Friday, July 06, 2012

Comic Cuts - 6 July 2012


I had a bit of a break over the weekend putting together the artwork for this week's World of Wonder galleries, plus a break mid-week to finish off a bit of work for Look and Learn, otherwise I have been working on the Mike Western book full time.

Progress is slow because I'm having to read huge runs of strips – this is, after all, a life story told through the comics he drew – and it's not easy to summarise stories without it becoming: "and then this happened and then that happened and then this happened and then . . ." etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I'm trying to find a happy balance between relating the plots and not boring the reader to death. I've only added roughly 4,000 words to the total this week and most writers aim for at least 1,000 words a day, so I need to pick up the pace a bit. That's not to say I'm unhappy with the way the book is going, I just want to get the text done so I can get started on the layouts.

Everyone who pre-ordered the Sexton Blake Annual and Peter Jackson's London Is Stranger Than Fiction will be pleased to hear that copies have started shipping and the first copies should start landing on your doormats very shortly. Pre-orders for the Blake are about half the level for the C. L. Doughty book that came out last February. They're not really comparable in content, so I'm not going to panic over the drop-off. But I'm hoping the Mike Western book will get me back on track after what has been a slow couple of months financially. The rent still needs to be paid.

Our random scans this week are a quartet of books by Kingsley Amis for no other reason than I happened to pick up a copy of Lucky Jim the other day. The covers are by Nicholas Bentley, Lou Klein, uncertain but possibly Edward Mortelmans, Josh Kirby and Edward Mortelmans.

Over the weekend we have a biography in strip form of the late Eric Sykes, a look at the Commander Amanda books of George Revelli and, starting Monday, hopefully another collection of artwork from World of Wonder, although the latter depends on what I can get done on Sunday.

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