Drinkers of vein-wine

The king wanted a game of chess, but feared that his courtiers were letting him win. So he offered a boon to any man who could beat him. A man requested that if he won the king should reward him with one grain of wheat on the first square of the chessboard, two on the next, four on the next, and so on. It seemed a modest proposal. The king didn't discover until he lost that he could never hope to grant the boon, even by emptying every granary in the land.

Some authorities have extended the same principle to the spread of vampirism. If each vampire were to take just one victim a week, they argue, the number of vampires in the world should double and redouble until quite soon all of humanity would have joined the ranks of the undead. In less than the time from conception to birth, in fact.

Since this has obviously not happened, it follows that the condition of vampirism is not passed on quite so easily or so quickly as people imagine. Actually it is misleading to think of vampirism as though it were some kind of virus at all, and most of the misconceptions about it can be blamed on popular novels like Dracula.

Let us be clear about one thing: there are many kinds of vampire, and few of the vampires of history have had the stature of Count Dracula. Dracula became one of the undead, not by contracting an illness or being bitten by a bat, but by the sheer implacable force of his will. He was a man who simply would not submit to death. With energy born of relentless evil, he set about the task of building an empire of bloodthirsty dead in a manner that most vampires would never conceive of.

A megalomaniac, Dracula desired subjects to serve and worship him. But most vampires yearn for a solitary existence, and would prefer there to be no others of their kind in the world. This is the one and only reason that we are not overrun by the legions of undeath even now.

"O pity the dead that are dead, but cannot make the journey. Still they moan and beat against the silvery adamant walls of life's exclusive city."

What do all vampires have in common? It is much easier to list their differences: some drain life in the form of blood, some by stealing the breath or dreams of their sleeping prey, some (called succubi and incubi) by the enervating snare of their sexuality. Some are animated corpses, while others have no true material form but manifest themselves as extremely vivid and substantial ectoplasmic emanations. Some can pass for human, and may haunt the backstreets of our cities by night. Others, lacking the intelligence and charismatic force of their cousins, are barely more than monsters. The Feng P'o, or Northern Chinese Vampire, for example, has a manlike head but a giant apelike body covered in gore-soaked fur.

Some vampires, such as the Murony of Eastern Europe, can appear in the form of a black dog, cat or crow. Others are bound to a single hideous form - such as the Tzitzi Mimeh, or "Devil Women" of Ancient Mexico. They were the revenants of women who died in childbirth, and on nights of the new moon they would claw up out of their graves and hover around houses where there was a baby or a young child. If you caught a glimpse of their grinning, fleshless faces at the window it was a sure sign that plague would soon strike your household.

Like dragons, vampires have been known to all cultures of the world in one form or another. The Japanese are familiar with vampiric Gaki - souls whose karmic burden is so terrible that they are reborn as malevolent spirits with an unquenchable hunger. The Ketsu-Gaki is the residue of someone who was excessively cruel or violent when alive; it flits about the night like a giant macabre insect, seeking victims whose lifeblood can sustain it. The Yokushiki-Gaki is more like the vampires we are used to in the West. It can appear as an attractive man or woman, cultured and charming, and when it seduces its victims it drains them like a leech.

In Malaysia there are vampires known as Penangga Lan that appear as disembodied heads trailing a mass of bloody entrails as they float through the air. The Langsuir of the Phillipines is a female vampire that punctures a hole in the back of its prey's neck in order to drink the blood; it can hunt in the form of a glittering white owl or use its beauty to ensnare a victim. From Greece and Turkey come reports of invisible vampires called Opir, who interbreed with mortals and who can only be seen and slain by their own deformed offspring. The aborigines of Australia not so long ago lived in terror of a batlike demon called the Garakan, while 19th Century Cairo was haunted by a vampire that tore out its lovers' tongues with a deadly kiss and then drank the spurting blood that pumped from the wound.

"Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for."

In the midst of all these tales of horror there are a few crumbs of hope. Accounts of vampires are almost unanimous in affirming that a vampire cannot enter a household unless invited to do so by someone who lives there. (This perhaps explains why vampires have developed abilities of charm, command and persuasion.) Most vampires, in Europe at least, are driven back by garlic. This must be wild garlic - "sorcerer's garlic" - and it is the small white flowers that the vampire abhors. Garlic cloves give no protection, and regular consumption of garlic is more likely to drive off vampire hunters than the demons themselves.

