin's work, really should be appreciated at full size emblazoned across two big pages of high-quality art paper.

As I mentioned before, Martin and I conceived the idea for this picture to set the record straight on unicorns, which in twee fantasy novels these days are too often reduced to rather soppy critters. Bromfield and Clattercut are of exactly the same opinion (funny, that) and here's their reply to a correspondent who wrote in with unicorn trouble:

Dear Dr Clattercut and Prof Bromfield

To the rear of my country house there are fields bordered by extensive woodland, so that it is not unusual to look out in the early morning to find deer on the lawn. No doubt the poets would have words to describe the tug on one’s soul in gazing on such a beautiful sight, the doe and her fawns like wanderers from Eden in the golden dawn. It is sometimes all I can do not to fetch my gun and join in “with both barrels” – but my wife would not appreciate being woken in such a robust fashion.

A few days ago a still more breathtaking apparition awaited me on rising. It was a magnificent stallion, as white as a statue of marble, with a straight horn in the middle of its forehead. I reached out towards it, but with the merest touch of my fingertips on the window pane, it bolted into the fields and was gone.

But, gentlemen, this is not the only marvel I have to relate. For this morning I looked out from the window to see the unicorn had returned. And my daughter, still in her nightgown, was there standing in the dew beside it. Have you ever witnessed a unicorn taking grass from the hand of a young girl? It is more humbling than bagging a dozen rhinos.

Now I have conceived a purpose, and I would be grateful for your advice on how best to achieve it. For I have a mind to capture this unicorn, and tame it to the bridle. I fancy that I will excite quite a stir at the Old Berks when I turn up riding a unicorn behind the hounds!

Sincerely, Sir Samuel Wadwough, K.G., Hinton Waldrist

Dr Clattercut replies: You will excite quite a stir too, my dear sir, when you are found dead on your lawn with a two-inch hole punched through you from sternum to spine.

Prof Bromfield: Quite so. Tame a unicorn? You may just as well attempt to put a leash on the Sirocco or teach Cleopatra’s Needle to dance the Argentine tango. I don’t know how the idea gained currency that unicorns are shy and gentle creatures, but I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

Dr Clattercut: Consider Pliny’s words: “The most fell and ferocious beast of all is the Unicorn or Licorne. His body resembles a horse, his head a stag, his feet an elephant, his tail a boar. He loweth after an hideous manner. One black horn he hath in the mids of his forehead, bearing out two cubits in length. By report, this beast is so wild that it cannot possibly be caught alive.”

Prof Bromfield: There you are; I knew Clattercut would have an obscure quotation on the subject. On a more practical level, I can assure you that a unicorn is quite capable of killing an elephant with a single thrust of its horn, and nor would it be averse to doing so. Its amenableness towards your daughter is also cause for concern – though of a different nature, too delicate for me to discuss here – and I advise you to keep her indoors while this creature remains in the district.

Cave canem

There’s something outside on the pavement (the sidewalk, to our American cousins). Nobody wants to touch it. We’re waiting for the rain to wash it away. One of the neighbours has pinned a big notice on a tree nearby: PLEASE CLEAN UP AFTER YOUR DOG.

My point? That little brown pile, that’s how UK publishers view comics. By and large they wouldn’t actually want to pick one up.

Having grown up with comics and got my love of fiction from them, I really don’t get it. Movies, comics, novels, games – aren’t those all valid and effective ways of leading somebody on an imaginative journey?

I’m sure American and continental European readers will simply be baffled by this, but most adults in Britain see comics as a mean and contemptible medium. I tell people I’m writing a graphic novel and they look at me like I’ve joined the Hare Krishnas. It goes beyond blank uninterest; it's more like pity. Some (and these are the worst) will say, “Oh, I think comics can be ever so helpful in getting reluctant readers to pick up proper books.” Nobody can do condescension like a British literary snob.

Leo, Martin and I have sometimes toyed with writing Mirabilis as a prose novel instead of a comic. Just to get some respect, you understand. I think publishers would sit up and take notice then. Some of them might even read it!

We’re not going to do that because – well, for a bunch of reasons. Because we like comics. Because we love making comics. Because Mirabilis is a visual story. And because anyway who needs respect from those twits? Stuff ‘em if they don’t like comics. Me, I don’t like crap novels where nothing actually happens. We’ll have to agree to differ.

But all the same, Mirabilis was conceived to be medium-agnostic. I’ve worked in games, television, books, you name it, and any way that gets the story across is fine by me. So Mirabilis is a comic but it isn’t only a comic. We have all the Royal Mythological Society story snippets, for example. And there are other bits of prose that got written for various reasons. Some of them we’ll use in that form, some get repurposed.

This vignette for instance. It was originally planned as a prose story to go in the Gazetteer, but got reworked as the basis for one of our newspaper comic stories. Though the pterodactyl didn't make it into the comic version, it got airlifted to Paris for a screech-on role in the main Jack and Estelle story instead. (And, as you can see from the picture, it had to dress up in a pteranodon costume.)

