Bear Alley: Comic Clippings -18 September 2006

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The Bill Kellaway Quartet by Gwyn Evans
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"The narrative is packed with action and I think readers will have a lot of fun with [Hercules, Esq.] and there are some genuine moments of laugh out loud humour. I can understand why the film rights for this book were snapped up and even today I could envisage it being a very enjoyable one-off TV series." — Cross Examining Crime.
"Although there’s some criminous stuff going on and Bill often finds himself vying against or working with various lawbreakers, the stakes are never really life and death in this book ... There is some slam-bang action, though, as well as a smart, really likable protagonist and a lot of really clever plot twists, but what really makes HERCULES ESQ. work is Evans’s style, which is consistently breezy, fast-paced, and funny." — James Reasoner, Rough Edges.

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Comic Clippings -18 September 2006

The ABC show yesterday was the usual day of happy chat and book-buying. Bumped into Paul Gravett who tells me his book will be launched at the end of October; and Phil Clarke and Mike Higgs are getting back into publishing as Ugly Duckling Press (web site coming soon) and reissuing the old Wolf Publishing Phantom comics and are planning other volumes.

Both David Roach and I are happy with the sample pages we've seen for the upcoming indexes. More good news: it's looking likely that some of the cover repros will be taken from the original artwork so we'll have something unique in the illustration department on top of all the new information we've been able to compile about artists and scriptwriters.

More random notes:

Saturday's Daily Mail carried a big feature on Look and Learn which compared a quiz from an old issue with one from a recent issue of Top of the Pops. Quite an eye-opener!

Rich Johnson's Lying in the Gutters has an interesting note about a book being compiled by Bryan Talbot called Comic Book Legends, "recounting tales of comic pros, mad fans and weird con and signings experiences." Hopefully Bryan has forgotten my attempt to interview him whilst "tired and emotional" and unable to string two coherant thoughts together at Angouleme fifteen years ago. Not my finest moment. Paul Birch rescued my bacon on that occasion and interviewed Bryon a couple of weeks later. Thankfully, the evidence was erased when I reused the tapes to interview Arthur Ranson the next day (it appeared in Comic Collector 3) and Bryan, being a gentleman, produced a fantastic cover for us a couple of months later.

(* The last story was prompted by seeing copies of the old Comic Collector/Comic World magazine on sale at the ABC show on Sunday. I can't believe it's over a decade since it folded. Happy days!)