Mirabilis: Year of Wonders advance copies go on sale

Advance copies of Print Media Productions hardcover edition of Mirabilis: Year of Wonders - Winter Book 1 are now on sale exclusively from First Age Comics, Lancaster.

A huge graphic novel project by Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, Mirabilis is a fantasy adventure story for young adults which opens New Year’s Day 1901, when a green comet appears in the sky. As it gets bigger, the line between reality and fantasy blurs. Soon there are mermaids in the Thames, elves in Parliament and a dragon roosting on Big Ben. But then the comet rounds the sun and starts to fade. Will the world be able to go back to a life without magic?

The full-colour graphic novel was originally serialized in The DFC, the weekly print comic published by Random House UK, who financed the production and has been released as a digital edition for iPad.

"We couldn't be more pleased with the production design on these books," says Dave Morris. "Typography, colours and layouts all add to the reading experience, and Print Media have carried all that through with professionalism and a real eye for detail.

"The end result is not simply our comic between hard covers, but a beautiful work that we think readers will treasure."

Mirabilis: Year of Wonders Volume 1 was solicited by Diamond (Order Code FEB111949), joining Keith Page and Stephen Walsh's Iron Moon title as the first graphic album projects from the new British company. Both albums will be re-solicited in July Previews.

• Advance copies are available now only from First Age Comics, The Assembly Rooms, Lancaster; order it online from the First Age eBay Store


• More about Mirabilis: Year of Wonders on the STRIP Magazine blog


• Mirabilis on iTunes

• Learn more at www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com

Print Media to publish Dave Morris and Leo Hartas Mirabilis project

Print Media Productions has announced it will be publishing hardcover editions of Mirabilis: Year of Wonders -- a huge graphic novel project by Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, also available on iPad and soon to debut on digital platforms Graphic.ly and Comics+.

Mirabilis is a fantasy adventure story for young adults which opens New Year’s Day 1901, when a green comet appears in the sky. As it gets bigger, the line between reality and fantasy blurs. Soon there are mermaids in the Thames, elves in Parliament and a dragon roosting on Big Ben. But then the comet rounds the sun and starts to fade. Will the world be able to go back to a life without magic?

The full-colour graphic novel was originally serialized in The DFC, the weekly print comic published by Random House UK, who financed the production and has been released as a digital edition for iPad.

Published by Random House, The DFC treated several thousand devoted subscribers to the very best in British graphic fiction, with stories by top-name talent like Phillip Pullman and Harry Potter artist Adam Brockbank.

The biggest single project among all The DFC's ongoing stories was unquestionably Mirabilis, a hugely ambitious comics saga planned to span almost 200 issues. Billed as "a modern Tintin", Mirabilis's planned 800 pages equals more than a dozen volumes of Herge's classic comic series.

When The DFC closed, Mirabilis creators Dave Morris and Leo Hartas had barely begun to tell their epic yarn. The next two installments appeared on the Mirabilis website (www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com) and drew almost 8000 hits. That's when Hartas and Morris realized they could be onto something.

"We couldn't bear to end our story there," explains Morris, a bestselling UK author and a mentor with the American Film Institute. "You have a duty both to your readers and to the characters you've created not to leave them in the middle of a cliff-hanger."

"The question was how to finance the project," says Hartas, the award-winning illustrator who draws the Mirabilis comic. "It's a recession and nobody was investing in anything. Then we decided, to hell with it – rather than looking around for new work, we'd just get our heads down and complete the story."

Dragon Rides - art for Mirabilis by Leo Hartas

The new Mirabilis

The first season of Mirabilis is now ready. Mirabilis: Winter is a whopping 200-page book whose eight chapters comprise the first act of Mirabilis's year of wonders. Morris and Hartas had several discussions with David Fickling, The DFC's ebullient editor, about releasing it through his book imprint. But the tortuously slow progress of print publishing meant that the first volume wouldn't appear until late 2012 – and Fickling and his Random House paymasters couldn't commit to future books until they saw the sales figures.

"In the end, much as we would have loved to stay with the Fickling label, we decided to keep doing it our way," says Hartas. "We just wanted to get the work out there in front of readers as soon as possible."

Two events provided the key to achieving that ambitious goal. First with the release of the iPad, which allowed Morris and Hartas to launch a digital version of the comic in time for Christmas 2010, and then in a deal with Print Media Productions, who have signed up Mirabilis: Winter for release as two prestige-format hardback volumes that will be in UK bookshops in 2011.

