Fiery Studios is the publisher of the Vögelein comic book.

Vögelein (a German word meaning "little bird") is the story of a clockwork faerie come to life. She was completed and first wound in 1671, though it took her creator, Heinrich Uhrmacher, over thirty years to finish her -- she was his final master work as well as a tribute to his lost love. She remains "alive" as long as she is wound each day, and remembers everything she has ever seen or heard as long as she doesn't wind down. If she does, she begins to lose her memories, starting with the most recent, and continuing to her earliest recollections. The longer she remains stopped, the more she loses, and if she stays unwound for too long, she will become nothing more than a simple automaton unable to move or speak on her own.

The first issue opens with the death of Vögelein's Guardian, Jakob. Suddenly alone for the first time in fifty years, she must find someone to trust before she winds down. The idea for the story sprang from a conversation between myself and a friend and writer, Jeff Berndt. We wondered aloud what the diametric opposite of a real faerie would be. The answer of course, was a robot faerie -- but let's face it: that's just not romantic enough. Jeff and I turned it on its ear and ran with it, as the thought of a story involving an ancient clockwork faerie was just too good to pass up. We originally planned a kind of creative digest full of Jeff's short stories and poetry and my illustrations, and comics that he'd write and I'd draw. Vögelein was one of the stories, but it wasn't long before she outgrew the confines of her initial ten-page story.

Jeff penned the plot for most of the first three issues, but when I took over as writer, I had to make some pretty sweeping changes to make it my own. His original ideas still comprise the backbone of the story, though, and anything that reads like poetry is his doing.

Jeff and I had been working together creatively for a while -- most of the ideas we had stemmed from finding the wonder in the everyday, the beauty between the cracks in the cement, the wide-eyed charge of coincidence too good to be true. We travelled Ireland together, Jeff and I, hitchhiking and meeting friends and circumstances so amazing that the people back home didn't believe most of the stories. Standing on Maeve's Cairn, or visiting Glen Alt in County Sligo is enough to change you forever. Each time we turned round, it seemed as though some amazing force was setting all the events in place like tumblers in a lock -- and it was that kind of magic that we both tried to carry into the book.

Please visit the Vögelein website for more information.