Hope you like our little amuse-cerveau. Tomorrow we’re back to picture stories. With flying dinosaurs. Promise.

Never Never on the Portsmouth Line

"You know, Jennings, it's getting worse if anything," remarked Sanderson over the glass bubble-helmet of the little green man on the seat next to him.

"I think you're right," his friend said in the same matter-of fact tone. "Take that last station. I could have sworn the sign said Never-never Land. Never-never Land didn't use to be on the Portsmouth line, did it?"

"That's not all. Do you know, just as we were leaving the office, there was something rather large perched on the top of Nelson's Column." Sanderson hesitated. "I didn't like to say at the time, but..."

"No need to apologise, old chap. Pterodactyl - no mistaking it. That's the second time this week it's been there. I suppose it's been keeping an eye out."

"For pigeons?"

"Well, I was thinking more of tourists."

"It's this comet that's to blame, of course."

"Without a doubt. No other explanation. Chap on the radio last night saying the same thing. Oh I say! What a cheek!"

The Martian sitting on the other side of Jennings had clamped a tentacle onto the page of his newspaper and was silently reading the share prices.

Jennings tugged the paper away and folded it up. "The nerve of these blighters, reading over a fellow’s shoulder like that."

"Tickets please," said the inspector.

Mr Sanderson handed over his ticket. The Martian beside him sat immobile. The inspector leaned down and rapped his knuckles on the glass dome. The green brain inside opened several eyes like a crab waking up inside a shell.

"Tickets," repeated the inspector.

The train rattled on through the dusk. The Martian sat in dumbfounded silence.

"He wants your ticket," explained Jennings, enunciating one word at a time as though the Martian was a very small child.

The Martian turned its eyes in several directions at once. Reaching into its little silver knapsack, it pulled out a ray gun.

"Ticket," said the inspector stolidly.

The Martian seemed taken aback. It leaned over Jennings' lap to confer with its comrade. The two buzzed and twittered at each other for a few moments, while Jennings stared at the ceiling of the carriage with a disdainful expression and pretended to ignore them. Finally the ray gun was put away and the Martian produced a ticket.

"Tak uz to yir leader," the second Martian said. Sanderson thought that its accent sounded faintly Scottish.

The inspector glowered at their tickets. "You want London, then. This is the down train."

The Martians sat bolt upright like glove puppets and started waving their tentacles. There was more buzzing, quite heated now. The inside of the glass helmets was beginning to steam up.

"He said you're going the wrong way!" said Jennings, losing his patience. "No use arguing about it."

"You'll have to go back to Woking and change there," said the guard. He gave the Martians their tickets and went on to the next compartment. They looked at each other glumly, silent now inside the fishbowl helmets.

Sanderson looked up at the window. "This is my stop," he said, rising.

Jennings nodded. "Looks like it.” He raised his paper and leaned over to speak confidentially. “What do you know? Martians. It’ll be Venusians next week.”

Sanderson paused as he stepped down to the platform. He thought about what Jennings had said and brightened. There was even a bit of a twinkle in his eye that had not been seen since Mrs Sanderson was a Miss.

“Venusians…” he said dreamily. “Marvellous!”

Up above the world so high

As expedition leader Sir Reginald Butley stepped across from the basket of his balloon onto the lunar surface, he uttered the immortal words: "That's one small step for a young man, but it's quite a jump for an old chap like me, I can tell you. I probably shouldn't have had that extra helping of shepherd's pie for lunch. And then there were the mince pies coming up. Tell you what, you young folk go on and I'll just sit here for a bit and enjoy the view. Whew."

In the absence of actual pages from the story, here's another breathtaking image by Martin. This was originally destined for the gazetteer, which was planned as a kind of Mirabilis yearbook along the lines of Dinotopia or The Spiderwick Field Guide. And the most amazing thing about this picture? It was never finished; this is Martin's idea of a rough sketch!

Moon-climbing is the kind of thing you'd see happening by April or May in the year of wonders. Our plan was to have twelve full color spreads throughout the gazetteer and make those also into a calendar. If that appeals, you should take a look at the Giclée prints available of some of Martin's most gorgeous full-color artwork.

The dark side

A typically dramatic and atmospheric picture from Martin here. It will come as no surprise that this came originally from his movie concept art portfolio. We talked about using it for a DFC cover (#34, January 2009) to tie in with "The Wrong Side of Bedlam", the episode that introduced Gus. But when we saw the age group that most of the DFC strips were pitched at, it was clear that something like this wasn't going to fit with the rest of the comic. Call me fussy, but dark and brooding just can't rub shoulders comfortably with candy-colored lettering and a Lazarus Lemming cover insert.