Mirrors can give some warning when a vampire is present, as it is said that vampires do not cast a reflection. Beware, though: only a mirror of polished silver has this effect, and it only works against Undead of the ethereal variety. A vampire with a true physical existence (a walking cadaver, that is) will still cast a reflection. A vampire of this type may also be immune to that other traditional defense, sunlight. Even Dracula, who was more probably a vampire of the ghostly sort with the ability to manifest in a variety of forms, was able to go about in broad daylight - though it was only at night that he was able to utilize all of his uncanny supernatural powers. Some sources claim that a vampire cannot cross running water, but it is inadvisable to rely on this. It derives from an old folk-belief that running water, particularly southwards running water, is holy and thus impervious to evil spirits. Possibly only a rural vampire who shares this belief will be affected by it.

Faith is the principal line of defense against the Undead. The crucifix, being the most potent symbol of Christ as well as an ancient talisman of the division between life and death, is anathema to any vampire. The vampire's personal religious conviction is immaterial: as a soulless monster, it abhors the sight of the cross and must retreat from it. In the hands of a sufficiently pure and pious individual, the cross can cause a lesser vampire to dissipate altogether. A more powerful vampire is simply "turned" - forced to depart.

Other religions also have some power over vampires. The Gaki of Japan are the result of a glitch during the proper course of reincarnation, the cycle of death and rebirth which Buddhists believe all things are subject to. They can usually be laid to rest by applying the Buddhist segaki rite for the dead, although first the Gaki's grave must be found. Islamic vampires tremble at the name of Allah and can sometimes be led to renounce their evil ways by reference to the Quran. Jewish vampires are motivated by demonic spirits. They are the forerunners of the traditional European vampire and are more powerful and purposefully malign than the vampires of the Slavic countries. Fortunately the elders of the Jewish church have access to magic via the cabbala, and are better equipped to deal with demons than Christian priests are. In former times Chinese vampires were generally courteous and quite conscious of their wickedness, needing only an appeal to Confucian ethics to point out the weakness in their character and impel them to self-destruction. This tendency has declined since the Cultural Revolution, however, and Chinese vampires are now among the most intractable and deadly in the world.

"What disturbs our blood is but its longing for the tomb."

Once a vampire has been rendered helpless by whatever means, it must be destroyed immediately and without pity. The creature will use all its wiles to escape this fate: threatening, conjuring images, pretending remorse, trying to hypnotize its captors, and so forth. Ignore any such ruse - even a show of hesitation is sometimes enough to dispel whatever advantage you have achieved.

First a sharp implement should be driven through the creature's heart. Some authorities insist on a stake of hawthorn wood (because of the hawthorn tree that Joseph of Arimathea caused to sprout at Glastonbury), but it seems that Harker and Morris were able to dispatch Count Dracula with a kukri and a bowie-knife. If the vampire is of the walking corpse variety, the demonic spirit possessing it will instantly be driven out and the body will attain its proper age and state of decomposition. If it is a vampiric ghost, its visible form will disband and you must then seek out its grave and repeat the procedure on its disinterred remains.

Once the corpse is impaled, any appropriate rites for the dead should be given while at the same time cutting off the head and - as an added precaution - the hands and feet. Various other measures can be taken at this point such as sprinkling holy water or wafer over the body. Lastly the remains should be burnt to ashes and those ashes either scattered over water or hallowed ground or else buried at a crossroads. If there is no crossroads nearby, a T-junction will do.

Van Helsing considers that no technique for dealing with and destroying vampires can be considered one hundred percent effective. These creatures assuredly are the most devious and mighty of all Earthbound unholy things, and the fate they threaten their victims with is nothing less than the damnation of the immortal soul. The best advice is not "Approach with caution", it is "Do not approach at all."

* * *

Hope you enjoyed our special Halloween feature. The story of how it came to be written is over on the Fabled Lands blog, along with the short story that eventually became the basis for A Dying Trade. The illustration is by Russ Nicholson - go and check out his blog too because I'll bet he has something really tasty for tonight's festivities.

National Graphic Novel Writing Month - part 2

We’ve all seen Harlan Ellison’s brilliant rant. I know that doesn’t narrow it down much. I mean his rant about the miserable treatment of writers. I used to work with a producer who was fond of saying, “Nobody wants to pay the cockadoodie writer!” Only she didn’t use the word cockadoodie; it was a bit more heartfelt than that.

