Mirabilis arrives in hardback!

Wheee! Down The Tubes has news of the upcoming Mirabilis hardbacks that will be rocketing like little magic comets into UK stores any day now. This is the whole 200-page first season in two volumes, and although I said "little" they're actually European album-sized (a whopping 235 x 315 mm) so they should be kind of hard to miss.

There's a glimpse of the Volume One endpapers here and a little more background info (and another sensational painting by Martin) right here, while the full story is over on the Strip Magazine blog. The first Mirabilis book is due in March, with Volume Two following hard on its heels a month later. Hope you'll join us for the adventure!

Sneak peeks

Leo, Martin and I have just been finalizing how to divide the first Mirabilis book into eight chapters - or issues, I guess is another way to look at it.

Without any forward planning at all, the whole thing breaks up very nicely into comic-book-sized chunks of around 20-25 pages each, and here are the individual covers.

We got so carried away with the idea of each chapter being a comic book in its own right that we've even added a letters column edited by the chaps at the Royal Mythological Society.

The first issue is already up as a flipbook on the Mirabilis website as a preview of goodies in store. As for the rest of the series - more news very soon!

Looping the loop

Here's a great painting by Martin McKenna (cross-posted from the Mirabilis blogsite) showing what it's like in our world now that midsummer's here and we've reached the perihelion of the green comet that's bringing magic into everyday Edwardian life. I'm terrified of heights so it's quite hard to look at this picture without shaking!