Now this is interesting. The Last Screenwriter is a movie made from a script written by ChatGPT-4. I'd like to tell you more, but knee-jerk hysteria (or so we're told) meant that the planned screening in London was cancelled. Too bad, as the filmmakers explain on their website that it was made as a non-profit experiment.

I'm curious about the use of generative AI in writing, art, and other fields. I suspect it won't lead to mass unemployment but instead will be a useful tool that creatives will collaborate with to improve their work -- much as desktop publishing has led to an explosion in the number of books. Hmm, given the quality of books these days maybe that's not such a great example.

Some people gripe (well, scream) that AI is stealing from existing authors and artists. Mostly that's a misunderstanding of how the models are trained. Yes, they look at millions of images to learn the way a picture is put together. Contrary to the belief of the pitchfork-bearers heading up to the baron's castle, the generative AI models don't record each individual image and reproduce it. It's more like how human artists and writers learn their craft.

For example, when I was a kid I'd often notice that my favourite comic book artists were having their panels "borrowed" by less well-known artists. The character poses you'd see in British comics in the early '70s (strips such as The Steel Claw in Valiant) had appeared in US comic books a few months earlier. But even among those Marvel & DC artists there was cross-pollination. Barry Windsor Smith famously started out drawing Jack Kirby pastiches and later went Pre-Raphaelite. Dan Adkins was famous for lifting poses from other artists. Writers too: H.P. Lovecraft began by imitating the style of Lord Dunsany. Dunsany was influenced by the King James Bible. Robert Bloch started out copying Lovecraft, and so the cycle continued. 

In the comics I made at school I emulated the art styles of Bernie Wrightson and Barry Windsor Smith; when I wrote my early stories I was following patterns picked up from Robert E Howard, Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, August Derleth, and others. This is how we've always learned -- and it's a much more targeted kind of swiping than the generative AI is doing. The AIs don't play favourites, which is why (now that you can no longer specify "in the style of" in the prompts) their art output tends to look like the soulless photorealistic fantasy paintings you see on DeviantArt.

I've talked before about using AI for artwork in gamebooks and RPGs. It's a good fallback for game designers who have no art budget. The snag is, people lose their shit when you so much as mention it. I've hired human artists whenever possible -- most recently Inigo Hartas for my Jewelspider roleplaying game. Of course you get a better result that way, but most independently published books don't even make enough to pay the author's phone bill. The option is often either AI art or no art -- or else public domain art like the William Harvey illustrations I used in the new print edition of Once Upon A Time In Arabia. Nobody was happy with those. (You can get a copy with Russ Nicholson's artwork on DriveThruRPG.) Another option is to use AI to enhance the writer's own sketches, which may be the best way to get the authentic imagery that the writer had in mind.

In any case, I'd like to see The Last Screenwriter because this is the future and we may as well start getting to grips with it. Smashing the looms never works.

It’s the time of year for me to weigh in on a claim that’s causing controversy – not to deny that the claim if true would be outrageous, but to say that I remain unconvinced that it is true. And, in line with recent tradition, the outrage again involves a professor.

This time round it’s the turn of The X-Men, first published by Marvel in July 1963, though with a cover date of September because comics. The Doom Patrol debuted in the June issue (that is, April) of My Greatest Adventure, published by Marvel’s rival DC. The bone of contention is whether Stan Lee was influenced by (ie swiped from) Arnold Drake, the writer of Doom Patrol, in putting Professor Charles Xavier in a wheelchair like the Doom Patrol’s leader.

Drake shrugged it off for years as a coincidence, but after brooding on it for forty years he became convinced it was dirty pool on Stan’s part:

"I didn’t believe so in the beginning because the lead time was so short. Over the years I learned that an awful lot of writers and artists were working surreptitiously between [Marvel and DC]. Therefore from when I first brought the idea into [the DC editor’s] office, it would’ve been easy for someone to walk over and hear that this guy Drake is working on a story about a bunch of reluctant superheroes who are led by a man in a wheelchair. So over the years I began to feel that Stan had more lead time than I realized. He may well have had four, five or even six months."

Now, I’ll put my hand up to being a fan of Marvel from way back. I grew up on those stories. So you might want to take what I have to say with that in mind, but – was Drake completely nuts? First of all, Stan Lee was having to get out more than ten books a month, and he was doing almost all the writing single-handed. Sure, he had “the Marvel method” to help (plot first, then art, then write the script) but even so it’s unlikely he had much time to look through DC’s output, at that time upwards of thirty books a month. And even if Stan had been told about Doom Patrol in January 1963, he wouldn’t have had long to single out that one idea and work it into the new book he was planning with Jack Kirby.

OK, it is just possible an artist came across from DC (it was a 13 minute walk) and mentioned that DC was doing a try-out book with a super-team whose mentor was in a wheelchair. But was that really the standout detail worth swiping? Far more likely that Stan got the inspiration for Professor X from any number of brainy invalid scientists in 1950s sci-fi movies. And in any case there’s a strong story reason for Professor X being in a wheelchair. Stan loved irony, and this character is all about the power of the mind. He’s Nero Wolfe turned up to 11.

In the same year as the quote above, Drake also said:

"Stan Lee and I were working in the same vineyards, and if you do enough of that stuff, sooner or later, you will kind of look like you are imitating each other."

