A deal with Death

Some years ago, my wife and I spent a week at Shute Gatehouse, a place owned by The Landmark Trust that you find by turning off the main road, passing between two half-collapsed stone posts, and finding yourself on a narrow route that seems to take you a couple of decades back in time. The mist closed in and we spent a few days exploring the local woods, pubs, and footpaths. 

One afternoon we came across a steep driveway lined with pumpkins - rotting, puckered and caved-in on themselves in the week since Halloween, but which must have marked out the way to a bonfire party. The story “A Wrong Turning” arrived in my head just like that, in one piece, a gift from the otherworld. 

The premise: it's that time of year when the veil between life and death is so thin that to stray off the path could easily take you on a detour via undiscovered country. Guy Wasserman has already suffered one bereavement, and when his car is forced off the main road he finds Death waiting with an impossible demand: "You, or your son." 

“A Wrong Turning” is my homage to the old Warren horror comics of the 1960s and 1970s. The tight, atmospheric pencils are by Martin McKenna, and you’ll see right away why he was so in demand for movie storyboarding. His artwork on this little tale reminds me of the great EC Comics and Creepy artists like Gray Morrow, Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres and Al Williamson.

A bargain with Death

It's that time of year again, when the veil between life and death is so thin that to stray off the path could easily take you on a detour via the Twilight Zone.

Martin and I cooked up this Warren-style short story "A Wrong Turning" a couple of years ago. I had spent a week at Shute Gatehouse, a place you find by turning off the main road, passing between two half-collapsed stone posts, and finding yourself on a narrow route that seems to take you a couple of decades back in time. The mist closed in and Roz and I spent a few days exploring the local woods, pubs, and footpaths. One afternoon we came across a line of pumpkins, puckered and caved-in on themselves in the week since Halloween, but which must have marked out the way to a party. The story arrived just like that, in one piece, a gift from the otherworld.

And so...

Guy Wasserman has already suffered one bereavement, and when his car is forced off the main road, he finds Death waiting with an impossible offer: "You, or your son."

Find out if Guy can cheat Death in the free PDF right here.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight

Frank Frazetta died yesterday in a Florida hospital. My first encounter with his work was the tiny black and white images of Creepy and Eerie covers reproduced in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Even in that form the images had the power to transport you to other worlds. I'd pore over them for hours, imagining scenarios of mind-numbing terror that Archie Goodwin's actual stories, marvellous as they were, could never quite match. A year or two later, I found some of the Lancer Conan books in my local newsagent and so got my first dizzying taste of Frazetta in color. It was as if the whole exotic world of American fantasy had come crashing through the plywood wall of 1970s Home Counties suburbia. I had a Frazetta badge (it was "The Death Dealer") that was still with me at college at the end of the '70s, and if I looked hard now I'm pretty sure I'd find it. For several generations he was one of the defining draftsmen of a gutsy, full-blooded, rock-n-roll brand of fantasy. The Aesir will greet him with honor.

Final destination

We like locomotives. And we like things that are a bit unsettling. So check out this brilliant animation, Madame Tutli-Putli, by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski - interviewed here - and a whole talented team with too many consonants in their names to list here.

If this appeals, you may want to pop over to Wrong - the modern magazine in the tradition of Weird Tales, EC Comics and Warren - and Coven 13, of course. The idea of the magazine is that it is wholly owned by the creators themselves. Come and give it your support; dictatorships aren't toppled by people saying, "I might show my face next week."

Cloud 109 and the lunch that lasted till breakfast

Like a stack of dominoes tumbling over, or a single fissile atom setting off a chain reaction, a whole bunch of blogs were late this weekend because of a long lunch chez Morris with the incredibly talented Peter Richardson and David Orme, artist and writer respectively of Cloud 109.

