Bear Alley: Comic Cuts

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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.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Comic Cuts

The Don Lawrence Collection has had to delay some publications of late, including a couple I've been involved with -- the next volume of the Trigan Empire Collection and the collected Karl the Viking. The reason has been the work involved in putting together the latest, 23rd, volume of Storm. This is the first volume following the death of Don Lawrence, who illustrated the previous 22 volumes and has been a long time in the making. Following Don's death, Don Lawrence Collection bought all the rights to Storm and found two artists who, between them, could produce artwork in the style that Don had established for the series.

With Martin Lodewijk writing, Romano Molenaar and Jorg de Vos began work on the new volume in 2005 and the new story (which continues directly on from the previous volumes) was serialised in Myx Magazine earlier this year. The album is now out and anyone wishing to see how well the new art team have done can pick up 'De Naval van de Dubbele God' from the Worlds of Don Lawrence website at a very reasonable 6.95 Euros (about £4.85). Imagine that: a 48-page full colour album for under a fiver.

It's in Dutch, of course, but I'm sure there will eventually be a translation as part of the Storm: The Collection series which I've been helping out with for the past few years. We've produced seven volumes to date, collecting the first 14 Storm albums. With the tenth album, Storm really went into overdrive when Martin Lodewijk (who had co-created the series but had only written one of the first nine books) took over the writing full-time. He rebooted the series by shifting the action across the universe to the mysterious Pandarve system. The subsequent books are hugely imaginative SF adventures which, until now, have only appeared sporadically in English: the first Pandarve volume appeared from Titan some years ago; one book was translated for the short-lived Marvel comic, Strip, and two further books were translated for Heavy Metal. (The translations in the Collection books went back to the original Dutch text, by the way, and are newly translated.)

On with the news...

* Nick Abadzis is interviewed about his Laika graphic novel at Playback:stl by J. Bowers (16 October). (link via Journalista)

* Warren Ellis has a short story in Forbes Magazine (15 October). (link via Journalista)

* A sneak peek at the next League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book by Alan Moore and Kev O'Neill, The Black Dossier, appeared on the Entertainment Weekly website EW.com. (link via Journalista)

* "Billy the Cat vs. General Jumbo", the story by Kev F. Sutherland and Nigel Dobbyn in this year's Beano Annual has been given the trailer treatment by Kev F. (link via Lying in the Gutters)