The Meadowvane memorial lecture

Leo and I are running daily previews of Mirabilis season two all this week. After working in secret all these months, it feels good to be taking the covers off, even for just a tiny sneak peek. And Dame Belchamy's lecture on daily life under the green comet is also an ideal catch-up for new readers. Hope you'll pop over and say hi!

"Echoes of Tintin" (he said)

Here's the first ever glimpse (well, almost) of Mirabilis Book 3, which Leo and Nikos and I are working to get ready in time for release in March next year. And as added encouragement, we just got a marvellous review for Book 1 from the discerning Mr Richard Bruton on the Forbidden Planet blog.

I'm looking forward most of all to the feedback from the kids in Richard's school library, but in the meantime comparisons to Tintin, Bryan Talbot, Bret Blevins, Jacques Tardi and Jules Verne are certainly making our work go with a swing today. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho...

Mirabilis in da house

...in the Print Media Productions warehouse in Lancaster, to be precise. I don't know exactly how many copies are there - but a lot. Good job it's got a reinforced floor, coz those hardbacks are heavy. And that's not even all of the Volume 1 batch. Volume 2 is on the way in time for the autumn and here's a sneaky peek at Volume 3, due out next spring.

The dragon has landed!

Finally! The first Mirabilis hardcover that I mentioned a while back was starting to look like a mythical beast itself, thanks to a banking snafu that left several thousand copies stuck in a Customs warehouse near Heathrow. But that's all sorted and the books are now at large in the UK. There's been a sighting in SFX magazine and now, at long last, a listing on Amazon. (Don't be put off by the "out of stock" notice; you can pre-order now and they will have copies by the end of the week.)

Volume two will be out before the end of the year, with volumes three and four following in March and September next year. Leo and Nikos and I better get our skates on!

The green album

I took advantage of the sunny weather to get a few shots of my wife looking at the Mirabilis Volume One hardback, now just weeks away from UK release. These photos don't really do justice to the quality of the colour printing, which is the best I've seen. And look at the size of it - this is a real whopping great European album! More pics over on our blog. (And by the way, did you notice that t-shirt?)

Digital take-off

I know there was some other big news this week... wasn't there? ;) but didn't want to miss out on telling everybody about us launching on Graphic.ly. Got an iPhone? Or an iPad? Or an Android mobile? Want to sample the cool streamlined viewing of Adobe AIR for PC/Mac? Or even just plain ol' web? There's an app to fit your device of choice, and Mirabilis #1 and #2 are hanging ripe 'n' luscious on those digital branches just waiting to be picked right now for free, with six more issues coming up on Graphic.ly and Comics+ too over the next six weeks.

What I really like about digital comics is that it's like coming down off the stage and mingling with the audience. Traditional publishing is thud, there's your comic, and unless you really want to plunge in to a life of fandom, the stream of community tends to pass you by. But digital platforms like Graphic.ly and Comics+ are really making comics collecting and reading into an easy participatory experience. Nothing very new in this (it's what Stan Lee did with Marvel, ably imitated in this country by Alf & Cos and later, of course, the Mighty Tharg) but digital comics make it so sweet. More on this here.

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!

Footnotes and fancies

Two of my absolute favorite fantasy novels are Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mister Norrell and Jack Vance's The Green Pearl. Both are big hefty tomes that suck you into richly detailed, immersive universes, and one of the techniques the authors use to do that is the liberal sprinkling of footnotes. These serve as little asides, often mini-stories in their own right, that you can dip into to get a sense of the broader world behind the action of the novel.

I reckon that's one way that e-publishing and regular publishing can co-exist and feed into each other, instead of fighting it out to the death as some publishers seem to fear. Ebooks are ideal for flash fic that you can snack on in between longer episodes of the main narrative. And with that in mind, I've corralled all our whimsical letters to the Royal Mythological Society from Mirabilis and packaged them up as a Kindle book that goes on sale on Amazon today.

