Broken Frontier

www.mirabilis-yearofwonders.com

Mirabilis: Year of Wonders is a new ongoing series that starts in issue 30 of Random House's comic The DFC on December 19th. 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. Our hero Jack Ember is sent to investigate strange happenings all over the world by the eccentric boffins of the Royal Mythological Society. 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 5-page episodes which will later be collected in graphic novel format as the four seasons of the Mirabilis year. The whole story is planned to run to an epic 56 episodes and is written by Dave Morris and illustrated by Leo Hartas, who dreamed up the entire Mirabilis concept between them in one evening and then spent ten years looking for the right form to tell the story - and for a publisher who could really appreciate the head-on collision of witches, robots, elves, undersea kingdoms, airships, ghosts, aliens, pterodactyls, homicidal saints and man-eating plants. The answer came in the shape of UK publishing visionary David Fickling, who seized on Mirabilis with gusto and suggested 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 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 cover was painted by Martin McKenna.
 
The DFC is published every week by Random House and for the time being is available only by subscription - see www.thedfc.co.uk