It was brought home to me this week when a comic book editor told me he expected to pay “name” writers no more than $800 to write a full 22 pages. How fast would you have to churn out the words to make that pay? It certainly puts the target of National Graphic Novel Writing Month into perspective. For NaGraNoWriMo you have to complete the script for a 48-page book by the end of October.

No grumbling, now – based on those rates, the pro writer would expect to do it in under a week. But that’s if you’re writing monthly comic books, the majority of which are intended to be read and chucked away. “Wonderful trash,” as David Fickling once said, “has its place in comics too.” A graphic novel, though, ought to be a work that people will keep, cherish and re-read many times. Here’s Neil Gaiman, quoted in Writers on Comics Scriptwriting by Mark Salisbury:

“I remember being told off by one writer who writes a comic in a day. We were talking and I was saying, ‘I've just finished this last Sandman, and it took me about three weeks to write,’ and this person looked at me and said, ‘I bash them out in a day. How can you afford to do it?’ Because at the time we were only making $1,500 to $2,000 a script. On the other hand, the ten volumes of Sandman are still in print, and they still sell more than anything else does. We've done roughly a million of them in the US alone and well over a quarter of a million in the UK, and over the years they've paid me back for the amount of effort I put into them. There was no guarantee that they would in the beginning, it was just how I felt they had to be done. Looking back, I'm not sure why I was doing it. I definitely wasn't doing it for the money. It was partly the fun, the joy of creating art, and a lot of it with Sandman was just the joy of doing something I didn't feel anyone had done before, which is not something that you get very often in any field of art or literature.”

Sandman was worth all the care and effort Gaiman poured into it. That book was never an example of Mr Fickling’s “wonderful trash” species of comics. It may have been released in monthly installments, but at heart Sandman was always a graphic novel. It’s a work that you keep discovering new layers to, that keeps on rewarding you each time you return to it- in the same way that the works of Dickens (originally serialized, of course) stay on the shelves while airport thrillers are intended to be read once and left in the bin when you check out of your hotel.

Perhaps the best comparison I can make is with television. I can enjoy a series like Monk or House, where the episodes don’t really build into much of a bigger whole. And on the other hand you’ve got the shows like The Shield or Deadwood, which genuinely are 13-hour movies. And it's the latter that are the equivalent of graphic novels.

Now, I know lots of people hate that term, but I think it has its place. ‘Graphic novel’ doesn’t have to betoken a badly-drawn semi-autobiographical work about an overeducated introvert losing love and gaining wisdom in a Third World warzone, or New Yorkers living in cockroach-infested apartments while ogling a girl they’ll never talk to. Swamp Thing was a graphic novel. Right from the start, even published as a monthly book, it was one big graphic novel. Watchmen too. Two of my current faves, B.P.R.D. and Hellboy, are so thoroughly conceived as graphic novels that I save up a complete run of issues before I’ll even start on a story.

The NaGraNoWriMo exercise isn’t about Mr Fickling’s “wonderful trash”, it’s about writing a graphic novel like that. To give you an idea of the difference, here is a script for a comic book I wrote in a weekend. That was for an issue of Frankenstein’s Legions (whence the pictures) and I wrote it over a weekend because I was doing it as a favor. The Frankenstein’s Legions script is for an 18 page book. It's rough, improperly formatted and a little underlength, but if somebody was only paying me $800 then I'm not going to spend much longer than a day or two on it.

Now contrast that with the opening episode of Mirabilis. Those 25 pages probably took me about five or six weeks to write – and that only after spending several months planning out the whole story. Mirabilis is intended to be for keeps, it has a good part of my heart and soul in it, and I hope the difference shows.

My point here is not to put you off attempting NaGraNoWriMo. (And boy do they need a better acronym. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s already taken, unfortunately.) I just want to make it clear to everyone – and in particular to the penny-pinching comic book company editors out there – that something of the quality of a great, or even halfway decent, graphic novel is not something you can knock out in a day or two.

Forty-eight pages in thirty-one days is an achievable target, but it’s not an easy one. Bring your best game and, as Ronald D Moore says, write with confidence.

iPad news

No, not that iPad news. You'll have to hang on just a short while longer before we can bring you that. But while you're waiting to hear when the green comet is going to light up the App Store (soon, very soon) you might be interested in this report on Russ Nicholson's blog about the Fabled Lands game coming on iPad.