The Year of Wonders comprises more than fifty fantasy and SF tales in vignette form, from the mysterious giant hand found in a wood in Yorkshire to the best way to deal with a dragon that's taken a shine to the gold reserves of Fort Knox. Best of all, you won't actually need a Kindle because I've sneaked a preview up on free flipbook site BookBuzzr. And thanks to the magic of widgetry it's right here:

E-comics

Not content with just our iPad comics app, we've just released Mirabilis #1 in EPUB format. I wasn't sure about this at first because having to conform to lots of different screen sizes meant that we couldn't show the entire page layouts as we can on iPad. But when we started chopping the art down to a one-panel-per-page layout, I started to really appreciate the incredible work that Leo, Martin and Nikos put into it. Take this panel, which for me has a touch of Steve Dillon about it. Hard to think of greater praise that that!

A clever widget

We've been playing around with promo sites like BookBuzzr as a way of spreading the word about the Mirabilis app (still available here - once you've bought your iPad that is).

On BookBuzzr you can set up a look inside view of your comic, and you get a widget like the one above that you can put on your blog or website. All absolutely free too, so a perfect fit for advertising budgets like ours.

And it seems to work. This week Mirabilis is #1 in BookBuzzr's charts for Young Adult, #1 in Sci-Fi & Fantasy, and #1 in Comics & Graphic Novels! I don't yet know whether this translates into real sales, but any of you guys who have a book or comic out there ought to give it a go.

Incidentally this particular sneak peek is an extra freebie that even the iPad customers don't get, as it's the first few pages of Mirabilis issue 2, which on iPad is one of the in-app purchases. This episode originally appeared as "The Wrong Side of Bedlam" in DFC number 34. Can you believe that was two years ago? Incredible.

Mirabilis: Winter is HOT!

I'm sure everybody knows by now that Mirabilis: Winter, the first 200-page season in our ongoing fantasy epic, launched in the App Store just before Christmas. (You did know that, right? You must've. Even my mum knows.) But what you won't know - because this news is just sizzling minutes old - is that we've rocketed up to #7 in "What's hot!" in book apps. Those Apple guys, they obviously know their onions. Oh, we're sooooo excited. It's like Christmas has gone right around the sun and come straight back!

Mirabilis graphic novel app in Top 100 grossing books

I'm cross-posting this from the Mirabilis blog because we're just too darned excited to keep it under our hats. Mirabilis - Year of Wonders has been in the App Store for four days now, which is pretty fantastic as it is. But the really great news is that we just nudged into the Top 100 grossing ibooks at #99!

You can get the first instalment of the story completely free, then other chapters cost $1.99 each. So it was dizzyingly good news when we rose to #13 in iTunes books, but to actually be in the top-grossing charts too shows that new readers are following through with the story after they've been astounded by the fluid interface, easy in-app issue management, eye-popping zoom and page flip (courtesy of demon coder Simon Cook), magical colors (by wizard of the digital rainbow Nikos Koutsis) and stunning art (by maestro of the Wacom tablet Leo Hartas).

Next stop: the Kindle. And in the meantime, if you haven't got the Mirabilis iPad app yet, you can find it here in the USA and here in the UK. And you can read the first instalment online on BookBuzzr even without an iPad!

Top of the world, ma!

Apologies for the avalanche of Mirabilis news this week, but there's no arguing with the Mighty Apple. And there we are splashed across the top of the "New & Noteworthy" page on iTunes. What can we say? Mr Jobs's guys, they have such good taste. You can pick up your Mirabilis - Year of Wonders graphic novel app here (the reader itself and first chapter are absolutely FREE) and if you haven't got yourself an iPad yet, here is where to find your local Apple Store. (No, we don't get a commission. It's just the coolest thing ever and you HAVE to get one. Trust me.)

