From Mytek the Mighty to the TARDIS control room

I was delighted and honoured to be invited to appear at CRoM Con Europe, the convention for comics fans and SF/fantasy geeks. Many thanks to Pops Van Sant, our esteemed host, and Glenn B Fleming, UK comics powerhouse, for including me. I got to hold forth about Mirabilis for a bit, describe my visit to the Doctor Who studios back in the Hartnell era, and as an added bonus I got to meet the guys from the Earth Station One podcast. Their back catalogue of episodes will be the soundtrack to my country walks well into the spring.

At one point we got to talking about Wrath of the Gods, a fabulously scary '60s comic strip set in the mythic age of Greece. It was illustrated by the (also mythic) Ron Embleton, of course, not "Ron Pemberton" as I burbled during the podcast. (I'd been chatting about Inside Number 9 recently; that's the only excuse I've got.)

If you want to skip, I come in after about three and half hours, but listen to the whole thing (there's a part two as well) because there are so many fascinating people with stories to tell and wisdom to impart. Talking of which, here's the time Glenn met Jack "King" Kirby:

And if you've just joined us:

Indestructible!

"Hapless", "vengeful", "ruthless", "snapped"... That was the vocabulary of those British comics stories I grew up with. Kelly's Eye ran in the UK weekly comic Valiant. Tim Kelly stole the jeweled eye of the idol of the Inca god Zoltec, which turned out to be a handy accessory for an adventurer, seeing as how it made the wearer invulnerable.

Kids today might have iPhones and videogames, but they never got to thrill to the likes of Kelly's Eye and The Steel Claw and giant robot ape Mytek the Mighty. There was something in the UK drinking water back then, and those strips were masterpieces of focused fantasy storytelling that skated on the fine line between brilliant and barmy.

Many years after following the adventures of Tim Kelly, I got the job of writing stories about another indestructible man: Captain Scarlet. It wasn’t easy. Captain Scarlet got blown up, he just came back to life. The only time I managed to inject a bit of tension was when he was shot in the chest but people were in danger so he couldn't afford the luxury of dying and coming back to life again.

Tim Kelly's invulnerability was something quite different. Because it depended on him having hold of the Eye of Zoltec, there was plenty of drama to be squeezed from situations where he'd lost the Eye or had to give it to somebody else.

My enjoyment of those British comics of the '60s will never approach the all-consuming and utterly obsessive ardor I have for Marvel Comics of the time. But with hindsight I can see that they were little gems of imaginative fantasy that fully deserve that cherished place in my heart. Hope you like this glimpse into the past.

Exeposed

A while back I did an interview for Exeposé, the student newspaper of Exeter University. As it deals with a couple of my main interests (comics and interactive fiction) I thought I'd reproduce it here. The picture is me dressed as Reason at my wife-to-be's "Come as a God" party a good few years ago. Why the pistol? Because you can't argue with Reason.

We notice that you studied Physics at university. How did you go from that to what you are doing now?

I’d have done an English degree too if I’d had the time. I’ve always been on that cusp between art and science, could never quite make up my mind to go for one or the other. That probably explains why I’ve ended up gravitating towards the games industry, where I can indulge my passions for storytelling, visual design, logic, physics and maths all at once.

What attracted you to graphic novels? What do they give writers and readers that traditional books don’t?

If you look at it from a practical point of view, some stories are easier to tell visually. Like if you are creating a completely new world without any real-world references – Avatar, say. If you did that as a novel you’d have to bombard the reader with great chunks of descriptive prose – ugh. At the same time, you might not want to do it as a movie because your story needs more space and depth than you can fit into two hours. Or, of course, you might not have a quarter of a billion dollars to spend.

In fact, though, I never think it through in that kind of detail. You just start working on a story and you either feel it’s right for prose or you start blocking it out in comic panels in your head. Your muse decides for you whether it’s going to be a graphic novel.

As for what graphic novels have that traditional books don’t – well, what does painting have that music doesn’t? They’re different, both equally to be cherished as modes of expression.

Do you have a favourite graphic novel? If so, why?

Wow – I wouldn’t know where to start, I read so many. I like the works of Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Alison Bechdel, Posy Simmonds, Matt Kindt, Alan Moore… A bunch of diverse comics creators who don’t have anything much in common, except that they rarely disappoint.

If I’m going to pick my desert island read it’d be Neil Gaiman’s tour-de-force run on The Sandman. That’s an opus of around 1500 pages, so if you want to dip in, start with the collections Dream Country and Fables and Reflections.

Do you think graphic novels are taken seriously enough as a form of literature?

Not in the UK, that’s for sure. Here, a graphic novel has to be freighted with literary significance for critics to get past their aversion to the medium. Like, I was looking at the Guardian yesterday and they had a full-page review of Chris Ware’s latest graphic novel. Now, I’m not disrespecting Ware’s work – he’s very talented, and I like that comics are a rich, broad tapestry with room for all kinds of story. But as Wiki says, “His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression.” And that’s why the Guardian will review him and wouldn’t touch 300, say. UK critics don’t know how to read comics; they don’t have a cultural lineage to fit them into. So they view them with the classic cocktail of fear, loathing and fascination. And so the only graphic novels they review seriously are the ones that fit really in an illustrated literary tradition rather than being unashamedly comics.

I don’t want to get too parochial about this because all writers work internationally these days, but Britain punches way above its weight in comics. You’ve got Gaiman, Moore, Ellis, Millar, Ennis, Quitely – too many to list, and many of them among the most successful in the profession. But they’re all working mostly outside the UK because comics here are barely a cottage industry. And the problem with that is it makes it difficult to get a British voice and sensibility across in comics. Those writers and artists have all had to adapt their style to the American market to some extent.

It’s very different in France, where four out of every ten books sold are graphic novels. You can go to a bande dessinée convention and you’ve got whole families there – kids, teens, parents, all reading graphic novels. And because of that there’s a nicely diverse range of genres: thrillers, rom-com, whodunits, science fiction. It’s not all superheroes and zombies.