Morris and Hartas had already had offers from digital publishers to release Mirabilis on iPhone, but were reluctant because the small screen didn't do justice to the fabulous full-colour artwork. "A graphic novel page is not merely a storyboard sequence of panels," says Morris. "On a phone screen you lose too much of the full reading experience of a printed book. The iPad, though, that's another matter."

Teaming up with Brighton-based TDB Software, Morris and Hartas drew on both their creative and entrepreneurial experience to set up Mirabilis on iPad through their own Mirus Entertainment label. The Mirabilis app is free and comes with the first 25-page chapter already loaded. Subsequent chapters are $1.99 and have been crafted to evoke the experience of collecting a set of comic books, right down to the covers and letters page.

"A comic is more than just a novel with pictures," says Hartas. "It's about community, it's about being drawn into a completely immersive fantasy world."

As inveterate comic and book collectors, Morris and Hartas were not content for their story to only appear digitally. “That’s why the offer from Print Media Productions came at such an ideal time,” says Hartas. “Print Media have their own print works in Europe, meaning that we can work closely with our editor, John Freeman and publisher Ivo Milicevic, to get the production quality tuned to perfection without the long delays that other publishers have to suffer with books being printed out in the Far East.”

The first volume was printed last week in Bosnia, and Dave and Leo were involved in pre-production every step of the way.

The Print Media edition of Mirabilis: Winter is being published as two top-quality hardback books, each of 112 pages, at the large-format album size traditional for European graphic novels that can be seen in a series like Charley’s War and the company's first graphic album release, The Iron Moon.

Mirabilis: Year of Wonders Volume 1 is now being solicited by Diamond (Order Code FEB111949), joining Keith Page and Stephen Walsh's Iron Moon title as the first graphic album projects from the new British company.

• More information on the Print Media web page: www.stripmagazine.co.uk

• Mirabilis: Winter Book One can be ordered via Diamond Previews, Order Code FEB111949.


• Mirabilis on iTunes . Versions for Graphic.ly and Comics+ will be announced soon

• Learn more at www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com

Mirabilis graphic novel released as iPad app

Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, a graphic novel by Dave Morris and Leo Hartas first seen in The DFC comic launched in the App Store for iPad this week.

Mirabilis is a fantasy adventure story for young adults which opens New Year’s Day 1901, when a green comet appears in the sky. As it gets bigger, the line between reality and fantasy blurs. Soon there are mermaids in the Thames, elves in Parliament and a dragon roosting on Big Ben. But then the comet rounds the sun and starts to fade. Will the world be able to go back to a life without magic?

The full-colour graphic novel was originally serialized in The DFC, the weekly print comic published by Random House UK, who financed the production. Mirabilis is the first of the DFC strips (which include Mezolith, Mo-Bot High and Monkey Nuts) to appear on iPad.

The iPad app comprises the first 200-page season in what Morris and Hartas plan as a four-book epic.

“iPad is a game changer for graphic novels,” says Mirabilis writer Dave Morris, a former number one UK best-selling author. “Go into most bookshops in Britain, you’ll be lucky to find the graphic novel section. Even in the US, they’re mostly just available in hobby stores. Yet suddenly the graphic novel market is worldwide, portable, affordable, open to everybody.”

“As soon as we saw the iPad we knew we had to release Mirabilis on this platform first," adds Leo Hartas, the story’s co-creator and illustrator. "The quality is better than print. The colours have to be seen to be believed."

Despite their obvious (and deserved) enthusiasm for the iPad, Dave and Leo aren't leaving print behind. Hardcover volumes of the Winter story will be published by Print Media Productions next year, and serialized print editions are in negotiation for India and the United States.

• Mirabilis iTunes on iTunes

• Learn more at www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com

Mirabalis Christmas Ghost Story is an Online Gem

We plugged the Mirabilis team's free-to-download Year of Wonders PDF comic just yesterday, but we're so knocked out by the Henry James-styled Christmas ghost story that we're urging you all to head over and grab your own copy - described as a "work in progress" - as soon as possible. It's just fab.

"Christmas Eve in particular is a time when the world holds its breath, the pulse of time fluttering to nothing for an instant before it begins again," says Dave Morris in his introduction to the tale. "Could there be a more appropriate time to settle down with a tale to send shivers up your spine?"

“A Wrong Turning” is one of half a dozen self-contained seasonal stories originally written to promote Mirabilis, a strip which fisrt saw light in the weekly The DFC comic from Random House and is now enjoying a new life online.

