As we mentioned the other day, bestselling fantasy novelist Mark Chadbourn joins the likes of Orson Scott Card and Richard Morgan in taking on the world of comics as well as prose novels. In Mark’s case he is now involved in creating – along with excellent artist Bo Hampton – work for Image Comics based upon the world and characters of his own excellent fantasy novels. We couldn’t resist asking Mark to tell us some more:
“Book of Shadows is a dark fantasy story examining what would happen if the gods of Celtic mythology returned to our modern world. How would our society cope when faced with wild magic wiping away the whole basis of the Age of Reason in the blink of an eye? That collision between fantasy and reality is something that has always fascinated me, and which I’ve dealt with in my novels, particularly The Age of Misrule sequence – World’s End, Darkest Hour and Always Forever. Those books have sold out multiple printings in the UK and have been translated into many other languages, so I presume one or two other people are interested in that topic as well!
Book of Shadows focuses on Annie Lovelock, a troubled young wiccan who is drawn into this shifting world by one of the Celtic gods, the Morrigan, the goddess of death and blood. Over the two issues, we follow Annie’s journey as she tries to make sense of what is happening. Fully-painted artwork is by Bo Hampton, whose probably best known for his work on Batman (Bo also returns to graphic novels with Sight Unseen this spring, also from Image). It’s stunning stuff.
I’m a lifelong comics fan with a geekhead encyclopaedic knowledge of just about everything DC and Marvel have published, so I couldn’t resist when Joe Pruett from Image’s Desperado imprint, asked me to do something for them. I had done some work for Joe before – a story in Caliber’s Negative Burn series (recently reprinted in The Best of Negative Burn from Image), a story for Caliber’s X-Files series Raven Chronicles, and one episode of a creator-owned series, Fatalis, for the same company. It’s such a fantastic experience I really hope to be writing some more comics in the near future.”
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June 14th, 2006 at 11:53 am
[...] We’re on something of a roll this week for What The Author Says features – the excellent fantasy author (and now comics writer) Mark Chadbourn takes some time out of his hectic schedule to tell us a little about Jack of Ravens, his new book published this month. Jack of Ravens marks the beginning of a new series by Mark, the Kingdom of the Serpent, so if you’ve heard many of us telling you how good he is and thinking, which series to start with, here’s a chance to get on at the beginning of a brand new and rather intriguing sounding one. And for those who missed some of Mark’s earlier work, Gollancz are collecting three books in Age of Misrule this autumn. [...]