Well, that change of heart is interesting. Maybe Drake had taken a step back to think about where his own ideas came from. If there was any creative borrowing going on, more likely it was in the other direction. Why was Drake creating the Doom Patrol in the first place? Because he understood the appeal of the Fantastic Four. The FF’s first issue was November 1961 – only, you know the score, that means September, so it had been running for thirteen issues by the time Drake sat down and scratched his head about what could be done to counter this new and coming force in comics.

Drake saw that the FF frequently squabbled. And they got their powers from an accident – not mutants like the X-Men, notice. And the coolest members of the team were sort of freaks, the Thing especially. So it’s not much of a stretch (I’m not planning these puns, honest) to think of Robotman as the Thing, Negative Man as the Torch, Elasti-Girl (wait, what?) as Susan Storm and the Chief as Reed.

By 2000, Drake had convinced himself he originated all this:

“That was the thing that made Doom Patrol different, these people hated being superheroes. And they were a little bit self-pitying, just a little bit, and the chief was constantly telling them, ‘Stop crying in your beer.’ That made them something that wasn't around at the time.”

It wasn't around at the time? Really? What about Peter Parker? Ben Grimm? Bruce Banner? Tony Stark? So it’s a little bit rich that a few years later Drake was saying of Stan Lee, ‘He’d take credit for the King James Bible.’

All that said, it’s interesting that these days it’s hard to make a convincing movie about the Fantastic Four, and yet there were four seasons of a Doom Patrol TV show. I didn’t stick with it even for four episodes myself, but it actually feels more modern than the FF -- who were, after all, Stan Lee’s first attempt at making superheroes real and relatable and flawed. As the prototype, perhaps it’s not surprising that the FF have dated – and they were my own least favourite Marvel comic back in the Silver Age, their adventures being too cosmic and out there to appeal alongside the convincing contemporary lives of Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, et al.

If you're interested in the full fascinating story of how Marvel overtook DC and revolutionized comic book storytelling, try Reed Tucker's book Slugfest and/or Adrian Mackinder's Stan Lee: How Marvel Changed The World.

Mirabilis, my fantasy graphic epic with Leo Hartas and the late Martin McKenna, originally appeared in The DFC, a short-lived forerunner of The Phoenix comic. A friend of mine read it on the sleeper train out of Moscow as he was travelling home just before Christmas -- pretty much the perfectly immersive experience.


Have a great Samhain/Halloween! And if you're looking for strange stories in a very different vein from Mirabilis, don't forget to take a look at the Binscombe Tales.

Dramatic irony occurs when the viewer or reader of a story knows more than the characters. It can be an effective way of making you connect with the story (“Look behind you!”) though if sustained for too long it tends to distance you from the characters (“Doesn’t that numbskull realise the danger?”) and then you've got the opposite effect.

A less immediate form of dramatic irony might plant a seed that will build over time. For example, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe we learn about Thanos’s behind-the-scenes involvement long before the Avengers even know his name. That doesn’t create emotional distance because for most of the saga he’s not the problem they have to face right away. He’s an oncoming storm, but it’s his proxies and allies who present the immediate threat.

Most film and television dramas aren't like first-person novels. There are scenes that don't feature any of the protagonists -- like those early tease moments with Thanos, for example. But when you're telling an interactive story, jumping away from our heroes to another viewpoint gets tricky. The characters expect us to advise and guide them, and the story really only works if we pick a side. (Even if that side might change.) We form a bond with our viewpoint character and that tends to frame how we expect to see events in the story -- not first-person, exactly, but close third. Under those conditions can dramatic irony serve any useful purpose?

An example: in the opening episode of Mirabilis, I cut within the first three pages between Jack Ember and Estelle Meadowvane, both lead characters, and inserted a scene (above) in which we see series baddie the Kind Gentleman in his true devilish form. The Kind Gentleman closes a web of dangers and intrigues around Jack’s life, but it’s nearly two episodes – that’s 50 pages – before they meet face to face. If we’d been interacting with Jack all that time, and knew what we know in the comic, and hadn’t warned him then he’d legitimately want to know why.

Well, let’s think about how we would interact with Jack and Estelle in an interactive version of Mirabilis. We wouldn’t want to do a lot of head-hopping, because interactivity favours a close relationship with one character, so probably you’d let the reader/viewer choose which of our heroes to follow each episode. The more the reader sticks to the same viewpoint character, the more they'll bond with them – but at the expense of not knowing everything the other one has been up to.
What kind of interaction would this be? The “Bandersnatch” episode of Black Mirror reportedly entailed shooting more than five hours of story content. If you’re working in a medium where extra scenes cost money (anything but radio or prose, basically) then you’ll want to steer clear of that Choose Your Own Adventure model – oh, and don’t call it CYOA unless you want to get sued.

Luckily there are more rewarding ways to interact with characters than telling them what to do next. You can chat to them, get them to reveal their backstory (cf Lost), find out how they feel about each other, make subtle hints about what they should say or how they should behave that will influence other characters’ attitude towards them over time. These are the kind of subtle nudges and inputs that we get from interacting with people in real life.

To make that model of interactivity work, you’d have most backstory strands only accessible when cued by something that happens in the story. Jack, thrown in prison, talks about how he used books to escape loneliness and poverty as a child – and that leads him to a realisation that feeds into the plot. In the interactive version, there might be several breakthrough moments when you could get him to talk about that, and several different eureka plot developments as possible outcomes.