Fabled Lands was a series of connected swords-n-sorcery gamebooks I wrote with Jamie Thomson back in the 1990s. We don't usually cover that branch of the fantasy family tree around here. We're more into Dunsany and John Collier than Feist and Gemmell. But if you allow that the point of contact between those two extremes might be authors like Moorcock, Whitbourn, Tim Powers and Susanna Clarke then possibly there's a line of connection to be drawn.

And while I'm on the subject of fantasy, there are interesting stirrings of something fresh in the genre, in the form of a movement called the New Weird. Okay, not really all that fresh (other than in name) as you can trace it back to In Viriconium, indeed to Gormenghast, and thence back to Gothic literature. But that dark, spicy strain of fantasy is enjoying a bit of a renewal of late. I like it because it brings a little of SF's progressiveness and naturalism to a genre that is often stilted, twee, contemptibly conservative, and slavishly adherent to familiar tropes. (Although if you like all those elven council sagas don't let me put you off.) The New Weird, though, is a bit grungier and rather more likely to shake your world-view than reinforce it. If it sounds like it might be your tincture of opium, you could do worse than start with this manifesto by Paul Charles Smith.

None of which applies to Fabled Lands, I hasten to add, which is unreconstructed FRP-style adventure as it existed in the heyday of gamebooks. Coming soon to an iPad near you.

If the coin had come up tails...

If you did a double take there, it means you are awake and sober. No, indeed that is not a page of Leo's and Nikos's art, but a true curiosity, pencilled by Russ Nicholson and inked and colored by Martin. It came about like this...

Years before Mirabilis appeared in Random House's DFC comic, we had been invited to contribute a try-out version of the first episode for their dummy issue. The artwork in that 6-page episode was all by Leo, including the coloring, and it was very different from Mirabilis as you will have seen it. For one thing, the army uniforms looked more WW1 than the dashing dragoon outfits we eventually (at Martin's urging, and quite right too) clothed Jack and Gerard in.

That was mid-2006, a long time before we actually got our very brief run in the comic. Sometime in autumn 2007, the excellent Ben Sharpe, editor of the DFC, asked us to come up with a bunch of Mirabilis stories to appear in The Guardian, a UK newspaper with a very shaky grasp of both epigenetics and spelling. David Fickling, the comic's publisher, didn't want these to be stories that would later appear in the comic. So I quickly cooked up half a dozen standalone stories, of which one became "A Wrong Turning" and Ben must have like them because he wrote back:

"I think they’re really great. Fantastic, actually. It’s not that we didn’t know that you were an accomplished writer, but to have conjured up all these little perfectly formed scenarios in one sitting certainly deserves the doffing of hats. I think these would be great for the paper – and also for the comic and the graphic novels, and etc, etc."

(Btw I've quoted that, not to fan the fires of my own ego, but to show what good taste and discernment Ben has.)

Now, Leo was still hard at work at a couple of books he was contracted to illustrate - and that was even before he could get going on the regular strip. So there was no way he was going to be able to fit in six 5-page stories on top of his other work. Oh, and did I mention these had to be done gratis? So we turned to Russ Nicholson, an old hand at the comics game and one of the many artists who did try-outs for the John Blake strip.

The only problem: I was still tinkering with the scripts and layouts, so I couldn't ask Russ to try out for our Grauniad strips using those. The only finished script to hand was the one from the dummy issue of The DFC, so we sent a couple of pages of that over to Russ and there's the result above.

It looks odd because the original plan for the DFC was to publish in Berliner format (31cm x 47cm) so the pages ended up having way too many panels. Fortunately that plan was abandoned. Much as I dislike the A4 format, it's certainly better for comics than Berliner! Unfortunately, another notion that got abandoned was the whole plan to put the standalone strips in the newspaper, because instead of appearing in the first issues of the comic it had now been decided to start Mirabilis in the Christmas 2008 issue. In the event, those DFC strips that did appear in The Guardian were, I think, then reprinted in the comic anyway, so it would have been a right waste of Russ's time to get him to do 30 pages of comic strips for nowt but a thank you.

