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.

A Wrong Turning

Mirabilis was one of the DFC strips that was supposed to appear in the Guardian's comic section. We were told that the Guardian pages would have to be original content, not pre-prints of the strip that would eventually and briefly appear in the DFC. So I wrote half a dozen one-off stories, each set at a different time of the "year of wonders".

In the event, we realized that time and money wouldn't stretch to doing an extra 30-40 pages on top of the serialized story in the DFC, so the stories were abandoned. And in retrospect that was probably just as well, as the approach we were aiming for might have made sense to somebody familiar with the old Warren magazines but would probably have baffled the typical British reader sitting with their toast and marmalade.

But one of those stories, "A Wrong Turning", got as far as the tight pencils stage. A single page of it was even inked. And, as it has no overt connection with the Mirabilis universe, we're giving it away for Christmas. It's a spooky tale of bereavement and classic motor cars, and when Peter Richardson on the fablulous Cloud 109 blog pointed out that this is traditionally the season for ghost stories, I realized it was the perfect time to dig it up.

You can read the preamble here or go straight for the PDF here. Ho ho ho.

New Mirabilis episodes online

No need to fight - they're free to one and all. Episodes 2, 3 and 4 are now on the Mirabilis website. If you like 'em, please drop by the blog and say hi.