You often work in collaboration with other writers and artists, what do you enjoy about these collaborations and what do you find more challenging? Has there been a collaboration that has been particularly interesting for you?

Actually, the truth is that my name may be alongside somebody else’s on the cover, but I rarely collaborate that closely. I’ve worked on a lot of series where I’ve split the writing chores with partners, but we usually have a quick consultation and then get stuck into our own individual books.

Comics like Mirabilis are the exception. Those are interesting precisely because the creative collaboration is so challenging. For example, I grew up on movies and Marvel comics, so all my layouts for Mirabilis are informed by that. But the penciller, Leo Hartas, is more influenced by illustrated books and European stuff like Tintin and The Beano. So sometimes it feels like we’re coming from opposite ends of the spectrum. I go for sexy, dark, dramatic with close ups, upshots and wide angles; he goes for funny, sweet, diagrammatic with medium shots, flat/diorama staging, and so on. But that cycle of thesis, antithesis, synthesis can throw up some nice creative surprises, I think.

A lot of your work makes literature an active experience, and puts the reader in charge. What do you hope to achieve by giving the reader a central part?

Only what any writer wants – a connection. An emotional reaction. That’s why the interactivity in Frankenstein isn’t about solving the plot, it’s about the relationship you develop with Victor and his creature. The choices you make affect their degree of empathy, alienation and – most importantly – the extent to which they trust you. That affects how much of himself Victor will reveal to you, for instance. Whether it works or not is up to readers to judge, but I think there’s never been a book anything like it before – and it’s nice when an author gets to say that.

It’s true that I’m interested in ways to make story worlds that people can interact with to discover or create their own narratives. But I think videogames are a better place to do that than interactive literature. I’m just using books (book apps, that is) as a test-bed to try out some ideas first.

Do you think it is difficult to adapt such a well-established story? Has it been well received?

Very well received, especially among younger readers (I mean teen and up) who probably wouldn’t crack open a 200-year-old novel if they’re not doing an Eng Lit course. Frankenstein is one of the modern world’s defining myths, a story that everyone thinks they know but one that is rarely read in the original. I hope my version will encourage more people to take a look at it.

Now the but: it was well received for a book that was only released on iPad and iPhone. I’m working on epub3 and Kindle versions but it was a big mistake not to bring those out at the same time. Lots of people were seeing the reviews (Salon.com had a nice one, incidentally, saying “it may be the best interactive fiction yet” – though admittedly the competition is not fierce) but couldn’t read it because they had Android tablets. But, you know, I don’t get to direct the publishing strategy. Unfortunately.

The adaptation wasn’t hard because, seminal work though Frankenstein is, it’s pretty much the worst classic novel ever written. I should qualify that. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she wrote it, and I certainly don’t want anyone seeing my teenage scribblings. On the other hand, she revised it in her thirties and only made it stodgier – and didn’t fix some glaring plot holes. So I felt completely free to take liberties with the text in a way I wouldn’t have done with Austen or the Brontës, say.

The end result is that my version is much more modern. There’s a lot of Mary Shelley’s prose still in there, but I fleshed out the characterization and the relationships as we’d expect in a novel these days, and I went for a pastiche style which feels 19th century in spirit but might flow a little easier to today’s readers. A large part of that is because I cut all Shelley’s travelogue stuff. Boy, she really padded that thing with chunks of a Grand Tour guide book.

Oh, and I set the action in Paris during the Revolution. That’s because Mary Shelley had Victor creating the monster in 1792, but for some reason had him at university in Ingolstadt – which seemed a bit of a waste of a rather wonderfully serendipitous dramatic setting.

Do you see interactive creations such as Frankenstein as the future of the publishing industry?

Not in the slightest! Take Amis writing Time’s Arrow. He didn’t think, “Now all novels will be written backwards.” My version of Frankenstein is an experiment, that’s all. Literature has always been experimenting and always will. But God help us if publishers suddenly start churning out “classics interactive”.

With the growth of the digital publishing industry, how do you think the issue of piracy will be handled?

Publishing is going to have to learn to get along with digital piracy, unless they have a trick up their sleeve that the music industry didn’t. But it’s not all bad news. We need to look at ways to extend the usual revenue model – slipcase editions with extras, for example, and pre-subscribed serials. Digital can be seen as part of the wide mouth of the funnel that draws paying customers in, whether or not they pay for the digital experience itself.

Do you have any exciting plans for the future?

Fabled Lands LLP, my company with Jamie Thomson, Frank Johnson and Tim Gummer, owns the Dark Lord series, co-created by the two of us and written by Jamie, which won the Roald Dahl Prize and has appeared as a comic strip by Dan Boultwood in The Phoenix. And we have a couple of new series that are about ready to go in book form. We tend to use print as a springboard for properties that we want to go on to develop in other media, which is either cynically manipulative or far-sighted depending on how much of a fiction purist you are.

Add to that my ongoing work on Mirabilis – which was conceived as a 260-page graphic novel saga but is growing to more like a target of 800 pages. And I have a long-cherished videogame project for kids that would be built around forging a real relationship with the characters. So I have more exciting projects than I have time to work on them, that’s for sure.

What would be your dream mash-up novel?

I love mash-ups in music. Have you heard the Arcade Fire v Blondie one? Or that sublime moment in The Sopranos where you realize that, yes, they really are crashing the Peter Gunn theme into “Every Breath You Take”. Oh, and as a role-player I have to give an honourable mention to “Roll a D6” even though strictly speaking it’s a cover spoof, not a mash-up.

