Up above the world so high

As expedition leader Sir Reginald Butley stepped across from the basket of his balloon onto the lunar surface, he uttered the immortal words: "That's one small step for a young man, but it's quite a jump for an old chap like me, I can tell you. I probably shouldn't have had that extra helping of shepherd's pie for lunch. And then there were the mince pies coming up. Tell you what, you young folk go on and I'll just sit here for a bit and enjoy the view. Whew."

In the absence of actual pages from the story, here's another breathtaking image by Martin. This was originally destined for the gazetteer, which was planned as a kind of Mirabilis yearbook along the lines of Dinotopia or The Spiderwick Field Guide. And the most amazing thing about this picture? It was never finished; this is Martin's idea of a rough sketch!

Moon-climbing is the kind of thing you'd see happening by April or May in the year of wonders. Our plan was to have twelve full color spreads throughout the gazetteer and make those also into a calendar. If that appeals, you should take a look at the Giclée prints available of some of Martin's most gorgeous full-color artwork.

That was the year that was

Amazing to think that it was last December that Leo and I put together the Mirabilis trailer, armed only with a bunch of stills and a great score by the multitalented Frazer Payne. I’d been steeling myself for a day or two swearing at Flash, so it was a happy discovery that we could do the whole thing in Windows Movie Maker in an afternoon and then go down the pub.

The pub in question was the Globe in Appley where we spent a very enjoyable evening with Fred Hasson of Red Bedlam and his family. Beer was had, and good pies, and Fred and his brother Leary, once stalwarts of ‘70s prog rock with their band Marsupilami, joined in a few songs with the Globe’s proprietor, affable Angelino LeBurn Maddox.

I mention all this only to show that it seems like it happened just a couple of days ago. The year has gone bounding by like an eager St Bernard on its way to a cable car disaster. Okay, we’ve done about 150 pages of Mirabilis since then, but it doesn’t seem enough – especially not while the work remains squirreled away like those National Gallery paintings they shoved in a Welsh cave during the war.

Leo and Nikos have been working flat out all year. Leo is drawing, drawing every minute the day gives him, and Nikos colors Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon along with a whole lot of other work. Compared to those guys, I feel like such a slacker. Only about half my energy this year has gone into writing Mirabilis. That’s the enjoyable half. The rest was frittered away trying to get projects like the iPhone version under way.

My resolutions for 2010 are therefore: to spend at least 90% of my efforts on the actual creative work, to make sure that I retain control of everything I create, and to achieve more.

Huh, did I just tell myself, “Must try harder”? My primary school teacher would surely approve!

Grr Argh

Maureen Ryan has an illuminating in-depth interview with Joss Whedon on the Chicago Tribune site. They're mainly talking about Dollhouse, his recently-cancelled show about operatives whose minds are blank until they’re imprinted with the personality and skills required for an assignment. (And if that suggests Joe 90 sitting in the Big Rat, put the image right out of your head; what Echo gets up to in Dollhouse would really steam Joe's bins.) After a couple of early episodes that make you suppose the show is going to settle into a comfortable weekly mission format, Joss takes it off in a whole strange, murky and kinky direction. And then at the end of season one it suddenly goes off the map into totally unexpected territory.

The bit that really got my attention was when Joss starts discussing his plans for more internet projects along the lines of Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, which has parallels with how Leo and I would like to build up an audience for our comic projects:

Ryan: When I was soliciting questions for this interview, I kept getting, "Why isn't Joss Whedon going to cable or just going off and doing his own Joss Whedon online portal or whatever?"

Whedon: Well I can answer both those questions - because Fox forgot to cancel my show. They looked on their calendars and went, "God, we were supposed to cancel this months ago!"

Nice to see that television networks also operate under the “idiocy of the system” method. Although by some fluke the system hasn’t behaved quite as idiotically as it does in other media, because Fox are after all allowing the show to run until the end of season two. Which is a lot more sensible than just filibustering a project and generally pissing off the people who created it until they wander off to do something else so that the publisher/studio/network gets to keep the biggest slice of an infinitely small pie.

Whedon: The Internet is slightly more interesting [than TV] right now just because I feel like we have to get in there and start figuring out how to create entertainment without the networks and the studios, because they’re basically trying to figure out how to create and entertain without us.

Ryan: Yeah, I think you’re right there, but as you say, it’s not easy to kind of create a new model for how everyone gets paid and makes what they want to make.

Whedon: Yeah, but people aren’t going to make what they want to make anymore. That’s not going to happen. The rainbow, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow got smaller, significantly smaller. […] The artistic community is more and more left out of the equation, so the trick is going to be finding out how to make the Internet work in such a way that people [can get by] because it’s not going to pay TV money. It’s not. In fact, people are going to have to be entering the business less with the idea of making a fortune and more of the idea of just making product, getting it done, getting it out there and then hoping that there is a way in which it can support [a creative community].

If anything, book publishing is further along that curve than TV. People complain about novels “written by” celebrities, but the fact is that an author must first build a platform, as they say, or their opus will assuredly sink in the sea of books being published every month. A soap star is someone who has nailed that obscurity problem, and the fact that they can’t actually write is easily dealt with by bunging a relatively small sum at a ghostwriter. (That's the way producers and editors mostly prefer writers anyway - as hirelings.)

The problem is that ghostwritten novels with celebrity names on the cover will not produce the original content necessary to drive the whole industry onwards. So some genuine authors are still needed – not many, but some. However, those authors too have to build their platform to stand out from the crowd. Networks and publishers should therefore be delighted to see authors willing to strike out and take all the risks themselves on the Internet. Then they can offer sweet deals to the ones who bob up to the surface. It’s like being able to wait and see if a lottery ticket has won before you pay for it.