Readers of the Fabled Lands blog will know that I'm a big fan of Russ's work. However, I don't think the style he went for there would have fitted alongside the uniquely atmospheric and warm style that Leo and Nikos created between them. In theory, the standalone strips didn't have to mesh with the main Mirabilis story, but there needed to be some sense of them belonging to the same tradition. As I've said elsewhere, Leo and Nikos remind me of the work of Guy Davis and Dave Stewart on B.P.R.D. - or maybe, if we're going back further into the great age of comics, of luminaries like Herb Trimpe, George Tuska and Marie Severin. The style Russ used is more of a traditional British comic look - Steel Claw, say, in Valiant. (Hmm, okay, the art on the Steel Claw was by Jesús Blasco, who was Spanish, but you know what I mean...)

Meanwhile, you may be wondering about that original 6-page episode in the DFC dummy issue. That should remain locked away in the vaults, I think. Like the original Buffy pilot, it served its purpose as a step in the development process. But here are a few frames for comparison with how the characters ended up - and, below that, the real deal as Jack and Gerard find the Kind Gentleman's coin. Leo's and Nikos's work never fails to thrill me. Accept no substitutes.

Bald sand elf

No, Mirabilis hasn't gone all elves and dungeons, that's a page from the Fabled Lands comic written by Jamie Thomson and drawn by Russ Nicholson. To tell the truth, it's the only finished page they did, although you can read the whole comic in rough pencils as a work in progress - issue #1 and issue #2. It's based on Jamie's BBC Radio adventure serial "The Heart of Harkun" that gets repeated every couple of years. He's currently at Lionhead Studios writing the script for Fable 3, so you know to expect a high standard.

If high fantasy action is your thing, you might want to check out the Fabled Lands blog, which has updates about stuff like the upcoming iPhone game, the FL boardgame and so on. Make sure to stock up on potions of +3 healing before you head over there. Dragons abound.

Meanwhile Mirabilis steams on into the east, with the next episode seeing Jack renew an acquaintance and finding out more about the green comet. Catch up on earlier episodes so you're ready for "Outside Looking In" tomorrow.

The best gamebook ever? Discover for yourself – it’s free!

UPDATE: Oct 14 2012 - I've taken down the free Heart of Ice file because the book is due to be re-released in spring 2013 by Osprey Books, along with half a dozen other gamebooks by me and Jamie Thomson - with more to come after that, we hope. Read all about it on the Fabled Lands blog.

In the twenty-third century the world is dying. Only a few million humans are left clinging to existence as the weather worsens and ice tightens its inexorable grip on the planet.

The cause of this slow death is Gaia, the AI satellite system designed to regulate Earth's climate. But Gaia has gone mad, and instead of a paradise she has made of the world a frozen hell.

Mankind's last glimmer of hope is the Heart, a crystalline meteorite thought to have been forged in the Big Bang. It has the ability to shape a universe, the one who touches it becoming mankind's savior and wielding the power of a god - or a devil.

The power to make yourself lord of a new creation is a tempting prize. The greatest heroes of the age covet the Heart for themselves, and the race is on.

The quest for ultimate power will take you across a dying world, contending with monsters, mutants and desperate men, to the haunted city of Du-En in the midst of the Saharan ice wastes.

You will need all your resourcefulness to choose the right allies, outwit your rivals, and be first to reach the Heart.

Now don't say I don't spoil you, because we've got a free gift and it's a big ‘un. Right HERE you can download an interactive PDF of my sci-fi adventure gamebook Heart of Ice, complete with exquisite illustrations by fantasy gaming legend Russ Nicholson and evocative maps by Leo. You won't need dice, you won't need a pencil. Just unzip the file and get playing.

And if you like it, please tell a friend. Or mail it to them. Shout about it on forums. Tweet about it. Plug it in your own blog (it’s http://tinyurl.com/y8qo9ou if you do, and I thank you from the bottom of my not-at-all icy heart). That’s it, that’s the only payment – we just ask that you help spread the word to everyone who might enjoy it.

Now, I appreciate that in these days of freebies everywhere, you do have to look a gift horse in the mouth. It may not cost you money, but there's still your time to think of. So I will say that Heart of Ice has been frequently described in reviews as "the best gamebook ever" and, although I obviously can't comment on that, it is the best gamebook I ever wrote and, frankly, that does probably make it the best gamebook ever. (Hey – it's honesty you're after here, right?)

