How I'd like to run a comic imprint

The big problem is the high set-up costs, because you need to keep the artist in food and clothing while he she does lots and lots and lots of drawing. (You really ought to pay a writer too, I say, but in UK comics - as in UK kids' television - the emphasis is always on the visuals because pictures are all that the executives can be bothered to look at.)

So I'd get a bunch of artists and writers and give them enough of an advance to see them through to completion of a 60-100 page graphic novel. Each graphic novel would go up online in instalments. People could preorder the book at a discount. When the book was complete, the online version would get taken down (most of it anyway).

How to keep the set-up costs down? Well, most of the online pages could be black & white, or only monochrome-coloured. Maybe they wouldn't even be full inks. That way, I could leave the decision whether to go to finished art till there was some idea of how big a fanbase each strip had built up.

And I'd pay smallish advances, maybe £100 a page, but balance that by giving the creators a bigger share of the back end. (As a creator myself, I know that's how most of us prefer it; against all statistical evidence, we always believe the next work will be the huge breakout hit.) Maybe I'd include a profit-sharing pool too, the way guys like George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola used to do points exchanges on their early movies to spread the risk.

That way, for around £100,000 I could get a slate of maybe a dozen different IPs to a first level of completion - ie not yet coloured, but complete in story and art and ready for a yes/no decision on publication. Of those, maybe six would then go through the next gate and appear in book form. If average sales of the books reach about 10,000 copies, the venture can break even.

And every so often the venture would throw up an IP like Spider-man or Judge Dredd. And, for all the talk of long tails, that's still what would make the investors very very happy.

You know, for kids

Ian Chesterton had already jumped across the chasm but he was roped to Antodus, the cowardly Thal, who of course made a hash of it, slipped and fell, almost dragging Ian down with him.

Now it wasn't actually Ian, it was Roy Castle, but I was willing to look past that for the pleasure of Daleks. In colour. On a very big screen. And just as he had in the original, Antodus sucked it up and sawed through the rope holding him, allowing Ian to scramble up to safety.

And then... and then... we heard a plaintive cry from below. Antodus was clinging to a rock and there were smiles all round as he plaintively called up, "Hey, get me out of here."

Smiles all round? From Roy and co maybe, not from me. I was outraged. I'd watched the TV version when I was six years old, and with all the Biblical ruthlessness of children I expected Antodus to fall to his death in the movie version too, his fear of everything redeemed by that one act of self-sacrifice. Even though it was Roy Castle he was saving, not the real Ian, that moment of courage meant something. Having him live meant something too... it meant the movie producers were treating me like a little kid.

It scarred me forever, that little bit of bowdlerization. Which is a good thing btw. We are nothing without our psychic scars; like Kirk, I need my pain. That particular scar means that I will never, ever voluntarily patronize my readers. Children respond to honesty in storytelling. Doctor Who was dark, bleak, fascinating and often violent. You want pratfalls and cosy outcomes? Go see a pantomime.

When I'm writing for kids, I'm writing for the kid I was. And kids like me like it without sugar-coating.

The soul of wit

Paul Mason emailed to say he was going to leave a comment advising us to go for shorter posts. The funny thing is, I'd just been saying the exact same thing to Roz about her writing tips site. Do like I say, not like I do...

I'm wondering whether the font colour is a little hard to read too. Looks nice, though. I've put this up in a different shade to see if it makes a difference.

Recommended reading

Not a comprehensive list, just a few titles off the top of my head...

The Sandman: Dream Country

Includes the first part of Gaiman's take on Shakespeare's creative bargain with Morpheus in "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which won the World Fantasy Award for best short story and quite right too. The stories are all standalones: "Calliope", "A Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Facade". Also has the annotated script for "Calliope" - I'm always interested in that kind of thing.

The Sandman: Fables and Reflections

Nine great stories. A man terrified by his nightmares of falling. Haroun al-Rashid selling the dream of Baghdad to preserve its beauty. The start of Gaiman's great heart-rending saga of Orpheus. And then there's old Baba Yaga in her chicken legged hut. We're going to have to get her into Mirabilis at some stage.

Kingdom of the Wicked

By the brilliantly talented (so obviously we hate them) British author-artist team Ian Edginton and Matt Brooker, aka D'Israeli . The story has some similarities to the Sandman classic "A Game of You" but not in any sense a rip-off. They're both interesting and very different explorations of a theme (like The Matrix and Dark City, say) worth reading as companion pieces.

Tiny Tom Fish-Head and Wavy Davy Dali from Kingdom of the Wicked.

Summer Blonde

The far end of the comics spectrum from something like Watchmen. Adrian Tomine's stories of urban alienation often don't really quite go anywhere - but in the most intriguing way.

Shortcomings

Another superb, disturbing, elusive graphic novel by Adrian Tomine. But don't take my word for it.

Jonathan Lethem: 'Shortcomings is as deceptively simple and perfect as a comic book gets.'

Nick Hornby: 'Reading a comic book suddenly becomes as rewarding as reading good contemporary fiction. Tomine has both talent and a writer's eye for the truth.'

Ghost World

So you've seen the movie and, good though it is, the graphic novel is much better. Daniel Clowes describes it as the examination of "the lives of two recent high school graduates from the advantaged perch of a constant and (mostly) undetectable eavesdropper, with the shaky detachment of a scientist who has grown fond of the prize microbes in his petri dish". So there you go. If Adrain Tomine is disquieting, Daniel Clowes's stuff is like being trapped in an elevator with a raving madman. In a good way, I mean.