So the plot as it is in the comic remains largely unaffected by the player's choices. That's not only to avoid drawing the thousands of extra panels needed for a diverging story, but also because interacting with plot is not what's really interesting. The linear surface story is fine as it is. The interactivity can instead be about exploring interiority, discovering more about the character, and building a closer relationship with them so that they start to share their hopes and fears.

In other words, we can't (and don't want to) change the plot, but we can enrich it with foreshadowing. For instance, maybe Jack confides in the player that, "If anything were to happen to Estelle I'd die." When Estelle is captured by the Big Bad, that moment will now land with even more impact. And, yes, you could do that in a linear story too: Jack just tells somebody else how much Estelle means to him. But in the interactive version it’s a shared secret. It’s something you earned from your relationship with the character. Maybe you even encouraged him in those feelings, and because of that he’s now more vulnerable. Now you’re not just watching the story; you’re part of it. And that's what interactive storytelling is all about.

Maybe one reason why I enjoy role-playing campaigns is because I came early to episodic stories. Long before discovering my great love, comic books, I was glued to Doctor Who and big books of Norse myths. The weekly UK comic TV Century 21 (which I collected from the second issue; it was always just “TV21” to me) presented all those Gerry Anderson shows as taking place in one universe, which fuelled the idea that stories don’t have to have an end.

But that’s for kids. The Norse myths mirror the dramas of childhood, where massive fallings-out and reconciliations can happen in the space of a summer’s afternoon and we don’t mind that each morning is a chance to reset the games and interests of the day before.

As we get older, we demand that stories go somewhere. Things must change. And that’s where they can go wrong, because if you’re going to have change you must also have an ending. When a story is forcibly kept going beyond its natural life, the shark is going to be waiting and one day you must jump it. And then we end up wondering what we even saw in that setting and those characters in the first place.

Breaking Bad and The Shield were designed right from the start so that their narrative trajectory would have an end. Likewise the Harry Potter novels. The Sopranos was originally expected to run for a single season, hence the frenzy of plotting in the twelfth and thirteenth episode when commercial success demanded a jolt of boosterspice. I’d rather have had one perfect season myself. A good show should build in its own Hayflick limit.

What goes wrong with an indefinite run? There’s the escalation of dramatic twists. Take Cracker, Jimmy McGovern’s seminal ‘90s TV drama that started so well. After a time, story logic demanded that the danger Fitz and his colleagues tackled would have to strike close to home. But once we’d seen the team sprint to Fitz’s front door once, the next shock twist had to be bigger. One police officer raped another, and then jumped off a roof. Fitz’s family began to be threatened on a regular basis, until finally his son was targeted by a serial killer who strapped him to an electrified bedstead. He was saved from electrocution in the nick of time. If the show had continued, the only place left to go would have been strapping a bomb to the baby’s pram.

Drama isn’t an Escher staircase. You can’t keep upping the threat. But once you succumb to the understandable urge to grab audiences with a big shock, where else can you go? The Doctor has to save the universe every season, and it has to be from a bigger and badder threat, and the personal secrets revealed (or cooked up) have to be ever more profound, ever more earth-shattering. It’s like taking a hit of heroin. You think it’s the answer to everything, but the doses get bigger and eventually you’re going to OD.

But just as toxic as escalating threat is the self-referential archness that creeps into the writing on a long-running series. It’s narrowcasting, as each instalment calls back to events that only the diehard fans remember – and those fans are the ones who wriggle and giggle at every knowing quote, while the rest of us just wonder why the characters are behaving like they’re in a pantomime.

When I began my comic Mirabilis, it was with the intention of telling the story of a single miraculous year. “Everything will change,” was the logline, because it would. Before the green comet appeared, it was the real historical 1901 – no vampires, no steampunk. Then there’s a year of wonders. One year. When the green comet departs, we’re back to the real world.

The first idea was to tell it all in fifty-two episodes, only they couldn’t have been fifty-two of the 5-page instalments that ran in The DFC. Fifty-two full-length comic books, maybe. Then I could tell the story. But it would still reach an end.

“Unless it’s a huge success,” said the publisher, David Fickling. “Then you’ll have to come up with more story.”

“After the comet goes we’re back to a non-fantastic universe, so there’s nothing more to tell.”

“You can just invent a new reason for there to be fantasy, can’t you?” asked Mr Fickling, flinging up his hands.

“Uh-uh.” I can be pretty stubborn in defence of what I see as creative honesty. “The whole point is that on either side of the year of the comet this is the ordinary world. The story is told. It’s over.”

Of course, having an end in sight doesn’t guarantee the writer won’t jump the shark before they get there, but it does at least let them plan out the gear-shifts of surprises and reversals so that they don’t have to start competing with their own ideas to keep the thing moving. And they can be fairly confident that they’ll never get so bored with the characters that they start having them talk with, as it were, repeated winks to the reader.

Have you been disappointed when a favourite TV show, comic book, or series of novels jumped the shark? How would you have fixed the problem? Don't say, "Get a bigger boat."

A while back I did an interview for Exeposé, the student newspaper of Exeter University. As it deals with a couple of my main interests (comics and interactive fiction) I thought I'd reproduce it here. The picture is me dressed as Reason at my wife-to-be's "Come as a God" party a good few years ago. Why the pistol? Because you can't argue with Reason.