I say a long lunch - it was very long, and turned into rather more than just lunch. After chicken satay sandwiches, a delicious banoffi pie that Peter brought from Cook in Battle, hours of interesting conversation, and many cups of tea in the glorious spring sunshine, David had to run to catch his train, but Peter was almost out the door when we managed to drag him back, ply him with beer and wine and lasagne, set the creative world to rights - and the next thing we knew, a phone was buzzing like a trapped insect. Well, it couldn't be mine or Roz's because we never switch them on. It was in fact Peter's wife, just calling to tell him that he'd missed his train home. Undeniably true - it was one of those evenings where we all thought it was about 9:30 but the clock insisted it was nearly midnight.

In the course of the evening, we cooked up the germ of a master plan to free comic creators from their shackles. Let the Empire tremble and the Sith scatter in fear, the rebels are about to commandeer their own Death Star and get thermonuclear on their asses! Well, maybe not anything quite so belligerent, that's the Lussac-Saint-Émilion talking (thanks, David) - but it is an exciting and slightly Marxist idea for pooling a mass of scintillating creative talent in a way that allows the writers and artists to reap the rewards of their own labours. Oh, and that incidentally will give birth to the new Creepy and Eerie. I'll be getting touch with some of you offline to talk about that.

Apart from the opportunity to get together with two fellow authors whose work I hugely admire, I also got my mitts on a copy of the Cloud 109 teaser book from Lulu. The art continues a little further with the story than we've so far seen on the blog, but the book also includes the script right to the end of book one. Well, my resolve not to look at that lasted all of ten seconds. Obviously I wouldn't dream of putting up any spoilers here, but I will say that the ending is everything you'd hope for - not only tying up the first part of the story, but planting the seeds that will take it on in the next two books. And I am in awe of David's deft control in telling a story at cinematic speed without ever seeming like it's rushed or missing anything. One to watch out for. Even Roz, who is not usually a comics reader, has lately been intrigued by both Mezolith and Cloud 109, and if I can drag her away from Nail Your Novel long enough, she's promised to do us a review.

Here by the way is the original image of Goth Gina in the Cloud 109 chatroom. Peter explains on the blog why he changed this by giving her spooky contact lenses, and for the sake of the story I think he was right to do so. But he did mention on Sunday that he liked the sad beauty of the simpler version. And just to show that every comics heroine needs a Goth outfit in their wardrobe, here's Estelle (as drawn by Martin and by Leo) freeing that inner sexy darkness. Down, boys.

A good scare

Over on the brilliant Cloud 109 blog, Peter Richardson has been running some veritable comics classics, with today's offering being a tense little drama from the pages of Creepy drawn by the legendary Richard Corben. In a career that has produced some truly great strips, Corben's standout story has to be "The Crooked Man" from Hellboy #33-35. Horror comics are at best usually intriguing rather than truly frightening, but this story (written by the equally gifted Mike Mignola) has chills to spare. It benefits from being inspired by the Silver John stories of Manly Wade Wellman, who drew on North American folklore to whip up some yarns that are so nightmarishly disturbing that you want to look away but you can't, you just can't. If you're into comics that push the boundaries, seek it out - but don't blame me for the sleepless nights.

The next nine Fridays

Doh. If I'd thought about it, I should have numbered these as a countdown and put them up as a sort of Advent calendar thingy. Nice to see them all like that, anyway, and to dream of the parallel universe in which we're free to publish them as a monthly comic book. As a youngster, I used to gaze longingly at the covers of Creepy and Eerie advertised in the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Were those atmospheric covers by Frazetta just mood pieces, or did they actually illustrate the stories inside? In the absence of actual copies of the mags, my ten-year-old mind tried to conjure up tales that would do justice to such powerful images. But (the good news) you don't have to make do with DIY Mirabilis. Read on...