So I love that stuff, and I think mash-ups like that are a great modern art form. But (sorry) I have to say that mash-up novels aren’t books, they’re just marketing gimmicks. That “this meets that” thing was always just a formula to get the attention of the dumbest guy in the room. Why, if mash-ups work so well in music and art, do they come across so lame in storytelling? (And, yes, I do mean you, Cowboys and Aliens. Or anything "vs" anything, come to that.) You’d think it would be the easiest medium to do a mash-up in. Maybe that’s the problem. It always feels like creativity by numbers.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note, so let’s take a look at some great mash-up movie trailers. Must Love Jaws and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments are over eight years old but they still haven’t been bettered. Sheer genius.

Look back at winter

You know how the summer holiday adverts start appearing on TV the moment the turkey and tinsel are cleared away. In the same spirit, here's an extended look at the opening of Mirabilis Season Two. The spring has sprung, the grass has ris, I wonder where Jack Ember is? Forty fathoms down, is the answer. Catch up on what's been happening to all our regular characters in the two months that Jack and Estelle have been missing on the sea bed.

The annoying thing for me personally is that this one episode is the sum total of all I have to show for 2012. There's much more written, but the past year turned out to be a damp squib as far as actually getting anything out goes. So I'm currently re-evaluating how to make sure that Mirabilis steams ahead in the New Year. That will involve a lot of big changes. More on that next time.

Mirabilis on Kindle!

You'll be forgiven for a sense of déjà vu. Hot on the digital heels of our NOOK release, the first eight issues of Mirabilis are now on Kindle. Admittedly, you're going to need a tablet. I don't think the regular old black-and-white Kindle is going to do them justice. But iOS, Android, take your pick. 

Here are the links (colour-coded for US and UK sites - don't say we don't spoil you) and yes, the first issue really is just 77p.

 Oh, and this isn't the really BIG news we've got in store. Just wait and see what the green comet brings in a few short weeks...

Writing with pictures

When early filmgoers saw the first close-ups on there on the big screen, many were baffled. “What is this giant face?” they wondered. And, “Why did you show a man looking horrified and then cut to a new image of a baby's pram bouncing down some steps? Is there supposed to be a connection?”

Cinematic storytelling. The grammar of moving images. It didn’t take long for audiences to learn the rules. Or to discover how they work, I should say, because visual grammar, like linguistic grammar, is wired into us as the way we process the world. The mark of good cinematic storytelling is that the meaning comes from the whole sequence of images. There is no “telling”. Each image is a single brick; it’s only the whole that has to look like a house.

One hundred and ten years on from the birth of cinema, everyone on the planet understands how to read a montage of images. So it surprises me that many people are unable to extract meaning from a comic story unless there are plenty of captions and word balloons (lots of text, in other words) to carry them along. Yet you can perfectly well read a classic sequence like the opening five pages of Spider-man #33 without looking at the words. Or look at this page of the Tintin story Black Island (analysed in depth here on Peter Richardson’s excellent Cloud 109 blog). You don’t need to speak one word of French to understand what’s going on.

Comics are not movies. But their great strength is that they can use visual grammar as well as linguistic grammar. The reason many people find it difficult to read a comic visually is, I think, because of the way they see comics. Rather than taking the comic as a montage of images and words combined to tell a story, those people think of the comic as a kind of illustrated novel. In books at primary school, you might have an image of a big guy in chains rising up from behind a gravestone to terrify a little kid, and the caption would read, “Magwitch surprises Pip in the churchyard”. If you come to a comic with that preconception, you won’t expect the pictures to tell the story, you’ll just expect them to illustrate what the words have already told you.

This may be a particular problem in the UK, where we have no mainstream tradition of comics storytelling and our movies are mostly like television drama (70% words, 30% images according to McKee) rather than cinema (vice versa). So British audiences are accustomed to having the words carry the story, and any images are just there as eye candy. Well, Britain is just one island (actually it’s around a thousand, including the Outer Hebrides, but only one and a half big ones) so it wouldn't matter that much if the British never get hip to comics. Europe, India, the USA, Japan and Korea add up to a pretty fair market to be going on with. Yet I do find it a shame that most of my British friends, unless they were reared on American comic books as I was, are not able to appreciate le neuvième art. So I can’t share my love of Sandman or Watchmen or B.P.R.D. with them, much less get their feedback on Mirabilis. Somehow I don’t see any UK government putting comics on the national curriculum, so homegrown comics may face the same kind of future as the UK film industry. Which would be a great pity.

Farewell to Genial Gene

The first new comic I bought had a classic Gene Colan cover: a dramatic up angle with just enough architectural detail to establish a sense of place but all the emphasis on the characters in muscular action pose.

I don’t know why I picked Daredevil. I’d been following Marvel characters in tattered old anthology books from the secondhand store across the road from the newsagent, all the stories out of order, covers scuffed white, and I already knew I liked Iron Man and Spider-Man best. But Daredevil had Colan’s art, and that was a revelation to me.

Ninepence on the counter and now I was a true collector. And immediately Gene Colan was the artist for me. I liked the openness of John Romita’s work, the gut-busting cartoony energy of Kirby, the clean precision of Don Heck, but Colan’s stuff was rawer and it was real. He could skimp on background detail, favoring tight shots that let him focus on the characters. But after all, the characters’ feelings and actions are what matter in a story. Lavishly depicted scenery in a comic book is like descriptive prose in a novel – you want just enough. And Colan knew exactly how much that was.

Take a guy hailing a cab in the rain. Kirby would give you a beautifully formalized fire hydrant and newspapers billowing soggily in the gutter. Ditko might give you a shot down on the whole street, with rain sluicing off gargoyles and the character dwarfed by the elements. Colan, though – he’d just show part of a building, the curb and the fuzzy headlights of the cab, all as sketchily under-detailed as possible, leaving the emphasis on the man raising his arm. And that line of action would be perfect – not the “model posed in the act” that most comics artists would give you, but a panel like a paparazzi shot catching a moment of action in a continuous movement.

