Skip to main content

Mice on the Ice

 


Today, with a small but impressive drum-roll, and a barely audible fanfare from teeny tiny trumpets, we announce the launch of the THIRD Adventuremice book, Mice on the Ice. This time there’s a festive feel in the air: the sea around the Mouse Islands has frozen over and the mice are all getting excited fro their annual Frost Fair. But when the ship that’s sailed to the mainland to nab some festive goodies gets stuck in the ice, it’s up to the Adventuremice team to save the day.

As usual with Reeve & McIntyre productions, the story was devised by both of us amid much giggling, then I wrote the words (with some help from Sarah), and we did the roughs together. Then Sarah spent MONTHS AND MONTHS drawing and painting the final artwork. I think she’s outdone herself this time - the chilly backgrounds make the interiors feel even cosier, and the colours really zing against the whites and greys of the ice. All the images are original watercolours, and if you’d like to buy one you can - Sarah sells them via the ‘shop’ section of our website, Adventuremice.com, and a lot of them are surprisingly inexpensive. (Adventuremice.com is also the site to visit for free Adventuremice quizzes, drawing guides, games, colouring sheets, etc.)


Sarah has also painted a limited edition bookplate for the fabulous Page 45 comics shop in Nottingham - there are only a hundred of these, and they’re only available if you buy a copy of the book from Page 45 (they ship internationally). But our publishers, David Fickling Books, have produced some sticker sheets for independent bookshops, so if you buy Mice on the Ice from your local indie you might be able to get stickers too. (When Sarah and I took our Adventuremice Roadshow to Bath Children’s Literature Festival last week, one girl in the audience had already got hold of some stickers and applied them liberally to an icy background which she’d drawn herself - an excellent idea!)

I’m really enjoying working on this series, and it’s nice to see them go from strength to strength as we get to know the characters and their world. The fourth book is already in production, and we have more lined up after that. Please support your local Adventuremice! 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thunder City

This September Scholastic will be publishing my new novel set in the world of Mortal Engines . Here’s the cover, created (like all the others in the series) by Ian McQue . The rule I set for myself when I was writing this one was that it shouldn’t feature any of the people or places from previous Mortal Engines books. So  Thunder Cit y takes place just over a century before the original book, when the town-eat-town world of Traction Cities is slightly less ruthless than it will become later, and none of the characters from the original quartet has even been born yet. (I suppose Mr Shrike must be bimbling about somewhere, but he’s still just yer basic implacable killing machine at this point so there’s not much point in paying him a visit). So hopefully this new take will be accessible to people who’ve never read Mortal Engines , and hopefully people who have read it will enjoy an adventure set in the same world. My pen and ink drawing of the Traction City of Thorbury,  after...
10 comments
Read more

Lord of the Rings 7: Minas Tirith

'This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once,' claimed the historical novelist Alfred Duggan, reviewing The Lord of the Rings when it was published. But I've read it through LOADS of times and now I'm blogging my latest re-read, so what did he know? And so we come to Minas Tirith, Tower of Guard, citadel of Gondor, seven tiers of fancy white fortifications built against a buttress of Mount Mindolluin, with the Tower of Ecthelion rising a thousand feet above the plain. It seems to me the template on which a whole genre of knock-off fantasy cities has been based - I guess Robert E Howard and people wrote about such places before Tolkien, and perhaps there were cities of equal grandeur on Barsoom, but when concept art threads on Instagram throw up unlikely gold and marble castles built on mountaintops and over waterfalls they always look distinctly Minas Tirithy to me. I'm wondering now if London in Mortal Engines was subconsciously echoin...
5 comments
Read more

Merlin (1998)

I remember Merlin being shown on TV as a two-part mini-series over a bank holiday weekend. The version I found on YouTube is a single three hour movie, but I think it might work better in two chunks, as originally broadcast. It still works pretty well, though. Director Steve Barron is completely infatuated with video editing tricks and slightly primitive CGI effects that I’m sure were state-of-the-art when it was made, but he uses them quite inventively, and there are some very enjoyable performances. Since First Knight was such a washout, I guess this is the definitive ‘90s Arthurian film. Like Excalibur , the definitive ‘80s Arthurian film, it tries to tell the entirety of the Arthur story, but since it’s main focus is Merlin it covers a lot more too, and Arthur himself ends up being a bit of a side-character, with the rise and fall of Camelot packed into the second half. At first glance, Merlin seems to be aligning itself with what I’m coming to think of as the Low Arthurian tradi...
Post a Comment
Read more