If further incentive is needed, take a look at some reviewers’ comments:

• “The game system is not only simple and elegant, but it also makes an absolute joy out of character creation.”
• “Superb use of exposition, tone, and detail.”
• “The characterization surpasses that of many a novel.”
• “Technology whose deeper secrets are lost to the centuries meshes wonderfully with a kind of freakish neo-Renaissance civilization of explorers, opportunists, merchants and nobles.”
• “At all times this world feels as if it exists outside of your immediate experiences, outside of the page.”
• “The metaphysical element reflected in the skill set melds seamlessly into the setting.”
• “It shows every sign of having been written by someone who loves the gamebook medium, and with great narrative skill and vision to back that energy up.”
• “The best character design, the best one-shot world design and the best writing.”
• “Heart of Ice is an experience to remember.”

Thanks to Paul Mason, print publisher of Heart of Ice, for okaying the free ebook version. And to Per Jorner for insights and critique.

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!

The Weird Wild East

The posts over on Garen Ewing’s blog and Sarah McIntyre's blog about the Royal Academy's Kuniyoshi exhibition (till June 7, don't miss it) gives me an excuse to show another of Russ Nicholson’s great illustrations for the Fabled Lands series. This was from Lords of the Rising Sun and I had specifically asked Russ to let himself be influenced by Kuniyoshi.

The scene illustrated is where the hero falls asleep and is asked by a queen to help her black-&-yellow liveried retainers fight off a dragon that has entered the castle. When the hero wakes, he is told by his friend that he missed the extraordinary sight of a snake trying to enter a beehive and being driven away by the swarm. In the jagged pattern of the samurai coats you can see Kuniyoshi’s design for the livery of the 47 Ronin.

Kuniyoshi himself had a marvellous ability to convey movement and drama. His heroes skate down roofs and tiles go flying. They grapple – sometimes underwater – and sinewy limbs entwine. Beams of magical force fling characters bodily through the air. Warriors are caught mid-leap in images that could be stills from a King Hu movie.

And the monsters..! Massive earth spiders, grinning demons, smoky flying things that look like aborted foetuses. Kuniyoshi was depicting the famous actors of his day, but he didn’t leave them becalmed on a wooden stage – he put them in a $150 million SFX blockbuster. When I say he was the 19th century Gene Colan, that’s not me being lowbrow; I like to think Kuniyoshi would see it as the highest praise.

Dinosaur lives! Or he should do...

In a parallel universe, some very interesting strips appeared in the DFC that never made it into our timeline. Even now, they’re out there. They exist. Within a year, they could be graphic novels on the bookshelves in our reality. There’s no reason why other universes should have all the fun.

So, publishers: buck your ideas up! Didn’t you see the success Borders has been having with their new graphic novel section? Pull your collective fingers out and start releasing some great original story-driven graphic novels here in the UK. No, I don’t mean dreamy melancholic reminiscences about growing up in ‘80s Britain, or worthy would-be award-winning stuff about being a child under the Khmer Rouge. Just some pulse-pounding, imagination-thrilling stories that will – good heavens – actually sell.

Here are a few I’d snap up in an instant:

Zhanna: Adventures in Time and Alternative Realities
Garen Ewing posted about this on the Super Comics Adventure Squad blog. He said that was just a working title, but you know what? I like it. Zhanna didn’t make it into the DFC because the time travel theme clashed with John Blake. (Hmm. So I guess it’s just as well we didn’t tell them about Gus…)

Dinosaur and WolfBy the absurdly talented, charismatic and inventive Iain McCaig, who was born the same day as me but probably not in Slough. The characters are a pigeon and a dachshund who think they’re epic heroes. At least, the pigeon does; the poor old dog just gets dragged along. It’s funny, wondrous, exuberant storytelling at its very best. You can find out more about this and some of Iain’s other projects in his gorgeous art book Shadowline.

Kingdom of Feathers
This strikes me as a kind of modern Trigan Empire or Atlantis Chronicles. The premise is absolutely brilliant and is the sort of thing that would have had me enthralled at any age from 8 onwards (right up to the present day). I’m not going to spill the beans here as I don’t know how the writer intended to unfold the story – or indeed who the writer is. But here are some pencil pages by Russ Nicholson.

Life and death are only a mouse-click away

This might seem kind of off-topic, but bear with me... Magnum Opus Press have this week released the first two books of the Dragon Warriors role-playing game as downloadable PDFs. I wrote Dragon Warriors with Oliver Johnson back in the 1980s, and I'm proud to say that it introduced a whole generation of British, Canadian, Australian and South African gamers to fantasy role-playing. (I'd like to say the same about US gamers, but as it happens they got D&D instead.)