That’s what Gene Colan had that other comics artists lacked. They’d dress a scene wonderfully, like a movie set, but Colan clothed it in reality. If he drew characters in a gym, you could smell the stale sweat. His New York sweltered in the summer and in the winter you could feel the bone-scooping cold. If he drew a ceiling collapsing, you felt the weight of the rubble. And most of all there was the constant sense of movement. His cars and trains sped by; his characters lunged and spun; emotions seemed as real as if the characters were in the room with you; a kick from Daredevil looked like it’d knock your teeth out.

Gene Colan died this week and the Silver Age of individual, idiosyncratic artistic talent like his slipped further away from us. But it gives us an excuse to briefly push aside the veil and bask in a ray of sunlight from those halcyon days. Thanks to digital comics, a lot of those great works are available again, and I advise anyone with a dream of working in comics to take an afternoon or two and really look at Gene Colan’s work from the late sixties through to the mid-seventies. We lived in the presence of genius then and we could buy it for ninepence a month. That’s something worth celebrating.

Also, imagine my delight, having read Daredevil #24 and gone back for more, when I discovered he was also drawing Iron Man!

Gene Colan September 1, 1926 to June 23, 2011

Tips from a master

I just came across the Temple of the Seven Golden Camels blog, which I see is going to keep me happily absorbed for weeks.

Here's just one of many gems, a set of comic book guidelines by Carson Van Osten, renowned Disney artist. If you like the sample above, shoot on over for a treasure trove of other great creative tips.

More mouse action tomorrow.

Darkness is too easy

Back when I was working in games I saw a lot of concept pitches. If you’re picturing the likes of Pikmin or Ico or LittleBigPlanet – well, that would’ve been a job to get in early for. Instead, what actually seemed the most common effusion of the collective unconscious was a succession of dark, edgy takes on something like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz.

In these pitches, Alice/Dorothy had usually gone psycho, confined to a mental asylum, her family dead or abducted by stark horrors that had pursued her from Wonderland/Oz. And from there it’s a paint-by-numbers to decide what had become of the Tin Man (cyborg), Cowardly Lion (serial killer), Scarecrow (cyborg serial killer) and so on. Those same writers would even have pitched Dark Pooh if Disney weren’t standing guard over Hundred Acre Wood with a very big stick indeed.

The reason why that’s such a heart-sink is not because I don’t like stories with a bit of darkness. More than a bit, in fact. My fave comic of all time is Sandman. No wait, it’s Watchmen. No, maybe it’s Swamp Thing. Whatever – all of those had darkness but they had light, beauty and humanity too. And, in the case of Sandman, real sweetness.

But plain unadorned darkness is just too facile. My wife Roz used to ghostwrite a middle-grade action-adventure series for a brand name author. The heroes were mid-teen crime fighters but the readership was centered on 10-12 year olds, meaning that sex and violence were mostly just hinted at. Over dinner one evening, for fun, Roz and I envisaged a YA version of the series, revisiting the characters a couple of years on and going right into the abyss with them. The kid whose obsession with computer hacking had given him a dangerously detached view of justice. The one who achieved his dream of joining the army but quickly became traumatized by the realities of modern warfare. The rich one, who had hardened and become arrogant working for her father…

In a dark pit struggling to reach the light. It almost writes itself. Trouble is, that’s so easy to do. And nothing good in writing is accomplished with ease.

As well as being the lazy writer’s option, a story of unremitting darkness is tonally boring. It’s way harder to write hope and humor and humanity alongside the horrors – which is why I value TV shows like Buffy, Fringe and Doctor Who. Yet in comics these days we so often see the stories copying the least original videogames, with heroes constantly being maimed or disfigured or driven mad. And, trust me, relentless twentysomething angst is not the way for comics to tap back into a broad market.

The best of the horror comics have heroes who are surrounded by darkness but who haven’t got darkness in their souls: Hellboy, B.P.R.D., even (believe it or not) John Constantine. And the authors of those books don’t gratuitously wallow in the darkness of their stories; they remember they are telling underworld myths that must lead the heroes back to the surface world. Like Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole disturbed, enchanted, altered – a far more interesting fate than simply being forever scarred.

Comics 2.0

Six months ago, when we launched the Mirabilis iPad app, we had only the vaguest idea about online stores like Graphic.ly and Comics+. We figured that getting our work out on them was just like putting it in Barnes & Noble as well as Borders.

Well, these are interesting times. There's a lot to learn, and it's fun having to learn it. Like seeing how the online comic stores are as much like fan clubs as they are places to browse and buy digital comics. I enjoy Graphic.ly boss Micah Baldwin's regular mail-outs, wherein it seems to me that he has picked up the mantle of Stan Lee's old Bullpen Bulletins that made Marvel not just the home of fabulous stories, but a great place to hang out too.

If you haven't encountered Graphic.ly yet, this update by Micah on the revamp they're doing this week ought to whet your appetite:

When we started Graphicly, our intent was always to create a place for people that love creating, sharing and discovering great stories.

Remember the first time you ever heard a great story? What was awesome about it is that someone shared the story with you. Story is not a solo activity.

We are taking a big step towards making story truly social and collaborative with the launch of our new site. There are the features you would expect: Profiles, Twitter and Facebook integration, amazing reader, solid search and a great store.

But, here is what is cool. Take the comics with you. Just like a YouTube video, you can now embed the comic wherever you want. Put it on your blog. Include it in a story.

Story has become truly shareable, and great content has become discoverable.

Interview on Guys Can Read

Guys Can Read is a must-not-miss podcast series in which co-hosts Luke Navarro and Kevin McGill take a weekly look at books. What's really refreshing about their shows is that, no matter whether they're tackling a comic book or a literary classic, they always bring the same respectful attention, enthusiasm and demand for high storytelling standards.

Their love of story really crackles across the airwaves (I know but, come on, it sounds better than "cables") and it came as no surprise to me that Luke is working on his Literature Ph.D. while Kevin is the author of a exciting new fantasy series called Nikolas and Company that I think will appeal to Mirabilis readers.

I was honored to be asked onto their 50th show and we had a great time talking about comics and writing in general, role-playing games, fantasy, science fiction, mythology... Lots of cool stuff. And you know what? It's not a private party - you can come too. Jump in right here and then come tell me what you thought.