It's been three and a half years since we created our first episode for the dummy issue of the DFC, and over a year now since weekly instalments of Mirabilis began appearing in that late, lamented comic. There was a long creative development phase: Jack started out as a podgy kid in WW1 uniform, Estelle wasn't nearly as pretty, and the Kind Gentleman wore a walnut whip wig that towered higher than Amy Winehouse's beehive. Fast forward to 2010 and, all told, we've clocked up about 4 man-years of effort - not just in creating the 190 pages of the Winter book, but also the storyline for all four graphic novels, the standalone episodes such as "A Wrong Turning", and the Royal Mythological Society correspondence over on the main site. That's a whole heap of work, taking up a good chunk of our creative lives, and most of it self-funded into the bargain. And most maddening of all, it's work that has largely never been seen. Only ten episodes of Mirabilis ever appeared in print, barely a quarter of the first book. The rest sits now in a virtual drawer gathering digital dust.

Okay, so if you were a subscriber to the DFC you will have already seen episodes 1-10. But it's fair to say that the DFC didn't enjoy quite the best quality paper or printing, and some of the early episodes came out looking rather muddy. So we are going to be rolling out (as they say) those episodes on the Mirabilis website, a new one every Friday over the next nine weeks, starting tomorrow. Not only will you get to see the previously published episodes in a form closer to how they are supposed to look, you'll get to read on and see what happens after Estelle fell out of that train window. And to cap it all we'll be running at least one never before seen episode. Santa told us you'd been nice, that's why.

"A Wrong Turning"

A few people have said they'd rather read the Christmas ghost story on site, instead of as a PDF download. And, as it is the season of giving, here are the pages. If you want the PDF version you can find it at http://tinyurl.com/yjpqbks. Tell your friends.

A ghost story for Christmas

We could have knitted you some socks. Or given you a box of handmade crackers that explode with a green flash. But in the end we decided to go with a traditional Christmas ghost story. Christmas Eve in particular is a time when the world holds its breath, the pulse of time fluttering to nothing for an instant before it begins again. Could there be a more appropriate time to settle down with a tale to send shivers up your spine?

“A Wrong Turning” is one of half a dozen self-contained seasonal stories originally written to promote Mirabilis. There’s nothing about the story that marks it as being set in the Mirabilis universe, though. A bereaved father and son take a detour that leads them into an eerie encounter with the next world. The tight, atmospheric pencils are by Martin, and you’ll see right away why he is so in demand for movie storyboarding. His artwork on this little tale reminds me of the great Creepy artists like Gray Morrow, Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres and Al Williamson.

You’ll find the PDF of “A Wrong Turning” here. Go ahead, it’s our Christmas present to you. All we ask is that, if you enjoy it, please send it to at least two friends who you think might like it, and ask them to do the same. If you have a blog or a website whose readers might appreciate a little scare, by all means feel free to put it up there too. 2010 is the year we’re planning to embrace viral marketing, and we mean to hit the ground running.

The genius of Ditko

There is no greater comic art luminary than Steve Ditko. Leaving aside the brilliance of his draughtsmanship, any page of his work is like a masterclass by the world’s greatest storyteller, director and cinematographer all in one.

Take a look at this excerpt from “The Shrieking Man”, which originally appeared in Eerie #4. The first page introduces us the set-up, hero, villain, dramatizes the whole thing with some vibrant Ditko drawing and atmospheric Dutch tilt, and incidentally slips in quite a bit of vital exposition without us even noticing. (To be fair, writer Archie Goodwin deserves his share of the credit for that.)

Now see what Ditko pulls off on the second page. In three panels he moves us from the set-up scene to a passage-of-time montage by way of a shot explaining the nearby graveyard. Three freakin’ panels, dude! Most modern comic artists wouldn’t be able to pull that off if you gave them three whole pages.

Then look at how Ditko kicks the story action into gear. A camera prowls to the window. See those tangled trees, the contrast of light and shade, the angles he picks, the care with which he locates the asylum relative to the graveyard so that we always know where we are. Again, many of today’s artists would miss this. They’d eschew the long shot to avoid having to draw too much detail, and a string of close-ups would leave us disorientated. Ditko never needs to clutter his frame with detail. It’s all there, but he carries it off with deft economy.

Yep, I’m kind of a fan if you couldn’t tell.

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.