There’s nothing about the story that marks it as being set in the Mirabilis universe, however. A bereaved father and son take a detour that leads them into an eerie encounter with the next world. The tight, atmospheric pencils are by Martin McKenna, and you’ll see right away why he is so in demand for movie storyboarding, his art style evocative of the likes of great Creepy artists like Gray Morrow, Reed Crandall, Angelo Torres and Al Williamson.

You’ll find the PDF of “A Wrong Turning” here. "Go ahead, it’s our Christmas present to you," urges Dave. "All we ask is that, if you enjoy it, please send it to at least two friends who you think might like it, and ask them to do the same. If you have a blog or a website whose readers might appreciate a little scare, by all means feel free to put it up there too.

"2010 is the year we’re planning to embrace viral marketing, and we mean to hit the ground running."

• Mirabalis Official Web Site

Tube Surfing: EveryDay Praise, Muppets and Mirabilis

• Forbidden Planet International's Richard Bruton has been heaping praise on the work of Manchester-based Adam Cadwell, whose EveryDay webcomic . "Cadwell’s work is much more slice of life, observational style than others," says Richard. "This means that the majority of strips tend to be stand-alone things, relying on an interesting idea, event or gag than any narrative, concentrating on the immediacy of the moment being conveyed in 3 or 4 panels of the strip... But where some autobiography that concentrates only on the minutiae of everyday life does come unstuck with the repetition, Cadwell’s work is fresh and interesting to read." Three collections of Adam's Everyday strip are now available from his web site. Read Richard's full review here

• Dan Abnett has just published the dates for his "Bloody Pact Tour" of the North, which starts at the Games Workshop Metro in Gateshead on 16th October.

• Good news for British fans of the Muppets and ace cartoonist Roger Langridge. .The first Muppet Show Comic Book collection, Meet the Muppets, is out this week and the good news for readers in the UK is that although the original comics weren't officially available in the UK, the collection is and is available from Amazon UK here. "So now British readers can stop wondering what I've been up to for the last year or so," says Roger. As an added incentive, the ten-page story he did for Disney Adventures a couple of years ago, which has never before been published in its entirety, will finally see the light of day in the collection. (There's a hardcover edition available, too).

• Martin Eden, creator of the critically acclaimed indie O-Men superhero comic, is putting the finishing touches to the first issue of his new project, Spandex. "The art is done, and now I just need to wait and see if I'm going to get lottery funding to print it up," he reveals on his blog.

• Bleeding Cool reports comics writer Mark Millar will be speaking at Charlotte Square Gardens as part of the Edinburgh Festival tomorrow night at 8pm, about comics, graphic novels and movies. However, as Jeremy Briggs reported here weeks ago the event is sold out: you'll need to see if there are returns on the door if you want to see him.

• Sky Box Office in the UK is to screen Watchmen from Monday 14th September.

• • Bleeding Cool also reports the hype for the Batman: Arkham Asylum game has given sales of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's graphic novel that inspired it a huge boost.

• Broadcast reports Michael Chaplin, creator of the BBC drama Monarch Of The Glen, is adapting Goodnight Mister Tom author Michelle Magorian's new young adult novel Just Henry as a family drama special, potentially for ITV. While the project has not yet been given the go-ahead, it is in development at ITV Studios. Published by Egmont UK, Just Henry is a post WWII thriller that follows Henry, a film-loving and judgmental teen who lost his father in the war, as he reluctantly becomes friends with two classmates when they are put together to work on a school project. When Henry is given a camera to help with the project he takes a photo that turns everything upside down and in the process he teaches him about friendship and not to be so judgmental.

• And finally... they aren't actually new if you subscribed to much-missed subscription weekly The DFC, but if you missed the run of ace fantasy strip Mirabilis there you can now read the first 25 pages (ie the first chapter of the Winter book) over on the Mirabilis website. Highly recommended!

Mirabalis Continues Online

New episodes of Mirabilis, which ran in the dead-but-just-resting The DFC, have just been posted online: www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com/Episodes.html

The creation of Dave Morris and Leo Hartas, Mirabilis was originally intended to appear in episodic form in Random House's weekly comic, before being collected for publication in book form. As the DFC has gone (although it may resurface next year), you'll now have to wait for the graphic novels – the first of which, Winter, is planned to be 160 pages long.

The creators will announce the release date for that as soon as they know it.