The author's promise to the reader

In the Best.Episode.Ever of The Simpsons, the Comic Book Guy is asked what right he has to complain about Itchy & Scratchy. “As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me,” he says, to which Bart replies: “They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.”

In most countries outside the UK you don’t have to actually pay for the mere right to have a television in your home. But even if you’re watching The Simpsons for free on Fox, you still get shown a bunch of commercials that aren't exactly an enrichment of your viewing experience. And then you give in and go and buy stuff you don't need and the advertisers give the network some money to thank them for bringing all those bees to the flower. So you did end up paying for that show, whatever the writers at Gracie Films may think. There are no free lunches, and no free TV dinners either.

The contract that exists between writer and audience is more complicated than that between a craftsman and his customer. The reader or viewer or player gives you their money, but on top of that they give you their undivided attention (the ones who keep up a running commentary all the way through a movie, please leave now). They are asking you to make them believe - and not only for the time it takes to watch the movie or read the book, but an enduring belief. That’s why I can’t abide plot holes. A story should bear scrutiny if it has any right to my time.

Neil Gaiman says that the reader’s contract when buying a book is for that book only; it’s not a mandate upon the author to deliver more in the series. The problem I have with that, as an author, is that I know the power of suspense. It’s the best trick I have in my writer’s toolbox to keep you reading. You want to find out what happens next - at least, I hope you do. And after all, I don’t have to promise a ten-book arc with a sweeping plot that hinges on many secrets with which I am enticing your attention. I could just tie up everything in the one book. If I choose not to, it’s because I’m trying to plant a compulsion in you to buy my next book - and in that case I'd feel under an obligation to deliver.

The corollary is that if I do start to weave a story around some far-reaching mystery, I’d better have in mind the real answer to that mystery. At the point when it because clear that Lost’s writers hadn't yet thought about why the polar bear was on the island (much less why it was also in a Green Lantern comic) and they were just going to figure out something later - at that point, the contract is broken. Why continue to pay their wages when you can make up your own ending and it’ll be just as good?

The flipside of all this, and just as undesirable, is when stories are spun out indefinitely. “A beginning, a middle and an end,” is what Aristotle stipulated, not “a beginning and then endless variations on the theme until you finally jump the shark.” Success is the usual culprit, as endings have to be left open enough to leave room for a sequel or a new season. Prison Break is a perfect example of the problem: what would have been a memorably taut, single-season narrative suddenly splurged into the diminishing returns of patched-on plot developments. And, although I realize this is heresy, maybe we could say the same of The Sopranos. I know we got six seasons of the best soap opera on TV, and thank you, David Chase - but what about the pitch-dark Greek (okay, Italian) tragedy that the first season was building up to? The network’s need for more of the same possibly deep-sixed a climax that, had they gone ahead and ended the show there, would be remembered now as the chilling, thrilling apotheosis of TV drama.

Any sense of obligation a writer may feel to his or her readers, beyond delivering the script or book that they actually paid for, is of course self-inflicted. George R R Martin and Neil Gaiman rightly take their own view on this. However, the writer’s duty is to the characters is not up for debate. You brought them to life, so it’s incumbent on you to give them a life. That means a proper story, not leaving them in limbo halfway through or dragging them into an endless and directionless existence where nothing is ever resolved.

Obviously I’m thinking now of Mirabilis. I can certainly promise that the story will not be spun out ad infinitum. Leo and I have one year of narrative, which we currently expect to take about 800 pages across four seasons. Then it’ll be January 1st 1902, the green comet will be gone, and all our loose ends will be tied up, leaving not a rack behind.

The harder promise to make is that the story will reach its conclusion. I would gladly swear to that right here and now, but it’s not just up me. Since the DFC folded, Leo and I have been continuing to finance the work at our own expense. At least in comics it's not too difficult to do that: digital publishing brings in a nicely regular if not (yet) huge revenue stream, and every time we sign to a print edition in a new territory, as with the upcoming Print Media hardcovers in the UK, that pays for a few more issues. Mirabilis #9 through #12 are already fully funded, and by the time we complete #12 we'll be able to say the same for the four issues that will tie up season two. A handful at a time moves the mountain.

That's why I'm glad I'm not doing this for television. Joss Whedon would love to have had enough viewers to make Firefly and Dollhouse viable; same goes for David Milch and Deadwood. My heart skips a beat every time Fringe's ratings are mentioned. Since they announced the season four renewal, the heart in question is looking healthy at the moment, and thank you for asking, but if I had to find $1 million per episode of Mirabilis then I'd be in cardiac arrest in a month.

If Mirabilis continues to build an e-readership as it has been doing since Christmas, and if we keep on picking up print publishers in the US and Europe - in short, if enough people care about Jack and Estelle to want to find out what happens to them - then we promise on bended knee at any altar you like to take this story right through to the end. We’ve planned out an epic with some really big surprises that we think you’re going to enjoy. Hope you can join the ride all the way to the end.

Just browsing: why should comics have to be "an art"?

I started off this week talking about the two ways of reading comics: as an aficionado appreciating an art form, or as a casual reader looking to while away a half hour. But what is a casual reader? These days, with the comics ecosystem looking like a rapidly drying waterhole, pretty much the only people reading comics are those who know their local hobby store like the back of their hand. In comics, the nearest equivalent to a casual reader in other media would be somebody who is picking up a comic for the first time.

Does that describe you? You don’t know where your local comic store is? You'd feel uncomfortable reading a comic book in public? You really never heard any name in comics other than Posy Simmonds and Hergé - and you don’t actually read even them?

