Comic Cuts

With only a couple of days left working for Look and Learn I've been trying to get as much done as I can. Between that and finishing up The Best of Boyfriend over the weekend hasn't left much time for anything else. The last few bits of The Thriller Libraries book are coming together and there's only one big job left to do on it, the artists' index, which I'm hoping to get to this weekend. At the last count we'd gathered together about 45 or 50 good images of original artwork to include in the book, something I'm especially pleased about. You can see one of the original boards at the top of this column, an excellent example of James E. McConnell's work from Thriller #93, Forward, the Musketeers.

The plan is still to run images of every single cover of Thriller, Cowboy and Super Detective plus we're hoping to have some additional images showing how some of the artwork was adapted when it appeared elsewhere.

As soon as my contract with Look and Learn comes to an end I'm going to be working on the last of the books that I'm doing for Carlton and the next Trigan Empire Collection. Thankfully, a lot of the work on these is already done (I think I typed up the story text for the Trigan book during July and August last year!) so I'll be in introduction writing mode for a couple of weeks. After that I'll be knuckling down to work on a project I've wanted to do for a long, long time... a much enlarged edition of The Mike Western Story. I've been a bit cagey with everyone about what I've been plotting to do post-L&L because I'm still looking at how to do the book practically and there's still a lot of juggling of figures to do but I've reached a point where I'm 99.9% certain I can do it and making it public will force me to go that 0.1% further and make it happen. So, finally, The Mike Western Story will be back in print, new, improved and hopefully welcome.

That's all my news, so here's some news from elsewhere...

* Roger Clark has set up a sight dedicated to David Wright's 'Carol Day' newspaper strip.

* Alan Grant is interviewed by the Sunday Herald (27 January) on the subject of writing Judge Dredd.

* 'Nemesis' artist John Hicklenton is the subject of a new documentary entitled Here's Johnny, recording the destruction of his life by MS. The Daily Telegraph (28 January) recently reported on Hicklenton's suffering and the Channel 4-funded documentary is to be shown at the Science Museum tonight (30 January). You can see a clip of the film here (under 'documentary').

* Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie are signing at Gosh! (39 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3NZ) on 2 February between 2-5pm. I don't usually advertise signings but this gives me an excuse to run the postcard images Richard Sheaf sent me. (Thanks, Richard.)

* John H. Mitchell interviews Bryan Talbot (27 January). (link via Journalista)