Friday, October 19, 2012

Comic Cuts - 19 October 2012


I'm pleased to say that copies of Sexton Blake Annual 1941 are now shipping out and should be with the folks who pre-ordered the book shortly, if they haven't already arrived. The next, final, volume is complete. I still need to get a proof done, but I've had no troubles with the first three so I'm not anticipating any problems. I'll post details of how to order in a few week's time in advance of publication at the end of November.

So with the latest two Bear Alley Books now published, that left me free to start writing an article for the next volume of Del Tebeo al Manga, which will be appearing some time next year. My contribution, about British graphic novels, is only a tiny part of the whole book and strictly limited to 15,000 characters (including spaces), or around 2,400 words. From which you can work out that the average length of a word I've used in the article is 5.2 letters. What you're going to do with this information I've no idea. Just let it be for the good of mankind and not for evil.

My first draft ran to 3,100 words, and I thought I was being quite good at cutting the fat as I was going along. I managed to trim and trim and trim it down further until I hit the correct length. Phew!

So I'm now working on a future Bear Alley Book. I now have various projects that I dip in and out of and I usually reach a tipping point on something that tells me that's the next book and I need to work on it flat-out. Two of them are indexes, one is the long-time-coming Mike Western book and the last is a comic strip reprint. All four are at various stages of development and I'm hoping to have one or other of them finished next month, although that depends on what other work comes in (work's a bit thin on the ground at the moment!).

Random scans this week begin with a rather poor effort from Hamilton & Co. "We never publish a dull story" they claim... but they did publish the occasional dull cover.

Three from Corgi. I couldn't think of a theme, so I picked numbers: 100 (Above Us The Waves), 500 (Kon-Tiki) and 1,500 (Catch 22). The two painted covers are by Corgi's master of cover art, John Richards.

 
 
Next week: the conclusion of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

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