We notice that you studied Physics at university. How did you go from that to what you are doing now?

I’d have done an English degree too if I’d had the time. I’ve always been on that cusp between art and science, could never quite make up my mind to go for one or the other. That probably explains why I’ve ended up gravitating towards the games industry, where I can indulge my passions for storytelling, visual design, logic, physics and maths all at once.

What attracted you to graphic novels? What do they give writers and readers that traditional books don’t?

If you look at it from a practical point of view, some stories are easier to tell visually. Like if you are creating a completely new world without any real-world references – Avatar, say. If you did that as a novel you’d have to bombard the reader with great chunks of descriptive prose – ugh. At the same time, you might not want to do it as a movie because your story needs more space and depth than you can fit into two hours. Or, of course, you might not have a quarter of a billion dollars to spend.

In fact, though, I never think it through in that kind of detail. You just start working on a story and you either feel it’s right for prose or you start blocking it out in comic panels in your head. Your muse decides for you whether it’s going to be a graphic novel.

As for what graphic novels have that traditional books don’t – well, what does painting have that music doesn’t? They’re different, both equally to be cherished as modes of expression.

Do you have a favourite graphic novel? If so, why?

Wow – I wouldn’t know where to start, I read so many. I like the works of Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Alison Bechdel, Posy Simmonds, Matt Kindt, Alan Moore… A bunch of diverse comics creators who don’t have anything much in common, except that they rarely disappoint.

If I’m going to pick my desert island read it’d be Neil Gaiman’s tour-de-force run on The Sandman. That’s an opus of around 1500 pages, so if you want to dip in, start with the collections Dream Country and Fables and Reflections.

Do you think graphic novels are taken seriously enough as a form of literature?

Not in the UK, that’s for sure. Here, a graphic novel has to be freighted with literary significance for critics to get past their aversion to the medium. Like, I was looking at the Guardian yesterday and they had a full-page review of Chris Ware’s latest graphic novel. Now, I’m not disrespecting Ware’s work – he’s very talented, and I like that comics are a rich, broad tapestry with room for all kinds of story. But as Wiki says, “His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression.” And that’s why the Guardian will review him and wouldn’t touch 300, say. UK critics don’t know how to read comics; they don’t have a cultural lineage to fit them into. So they view them with the classic cocktail of fear, loathing and fascination. And so the only graphic novels they review seriously are the ones that fit really in an illustrated literary tradition rather than being unashamedly comics.

I don’t want to get too parochial about this because all writers work internationally these days, but Britain punches way above its weight in comics. You’ve got Gaiman, Moore, Ellis, Millar, Ennis, Quitely – too many to list, and many of them among the most successful in the profession. But they’re all working mostly outside the UK because comics here are barely a cottage industry. And the problem with that is it makes it difficult to get a British voice and sensibility across in comics. Those writers and artists have all had to adapt their style to the American market to some extent.

It’s very different in France, where four out of every ten books sold are graphic novels. You can go to a bande dessinée convention and you’ve got whole families there – kids, teens, parents, all reading graphic novels. And because of that there’s a nicely diverse range of genres: thrillers, rom-com, whodunits, science fiction. It’s not all superheroes and zombies.

You often work in collaboration with other writers and artists, what do you enjoy about these collaborations and what do you find more challenging? Has there been a collaboration that has been particularly interesting for you?

Actually, the truth is that my name may be alongside somebody else’s on the cover, but I rarely collaborate that closely. I’ve worked on a lot of series where I’ve split the writing chores with partners, but we usually have a quick consultation and then get stuck into our own individual books.

Comics like Mirabilis are the exception. Those are interesting precisely because the creative collaboration is so challenging. For example, I grew up on movies and Marvel comics, so all my layouts for Mirabilis are informed by that. But the penciller, Leo Hartas, is more influenced by illustrated books and European stuff like Tintin and The Beano. So sometimes it feels like we’re coming from opposite ends of the spectrum. I go for sexy, dark, dramatic with close ups, upshots and wide angles; he goes for funny, sweet, diagrammatic with medium shots, flat/diorama staging, and so on. But that cycle of thesis, antithesis, synthesis can throw up some nice creative surprises, I think.


A lot of your work makes literature an active experience, and puts the reader in charge. What do you hope to achieve by giving the reader a central part?

Only what any writer wants – a connection. An emotional reaction. That’s why the interactivity in Frankenstein isn’t about solving the plot, it’s about the relationship you develop with Victor and his creature. The choices you make affect their degree of empathy, alienation and – most importantly – the extent to which they trust you. That affects how much of himself Victor will reveal to you, for instance. Whether it works or not is up to readers to judge, but I think there’s never been a book anything like it before – and it’s nice when an author gets to say that.

It’s true that I’m interested in ways to make story worlds that people can interact with to discover or create their own narratives. But I think videogames are a better place to do that than interactive literature. I’m just using books (book apps, that is) as a test-bed to try out some ideas first.

Do you think it is difficult to adapt such a well-established story? Has it been well received?

Very well received, especially among younger readers (I mean teen and up) who probably wouldn’t crack open a 200-year-old novel if they’re not doing an Eng Lit course. Frankenstein is one of the modern world’s defining myths, a story that everyone thinks they know but one that is rarely read in the original. I hope my version will encourage more people to take a look at it.

