Original Hartas artwork to own!

Recognize this? Maybe you don't know the wight in question personally, but the artist will be familiar if you've read Mirabilis. It's actually one of the very first illustrations that Leo drew for a gamebook called The Crypt of the Vampire, which was the first book that either of us worked on. It was a long time ago and the clocks were striking thirteen, and that's all I'm going to say, but here's the full story if you're interested..

Now Megara Entertainment are running a Kickstarter campaign to finance a hardcover edition of Le Tombeau du Vampire, which is a new French translation of Crypt of the Vampire, and the campaign also gives you the opportunity to buy Leo Hartas's original artwork for the book.

Yep. Leo Hartas. Original. Artwork.

The Kickstarter page is in French, but there's an English translation in the sidebar for UK or US gamebook collectors and art fans who might want to own one of these unique drawings. Not prints, you note. Not copies. The actual honest-to-goodness pen-and-ink drawings that Leo did all those years ago for the Golden Dragon Gamebooks series.

How it works: pledge €600 and for that you get any one original drawing from Crypt of the Vampire. (You choose which one, it says, but presumably it'll be on a first-come-first-served basis.) You also get any one English hardback collector's gamebook from Megara Entertainment's webstore. Shipping to anywhere in the world is included in the price, with tracking. The drawings are 90mm x 145mm on 160mm x 225mm card. (Oddly, it looks as if this reward doesn't include the hardback of Le Tombeau du Vampire, but I guess they assume that if you're picking the English language option then you won't want the French edition.)

So, if you were one of the female students at Brighton University faculty of arts in those far-off days, and you turned down a late-night offer from Leo to show you his etchings, here's the chance to finally buy one! But the campaign has just three weeks left to run, so don't delay. Check it out here.

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STOP PRESS: Alternatively, for €29 you can get a full-colour hardcover edition of the book in either English or French (your choice). Leo is colourizing his original pictures for this (and see above how awesome they look, too) and he's also going to be painting an all-new cover.

Leo Hartas. All-New. Cover. The goodies just keep on coming.

STOP STOP PRESS: ...Or maybe not. It now seems to be up in the air as to whether the cover of the English edition will be a new Leo painting, one of the colourized interior pictures, or just blank. The moral of the story is: don't launch into a Kickstater campaign without any planning and then change the goalposts every few days. Sigh. But you definitely can buy Leo's original art, and the English edition ought to have colour versions of his original drawings inside. For anything else, I can only advise that you check the fine print on the Kickstarter page on a twice-daily basis.

STOP STOP STOP. JUST STOP: Okay, so Megara Entertainment have now (June 2) announced they are cancelling the Kickstarter campaign for Crypt of the Vampire. Don't let it put you off crowdfunding new gamebooks, though, because the campaign for my story The Frankenstein Wars has just started. It's a Kickstarter Staff Pick and it's going great guns: in the space of half a day it's already 12.5% funded. And I can guarantee that Cubus Games, who are running it, will not cancel this campaign. More details of The Frankenstein Wars in the post above this one. In the meantime, if you want to buy Leo's original artwork, there's an easier solution than doing it by means of a Kickstarter - why not just contact him directly?

The moving finger writes (and draws)

You’re looking at a turning point, a signpost of destiny. Like the hiss of cosmic background radiation, or that iridium line through the rocks of time that says “Dinosaurs Keep Out”. This is where history made a decision to go one way and not the other. And that made all the difference.

It’s like this. My friend Jamie Thomson used to edit White Dwarf, which in those days was a role-playing games magazine published out of Games Workshop’s offices on an industrial estate in North Acton. Most days I would go in to write articles and scenarios and generally hang out.

This one morning, a gangling, bespectacled, leather-jacketed artist arrived with his portfolio under his arm. He had an appointment, he had enthusiasm and talent and smarts, but nobody at Games Workshop had remembered. It was close to the monthly deadline. He ended up having to lay his artwork out on the floor as people ran in and out with red-marked sheets of copy. I took time to look at his stuff and I loved it (still remember a great picture of a magic book with things manifesting out of the pages) but, after all, what use was that to the poor guy? I was just a freelance writer.

A few days later, I signed a contract to write my first ever professional books, The Crypt of the Vampire and The Temple of Flame. In those days, editors were titans; they made decisions fast and effectively. Angela Sheehan at Grafton said find yourself an artist. My first thought was of Russ Nicholson, whose work I liked, but he was off in Papua New Guinea for a year. The hand of Fate again.

That weekend I happened to go to Pevensey. Halfway there, as the train clacked and swayed through rabbit-dotted countryside, I remembered the artist kneeling on the White Dwarf carpet. Didn’t he live on the south coast somewhere? I called Jamie. Did he still have the guy’s telephone number? By nothing short of a miracle, Jamie had left his wallet out of his jeans pocket when he washed them that week, so the scrap of paper with Leo’s details on it was still legible. That afternoon, we met up in the garden of a pub near to the castle. Leo brought Jo. We walked and talked all afternoon, had tea in a sort of barnacled driftwood shack on the beach. Leo agreed to illustrate my two books. We didn’t know then that it would be a lifelong friendship and creative partnership, that Jo and he would be married with three great kids, and that I would be godfather to the youngest. (Hi, Inigo!)

And this? This was the first drawing Leo did. The very first page of the very first book either of us ever published. And, whaddya know - it’s a gate!