Appy families

Last week, Roz and I ventured off over rime-caked roads and fog-blurred distances into Britain’s deep West Country, blanketed then in the icy breath of Fenris the winter-spirit, to spend a few days at a couple of magnificent old manors leased to us by the Landmark Trust. The whiteout pressed right up to the stone-mullioned leaded panes, but inside we were snug as long as there was another bag of logs to toss on the fire.
Our first sojourn was under the shoulder of Dartmoor at Wortham Manor and the second (not quite so remote in the normal course of things) was Gurney Manor near Nether Stowey – whose most famous resident, Mr S T Cumberbatch, was briefly in Elliott’s Light Dragoons and whose career therein inspired the scene in Mirabilis where Jack Ember gets promoted to lieutenant. Oh, but I digress…
One evening, braving the arctic weather, Leo and his family drove over to see us and we all sat down for a massive feast overlooked by 18th century portraits. It was a little bit of a celebratory dinner, in fact, as a few days earlier we finally submitted the Mirabilis comic reader app to Apple for approval. And now that Steve Jobs has given us the nod, and Mirabilis is bumping its way up the App Store book chart, here are a few pictures of Clan Hartas giving it a test-drive.

Mirabilis hits No.17 in the Top Free Book iPad charts in just 24hrs!

Yesterday our iPad app, Mirabilis, finally made it into the light onto iTunes. It's a free app developed by Simon Cook that contains a super smooth reader and store front. You get the first 25 page issue free with the next 7 issues, totalling a whopping 200 pages, available to buy from within the app.

Mirabilis, with it's beautiful, rich colours by Nikos Koutsis, looks fantastic on iPad. Was Mirabilis made for iPad, or iPad for Mirabilis? Neither, but it's marriage made in heaven! We are really thrilled and excited to get our work out there and being downloaded so quickly. I know, you may say "free", is the way to get the numbers up, but I just looked and we are 117 in the Top Grossing iPad Books chart, so the paid for issues must be selling! We're doing this all ourselves, Dave, Nikos and me. Please help us by spreading the word! 

On iTunes
Mirabilis website

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!

Music hall magic

Here's a look at one of Martin McKenna's spectacular widescreen paintings for the Mirabilis Gazetteer. This was the way we originally planned to tell the Mirabilis story in the days before a comic strip was ever discussed, as a kind of multi-stranded global weave of stories with artwork by Martin and Leo. In short, a Dinotopia-style art book. We even had a firm publication date of September 2009 before the DFC came along and distracted us - and, while working on the graphic novels is a lot of fun, in retrospect we might have been better off starting with the Gazetteer. (20/20 hindsight, what a superpower!) Anyway, we've been dusting it off and there really is rather a lot of juicy artwork just crying out to be seen, so we've decided to get the Gazetteer back on track for publication next year. Watch out for more sneak peeks.

Green issues

It's Earth Day according to Google, so here's a leafy pic from Mirabilis - courtesy of the inimitable Leo and Nikos. (And now, at Lorenzo's request, with word balloons!)

Nihongo wo hanasemasu ka?

Undeterred by the almost total absence of airships, big eyes, cute kids or wacky talking animals, Leo and I have decided to undertake the Benkei-sized task of getting 190-odd pages of Mirabilis translated into Japanese. The first ten pages are here and here.

Mirabilis episodes every Friday

All this snow, eh? T. S. Eliot wrote of "the dark time of the year/between melting and freezing/when you can't get to the shops without bruising your bum." And apparently it's what the scientists meant all along when they said "global warming" so we can't even get our money back.

Anyway, looking out over white rooftops reminds me of a year ago, when the DFC appeared to be sailing unstoppably through the pack-ice of British indifference to comics. It was a special time for me, Leo, Martin and Nikos because we'd already been working on Mirabilis for what felt like an ice age, and finally we had episodes actually appearing every week. Kids in a sweetshop, we were. Or maybe I mean sweatshop. Both, probably.

Like Camelot, Dollhouse and the sex life of a butterfly, of course it was too good to last. Icebergs were waiting. Storm clouds gathered. The DFC went down and all hands were reported missing - though we do now know that a few plucky lifeboats got away, and we're praying for them to reach safe harbour by the spring.

Meanwhile, rime-locked on the wreckage, Leo and I have decided to indulge in a bit of mallemaroking (because, let's face it, how often can you use the word?) by re-running the Mirabilis episodes from the DFC in flipbook form. There'll be a new episode every Friday, just for nostalgia's sake, and at the end of the run there will be three non-DFC episodes including one that's never been seen before. That will carry us through to the end of February and, a few days after that, the first of the DFC Library will appear like the shoots of an awakening year. Hope yours is a warm one.