A dream to some...

This is from another of the projects that Leo and I pitched to David Fickling as a possible DFC strip before we settled on Mirabilis.

We originally developed New Knights of Camelot as a TV show. In fact it got as far as a complete series bible, 13-episode season treatment and the first couple of scripts. (You can do an awful lot of work in television that goes nowhere, even if you do get paid for it.)

The idea originally came from Ian Marsh, one-time editor of White Dwarf, in the form of a role-playing game he ran. After the final battle, King Arthur and most of the Round Table are dead. Right… so get over it. What happens next?

In our story, a group of kids try to keep Arthur’s ideals alive even as Saxon war-bands are sweeping across Britain and Morgan le Fay is planning some occult nastiness that will pervert the power of the Holy Grail and make her queen of a poisoned land. Oh, and Merlin is in there of course: the New Knights’ extremely unreliable mentor.

Our Scoobyish little band are recruited more eclectically than the chivalric classes Malory and Tennyson wrote about. We’ve got a poacher, a blacksmith’s apprentice, a youth from Judea, a squire from north Africa called Hannibal. (That wasn’t just some odious BBC-style box-ticking approach to diversity, incidentally; it was the whole theme of the story.) Admittedly two of the main characters are Gawain’s offspring, but they’re not exactly your snooty public school types, this being the grubby post-Roman end of the 5th century. Only Lancelot’s niece is really what you’d call posh, and even she’s going to have to learn to get down and dirty before the story’s done.

This lad here is Ozzy, the self-taught alchemist – who looks spookily like me when I was a teenager, come to think of it.

Try before you buy

A little experiment here. No, we're not switching to black and white. But Garen Ewing was saying on his blog how the full online version of his comic Rainbow Orchid is having to come down now that it's all going to be appearing in print. Which set us thinking...

We'd like to get a good chunk of Mirabilis up on the main site very soon. (Yep, still waiting for clearance from our publishers on that; it's a bit like filing a request for 100 bottles of olive oil when you're stationed on Hadrian's Wall.) But then, looking beyond that, we'll have to take most of it down as the publication date for the Winter graphic novel approaches. So one option then would be to switch the online material to black and white.

As you can see, it still looks pretty tasty - a testament to the great artwork by Leo and Nikos. You'd be able to read it in this form up to the end of chapter two (45 pages, which is most of what has already appeared in the DFC) and that's probably enough to decide if you'd want to shell out £15 to read the whole story in living colour.

That whole story - the whole Winter book, that is - will weigh in at an epic 180 pages. I'm just writing the last few pages this week. The book wants to end on another cliffhanger and I'm not going to be able to stop it - so roll on Spring!

Once upon a time

There was a boy I sometimes played with. I can’t say that he was quite a friend. His mother was French, and I asked her one day about some translation in my homework. She couldn’t remember the word. She had lived so long in Britain that she had forgotten half her native tongue. At the same time, she had progressed only a very little way in learning English. So there she was stuck in a no man’s land of miscommunication where only the least complex thoughts could be expressed. And even then, only in the present tense.

I’m getting to that stage with the books I can bear to read. Once I devoured heaps of “glorious trash” – science fiction and fantasy written in the crudest pulp fiction style, but as long as they were good yarns with plenty of surprises and reversals they’d keep me engrossed. (I don’t mean, by the way, that all SF and fantasy is badly written; but remember Sturgeon’s Law.)

Nowadays I need more. Prose should be beautiful – not showily beautiful, necessarily, but writing is a craft and like any craft it should be executed with panache. Virginia Woolf spoke of her anguish when “the smooth gliding of sentence after sentence” was interrupted: “Something tore, something scratched; a single word here and there flashed its torch in my eyes.” Her tastes had become refined to the point where bad writing was literally unreadable.

Why this puts me, if not in no man’s land, at least on a small island vanishing faster than the Maldives, is that there is very little modern fiction that is both elegantly written and that has a plot. There are, of course, lots of modern writers who are superb wordsmiths. I’m reading – trying to read – a novel at the moment by a very famous author, the sort who wins the Man Booker and the Nobel prize for literature. The prose is breathtaking, the imagery vivid. But there is absolutely no plot. No suspense to draw me back, no sticky situations, no real problems for the characters to face.

Modern literary authors are frightened of story. As long as they spin elegant sentences into a web of slightly hard-to-follow prose, and make sure to pour in a sackful of literary allusions, they can hold their heads up at any dinner party. But writing a narrative where – omigod – stuff actually happened could expose them to ridicule. What if they got it wrong?

