He showed us marvels

It’s impossible to imagine the Fabled Lands without the involvement of Russ Nicholson, who died this month. His filler drawings are my favourites, little vignettes necessary for gamebook layout so that options don’t spill over a page, but also perfect for evoking the ambience of each book’s setting. He always put something extra into all the pictures: comic book style inserts, fragments of unknown scripts, characterful onlookers in the background of a scene, a thousand touches that convey personality, colour, humour and reality.

For some reason we had a struggle getting the Pan Macmillan art director to let us use Russ for the world maps. They had a different illustrator lined up but, as you can see by comparing the first four FL books with the last three, Russ’s cartography was streets (and forests, and mountains) ahead. In FL book 3 they printed the two halves of their map the wrong way round, at which point they admitted that maybe we’d been right all along and Russ should handle it.

I put a personal tribute to Russ on my Patreon page (unlocked) and I asked other members of the Fabled Lands team to contribute their memories. Here’s Paul Gresty:

“I first met Russ in 2010, when I was his interpreter at a gaming event in Paris. He’d illustrated many, many books that I owned and loved, and I was incredibly excited to spend a weekend with him. Throughout that event, Russ was interesting, and kind, and humble; whenever a fan of his work asked him to sign a book, Russ also took the time to draw an illustration in there, too.

“At some point that weekend I asked Russ if he’d sign a copy of Citadel of Chaos for me. I was expecting a signature, and perhaps a quick sketch. Instead, Russ took the book back to his hotel room so that he could spend some time on a picture. When he returned the book to me the next day he’d drawn a phenomenal illustration (an axe-wielding warrior and a dragon) right across the book’s copyright and title pages – and he actually apologised that it wasn’t as good as he’d hoped. The paper in the book wasn’t ideal for ink drawing, he explained; the ink had bled on the page a little. I guess that’s an artist term. Bleeding ink or not, I was overjoyed with the illustration.

“I’m happy and grateful that I was able to work with Russ after that, and to meet him in person a few more times. He was a creative powerhouse, and a joy to be around. Incidentally, it was Russ who introduced me to the Fabled Lands books, showing me a book that somebody had brought for him to sign. He (correctly) told me I’d enjoy reading them.”

Jamie Thomson adds:

“A sad loss indeed, both personally and professionally. I remember meeting him in our White Dwarf offices a few times way back when, just a nice guy and so talented. Iconic game book and WD illustrator. I guess the ink blot story is my favourite. He was doing a Fabled Lands map and blotted it by accident. Me and Dave immediately came up with 'The Hole in the World' so it looked like it was deliberate. Well, I think we did, maybe it was Dave or Russ that came up with it, I can't remember. Anyway, there were quite a few things that we added to the stories and the lore that came from Russ; he inspired us too.”

At first I wasn't sure about Jamie’s recollection there because Russ's world map for FL didn't appear in print until books 5 and 6, so how come he drew the Hole in the World before anyone else? It's probable that he drew his own version of the world map right from the outset in order to have a context for the regional maps in each book. It's typical of Russ's boundless enthusiasm for and professional pride in his work that he'd do that even without a commission from the publisher. He improved every idea we gave him. He was our Jack Kirby, our Billy Preston, the Eno to our Roxy Music. As film directors value a great cinematographer, we valued Russ – as a good friend as well as a collaborator. He won’t just be missed, he’s irreplaceable.

He leaves behind his partner Jacqui. His wife, I should say, as they had planned to get married while Russ was in hospital, only he got moved to another ward which couldn’t accommodate a bedside ceremony. Had he come home I’ve no doubt they would have had the wedding then, but sadly he died in hospital. Fans will remember him fondly, friends with love, but the real wrenching loss is Jacqui’s.

However, as long as we have Russ’s art we can still see the expression of his personality. In that sense he’s with us always. Here is a small selection of illustrations by him that you might not have come across before.

This from the summer 1978 issue of Fantasy Tales:

This from A Dying Trade:

A sample page Russ did for The DFC:

Two more sample pages for The DFC, this time for the John Blake strip:

A test page for Mirabilis, because in the early days we thought Leo and Martin would be too busy on the gazetteer book to handle the comic strip chores as well:

Layout page for “Rich and Strange”, one of several Mirabilis standalone stories I wrote to run in The Guardian newspaper:

(Only one story, “A Wrong Turning”, was ever fully illustrated, and that by Martin McKenna whose loss we also mourn.)

Part of the layouts for the Camelot Eclipsed comic book (originally The New Knights of Camelot):

Some concept art for Shadow King:

A rough that Russ prepared for A Town Through Time, a project we pitched without success to publishers in the late ‘90s:

You can see how much on-spec work an artist has to produce in order to nab a few paying gigs. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here's another -- Russ's drawings for the Conquerors game.

Jamie unleashed

I would have loved Jackanory as a kid if Jamie had been on it. You don't know what I mean, I guess. You're too young. Or you aren't British. Storytelling like it used to be: no special effects, just the raw magic of words spun into narrative spells around the fireside. Well, okay, around the TV. Same difference.

Here's Jamie in thundering form on the Guardian website, captivating the nation's youth by teaching them how to be evil. True moral guidance is what it is. Nobody said which flavour of morality it had to be, did they? Oh, they did? Too late now.

