Bear Alley: It's a Dog's Life

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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.

Monday, November 13, 2006

It's a Dog's Life

And so to post #100. These landmarks seem to come round quite often so I'll probably just let them go by from now on.

So... as I mentioned Hank Janson in post number 50, I thought I'd mention Valiant in post number 100.

It's in the form of a puzzle:

Which Valiant characters are just about to get their own comic?

Actually it's a bit of a trick question because, although these characters appeared in Valiant, they were actually reprinted from the famous French comic Spirou. 'Boule et Bill' are the stars of a new comic which debuts in France on Wednesday, 15 November. The characters were the creation of Jean Roba, subject of a long interview (in French) and a Wikipedia entry (in English) if you want to learn more. Created in 1959, the strip was translated as 'It's a Dog's Life' and appeared on the back page of Valiant between 1964 and 1967, the first year in colour. The example below is the first episode from 11 April 1964.

(* I was on radio twice today: a longish piece on BBC Gloucester and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it interview on Three Counties Radio which was almost scuppered when the phone went dead 30 seconds before I was due on air.

(Between sending out press packs answering questions, I've not actually written anything for a while. I did a piece that's to appear in the Albion trade paperback from WildStorm in... well, Amazon reckon December but I'm not so sure and... er... that's about it. All the text for the War Libraries book is in the hands of the designer who now has to wade through a couple of thousand titles to get it all looking nice and neat and I've been fiddling around with the text for the next book which will be the Adventure Libraries, namely Thriller, Cowboy and Super Detective. I've clumped them together as 'adventure' because I couldn't think of anything better. After that will be the Miscellaneous Libraries -- schoolgirls, romance, and various comics related like Valiant Picture Library, Lion Picture Library and so on. David Roach has been working on this one tirelessly for quite a few months now while I've been tiredly doodling along with the others. Hey, I've got a full time job, y'know. And I do like to fit in the occasional forty winks.)