Kubo and the Two Strings

Last time I was over at Leo's he recommended some movies I needed to catch up on. One of them was Kubo and the Two Strings and -- wow. Just wow. I don't want to say anything spoilery (even that trailer gives away a little surprise that's waiting in the end credits) so I'll just urge you in the strongest possible terms to watch this asap. It packs in ten times the wit, charm, imagination and originality of the typical blockbuster SF/fantasy movie. Oh, and fans of my Blood Sword gamebooks will realize by the end why I especially cherish this story. A real delight.

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?

Resolution

It's been a frustrating year. My interactive reworking of Frankenstein was published to critical acclaim and won a Kirkus star, and I have now prepared Epub3 and Kindle editions for release next year. My company Fabled Lands LLP entered a joint venture with a major international publisher to reissue a back catalogue of over thirty gamebook classics by me, Jamie Thomson, Oliver Johnson and Mark Smith, in both print and digital formats. And Dark Lord: The Early Years, created by me and Jamie Thomson and brilliantly written by Jamie, won the 2012 Roald Dahl humour prize.

So why the frustration? Because what matters most to me is Mirabilis. The other things are great too, but Jack's and Estelle's story is what is dearest to my heart. And nothing has been achieved on Mirabilis since June last year. I have all of Book 3 written (the first half of Spring), a bunch of standalone stories set in the Year of Wonders, and the outline for a one-special featuring a famous fantasy personality coping with the onslaught of the unreal in 1901. But those stories all need an artist, and both Martin and Leo are now far too busy on other projects (Martin's charming picture book The Gift and Leo's Pollock Theatre style Playrama cutouts for kids).

Eighteen months is quite long enough to let things slide. Too long. A little while back, Jason Arnopp (author of A Sincere Warning About The Entity in Your Home and Beast in the Basement - both brilliant, scary works of genius; go and buy them now, then come back and read on) tweeted that you should write as though you had twelve months to live. Wow. Some advice hits you like the word of God. What if 2013 was my last year? I need to get Mirabilis moving again and it's time to start recruiting the team and raising the money to do that. I've put up the provisional opening episode for Spring, "Long Time With Wadwoes", on Freado and I'll probably put it on DriveThru too. Now I'm looking at ways to get the whole thing restarted so that 2013 can be a true year of the comet!

All-new Mirabilis

Tomorrow and for ten days, Leo and Nikos and I will be bringing you a never-before-seen taster of season two, work on which is what has kept us so busy that we've barely had time to post anything recently. But now those pages are rolling off the production line and - oh my, they look fantastic. But don't take my word for it. Pop back tomorrow and see for yourself.

The original and genuine

And here, by popular request (well, actually nobody but Peter Richardson of Cloud 109 fame actually asked, but that makes it unanimous) is a snapshot taking you from pencils to finished art of a scene from Mirabilis episode 1.

Keep tuning in. At a panel a day, we will get the whole book up online by 1st May 2013. Oh, and I almost forgot, but notice how those uniforms changed between pencils and inks? That followed an intense concepting weekend in which Leo and Martin got together to really define the look of the main characters.

And you know, again I have to say I'm utterly in awe of what Leo and Nikos pull off. Separately, artists of exceptional talent; together, the best team in comics.

Spring is in the air...

It being the spring equinox today - surely cause for celebration in anybody's calendar, if you're not still hung over from yesterday's blog birthday - we thought we'd mark the occasion by putting up reminders of some projects of our own that we own and control. Most of these you can buy in shops or online or both.

To begin with we've got the Dragon Warriors Bestiary, one of the books in the totally rejuvenated and lavishly presented series from Magnum Opus Press. You can read more about things like that on the Fabled Lands blog. The painting is by the great Jon Hodgson, the Frazetta of his generation.

And then there's Frankenstein's Legions, illustrated beautifully (if that's the right word) by Martin, undisputed master of the macabre. His eldritch aura masks a very nice chap who's a demon with a cocktail shaker, and though his postman runs in fear from the dark portal of his manse, his dog loves him. You can't actually buy FL itself yet, but Martin has some gorgeous colour prints on offer.

The stunning comic book art here is by Nikos, our own Greek God of Visual Brilliance. This book is The Replica, with script by sci-fi author Michel Manolios. (I don't know him, but any mate of Nikos's is a mate of ours.)



And last but very definitely not least, this gorgeous howitzer, which is one of the super card models you can buy direct from Leo's Fantasy Cutouts site. Come on, this is what blokes of all ages live for. Get out your glue pots and start uber-geeking!

So, that's what's occupying us all individually. Such unbridled talent, we should really get together and work on a joint project. Oh, wait a minute - we already did.