The gore-coloured, twistily imaginative background picture is by Freya Hartas, who is a whole lot nicer to look at than Jamie but didn't get the gig because her laugh is sweet (deceptively so; she's actually very wicked indeed) rather than the obviously villainous guffaw of our Mr Thomson.

Oh yes, it's Thomson, by the way, not Thompson. But it wouldn't be the Guardian if they got something like that right, would it? Shouldn't knock them, though. The Grauniad is still Britain's best paper, after all, especially for books coverage, and here to prove it is Jamie's (and Dirk's) pick of the funniest reads.

A Dirk Lloyd audiobook should be out next year - narrated by Jamie (who else?) and you'll also be able to read the first in our new series, Starship Captain. But before we're quite done with 2012, you'll be wanting to see what's in the Fabled Lands Santa sack for this Yuletide. A couple of things, actually. Tune in on Monday for the first of them.

Emerging from The Waste Land

There's a lot of talk about the resurgence of gambooks, so it's nice to see quality UK newspapers like The Guardian taking the new wave of digital interactive literature seriously. Literary editor Claire Armistead writes:

"Last week, the independent publisher Profile Books launched an updated, interactive version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which leapt straight into the top 10 in the books section of Apple's App Store on both sides of the Atlantic."

Whether your preference is literary fiction or orcs-n-goblins (or both) this should be good news for gamebook aficionados as it signals a willingness in the mainstream to take the medium seriously. Hit the link to see a bunch of other interesting digital books that Ms Armistead is looking at.

Fantasy comes in many flavours

In his Guardian column recently, Damien Walter lamented the scarcity of interesting new weird fiction. Buy me a coffee and you’ll hear me saying the same thing, but Mr Walter went further. He invited readers of the column to send in their own self- or independently-published novels.

While people like me cower at the thought of a million genre novels being published every year, there’s Damien Walter throwing open the floodgates and standing smack in the way of the oncoming torrent. I can only salute such bravery (a tricky manoeuvre to carry off, incidentally, while simultaneously scurrying for the safety of high ground). He will be remembered.

Personally I’d push the Dalai Lama under a bus rather than read a single trilogy of the G’nar’gh empire or the steampunk adventures of Algernon Blackwood, wendigo hunter. So it is my awe of Mr Walter’s fortitude that leaves me shamed and chastised by his comment in today’s Guardian that “those writers who make a critical understanding of fantasy part of their work create better stories than those who remain […] ignorant of it.”

The irony is that I do read a fair bit of lit crit, just not in the field of fantasy. In fact, I barely even read fantasy fiction. Given that fantasy is my bread and butter, and stung by Mr Walter’s parting words as he sank beneath the deluge, I scooted over to Amazon and bought Farah Mendlesohn’s book Rhetorics of Fantasy. At 336 pages it may take me a while, but already I’m intrigued by the core concepts. In essence, Ms Mendlesohn defines four categories of the fantastic. There are portal fantasies (Narnia, The Lost World), immersive fantasies (Game of Thrones), intrusive fantasies (War of the Worlds), and then there are liminal fantasies.

That last one is a little trickier than the rest. It’s also the most interesting. Liminal fantasies are those where the fantastic element is part of the normal universe and, though they may not like its effects, everybody seems to just accept it: Kafka’s story “Metamorphosis”, for example. It’s the kind of fantasy you find in dreams and fairytales. A movie example would be Guy Maddin’s Careful; in novels, Steven Sherill’s The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break; in short stories, W F Harvey’s “The Beast With Five Fingers”.

All of magic realism could arguably fit into the liminal category. There, of course, we are supposed to recognize the fabulosity and artifice of what we’re being told. I don’t think it’s intrinsic to liminal fantasies that they need to recognize their own fictionality in that way, simply that when literary fiction does include fantasy, it is most likely to be liminal fantasy.

Most fantasy stories belong to more than one category. Harry Potter begins as a portal fantasy but later becomes intrusive fantasy. The Lost World (what is the plateau if not a portal?) has its little bit of intrusive fantasy in the form of the pterodactyl egg that Challenger brings back to London. Raymond E Feist even wrote an immersive fantasy with a portal fantasy element, in the form of a rift leading through to Tsolyanu. I mean Tsuranu.

In my graphic novel series Mirabilis, the fantasy at first is intrusive; but, as the green comet draws nearer to Earth, people first begin to accept the reality of previously imaginary things and later, by midsummer, to treat them as though they have always been there. (I even wrote exactly that, in my first draft of the Mirabilis storyline ten years ago. For the month of June: “Liminality; it is as if magic has always been part of everyday life.”)

Frankenstein could have been an intrusive fantasy. If Mary Shelley had treated the story in that way, it would have read more like something written by H G Wells. Instead, in the original Frankenstein novel, almost nothing is made of the science fictional element. The monster’s existence doesn’t impact on the world at large, only on Victor Frankenstein’s own life. If not for Captain Walton’s encounter with the monster right at the end, the whole book could be read as the imaginings of a highly unreliable narrator. And even Walton’s tacked-on testimony doesn’t quite banish the suspicion that what we have been reading is not an SF tale about creating life, but that immemorially potent fable, the Return of the Repressed. Like the best kind of fantasy, Frankenstein finally reveals itself as a disturbing conjuring trick in which the question, “Is it supposed to have really happened?” is the least interesting of all.
Dave Morris's interactive retelling of Frankenstein is published by Profile Books and coded for iPhone and iPad by Inkle Studios. Look for it from April 26 on the App Store.