Now the but: it was well received for a book that was only released on iPad and iPhone. I’m working on epub3 and Kindle versions but it was a big mistake not to bring those out at the same time. Lots of people were seeing the reviews (Salon.com had a nice one, incidentally, saying “it may be the best interactive fiction yet” – though admittedly the competition is not fierce) but couldn’t read it because they had Android tablets. But, you know, I don’t get to direct the publishing strategy. Unfortunately.

The adaptation wasn’t hard because, seminal work though Frankenstein is, it’s pretty much the worst classic novel ever written. I should qualify that. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she wrote it, and I certainly don’t want anyone seeing my teenage scribblings. On the other hand, she revised it in her thirties and only made it stodgier – and didn’t fix some glaring plot holes. So I felt completely free to take liberties with the text in a way I wouldn’t have done with Austen or the Brontës, say.

The end result is that my version is much more modern. There’s a lot of Mary Shelley’s prose still in there, but I fleshed out the characterization and the relationships as we’d expect in a novel these days, and I went for a pastiche style which feels 19th century in spirit but might flow a little easier to today’s readers. A large part of that is because I cut all Shelley’s travelogue stuff. Boy, she really padded that thing with chunks of a Grand Tour guide book.

Oh, and I set the action in Paris during the Revolution. That’s because Mary Shelley had Victor creating the monster in 1792, but for some reason had him at university in Ingolstadt – which seemed a bit of a waste of a rather wonderfully serendipitous dramatic setting.

Do you see interactive creations such as Frankenstein as the future of the publishing industry?

Not in the slightest! Take Amis writing Time’s Arrow. He didn’t think, “Now all novels will be written backwards.” My version of Frankenstein is an experiment, that’s all. Literature has always been experimenting and always will. But God help us if publishers suddenly start churning out “classics interactive”.

With the growth of the digital publishing industry, how do you think the issue of piracy will be handled?

Publishing is going to have to learn to get along with digital piracy, unless they have a trick up their sleeve that the music industry didn’t. But it’s not all bad news. We need to look at ways to extend the usual revenue model – slipcase editions with extras, for example, and pre-subscribed serials. Digital can be seen as part of the wide mouth of the funnel that draws paying customers in, whether or not they pay for the digital experience itself.

Do you have any exciting plans for the future?

Fabled Lands LLP, my company with Jamie Thomson, Frank Johnson and Tim Gummer, owns the Dark Lord series, co-created by the two of us and written by Jamie, which won the Roald Dahl Prize and has appeared as a comic strip by Dan Boultwood in The Phoenix. And we have a couple of new series that are about ready to go in book form. We tend to use print as a springboard for properties that we want to go on to develop in other media, which is either cynically manipulative or far-sighted depending on how much of a fiction purist you are.

Add to that my ongoing work on Mirabilis – which was conceived as a 260-page graphic novel saga but is growing to more like a target of 800 pages. And I have a long-cherished videogame project for kids that would be built around forging a real relationship with the characters. So I have more exciting projects than I have time to work on them, that’s for sure.

What would be your dream mash-up novel?

I love mash-ups in music. Have you heard the Arcade Fire v Blondie one? Or that sublime moment in The Sopranos where you realize that, yes, they really are crashing the Peter Gunn theme into “Every Breath You Take”. Oh, and as a role-player I have to give an honourable mention to “Roll a D6” even though strictly speaking it’s a cover spoof, not a mash-up.

So I love that stuff, and I think mash-ups like that are a great modern art form. But (sorry) I have to say that mash-up novels aren’t books, they’re just marketing gimmicks. That “this meets that” thing was always just a formula to get the attention of the dumbest guy in the room. Why, if mash-ups work so well in music and art, do they come across so lame in storytelling? (And, yes, I do mean you, Cowboys and Aliens. Or anything "vs" anything, come to that.) You’d think it would be the easiest medium to do a mash-up in. Maybe that’s the problem. It always feels like creativity by numbers.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note, so let’s take a look at some great mash-up movie trailers. Must Love Jaws and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments are over eight years old but they still haven’t been bettered. Sheer genius.

I wonder what it's like for Woody Allen or Mick Jagger. Maybe not so bad for Jagger. People might keep screaming for him to sing "Sympathy For The Devil", even though we all know it's never going to be as good as this again, but nobody expects the next Stones album to be a follow-up to Their Satanic Majesties. Woody, though, must get pretty cheesed off with well-meaning fans quoting that Stardust Memories line.

I experience a much-diluted form of the same thing whenever I'm asked to write another Fabled Lands book. That is not a gripe. I'm very glad that the FL books connected with so many people. It's what you aim for as a writer. But you can't step twice into the same stream. Twenty years go by, you've got a whole bunch of new experiences, new influences, new concerns, new things to say. You're a different person. Ridley Scott is never going to make another Duellists - more's the pity.

This blog ranges far and wide but it mostly tends to stick to either roleplaying or interactive storytelling. I never tire of the former, the hobby I love and that is the crucible in which everything I work on is first reacted. My storytelling these days is usually of the traditional variety (ie you sit back, I'll tell it) and when I do mix in some interactivity I'm interested in character rather than puzzles. The old dungeon-style gamebook is all about closing the narrative back onto a linear path. Look, here's an orc; get what you will from it, or kill or bypass it, and the adventure flows on with barely a ripple. On the other hand, if you've been having an affair with your best friend's wife and you have to decide whether to confess - well, whatever you choose to say, the story is going to spin off in an entirely different direction after that. This is more interesting but it makes for a more complicated design, more suited to digital than print.