Okay, let's say you answer yes. So you're a reader who might possibly pick up a comic with mild interest, but you're a long way from being the kind of comic reader who scurries home with the week's latest issues in mylar bags. As you're a casual reader, I've got a couple of scenarios to tell you about that might sound familiar. When Leo showed some pages of his comic art to a family member (most certainly not someone who has any affinity for comics) she angrily demanded: “All these panels on a page - how do you know which you’re supposed to read first?” A friend of mine, less emphatically, complained: “The characters were in one scene, then I turned the page and it was a different bunch of characters somewhere else.”

If those are your first hurdles, it’s simple. Read left to right, top to bottom. Most comics are not tricksy about this. You wouldn't hold a novel at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger and ask which end of this curious beast is its head. Fine, just read a comic the same way you would any book. And addressing the second point: yes, there will be cuts between different scenes. In the same way that movies have largely dispensed with intertitles in the last, oh, eighty years, so comics nowadays don’t often feel the need to flag the scene change with a big explicatory caption. You’ve seen a movie? You’ve watched television dramas? Know what a turtle is, Leon? Same thing.

For that relative of Leo’s, comics will always be disreputable and incomprehensible. This is quite a common attitude in Britain, at least if the comic is aimed at readers over eight years old, though it is possible to break through those prejudices. My friend persevered. Snowed in at Moscow airport over Christmas, he downloaded all eight issues of Mirabilis to his iPad and surprised himself by reading the whole story, understanding it, and most importantly eager for more. But that disqualifies him from reading today’s post, I’m afraid. He’s crossed the border country. He’s a comics reader now; even if he never looks at another comic, his sensibilities have been wakened. Remember we are just talking to the purest comics innocent here.

How should you read a comic? Just think of it as a movie storyboard. (Your hackles are rising at that? Then you’re in the wrong class. You’re one of them ay-ficky-oh-nadoes. Get outta here, this is 101.) A storyboard, I say. And as you are used to visual stories in the form of movies, TV and game cutscenes, which are all sit-back media that must resort to dramatic emphasis to engage the viewer’s attention, chances are you will prefer this:

over something like this:
You could almost call those the movie and TV version of the shot. And the casual comics reader is likely to respond more positively to the former. Which begs the question why the other style exists at all. Is it just the lazy or low-budget option? Like in Deadwood, say. If we are just given a straight two-shot of Al Swearengen berating some poor sap in language of the most baroque profanity, is that because the director didn’t have the time to mount the camera on a rail on the underside of the bar so we could get a low-angle tracking shot instead?

As the sophisticated comics reader knows, sometimes less is more. (And when I say “sophisticated” by the way, I just mean anybody who’s read enough comics to know their way around a thought balloon.) Consider the range of styles an artist might use for his comic book characters. Leaving off the extremes of realism and pure cartoon, we’ve got a spectrum a bit like this:
The novice, the which-way-do-I-read-this guy, will probably start off preferring one of the faces in the middle somewhere. Realism can easily end up looking stiff and spooky on the page, while the more stylized faces are more approachable but, as regular characters that we’re going to invest in, they still take some getting used to. So again: why would an artist deliberately choose to draw his character with stylized features? Well, think about a classic Disney movie like Snow White & the Seven Dwarves. Is it the normal human characters like the traditional prince and princess you most readily connect to - or is it the warm, daffy, rambunctious cartoony characters? See, realism isn't everything.

The dramatic, cinematic composition and the midway-realistic facial features are both designed to appeal to a sit-back reader. These style choices aim to push the story at us. Any of those big amazing splash panels that make you sit back in awe – think about it, unless those are intended as point-of-view shots to put us in the lead character’s shoes, they’re actually encouraging you to see the story from the outside. You are amazed by the spectacle, not seduced by the personalities.

And that’s what a casual reader wants. But as you read more comics, you’ll most likely start to get under the skin of the characters. Dramatic compositions then can seem distancing, and you want to see them sparingly if at all. The artist knows to save them up for when a zombie with a machete comes blundering through your French windows, not for a scene where two guys in an office are having an argument over the week’s payroll.

Characters too. The stylized character is closer to our own vague sense of how our face appears to others. The simplicity allows us to pour our own identity in. That, of course, is no longer a sit-back response to a story, which is why it’s not the casual reader’s choice. An airport thriller or a blockbuster don’t expect us to engage as an active process, they just want us to open our minds and let the story blow through. This is not to disparage the casual reader. People have a perfect right to experience stories however they like, and if you’re a busy man like, say, Barack Obama or Steve Jobs, I doubt if you want to have to make the degree of commitment to a story that the sit-forward approach demands.

We could look at content too, but I figured on leaving that out of this discussion just to save it from ballooning into an entire book. I will just point out that when fans say that the next Iron Man movie should follow some obscure and immensely detailed story that's been running in the comic book sometime in the last few years, they're missing the whole point. The most successful superhero movies are the ones that hark back to the simple, arresting, broadly accessible plots of the mid-'60s. Lost brought SF to millions who would never watch or read hardcore sci-fi. Phantom of the Opera appeals to a much bigger audience than are ever going to roll up for Rigoletto. It's not just the readers of superhero comics who've taped their heads inside a genre box - though look at their frankly ridiculous suggestions every time a new superhero movie is announced and you'll grasp the stratospheric disconnect from commercial reality that has had comics sluicing down a narrowcasting sinkhole for the last decade.

To attract a new, large, casual readership to story-based comics, I'm saying it helps to have bold, dramatic staging of action. Characters need to be not too cartoony (the masking effect, as Scott McCloud terms it) because to lock in on the empathic effectiveness of that first requires the reader to have developed a sophisticated approach to the material. The content needs to be pitched at "network" rather than "cable" as far as genre flavor and audience commitment are concerned. Don't rely on people becoming fans, in other words, because most people are not by nature fannish. And most of all the characters need to be relatable, not merely aspirational - with problems, failings, and character flaws that let us root for them to grow into believable heroes.