Anyway, back to Joss Whedon. All this has just reminded me that I still haven’t got around to watching Firefly. The hokey cowboy angle just keeps getting in the way. But I’ll try and get past that because Whedon’s TV shows are like Alan Moore’s comics: even the weaker stuff rewards your time. So if you’ve begun puzzling over Christmas presents, that could be your answer. Dr Horrible is a great laugh, Dollhouse is compelling and thought-provoking, and Buffy is just about the greatest body of work yet made for television. Go on, you won’t be disappointed – and, better yet, you’ll be helping Joss escape the clutches of the networks so he can go on to create even more original stories.

Let me take you by the hand...

Another nice bit of concept art from Martin, and a reminder that the world of 1901 wasn't all regimental balls, tea in Bloomsbury and a private compartment on the Orient Express. Without the squalor, poverty and injustice that infested the underside of la Belle Époque, the arrival of that green comet would betoken nothing more than an explosion of random magic. We chose two heroes from opposite ends of the social spectrum for a reason, intending to develop a serious theme alongside all the fantasy adventure. This is a world that needs changing.

However, rest assured that if you have no taste for social politics you can safely ignore that aspect of the story and concentrate instead on the plant monsters, vampires, robots, talking apes, undersea kingdoms, mad scientists, flying machines, fighting saints, genies, baby giants, pteranodons, witches, elemental spirits, 2000-year-old wizards, potions, rope tricks, murder mysteries and very bad fairies.

Camerawork

It was only on reading Peter Richardson’s fascinating posts about Jim Steranko that I remembered Jaunty Jim’s artwork for Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. was what first made me aware of the potential of comics to tell a story cinematically. I don’t know why it took me so long, because I had been reading comic books avidly by then for several years and I was a total movie nut almost from infancy. (At the age of six I was telling my bewildered teacher how there was this scene of Lawrence striding along the top of a train and it was really brilliant because David Lean had only shot Peter O’Toole’s feet. I really was quite a scary little boy.)

Comparisons are not only invidious, they don’t really work. To say that comics are like cinema is to miss all the ways that they can do things differently. Alan Moore has something to say about that:

“The use of cinematic techniques can advance the standards of comic art and writing, but if those techniques are seen as the highest point to which comic art can aspire, then the medium is condemned forever to be a poor relative of the motion picture industry.”

And this from the man who wrote the opening page of Watchmen, remember. I get the point Mr Moore is making. However, many of the techniques we think of as cinematic actually predate the moving image by many years. There’s a sequence in Great Expectations where Magwitch is about to reappear on the scene. Dickens describes a storm rolling in over the rooftops of London and then he swoops down into Pip’s lodgings in Middle Temple. I can just see a director like Fincher or Burton having fun with that. But even much earlier, in Pickwick Papers, Dickens had scenes that were set up (as we would see it now) cinematically. I’m not just talking about his very evocative visual descriptions, but his use of spatial relationships in a scene, the sense that he always knows exactly where “the camera” is.

What I like is the way a camera can pick out a detail for emphasis – like running feet in a Lean or Kurosawa movie, the cage of shadows in film noir, the hiss of steam from a pipe in Roeg’s Bad Timing, or bamboo swaying in the moonlight in King Hu’s Touch of Zen. The “camera” in this context could equally well be our viewpoint in a comic, a videogame or even a novel.

But what I really love is when the camera/viewpoint explores the 3D-ness of a scene. Maybe it has something to do with our hunter-gatherer past that makes spatial relationships so fascinating and pleasurable? The three panels above are from fairly late on in the Mirabilis story and come right after a sequence of several pages that has taken us from the streets of Constantinople to the rooftops and right across the bay, and there from the mast of a ship to its deck. Breathtaking comics work from Leo there, and I hope we get the chance to show it all to you soon. (Update: it's here in Book Two.)

Games, of course, excel at this particular “cinematic” trick, and one of the best examples is in the classic game Outcast. Watch from 4 minutes in:



- though for the full effect you really need to play the whole game. Ten years old and still the best - trust me.

The last page

Here's a detail from the very final panel of Mirabilis. (That's the Sea of Marmara but, as you can see, the picture doesn't give anything away about how the story ends.) We've got nearly 200 pages and about two years of work behind us on this one, so I reckon we deserve an afternoon off. Read more on the Super Comics Adventure Squad site.

Unfortunately you can't get hold of the story anywhere yet - apart from the early online episodes, that is. Ideally I'd like to get the first five chapters (roughly equivalent to twenty-two of the old DFC episodes) out in electronic form. That's about half the book and, since our biggest problem is obscurity, it would be worth giving away to get the widest readership possible. (Just like music: ensure your tracks have the widest possible distribution and you'll make money on the concerts. In this analogy the printed book is the equivalent of the concert, of course.)

Anyway, we can't do it that way with Mirabilis but it is how we'll be releasing Sweet. The first 20 pages of that are all written so as soon as Leo's Wacom tablet has cooled down we'll be getting the art under way. This one will be released episodically so we can build an audience. It only took us two years to learn how to do it right!

Writing 101

We've had posts from time to time about the creative process, so I feel justified in this plug for my wife's book Nail Your Novel, which is available free in PDF format on her blog. (You don't actually have to have an iPhone, she just took those photos to show it's perfectly readable on a small screen.)

If you're planning on writing a book - or a comic, come to that - grab it while you can. Roz sold half a million copies of her own books last year, so her advice is worth getting.