A very simple example: in my interactive version of Frankenstein, Victor can end up referring to his creation as "he", "it", "Adom" or "the fiend" depending largely on some very early choices that have far-reaching implications. That was easy for me to implement in the markup language I used to write the book, given that you'll be reading the book on iPad, but it would make for a fine old mess on the printed page. Digital gamebooks and print gamebooks are moving into different places. Speciation is inevitable.

Hence if I write a gamebook these days, it won't be Fabled Lands 7 or the sequel to Heart of Ice. (All right, in HOI the universe blew up, which I have a habit of making happen in my books, but even if not I wouldn't be going back.) I might not even end up with something that a purist of the medium would call a gamebook. And much of the time I'm working on other things in other media: novels like the Dark Lord and Starship Captain series, which I co-created with Jamie, or comics like Mirabilis, the labour of love that I work on with Leo Hartas on the rare occasions that our different schedules permit.

Just because you like one thing a person creates doesn't mean you're going to enjoy the whole oeuvre. The Sandman is probably my favourite comic book of all time, but Neil Gaiman's prose fiction doesn't work for me. Hounds of Love still gets played regularly chez Morris, but the Moon would have to go ultraviolet before I'd willingly throw on 50 Words for Snow. So when my other projects leave roleplayers or gamebook fans indifferent, I get it. And don't worry, I'm not going to be bursting into a rendition of "Jumping Jack Flash" any time soon.

Krypton blows up. If you didn't already know that, you won't care anyway. And this isn't going to be a review of Man of Steel, because Mark Waid has already nailed that - everything that I would say, only phrased better and with more than adequate spoiler warnings.

Still here? Okay, so I share Mark's reaction to the final showdown between Supes and Zod. I wouldn't actually jump up and shout my opinion to a crowded cinema, as I figure they paid £15 to watch the movie, not listen to me. But hey, it's the USA. They do things differently there. (Here in the UK we do our shouting on the inside.)

That final snap (listen, I did say spoilers ahead) is just the last in a whole chain of narrative dominos that start toppling with relentless inevitability from the point that Zod and his rebels turn up in their big spiky ship. Here's how I picture the writers' meeting:

"Zod's got like a dozen guys with him. How's Superman going to beat all of them? Kryptonite?"

"Nah, we're keeping kryptonite for the sequel with Luthor."

"Okay, so how about this? Jor-Ex-Machina figures out a way to suck 'em all back into the Phantom Zone."

"We're calling it a black hole, but OK so far."

"But we still need a big showdown with Zod. So he's gone off to get something, and he isn't on the ship when it gets black holed. All his soldiers have gone. His dream in ruins. He's alone, nothing to lose. Big punch-up."

"How's that going to end? Even if Superman beats him - and this is Farm Boy vs G.I. Joe, remember - what prison can hold him?"

"He's gotta die..?"

"Uh-huh. Gotta die."

[Both think furiously.]

"Got it. In the fight, Superman gets the upper hand. Arm round Zod's neck. But Zod, he's berserk now. 'I'm going to kill all these bitty humans!' So he's lasering his heat ray towards a few little people. 'Don't you do it!' says Kal. 'I will!' snarls Zod. So, tearfully, Superman snaps his neck."

Now, why am I (and Mark Waid) so profoundly pissed off by this outcome? First of all, it's Superman. He's not just a superhero, he's the superhero. Here's what the film-makers want us to think: boy, what an impossible situation. He has to take one life to save a half dozen others. At least they're innocents and Zod is a murdering arsehole, so the moral arithmetic works out fine.

No it doesn't. Captain Kirk was several times faced with that kind of a choice: sacrifice one to save many. And Spock may raise an eyebrow, but Kirk would say no, that's unacceptable - taking one life or taking many, I reject those choices. And he would find another way. Why? Because that's what heroes do.

For all that, it's not the disastrously misjudged morality of this Superman that bothers me most. It's that the writers just went with the laziest solution because coming up with a genuinely heroic conclusion would have called for much more ingenuity. Well, I shouldn't be casting stones at other writers, and Lord knows we've all been face to face with a deadline only to find the Muse hasn't got our back. Maybe they'd got tired by that point in the proceedings - two and a half hours of CGI devastation in 3D can do that. But if you're going to tell a story about a hero - about what it really means to be a hero - either know your play or pass the ball.

In Blade Runner, who saw it coming when Roy Batty lifts Deckard up onto the roof? That's a moment of heroic redemption, surprising but inevitable as all endings should be. Or, for a less familiar tale, watch André De Toth's 1959 western Day of the Outlaw. Robert Ryan is one of those guys out of time - a relic of a hero, now a danger to the settled community he made possible. Then a bunch of outlaws show up and hold the townsfolk hostage, and it's up to him to save the day. Today that part would be played by Bruce Willis with a quirky grin and two meaty fists, and he'd be quickly dispatching those baddies with a series of lethal Home Alone type manoeuvres, but in De Toth's movie it's not so easy. Ryan has no gun, he's one man with a mere mortal's strength. So, in the absence of any easier choices, he has to dig deep and be a hero. The ending of the story? I won't spoil it, but it's surprising and inevitable.