"We're hoping to get all the earlier episodes up online eventually, but for contractual reasons that isn't possible just yet," says Dave. You can read the first four episodes, and episode 1, “Stung!” in both English and French.

DFC readers who were left on tenterhooks with Estelle plummeting through the train window at the end of episode 10 (“Outside Looking In”) can now find out what happened. Those further two episodes, “Murders to Dissect” and “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” may only be online for a limited time, however, so read them while you can!

Incidentally, of the many Flash readers for online comics I've used, the engine for Mirabilis is excellent, if a little requiring of instinctive clicking on first use. There's no clutter of uneccessary bells and whistles to help read the strip. Check it out.

• www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com/Episodes.html

Tube Surfing: 6 April 2009

• We're sorry to report US comics artist Frank Springer died at his home in Damariscotta, Maine on Thursday aged 79. His credits include work for Marvel, including issues of Thundercats and Transformers - reprinted by Marvel UK - and Man from Atlantis. He also worked for DC Comics and on the newspaper strips Terry and the Pirates and Rex Morgan, M.D. Newsday.com reports Springer was a gregarious and practical man who laboured for hours a day in his backyard studio, said his son, Jon Springer of Brooklyn. "He'd be out there basically all day long, morning until dinnertime."
Lambiek notes his most lasting fame was for drawing The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, written by Michael O'Donoghue and published in Evergreen Review in 1965-66. Sexy cartoon albums were not new in Europe, but 'Phoebe Zeit-Geist' was a sensation in the United States.
"Very few people could surpass him as an artist, as a gentleman, and as a true gentleman in my field," said Stan Goldberg, who draws the Archie comics. "When you see a Frank Springer job, you know it's going to be the best job in the world."

• Accent UK's 192-page 2009 anthology Western is available now, price just £7.99. It features a plethora of new and established talent, including Kieron Gillen, John Reppion & Leah Moore, Andy Bloor, Dwight MacPherson, Kirk Manley and Steve Bissette, and A Fistful Of Steam Valves written by Lee Robson, with art by Bryan Coyle. "The story is a Steam Punk Spaghetti Western," says Lee, "so it became paramount to create some stand out characters that would be both recognisable and completely unique. Fortunately, we had the amazing Billy Armstrong on hand to help us out with that..."

• Simon Furman has written a Transformers story for IDW’s post-All Hail Megatron series Coda. "And a lot of fun I had with it too," he says. Without giving too much away (after all, it’s only 11-pages!), it revolves around the longstanding relationship/friendship between battle-scarred veteran soldier Ironhide and Autobot leader Optimus Prime." The first issue of All Hail Megatron: Coda goes on sale in July. For more details check out the IDW website here.

• The UK edition of Wired is on sale in all good newsagents now and includes a column by Warren Ellis. "I’m somewhere in the back, where they keep the mad people, apparently.." he notes. "Please buy one, and prove that the UK can support a magazine about the future.

• New episodes of the goregous sort of steampunk strip with fantasy thrown in, Mirabilis, which began running in the already-missed The DFC, are now appearing online: Episodes 11 and 12 on the main Mirabilis site. "This brings us up to 'Standing on the Shoulders of Giants' which introduces Inspector Primo Simeon and his loyal, long-suffering sidekick, Officer Caitou," says Dave Morris.
"Ideally we're going to have episodes 1 to 13 all available to read online before too long, though that's something we will need to agree with David Fickling and Random House. (Is it a good idea effectively to give away half of your graphic novel for reading online? Some current thinking would say it is.")

• Talking of Dave Morris, remember we plugged a recent issue of Doctor Who Magazine and a brilliant article by Andrew Pixley, illustrated by Brian Williamson, revealing how a Dalek TV series came close to being made in the 1960s? Dave revealed recently that he actually did try (here's hubris) to get a Dalek TV movie going with the Sci-Fi Channel. "This was before Russell T Davies's reimagining of Doctor Who, so not quite as long a shot as it sounds - the Daleks hadn't been on air for years," he reveals. "But Nation's agent explained that the BBC, although not actually having the rights, could stick their oar in to any production involving Daleks. Well, I've had some dealings with the BBC and I knew enough to drop the idea right there..."

Tube Surfing: 15 December 2008

• Warren Ellis has announced he will be writing a column for Conde Nast's upcoming Wired UK magazine, edited by David Rowan, which launches next spring. "This attempt involves the services of Ben Hammersley, whose CV is twice as long as mine or yours and eighteen times as mad. And Ben Hammersley has engaged me as a monthly columnist for Wired UK, with an editorial mandate of, well, writing about anything I feel like writing about... This will be massive amounts of fun."