And you know what's ironic about this? None of it is new. It's exactly what Stan Lee and the guys at Marvel were doing with such phenomenal success through the '60s and early '70s. It worked precisely because they were just trying to entertain. The Bullpen approach didn't see anything wrong with comics being "low culture". They weren't out to make the "Ninth Art" equivalent of Last Year at Marienbad. Personally I love Mr Punch (Gaiman & McKean) and it's a book I'll read many more times. But it would be no use giving it to a casual reader. Something like The Clockwork Girl, that ticks the boxes I'm talking about here.

Yes, all the above are sweeping generalizations and are fuelled by egregious assumptions on my part. You will no doubt be itching to point out exceptions to every "rule" listed here. So leave a comment. I'm just getting the discussion started. And it's a discussion we need to have if comics are to break the stifling label of being "a worthy art form" that the fans would inflict upon it.

Two ways of reading comics

What I thought I'd do today is return to the subject I touched on with the Tintin post - only from a slightly less controversial angle. Put another way: comics don't have a broad readership anymore in the US or UK. In the Silver Age, a top comic could nudge a third of a million copies a month, and most of those readers were casual and uncommitted. Definitely not hardcore fans. I say we need to invite more readers in - not necessarily to become tomorrow's hardcore, or even tomorrow's regular readers, but because any artistic medium can only sustain its devotees if they are floating on a sea of casual and occasional buyers.

Leaving aside the question of content and retail outlets, both of which have slid comics across into their current niche state (or been slid themselves, it's a feedback loop) there's also the whole question of form. How are comics perceived by different kinds of readers, and are there lessons we could learn about how to give those casual readers who currently dismiss comics an easy way in? I picked on Tintin before, but I could just as easily have highlighted the transition from Ditko to Romita Sr on Spider-Man, or how Dr Who went from being a fanboys' favorite to family fare. What one person calls dumbing down, another sees as broadening the appeal.

And incidentally, even restricting the discussion to just form, we're hardly going to scratch the surface in a few posts, so think of this as just a preamble to getting a debate going.

In Bali (bear with me, this is going somewhere!) you can see some of the most exquisite woodcarving you’d find anywhere in the world. Craftsmen typically spend five years as an apprentice, five more as a journeyman, and only then qualify to call themselves masters of the art. Among aficionados, the market price of a master craftsman’s carvings reflects all that hard-earned skill.

Which is fine as long as the people buying the works belong to a culture for which woodcarving is an esteemed and deeply appreciated art. But now introduce tourists into the mix. On the lookout for something to put on the mantelpiece back home, they don’t look at woodcarving from a long artistic tradition. They can see that a journeyman’s work is better than an apprentice’s, but they don’t perceive the distinctive élan, that final five percent leap towards perfection, that hoists a master’s work up into the genius bracket. And they certainly won’t fork out the extra $100 that’s demanded for a finely carved cheek, the precise angle of a finger, the delicate lips that smile just so.

And so it is that the journeymen get rich while the masters can settle for pride or a living wage, but not both. The latter choice means turning their backs on what they’ve learned, eschewing the extra time and tears required to produce a masterpiece. They may as well just produce journeyman-quality works, that being what the market has chosen as the maximum value of the utility function.

All art is like this. At college, I had two friends who were really into classical music. They would laugh in delight at what seemed to me to be random notes in a piece, saying, “Did you hear what he did there?” Not me. I just wanted to crank up the volume and listen to “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes”. You have the refined form, the high art, the medium in which the cognoscenti are tuned to detect every nuance. And then you have the guy who just came in to while away a half hour.

To talk about reading comics, we need to think about what kind of reader we mean. Comics have become such a niche interest, like crystal radio sets or the Japanese tea ceremony, that almost everyone who reads comics does so as a connoisseur. If that describes you, pop back next week. But if you’re honestly just a casual reader – maybe you enjoyed the Iron Man movie or From Hell, and you’re curious to see if the medium from which they sprang has anything to offer – then you need to pick the other box, opening here on Friday.

Audrey Niffenegger talks about comics and time travel

Today's Panel Borders audio interview with Audrey Niffenegger is now available for streaming or download. Most of the discussion is about her graphic novel The Night Bookmobile. I'm planning to read the book (intriguing reviews from Danny Graydon here and Graphic Novel Reporter here) having found that the original novel of The Time Traveler's Wife is a lot more complex and interesting than you might think if you've only seen the movie. And Ms Niffenegger did all the art herself too, so (as one of those comics writers who rely on somebody else to do all the hard work) I wouldn't dream of saying anything negative anyhow.

A reservation I have about the interview itself is that it betrays the typical British awkwardness about comics. Even that term "graphic novel" - I don't object to that, unlike my good friend Peter Richardson of Cloud 109, for example, who finds it unbearably affected. When it's used to mean a comic that's ashamed to say it's a comic, then I agree. (That's not why Ms Niffenegger herself used it, incidentally, as she explains in the interview.) But as a way of saying, "This is a complete story in fifty or more pages" as distinct from a 22-page monthly comic book, then it's fine.

The interviewer does wander off a bit into discussion about how comics pages can be designed so that you read them Calvino-style in multiple directions at once, and how that can lead to a disconstruction of the very nature of linear narrative, blah blah blah. None of which I have the slightest patience for. A story is good simply insofar as it engages the reader and makes them care enough to want to know what happens next. A good (ie effective) comic is a storyboard of static images, much like a movie but with the advantage that comics are a literary medium and can therefore provide the depth that a movie, having a set pace that the viewer must fall in step with, doesn't have time to explore.

But that's a minor quibble. Overall, if you can get past the zoo-visitor's wary fascination with the outlandish beast that is a British literary critic's view of comics, it's an entertaining show that takes in Doctor Who, comics, time travel and storytelling in general. Well worth a listen, even for someone who prefers Daredevil to Derrida.

Mirabilis nabs top three slots on BookBuzzr!

We just heard that Mirabilis took the #1, #2 and #3 positions in the overall ratings on preview platform BookBuzzr for last month, with our first issue having clocked up nearly 30,000 views on that one site alone!