That's a lot harder work for the writer. Maybe some writers welcome the glut of comic book movies because they think it's all about biffing bad guys through skyscrapers. But I'm a comics fan from way back, avidly hanging on the escapades of Spider-Man and the X-Men while my schoolfriends were reading The Beano, and even as a little kid I always knew that being a superhero isn't about the cool powers. It isn't about ethical sums. It's a quality from within that shows the rest of us how to live. Without that, even the Man of Steel is just a muscle-bound jerk in a silly suit.

I'm used to the idea that most visitors to this blog are really only interested in Fabled Lands news, maybe with a side order of 1990s gamebooks - and hey, I'm not knocking it. It's nice to have your work appreciated, even if it is sixteen-year-old work. But I didn't retire or anything, and naturally I think I'm a better writer now than I was back then, so I hope the hardcore gamebook fans will allow me the occasional indulgence of talking about what I'm working on nowadays.

One such project is of course Frankenstein, which came out earlier this year on iPad and iPhone. I'm right now working with Spirit Entertainment (the new FL app developers) on Kindle and EPUB versions of that, which should be published by Profile Books this autumn. And next year there might even be a print edition - which is not easy, because this is an interactive novel rather than a gamebook, so telling the reader about the characters' degree of alienation or trust is not exactly conducive to the literary experience. But I'll see if I can figure something out.

And then there's my ongoing comics epic Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, created with Leo Hartas and Martin McKenna. This is my labour of love. The work that I would still do if I was stranded on a desert island with no one to read it.

Recently Mirabilis was released on the NOOK and in the iBookstore, but the important scoop du jour is that it's just out on Kindle and for this week only the first two issues are discounted down to - oh, absolutely free. Well, how about that. There's never been a better time to try it out. And if you like it, let me know. Writers are more like cats than sharks, you know. We like to be stroked.

Gearing up for the (hopefully) imminent release of Volume 2 of Mirabilis, my ongoing comic book fantasy epic, here is an online preview of the first ten pages. New to the party? In that case, you can see how the story starts with the first 30 pages of Volume 1 online here.

If it's your cuppa, you can still order the gorgeous hardcover edition of Book 1 here and you can pre-order Book 2 here. And the paperback edition is available here.

For the last couple of weeks we've been looking at the Frankenstein's Legions game design document, which dates back to the late '90s when I was working alongside Martin McKenna on a bunch of games at Eidos, notably Plague, which later became Warrior Kings.
Frankenstein's Legions: US Civil War story notes

In the treatment, the setting was Napoleonic Europe and there were two distinct threats. First, the left-wing revolutionaries of the French government (kind of Khmer Rouge extremist communists, if you like!) were willing to use the Frankenstein tech in really horrible ways: grafting human heads onto giant eels, dog heads onto human bodies, etc. In real life, those were the same guys who invented industrialized executions 150 years before the Holocaust, so it makes sense they would blithely authorize experiments that would horrify any normal person.

I wanted that because we have a world in which horrific things are happening - the dead being brought back to life to serve as slaves and soldiers. So pretty soon that becomes the new status quo and we need something even more horrific, like creating hybrid monsters, to define our bad guys for whom fanatical logic dictates the unthinkable.

Secondly I had Napoleon as a personified bad guy. The French revolutionary government sent a commando team to bring his body back from St Helena, where he died in a British prison. After being restored to life, he had to be kept in a tank of preservative chemicals because he'd been in the grave a while. He was slowly recovering his memory, so whereas the fanatics thought they'd just acquired a kind of military strategy computer, they didn't reckon on him hatching plans to overthrow them.

I needed both those elements, the fanatics as a group and Napoleon as an individual, because the story couldn't just be "the Brits are good, the French are evil". Both sides use the Frankenstein tech, and the villains are individuals or creeds who go a step further. I think you'll need to keep this idea in the Civil War version. Most Confederates were not evil racist autocrats; most Unionists were not fighting like paladins with the lofty goal of emancipating the slaves. There is good and bad on both sides. You may need an equivalent mythic figure to Napoleon (perhaps from the War of Independence? though I guess the world has had few dictators of Napoleon’s calibre) and an equivalent to the extremist fanatics of the French revolutionary government. It needs to be a creed, not just a few mad scientists. Maybe a crazed cult who believe God has authorized a new Eden on Earth and it's okay for mankind to play around creating abominations.

Incidentally one of the key ideas in Frankenstein's Legions is that you aren't just brought back to life by the technology. When you get off the slab, you don't know who you are. It's a new you. Like Frankenstein's monster - he didn't think, "Oh, my brain came from a criminal who was hanged" or whatever. The brain got rebooted, so in a sense it's a newborn person getting off that slab. Lazarans are like amnesiacs in that they know the skills they had before – how to shoot a gun or play the piano, how to speak – but specific personal memories are lost. The tragedy is that they may encounter their loved ones, but they don't remember them. There may be snatches of memory, that's all.

So the search to recover memories is one way a resurrected character may go. Another might want to shun anything to do with who he used to be: "today is the first day of the rest of my life". Interesting character tensions.