• Hot on the heels of the launch of a web site promoting Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, a new strip for The DFC, comes another trailing Frontier, described as a 'weird wild west' strip by Jason Cobley and Andrew Wildman.

• Talking of Mirabilis, which we plugged last week, there's now a trailer for the strip on YouTube. Just in case you can't see it below...



• Blueberry artist Colin Wilson reveals a limited selection of his earlier art for 2000AD, Blueberry, Point Blank and The Losers etc (but, as yet, no Star Wars art) is now available to buy online. "Royd Burgoyne has kindly agreed to look after this for me," he notes on his blog, "and the first selection of my work to be made available can now be seen at his online Comic Art Shop.

"I've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks sorting and cataloging my artwork from the 80's and 90's," he notes. "There's a lot of it, and I've been discovering things that I can't even remember producing.... things like this."

• Cy Dethan has just posted an early version of Scott James' cover for The Case Files of Harlan Falk #3, to be published next year by Markosia. Read more about this here

• Jennifer Contino of The Pulse has just interviewed Tony Lee on the upcoming MILF Magnet from Moonstone, with five or six teasers from the comic itself.

• (With thanks to Matthew Badham): Top US writer Mark Waid has begun blogging about comics wrting on the Kung Fu Monkey blog, which also features contributions from John Rogers and Michael Alan Nelson. "His first post is f****** gold," enthuses Matt Badham.

• And finally, in my only acknowledgement so far for the season, Paul Cornell has posted a number of Christmas recipes from comic creators. These include suggestions from the likes of Frazer Irving, Andy Diggle and Joe Quesada. My all-time favourite comic creator recipe was that of Martin Skidmore, once editor of Fantasy Advertiser, for a BAPA mailing. "Go to the fish and chip shop. Buy some fish and chips. Eat them..."

Dragons, Duels and Deadly Danger in The DFC!

Mirabilis: Year of Wonders is a new ongoing series that starts in Issue 30 of Random House's comic subsscription-only weekly comic The DFC on 19th December.

Written by Dave Morris and illustrated by Leo Hartas, the series tells of a lost year forgotten by history "sometime between Victorian and Edwardian times" when a green comet appears in the sky. As the comet grows brighter, the barriers between reality and fantasy begin to break down, unleashing a tide of mystery, wonder and supernatural excitement. Intrepid hero and former grocer's delivery boy Jack Ember is sent by the eccentric boffins of the Royal Mythological Society to investigate strange happenings all over the world.

Despite the constant incursions of folklore, myth, horror, fantasy and outright whimsy, Jack soon finds there is nothing in the world more perplexing than girls - in particular Estelle Meadowvane, the beautiful young amateur astronomer who discovered the green comet.

The series unfolds in five-page episodes which will later be collected in graphic novel format as the four seasons of the Mirabilis year. The whole story,written by Morris and illustrated by Hartas is planned to run to an epic 56 episodes.

The pair dreamed up the entire Mirabilis concept between them one evening as a love letter to the brilliance of human imagination and storytelling, and in particular to their creative heroes Lord Dunsany, Steve Ditko and Neil Gaiman. They spent ten years looking for the right form to tell the story, and a publisher who could really appreciate the head-on collision of witches, robots, undersea kingdoms, airships, ghosts, aliens, pterodactyls, homicidal saints and man-eating plants. Luckily, along came just the man they needed: UK publishing visionary David Fickling, who seized on Mirabilis with gusto and immediately saw that it would make a perfect ongoing series in his weekly comic The DFC.

Leo and Dave have worked together on many other projects - notably on the classic role-playing game Dragon Warriors, coincidentally reissued this month. They thrash out the overall storyline together, then Dave writes the scripts for each episode and gives them to Leo along with his own "thumbnail layouts" to show what he's got in mind. Leo then quickly works up a rough pencil version of the episode, they discuss any changes of camera angle or text that might then be needed with series producer Tom Fickling, and Leo then goes straight to finished art.

A final touch of magic is applied in Athens by internationally renowned colorist Nikos Koutsis. For the final page layout and word balloons they use Serif PagePlus, with fonts from Blambot. The covers are being painted by Martin McKenna.

• For more stunning art and information about the series visit www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com

• The DFC is published every week by Random House and for the time being is available only by subscription - see www.thedfc.co.uk