Shadowmagic

Once upon a time John Lenahan was a magician. Then he revealed the workings of the 3-card trick, got expelled from the Magic Circle and began a successful media career, starring in his own BBC series, fronting a series for ITV and making untold other assorted TV and stage appearances.

He still follows that career but a few years ago he decided to write a novel as well. He spent several months, writing 1000 words a day, and then… Shadowmagic was finished.

Now I would not usually begin a book review with a potted bio, but this book is different.  You see, John quickly realised that the route to market is fearsomely tricky, even for someone with a substantial reputation for comedy and magic. So he decided that the best way to get his book out to the public was to record himself reading it, chapter by chapter, and then publish it on podiobooks.com.  Clearly, all his experience as a performer helped and within a short while Shadowmagic was voted number one out of the 300 books on the web-site and John had 20,000 subscribers.

And then the publishers started to call him.

Shadowmagic is still available free as a podcast. But now (for a reasonable £6.99) you can get your hands on an old-fashioned printed copy and listen to the voice in your head instead of John’s mellifluous tones.

So what’s it about? Here’s how John introduces it on his web-site:

“Hi, my name is Conor.  Other than my father being a bit of an eccentric lunatic, my life was pretty normal until I got attacked in my living room and whisked away to Tir na Nog, the mystical land of the ancient Celts, where it turns out Dad is the usurped heir to the throne and everybody wants me dead because of some prophecy.  Don’t you just hate when that happens?”

In essence Shadowmagic is a quest.  Conor is dragged off to Tir Na Nog, discovers the truth about his father, meets the rest of his family (not all of whom are friendly and none of whom are entirely reliable), makes friends with a banshee called Fergal, an Imp called Araf and an exquisite princess called Essa, and with their help, attempts to find his way back home, whilst, at the same time, being side-tracked into saving Tir Na Nog from an evil tyrant .

But what makes Shadowmagic such fun is Connor’s voice. The whole story is written in the first person and within the first few pages the reader realises that this particular first person is a cocky, somewhat glib kid with an inflated sense of his own comic genius, but also with an ability to smile in the face of adversity which can only come from a level of courage the reader would not expect. He is also deeply rooted in modern day culture and technology, which provides Lenahan with endless opportunities to play games with the both mediaeval and magical sensibilities of Tir Na Nog’s residents.

Add to this the fact that every chapter ends with a hook (That’s when the bus hit me. I had just met another member of the family. That’s why we didn’t hear him approach.) that lures you into reading the next chapter, and the next one, and so on until, breathless, you have reached the final page, and you have a very readable, very enjoyable and very magical tale indeed.

It’s out now. So why not pick up a copy? You won’t be disappointed.

The Rainbow Orchid

JE Towey talks to cartoonist and author, Garen Ewing, creator of The Rainbow Orchid.

At some point in our childhood, or perhaps only in our mythical childhood, didn’t we all spend winter Sunday afternoons, curled up beside a roaring log fire with tea and toast and an Asterix or Tintin book, doing our utmost to ensure that the warm butter dripping down our chins didn’t sully those precious pages?

Now Egmont, who still publish the Tintin books, have taken a punt on a young Briton, called Garen Ewing, to bring us The Rainbow Orchid, a new take on that experience. I thought you’d like to know what makes a 21st century cartoon artist do such a thing. So, off I went on my travels down Southern England’s A roads once more, to find Garen and have a chat.

Now, the first thing you discover about Garen is he’s a gentleman. My car was reporting an external temperature of 28.5 degrees when I arrived; Garen offered me a choice of cold drinks, ushered me to a comfy sofa in his front room and opened the conversation with the kind of selfless questions that immediately puts someone at ease.

And there is something quintessentially gentlemanly about Garen’s attitude to his art too. He combines a quiet confidence in his graphical abilities with an almost unnerving modesty about his command of colour. Indeed he confesses that the limited palette used for The Rainbow Orchid was a product of his own uncertainty and a suggestion from his wife to keep to the Dulux Heritage range of colours! For my part, I don’t care how he got there. The combination of simple, but assured, line drawings, and flat, muted colouring is what gives The Rainbow Orchid its exquisitely enchanting quality.

But, please, don’t be misled by all this talk of colour palettes and enchantment, nor even the title, The Rainbow Orchid. For this is not some saccharine tale of fairies or cutesy magical flowers. This is a fast moving adventure tale, with action and intrigue, mystery and suspense, a plucky young hero and a beautiful heroine, an ancient, priceless sword and a mythical plant.

The story opens in the 1920s at the home of Sir Alfred Catesby-Grey and immediately the reader is plunged into a Conan Doyle world of wealthy amateurs living in elegant London terraces. Young Julius Chancer, Sir Alfred’s assistant, has just returned from an eight month assignment to recover the manuscript of a lost Purcell opera; an assignment, we learn, that has been fraught with the kind of difficulties and danger a modern audience would associate with the Raiders of the Lost Ark and Mummy film franchises.

The filmic references are not out of place. Garen is a fan, particularly, of the early silent films, whose combination of story-telling imagery and written titles, bear more than a passing similarity with comic books. He cites an example from Chaplin’s 1931 film ‘City Lights’ where Chaplin plays a tramp who falls for a blind flower girl, as illustrating how Chaplin, as both writer and director as well as actor, uses emotion and gesture to tell the story. It is a technique he uses to great effect in his book: he seems to take particular delight in the use of eyebrow gesture, for example. (A particular favourite of mine is the sequence of scenes where one of the secondary characters gets his hand stuck in a Phoenician vase.) And this interest in early films is, he confesses, one of the reasons for setting the story in the 1920s.

All of this is, of course, a far cry from the vast majority of comic books currently available. US, superhero and manga comic books all make use of a bold and vivid colour palette. They shout at the reader, especially when depicting action and violence. Garen shows violence too, but he uses restraint and economy of line. There is, for example, a subtly simple panel showing a fist ramming into a man’s jaw and making his head vibrate. The violence implied by a few, apparently, casual lines is breathtaking and far more memorable than the Wham Bam violence with which we are all more familiar.

Talking to Garen, though, it is clear, that the differences do not just lie in the subtlety of line and colour. There are huge differences in how the books are conceived and created too. Garen is wedded to the idea that a comic book should be the product of one creative personality. This concept came to him over twenty years ago when he was pitching his portfolio at a comics festival, and realised that he could never achieve what he wanted if all he did was make drawings for other people’s words. So he builds up his books, bit by bit, partly with a script, partly with a few sketches until he has a firm hold of what is happening in each scene. This is a far cry from the more usual, almost production line, process where even the art content is broken down into pencil, ink, colour, etc and each is carried out by a different person.

I could go on a lot longer telling you more about the story of The Rainbow Orchid or outlining Garen’s biography. But there really is no need. You see, another aspect of Garen’s gentlemanly nature is his generosity. Take a look at his web-site. There you will find excerpts from Volume 1 and 2, fascinating video footage of Garen creating one of the strips, chunks of biography, links to interviews and reviews and a members section where you can sign up for newsletters and the opportunities to win original art work. Have a browse and I think you will see what I mean.

All that’s left for me now is to tell you that Volume 1 of The Rainbow Orchid is to be published on August 4th. Volume 2 will follow early next year, and Garen is soon to start work on Volume 3. So pop that date into your diary and make sure you get a copy. And if the cover alone doesn’t make you think of hot buttered toast, then you must have had a pretty miserable childhood!