In The Art of Fiction, David Lodge said: “Novels are narratives, and narrative, whatever its medium - words, film, strip-cartoon - holds the interest of an audience by raising questions in their minds, and delaying the answers.” He goes on to quote this very short story by Leonard Michaels which is at once elegantly written and complete as a narrative with beginning, middle and end, conflict, surprise, and a theme that leaves you with something to think about. Things that every story ought to have.

THE HAND

I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, "Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you." I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps.

The dead travel fast

Walpurgis Nacht in Germany and Eastern Europe is the time for witches and spectres to roam abroad. Halloween might seem a better time for that than May Eve, but the principle is the same. As seasons change, there’s the chance for unnatural things to slip between the cracks.

In the deleted opening chapter from Dracula, Harker has already sent his coachman away with the rash assertion that, “Walpurgis Nacht has nothing to do with Englishmen” when he finds himself outside a tomb in the woods near Munich:

Walpurgis Night was when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone - unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me!

Chin up, Jonny boy. At least you’re not in Transylvania - yet.

If the DFC had continued, this Friday you would be reading episode 16: “The Dark Side” which we planned as a Walpurgis Nacht special (although in story chronology it’s still only mid-January 1901). As we’re still waiting to get contractual clearance to put some of these new episodes up online, here’s a little bit of bitey action with an Indian flavour that I wrote years ago for the bright young film-making team of Dermot Bolton (producer) and Dan Turner (director). Turn down the lights, draw your chair closer to the screen, and shiver at the story of A Dying Trade part 1 and part 2.

Where’s Mr Pointy when you need him?

Mirabilis monthly

The discussion under NEW EPISODES about serializing Mirabilis set me thinking. What would be the perfect way for it to appear?

Obviously it’s going to appear as a graphic novel. That will be how most people first experience the story. But most of the comics I’m into, I don’t buy in trade paperback. (Actually not quite true – I do buy the tp, but I’ve already bought the monthly books first. Dark Horse and Vertigo, I’m your ideal customer.)

I don’t think Mirabilis worked at its best in 5-page instalments. There’s too much story going on for that. Imagine reading one chapter of a Garth Nix or Philip Pullman book and then waiting 7 days for the next. There's such a thing as taking deferred gratification too far. The older kids I've spoken to (11 years and up) weren't interested in stories that were broken down into such minute chunks; they'd rather have read 20 pages every month.

The first episode, “Stung!” was originally written as an 8-pager. For the dummy issue of the DFC, we squeezed it down to 6 pages - should’ve come with a free magnifying glass! When we got the go-ahead, I reworked it into 10 pages and that would have made up episodes 1 and 2. (In fact, all our files still use that numbering – always takes a bit of mental arithmetic to work out the number of an episode in the DFC.)

I like the discipline of having to hit a big dramatic beat every 5 pages. And I’ve been sticking to that even now I’m not writing the story in weekly instalments. But if it were serialized, I’d want to read it the way we’ve organized the chapters of the graphic novel. Every 20-25 pages there’s a mini-closure that feels like you’ve just been served a satisfying chunk of story and you’re gearing up for the next.

Jack bottles the witch at Selsey; the Kind Gentleman delivers his ultimatum; everyone is settled aboard the train as they steam into the Carpathians. These are comic-book-sized instalments which, if they appeared monthly, would deliver more than just a cliffhanger to entice you back.

That was the way I read comics growing up. Collecting a dozen monthly titles meant that there’d be something to buy every Saturday when I did my trawl of the newsagents. The 20-page format allowed the story room to breathe.

You can tell stories in less space - Adrian Tomine, for example, regularly ties up a complete narrative in 2 or 3 pages. That’s not the way I’d want to tell a story like Mirabilis, though. In a perfect world, we’d come out as a monthly comic book with a new collection in book form every nine issues or so.

NEW EPISODES!

No need to fight - they're free to one and all. Episodes 2, 3 and 4 are now on the main Mirabilis site. Enjoy!

New episodes on the line

We're going to get some new episodes up on the main Mirabilis site this week.
Yep, I said new episodes. Not all-new (that's coming soon, though) but it does mean that anybody who missed the start of the story when it was serialized in the DFC can now catch up.

We already have the pilot episode up, of course - and in French here, mes vieux chanceux. The new episodes will complete chapter one ("The World Turned Upside Down") of the Winter book, comprising episodes 2, 3 and 4 as published in the DFC.

Even if you've read them before, they're still worth checking out online as you'll be able to see Nikos's magnificent colours as they were meant to be seen. Keep an eye on the blog and we'll let you know as soon as they're up.