The Golem's Mighty Swing

Golems, baseball, racial intolerance, the Great Depression and the American Dream. But it's not just the great comination of themes or the way James Sturm tells the story, it's the marvellously simple drawings that pack such movement and flow.

The Death of Speedy

One of the best Love & Rockets stories - which makes it almost the best you're ever going to read in comics.

Free stuff

We've been having a lot of visitors this weekend, both to the main Mirabilis site and this blog - no doubt all pointed our way by the notice in the final DFC.

Some of the other DFC strips are finishing their run online. Seeing as we left Estelle falling out of a train window a hundred feet off the ground, obviously we're going to have to stick up the next couple of episodes. You know, just enough to get her or Jack into another sticky situation.

But what else? We had planned to put all the earlier episodes online. So that would be a total of 70 pages of comic content. I believe the way to build an audience (or do I mean readership?) these days is to give 'em a bunch of free stuff and then ask who'd like to buy more. Neil Gaiman thinks so and so do Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield with Freakangels.

Those earlier episodes aren't going up just yet because we have a publishing contract with Random House and so we need to square it with them first. But if you want to find out if Estelle got out of the cockadoodie train, take a look at the site next weekend and we should have at least the next two episodes ready by then.

Heads Hands and Eyes

Today I've been working on the roughs for episode 24 (we still think in DFC episodes, even after it's sad demise), that's about 115 pages into Mirabilis. I've done a little over two pages of roughs today, not great progress, I can sometimes manage 5 pages a day, but this scene is complicated with several characters in the same space. I thought I'd post one frame (that's not important enough to give any of the story away!), and briefly go through my process and thinking. Incidentally, I don't think this is a an especially good frame, it's just what I'm doing right now.

Actually, the process is rather vague, which is get it done as efficiently as possible any which way I can. I take Dave's thumbnail sketch as a good starting point. Dave is brilliant at taking on a lot of the leg work in arranging the elements of frame. Sometimes I change his perspective or viewpoint, but most of the time he's already sorted out the basics in the best way possible. It's where the writing and drawing phases mesh.

I'll then very roughly sketch in the characters and as little of the background as is necessary at this stage. Heads first, then vague body positions then hands. In fact, the heads and the hands often drive the whole process, they are the expression that carries the story and the dialogue. I move them around and have arms, shoulders, chest, etc. follow them, just like inverse kinetics used in 3D animation software.

At this stage I refine the overall positions of everything using the fantastic Transform tool (I'm doing all of this in Photoshop btw). When I used to draw on paper, (the last 20 years!) I would have to rub out sketches and redraw to make even small adjustments. I find scaling characters in their space something that I often get slightly wrong at the first pass or two.


Once happy with general positions I then draw in more detail, but only to the minimum level I will need to ink the final black line. I concentrate on faces and eyes, wanting to pin down the emotional connections between characters. I'll keep working on this aspect however long it takes, because it's critical. The reader will immediately look to the eyes, as in any interaction in real life, to try and gauge their thoughts. I then work on hands. With Jack's hand I experimented with a more forceful pointing, but what I wanted was a hesitant gesture, a half formed attempt at stopping the rushing Gus. It's like acting, I guess. I'll even get up up from my desk and test the pose. (I hope the postman doesn't catch me!)

I thought about Mentello, the guy on the right with the hammer. His left hand is slightly supporting him on the tips of his splayed fingers. This was to emphasise the kind of personality I imagined he would have. A precise man acting out a well rehearsed entertainment routine, where even leaning on a table is done with a practised flourish.

I'm not entirely happy with the positioning of Lady Whitmead in the background, her eyes need widening in anticipation of the hammer coming down and her head turned directly to it. She's a simple soul, totally engrossed in Mentello's trick. It'll do for now, I can give her a boost at inking. I just saw something unintentional, but sort of cool. Jack's hand mirrors Gus's pointing hand. This is good, both hands emphasis the Gus's need to hurry out of the frame. The fact that Jack's hand is accidentally sort of pointing emphasises his failure to react fast enough to slow Gus's advance. May be that last bit is a bit of guff-to-far. I don't usually take my work apart like this, there isn't time.

In the background of my studio I have on Radio 4, or a listening book, but miss big chunks as I try to figure out the drawing. It's quite irritating. Perhaps I'll listen to music. I'm constantly interrupted, my wife telling me not to forget the onions, and the boys asking where the Airfix is. On one level annoying, on the other a gladdening reminder that I'm still alive in the real world. Also I love 'em.

Passage of time

I just came across my chronology for the Winter season of Mirabilis:

• Tuesday January 1st 1901 - the duel
• Friday January 11th 1901 - Jack's trip to Selsey
• Sunday January 13th 1901 - setting off from Paris on the Orient Express

The book by al-Mas'udi that Jack is supposed to fetch in Istanbul is going up for auction at noon on Friday January 18th 1901. (He would normally get there with time to spare, but obviously there have to be complications.)

Episodes 24-32 (I still think in episodes, even now the DFC is defunct) all take place over the space of a few hours on January 18th. Which means that if the DFC had continued, we would have been rounding off the Winter part of the story in August (our time) but Jack and Estelle would still be less than three weeks into the Mirabilis year!

After "episode" 32 there's going to be a jump, picking up the story several months later. By this time fantasy is getting to be a familiar part of everyday life, as you can start to see in the correspondence at the Royal Mythological Society.

Amazing to think that at one point we were seriously talking about running Mirabilis over 52 weekly episodes in realtime, ie so that time passed in the story and the real world at the same rate. It was a nice idea but, with only 5 pages a week, it would never have worked unless we'd tried some variant of the two clocks system in Othello.