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.

The images here come from Mirabilis episode sixteen (“The Dark Side”) back from the days when we were running in The DFC in 5-page episodes rather than the 25-page issues we have now. It was timed to appear in print in the week of Walpurgis Night (although in story chronology the action there is still only mid-January) but, of course, The DFC was already buried in unconsecrated ground by May 2009. Never mind - we kept right on going with all the crazed energy of one of Dracula's Szgany servitors and are now working on what would be episode forty-three in DFC reckoning.

Turning to a whole other continent of vampiric lore, 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?

Princes, kings and heroes

“It’s usual in these stories,” David Fickling reminded me, “for the hero to be marked out by destiny. Often he’s a prince, for example.”

I didn’t want either Jack or Estelle to be predestined for greatness, preferring instead to explore the idea that the hour (or year, in this case) produces the man (and woman). On the other hand, I wanted Mirabilis to be commissioned for The DFC so I probably tried to get away with a noncommittal “Um.”

The heroes of fairytales are often royal, a shorthand for them being the sons of gods as they are in myths, because if you take a scion of royal blood and have him brought up in a woodsman’s hut you’ve got immediate rooting interest. The tension in such a gross disturbance of natural law means that the story practically tells itself, unfolding nicely until the lad sits at last on the throne that was always meant for him.

That seems too easy though. I would’ve preferred it if Arthur was not born to draw that sword, had been just a clever peasant who rose to the occasion. People who crown themselves, as Napoleon knew, create a more lasting myth. Likewise when Don Blake saw the inscription: “Whoever wields this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor” it seemed to say that an ordinary man could achieve greatness. It was only later that we found out he’d been Thor all along.

Leaving aside the X-Men, for whom destiny was in the double helix, most of the old Marvel heroes had heroism thrust upon them and had to grow into the part. Peter Parker may have been the archetypal orphan, but there was nothing special about him until the spider bit his hand. That’s what I liked, but it seems from Wiki that they since retconned it:

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski began writing The Amazing Spider-Man with #471. Two issues later, Peter Parker, now employed as a teacher at his old high school, meets the enigmatic Ezekiel, who possesses similar spider powers and suggests that Parker having gained such abilities might not have been a fluke - that Parker has a connection to a totemic spider spirit.

Totemic spider spirit..? Ugh. Just, ugh.

Princes in fairytales embody the archetypal hero in rejuvenated form. “His greatest virtue is intuition,” says J.E. Cirlot (A Dictionary of Symbols) and who can doubt it: Arthur handing Excalibur to Uryens, Alexander taming Bucephalus, Luke deciding to just go with the Force. Each shows that, whatever wise gray heads may think, youth is stronger for not knowing what’s impossible.

Yet maybe the facile storytelling trick of having your hero royally born to greatness is wearing thin with today’s sophisticated audiences. Harry Potter, who appears at first to have everything including the birthmark, turns out merely to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, his special seal of greatness being earned not by birth but by accident and the magic of a mother's love. Likewise Lyra in His Dark Materials - despite being a Moses-like foundling, and having the requisite exceptional upbringing, she is after all just an ordinary girl. Her personality, not her pedigree, is what makes her special.

That’s how I think of both Jack and Estelle: exceptional but no more exceptional than anyone else might be. You will find little nods throughout the Mirabilis story in the direction of a kind of kingship. I won’t give any spoilers here, except to say that they all tie in to the question of whether one can be born heroic or must struggle with one’s self-birth as a hero. Neither Jack nor Estelle has any midichlorians (ugh, again) in the blood, no royal birthmarks, no prophecy to make their greatness a simple matter of jumping through hoops. In the end, we're all princes if we want to be.

Mirabilis e-comics are best bought from Graphic.ly

The first Mirabilis hardcover goes on sale in just over a week, the second volume is likely to follow within two months, and we're back to working full time on season two. So what could possibly go wrong? Here's what: an update to the iPad app which, despite being approved by Apple, turns out to contain a fatal bug that prevents you from downloading any of the issues. Epic fail is not an overstatement.

If you already had version 1.0 and just got the update, you can fix everything by deleting the new version from your iPad, then sync with iTunes on your computer to reinstall version 1.0 of the app. You'll need to restore the issues you already paid for, but you don't (of course) have to pay for them all over again. The old app will just re-download them, and in a minute or two you'll be good to go.

It was particularly annoying to hit this bump in the road as we had planned an update with lots of cool new features, including a Read Next Issue button and a social networking feature whereby you could tell friends about Mirabilis. None of those were in the 1.1 update, though, which really only had a new front page. So I guess it's a case of fixing what ain't broke and suffering the consequences. Doh.