Rather than attempt a blurb-type description myself - never a good idea - I shall quote from Magnum Opus's own summary:

ABOUT THE DRAGON WARRIORS ROLE-PLAYING GAME

Dragon Warriors is a fantasy role-playing game of adventure, magic, folklore, superstition and horror. The players take on the roles of gallant heroes in a world of fantasy who undertake dangerous missions and adventures, pitting themselves, their wits, their weapons and their magical abilities against any number of foes and challenges. Some do it for money, some for honour, and some for darker, more personal reasons.

The game is set in a world known as Legend, loosely based on Europe at the time of the medieval crusades. Human civilisation has spread across the world, but its links are fragile and are often broken by conflict, invasion, or reasons natural or supernatural. Man has learned something of the art of magic, though spell-casters are widely feared by normal folk. Creatures from folklore and myth roam outside the human communities, or sometimes inside them, spreading fear and ruin. And there are ancient quests and long-dormant discoveries to be unearthed by the brave, and riches and status to be gained.

The world of Dragon Warriors feels familiar but at the same time it is a place filled with threats and the unknown. The further you stray from home, the stranger the places you will encounter. The desolate tundra and pine forests of Krarth - reached by crossing the Rathurbosk, a magical mile-long bridge-city built over a gouge between two continents. The ruins of the city of Spyte, destroyed by its mad rulers the Magi whose descendents still control Krarth today. The peril-filled tropical jungles of Mungoda that grow over the faded remains of dead civilisations - jungles now home to the Volucreth bird-men, who hunt humans like animals. The New Selentine Empire, desperate to recapture the glories and power it held in the previous millennium. The Nomad Khanates. The Ta'ashim lands, steeped in magical stories and now in uneasy truce with Principalities of the Crusades. The great city of Ferromaine where money is king and anything can be bought if the price is right. And much more.

DW belongs to a very different tradition of fantasy from Mirabilis (as different, indeed, as Jack Vance and Lord Dunsany) but the connection is not as tenuous as it seems. Not only did Leo devise the Rathurbosk, which he did a great painting of, he also helped create the basic map of the whole world of Legend.

I was living at that time in Abbeville Road in South London. Leo had come up to stay the weekend and, as often happened, we got to talking about our latest projects. I had to create a setting for Dragon Warriors, the way Lord of the Rings has Middle Earth, but the only part Oliver and I had worked out in detail up till then was Ellesland, the setting for the first five books. With book six looming we needed to give players a full worldbook with details of all the other countries we had so far only mentioned in passing. As Oliver was wrapping up book five, it was high time I made a start on Legend but so far hadn't got much further than sketching a few ideas on the back of that familiar envelope...

At which point Leo grabbed a big sheet of tracing paper from his bag and drew the outline map of the DW world. Just like that. And then we starting riffing on what each bit of the world might contain, and that's when the Rathurbosk got added to the world - and the gothic idea of the degenerate descendants of the original Magi, many of whose armorial emblems Leo drew on the spot. The map above is by Russ Nicholson, and marvellous it is indeed, but I also treasure that original scrappy blueprint map that Leo drew.

Grauniad strips

A real old curio here. Back around September 2007 we were asked to do some Mirabilis strips to go in the Guardian. There was no way we could get the main storyline started at that stage, as Leo was still finishing off a couple of books. So I wrote a bunch of one-off stories set throughout the Mirabilis year: "Diamond in the Sky", "Two by Two", "The Happy Event", "Home Front", "The Jar of Piccalilli", "Wrong Turning", "A Flower in Your Hair" and "Never Never on the Portsmouth Line".

With Leo tied up, we turned to my old mucker Russ Nicholson for the art. Russ used to illustrate girls' comics like Jackie way back when (not many people know that) and I can only imagine the effect of a shoggoth in the Lower Fifth hockey team.

Anyway, we made a start but decided that Russ's comic style and tone (as shown) was too different from Leo's for the strips ever to mesh, so the idea got dropped. Pity - I would like to have had a strip alongside Posy Simmonds. Oh, behave.

Martin McKenna later pencilled another of the stories - the Halloween one: "Wrong Turning". At some point in the distant future, when the four main Mirabilis graphic novels are complete, I'm hoping we can return to the short stories. We could use a blend of styles, with Leo and Nikos inking each other's pencils or whatever. Could be interesting?