Mirabilis is sometimes dark and chilling and, in hindsight, probably didn't sit well with the DFC readers, who I'd guess were predominantly 7- or 8-year olds. That's why I'm keen to get it out in graphic novel form. Then it can find its own audience. Not that our story is ever very dark, come to that. No more so than a Tim Burton movie, say; we're not talking Pan's Labyrinth here. You'll be seeing this and other brilliant pics by Martin in the Gazetteer.

The commercial side of magic

Here's another newspaper advertisement from the annus mirabilis. When we started kicking the idea of the gazetteer around, twelve years or more ago, we planned to do a lot of these. Since then they've become something of a cliche (Larklight, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you name it) but it'd be a pity not to do one or two. Like the five-storey removal firm Stoop and Sons and monster opticians Blink and Wiper, this won't just be a throwaway joke but will actually link back into the Jack & Estelle story. That's the plan, anyway.

Step on it, Dad

A few months ago, I mentioned the Mirabilis stories we planned for UK newspaper The Guardian. Those are all written and the first of them, "Wrong Turning", has been pencilled by Martin.

It's very much in the (jugular) vein of a Warren horror story. A father and son are forced off the main road and find themselves taking a detour via "the undiscover'd country". Okay, the story is a little less cautionary and a tad more uplifting than the sort that Uncle Creepy used to tell, but the art style is eerily reminiscent of the great Reed Crandall. Only even better.

Don't expect this any time soon, but we will try and get it ready for Halloween. And it and the other stories will appear in the Mirabilis gazetteer sometime in - oh, I dunno. When we've finished the Jack and Estelle story. So not till 2011, probably. Meanwhile, there's plenty of McKenna eldritch brilliance as usual over on his site.

Horse de combat

Having had a centaur rear up, so to speak, on the RMS Notes and Queries page, this seems like a good time to show off a couple of pics of the beasties by Leo and Martin.

Why the military angle? Here's the snippet from the Gazetteer:

"Thank heavens for these centaurs we were issued with in the spring," said the brigade's commanding officer today. "They're the bee's knees, I can tell you. Much nippier than our horses used to be. Which is just as well when some damned fool tells you to charge a Russian artillery emplacement. Er, don’t print that."

That's one of our fake news reports, obviously. And why is the Crimean War going on when the setting is supposed to be 1901? Fantasy, you see. The unreal. Breakdown in the natural fabric of things. Logic has gone on holiday and didn't leave a forwarding address. Trust me, it all gets stranger and stranger from here on.

One lump or two?

A little bit of Mirabilis magic for Good Friday: here's Pan taking tea with the vicar.

Actually it's still a bit early in the year for fantasy and everyday life to be quite as intertwined as this. By April the vicar would be torn between admitting dryads into his congregation and trying to get them to dress more decorously in church. But it's going to be May or June before you're likely to get pagan gods turning up for afternoon tea. The Royal Mythological Society's notes & queries give a pretty good idea of how things are changing as the green comet gets bigger in the sky.

This picture (by Martin, not Leo) was originally intended for the Gazetteer. Unfortunately very few of the pictures that were planned for that were ever completed - if we were to release it we'd have to call it the Pamphlet of Wonders. Oh well, you're going to get four thumping great Mirabilis graphic novels instead. Not a bad trade-off!

The well-dressed cyclops

Another relic of the Gazetteer is this example of the sort of spoof newspaper ads were were going to use to evoke the Mirabilis world:

That path has been well-trodden in everything from Extraordinary Gentlemen to Larklight, but eleven or twelve years ago it still had a slightly fresh whiff about it. I like this one anyway - and that is not vanity speaking, because art and text are both by Leo.

The Gazetteer

Before we thought of the comic, Mirabilis was originally planned as a kind of Dinotopia art book which we ended up referring to as "the Gazetteer".

We wanted to try telling a story in the form of lots of interwoven strands in the form of newspaper clippings, diary entries, letters, music hall posters, etc. This would be the only way to cover a canvas as big as Mirabilis - an entire world, transformed for an entire year.

For example, there was the explorer who got disgruntled at the lack of challenge now that so much fantasy was becoming commonplace. He set out alone to cross the Antarctic, only to fall through into a subterranean jungle world populated by prehistoric animals. His increasingly desperate attempts to find solitude in his explorations were thwarted by the savages of the jungle world, who led him to a lost Egyptian colony far below the surface who insisted on crowning him their absolute ruler and god-king - much to his disgust.
Martin McKenna completed a half-dozen very nice pictures that were intended for the Gazetteer, like the one above featuring the giant removal man. The ad on his cart reads:

STOOP and SonsThe BIG name in removals
From baths and bedsteads to the tiniest teacup
“Lift it and shift it? You want Stoop!”
Breakages ensured!
Head and shoulders above our competitors

We're hopeful that the Mirabilis Gazetteer will appear eventually - the current idea is to release it after the graphic novels as a back-up book to the main story, like Lyra's Oxford or The Guide to Middle-Earth. It's certainly one of the things we're signed to do for Random House. But first things first. We're got an awful lot of Jack's and Estelle's story to tell before we can return to the broader canvas.