Our hard-pressed coder, Simon Cook, is unfortunately on vacation this week so we won't get the new version of the app fixed for some time. But Leo has been in touch with Apple, who promise to try and revert back to version 1.0 as soon as possible. In the meantime, I'm in the odd position of having to tell everybody not to get the Mirabilis app - and if you do have it, don't update to version 1.1. What we'll aim to do is stick with version 1.0 for the time being, as it does the job perfectly well, and we'll only update when we can bring in a whole lot of new features in one go.

Even this cloud has a silver lining, as all eight issues of season one are now available on Graphic.ly, whose tech allows you to buy once and view the issues on multiple platforms including iOS, desktop and Android. And as a bonus, for a limited time only, issues #1 and #2 are both free. Get them from Graphic.ly here.

Nothing but blue skies

The glorious early summer weather that London is enjoying at the moment provides the perfect excuse for a photo session with the scrumptious new Mirabilis hardback from Print Media Productions. This is the first copy to reach Britain - the rest are even now en route by lorry from the print works in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or possibly resting in a lay-by while the drivers fit in a well-earned cuppa and a sandwich.

I've previously gone on record as saying that the Mirabilis iPad edition looks "better than print", but that was before I saw the quality of colour printing that publisher Ivo Miličević has brought to this project. These books really look amazing - even better than iPad, in fact - and are such a feast for the eye that they almost eclipse the ravishing Dirty White Candy, who took time off from her punishing schedule of blogging, tweeting, script-doctoring and novel-writing to pose for the camera in a Mirabilis t-shirt.

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.

This is the universe. Big, isn't it?

“One is starved for Technicolor up there.” So says Marius Goring as the Conductor, a sort of bureaucratic ghost sent to Earth to convince David Niven that he needs to give up his life in order to balance Heaven’s books.

If the Conductor was looking for Technicolor, he wouldn’t find it done better than in Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s 1946 movie A Matter of Life and Death. Commissioned to improve UK attitudes to the US servicemen who remained stationed in Britain after the war, the movie almost immediately exposed the gaping cultural differences disguised by our common language. The title was changed to Stairway to Heaven for the US theatrical release, and the US censor took scissors to an early scene where Niven, encountering a little nude boy on the beach, assumes he’s already in the afterlife. The movie's humanistic message only escaped intact because it must have been too subtle for the studio suits.

Powell said:

“In the last twelve years, sixteen million human lives had been sacrificed to overthrow one man and his lunatic ideas. The words ‘life and death’ were no longer the great contradictions they had been. They were just facts. Out of this enormous holocaust, Emeric and I were trying to create a comedy of titanic size and energy. Two worlds were fighting for one man’s life. It was indeed a matter of life and death. And now we were told that [in the USA] we couldn’t have ‘death’ in the title. […But ] after all, there was a stairway in our film, a moving stairway, and it did lead to another world, even if it were not Heaven. Throughout the film, we were careful not to use that mighty word.”

If you haven’t seen A Matter of Life and Death then why are you even reading this? Go and get it now, from Amazon or Netflix or anywhere else you can. And while you’re at it, why not take a look at E M Forster’s short story “The Celestial Omnibus” too? It provides another look at that particular English whimsy that prevailed in the first half of the 20th century. Except of course that Pressburger was Hungarian and Forster was Anglo-Irish and Welsh… Oh, I’ve been here before.

The movie is shot in full color and, for the scenes set in what might be Heaven, in monochrome – not black and white, but bleached color film that gives those sequences a fittingly pearly glow. The Conductor is trying to get Niven’s airman to accept that he died along with the rest of his bomber crew. But there’s a hitch. In his borrowed day, the airman has fallen in love. And thus begins a trial for his right to forego Heaven. Or, just maybe, it could all be in his mind, as the climax takes place while he’s lying on the operating table undergoing emergency brain surgery. You won’t object to the ambiguity. All the things that matter in the universe are in the mind, after all.

The reason I was watching A Matter of Life and Death for what must be the twentieth time is that James Wallis, former publisher of Dragon Warriors and brilliant game designer in his own right, recently released a mini-game inspired by it. The game is called Afterlives and is set in the celestial courtroom of the movie’s third act. It’s not easy to see how you’d play it – James suggests tying it in with a roleplaying campaign, but I suspect few campaigns would have the frivolous tone required. Not that that matters. As with James’s equally essential parlor game Baron Munchausen, the real joy is in the sparkling prose and dry humor.

Not so green as cabbage-looking

As part of our policy of listening to our readers (see comments for the Kapow! report) Leo noticed that quite a few people said they bought Mirabilis for the cabbages from Yuggoth - so here they are. In season one they just get three panels and then they're cooked, but I'm sure we haven't seen the last of them. They just need to lick the refrigeration problem. (If it's not too big of a spoiler, I have a feeling aphids will see them off in the end.)