Now, impressive though that is, you don't need to read Mirabilis in the nifty little BookBuzzr widget any more because it is now (as I'll never tire of saying) up there for the whole world to see on Graphic.ly's gorgeous array of digital platforms. And to cap that, the first two issues are free. That's 60 pages of green comety goodness for the whopping price of absolutely nothing. Grab it before the wind changes!

A nice big purr from Shadowcat

There's a great review of Mirabilis #1 over on cool comics site Kitty's Pryde. Four-and-a-half stars and we didn't even have to leave a brown envelope stuffed with cash behind the water pipes. "Almost musical," is their judgment on the script, "with a nice storytelling feel." Heap it on, guys, I can take it. Better not repeat what they have to say about Leo's artwork as it'll only make him big-headed.

Judging a comic book by its cover

Believe it or not, this was our early mock-up for the cover of The DFC issue 34 (Jan 2009). I mean very early, when we first started planning Mirabilis in the pre-publication days before we had any idea what the comic was going to be like. Back then, Martin and I were probably envisaging a cross between 2000 AD and Strange Tales. (I mean the original 2000 AD and Strange Tales, of course, though being like the new ST would be cool too.)

As we quickly came to realize, this kind of spooky mood piece wouldn't have worked at all. Truthfully, it would barely have worked as the cover for an issue of something like Eerie, would have fizzled and gone out as a regular comic book cover, and on the front of a weekly anthology comic like The DFC, with funny animal stories and some of its readers barely out of short pants? Doh, we're idiots; it would have sunk like a copernicium balloon. Not because it's a bad painting - Martin is never less than brilliant, and that's on his bad days. But he created this as a piece of concept art, and it was never meant to dramatize a scene.
In the event, DFC #34 had an absolutely superb cover by Andrew Wildman for Frontier. Whereas our Bedlam cover merely rewards you for already knowing about the accompanying story, that image of Daisy Adams and Mitch Seeker menaced by werecoyotes entices you to find out. The DFC editor, Ben Sharpe, must have thought we were a few bullets short of a sixgun for our suggestion, but I'm sure he was very polite in rejecting it. I do wish the real cover didn't have all that cluttering text and design element overload, though. Would you do that to a Wildman original? (You may say I'm not thinking like a kid, but my 9-year-old self had the exact same opinion about comic covers. That's another reason why in those days I followed Marvel rather than DC.)

Btw if you recognize the Bedlam picture, it's because we've talked about it before and that shows you've been paying attention. It's another of Martin's movie concept paintings, and I briefly considered using it for one of the covers of the the Mirabilis Kindle mini-editions. But those covers on Amazon are displayed sooooo small, and the content in each mini-edition so bite-sized, that a big atmospheric cover just didn't fit. Instead we went with three minimalist portrait-based covers that do exactly what it says on the tin.

What got me thinking about The DFC after all this time? It's because Team Mirabilis received an invitation to a party at the David Fickling Books offices, and the invitation came from Mr Ben Sharpe himself. So what's the occasion? Is The DFC coming back? My lips are sealed - for now - but the party is this afternoon, so right after I get back from that I'll be sure to tell you everything.

Mirabilis on Android and iPhone

Big shout out today for Kate Lauder and the rest of the awesome Graphic.ly team, who have been pulling out all the stops to get Mirabilis season one converted to all their platforms. I've just been taking a look at the online proofs for issues #1-#3 and the work Kate's guys have done is stunning. Even if I wasn't the writer, I'd be one of Mirabilis's biggest fans.

Those first 8 issues will be going live next month, and what that means is that you won't need to buy an iPad to read Mirabilis any more. It'll be on iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android and Adobe AIR for Mac/PC. And you only need to buy once to have the issues on any of those OS/devices that you own. (I'm still going to say you should have an iPad, though.)

Graphic.ly aren't just about putting the comic pages out there digitally, oh no. They appreciate that comics are about community as well as content. This was a big part of what made me a Marvel rather than DC fan when I first got hooked on comic books in the (gulp) late '60s. The DC stories were fine and all, but they didn't seem too interested in the stuff that surrounded that. Often you didn't know who'd created a DC story, while Marvel credited inks and letters as well as story and art. DC often dropped the letters page, whereas Marvel usually gave you two and made sure to reply to them. And most importantly, Marvel comics had the Bullpen Bulletin page. When you look at some of the news snippets, it sometimes seems to me like Stan and co had foreseen Twitter :

Our own STAN LEE and his old friend CARMINE INFANTINO shared a lively lunch together recently. They got all misty-eyed talking over old times and speculating about what might have been and what new excitement is still in store for all of comicdom.

Speaking of JACK KIRBY, he and his radiant Roz are now building their own home in sunny California. He should worry how much we haveta spend on postage stamps!

How about RASCALLY ROY THOMAS finally seeing his life-long idol, Elvis Presley, during his recent West Coast vacation?

Maybe you had to be there. Anyway, Graphic.ly's Micah Baldwin totally gets this. What first attracted us to getting Mirabilis on their platform was his comment that, "Digitial comics need to be more. [We need to] grow the comic experience."

So part of what Kate's team has been doing is tagging characters (so that new readers don't confused - something a book like X-Men could do with) and setting up the feedback, comments, creators' cameos and other extras that turn a bunch of words and pictures into a full-blown comic community.

Mirabilis on Android, iOS and Adobe AIR. The whole of season one. Next month. Be sure to have your phones charged 'n' ready.

It all starts here

Mirabilis has been in the App Store a little over 2 weeks now, and in that time we hit #12 in the UK books chart, #24 in France, and #74 in the US. Not a bad start to 2011. In a few weeks we'll have news of the iPhone version, and some other digital platforms too, along with more details of when readers in the UK and Eire can get their hands on those gorgeous Print Media hardback editions.

Stateside and Canada, you can get the trade paperback already: Mirabilis: Winter volume one from Amazon and from Barnes & Noble and volume two will be on sale before the end of January. There's never been a better time to make it a Year of Wonders.