As far as the artwork we've seen so far, it's important that the lazarans don't look like zombies. I'm sure there are a whole bunch of Civil War zombie books out there already, and we need to be brandably distinct. A resurrected guy may have scars if he was stitched together from separate parts, so some of the ones who've been resurrected many times could be quite monstrous: hands or arms out of proportion, different skin tones, asymmetric bodies, etc. Others who died a clean death could look almost normal. Almost. Here is Mary Shelley's description of the original creature:

I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they  were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

I like the idea that such a face, with skin taut on the veins and muscles, could be both ugly and beautiful at the same time. In some cases, the yellowish skin colour (caused by their differently colored blood) might be the only sign at first glance that the person is a lazaran. Most certainly they aren't undead – the opposite, in fact: full of vigor, intimidating to ordinary men because of their raw energy and animal strength. They are the homo superior of their time, and it's only a matter of time before we see a lazaran Magneto, or even some people who are willing to kill themselves in order to get the enhanced strength, speed and senses that come with resurrection.

Okay, so back to that prologue. A raid on a remote farmhouse where lazaran hybrids are being created? Or perhaps a cult who have their own unique interpretation of Revelation 20:6:

Blessed and holy are those who have part in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over them, but they will be priests of the Lord and will reign with him for a thousand years.

So these cultists are deliberately committing suicide, performing surgery to enhance the bodies, and resurrecting each other as the new "chosen ones" who believe they're going to reign for a thousand years. (Obviously you'd need to have some normal, sane preachers on the good guys' side to show that this cult is a definite aberration!) We start with a small band of Civil War deserters looking to raid a remote homestead. They sneak inside, bit of banter, the place seems deserted – then they are picked off one by one, fast like Alien, and that pre-title sequence ends with the last of them being leapt at by a horrible hybrid: human head, wolf-like body, serpents growing out of its back or whatever. Let Martin have some fun here! Then cut to the opening we have already, a quieter scene with a family pushing the body of their loved one in a cart.

Okay, Castle of Lost Souls part one is coming up on Monday as promised - and that's the original White Dwarf version, remember. And to entertain you over the weekend, here's a look at the cool new comics reader widget from Graphic.ly, which allows users to share around their comics.

I was recently interviewed by Dorothy Dreyer on her blog We Do Write. As you might guess from the name, it's all about writing, not game design, so don't feel you have to. Highlights (or lowlights, depending on your tastes) are: Earl Grey tea, Ragnarok, Lawrence of Arabia, the day I saw a ghost, super powers, how I met Leo Hartas, horses, Alfred Hitchcock, and Philippe Starck furniture. Ouch.

Brilliant podcasting blog Guys Can Read (does exactly what it says on the tin) has an interview with me today. We're talking about roleplaying, gamebooks, comics and other fun stuff right here.

A cross-post today from my Mirabilis comic blog. Mirabilis season one, all 200 full-color pages of it, launches this week on Graphic.ly's multi-platformed storefront. If you've had your nose pressed to the Apple Store window wondering about that iPad, save your money - the new version is out in a month or two anyway, and in the meantime you can not only get Fabled Lands on iPhone, you can now collect all eight issues of Mirabilis on a whole bunch of smartphones and other devices.

Which devices? Well, desktop or laptop for starters. You can get the free Adobe AIR application which really is a nice presentation frame for your comics. Then there are the iPad, iPhone and Android versions - also absolutely free, naturally. And if you prefer to go old school, there's Graphic.ly's web reader that lets you have a look inside all their latest titles and to view the ones you collect on stunning fullscreen view. Setting up your Graphic.ly ID takes a couple of clicks and then you can read your comics on any or all of the supported platforms.

Still not convinced? Okay, well try this: as an introductory offer you can get both Mirabilis #1 and #2 for free. And Graphic.ly offer a whole bunch of other great titles in their online store, many of them free, and all backed up by the kind of extras we're coming to expect in digital comics: creator info, interviews, trailers, character tags and so on. Having just raised a further $3 million investment, Graphic.ly are ramping up to be one of the major forces in the new comics media, and we're very proud to have Mirabilis as part of their 2011 flagship line.

This digital lark, there might actually be something in it, eh? But if you don't think so, hold on a few weeks and, if you live in the UK or Ireland, you'll be able to buy Mirabilis as two deluxe hardcovers.

Now, any choices I've left out..?

I'm cross-posting this from the Mirabilis blog because Leo and I are 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 UK 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).

And don't feel left out if you don't have an iPad. You can read the first chapter on BookBuzzr or buy the trade paperback on Amazon. 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. Spread the word!

This is a cross-post from the Mirabilis Year of Wonders blog, but I feel justified in squeezing a snippet about my personal projects before some more bits of big news from Fabled Lands LLP over the next week or two.

The Mirabilis Year of Wonders e-comic book is going to go live in only a few weeks now. But I just had to share this pic with you because I've been playing the ad hoc build and it really is a dream. Lush magic lantern colors, razor-sharp graphics, and an interface that's as stylish and smooth as an Irish coffee poured by George Clooney. If you're used to struggling with existing comic reader apps, you're going to be blown away by what our resident iOS wizard has conjured up.

Don't wait. Really, you should go direct to your nearest Apple retail store (look here for Apple in the UK or Apple in the US), buy yourself an iPad for Christmas, and you will then be able to get the reader app and the first chapter of Mirabilis free, with the other chapters available via our nifty in-app storefront. The Mirabilis graphic novel on iPad is our way of telling you that the Year of Wonders has arrived.