Comic Cuts

A relatively quiet week after all the disruption of the past couple of months. We're slowly getting our lives back in order now that we've got our gear back from storage, although it's still going to be a while before everything is out of boxes. It's one of those Catch 22 situations: throw everything up on the shelves willy-nilly you end up having to take everything down again to rearrange it, so you end up doing the job twice; the alternate is, plan ahead, do things in a logical order, spend ages living out of boxes. Neither solution is ideal but the latter seems to me the more sensible, although painfully slow, way to do it. Mind you, I seem to be spending loads: in the past few weeks I've bought a USB turntable to record old albums so they can be squirreled away into the deeper recesses of a cupboard, a load of magazine boxes (yes, more boxes... the ones used for storage are too big to stack unless they're packed absolutely solid and that makes them too heavy to move around easily) and a load of CD slipcases for all my DVDs, freeing up shelf space for up to 1,400 books (if you double stack). I suspect some hard decisions are going to have to be made soon about whether to sell off some of the books I've had buried unused in boxes for years.

So, a bit of a bitty week split between emptying boxes, scanning, cleaning up scans, researching some stuff, recording, battling a rising tide of plastic packaging, flattening boxes and making others, punching holes in paper so it can filed and typing up some pages so that paper can be chucked. I'm sitting here now thinking that nothing looks any different and wondering why I feel so knackered.

Things should get back to normal next week from a working point of view as I'm starting work on the final two Trigan Empire Collection volumes. We've still got the rest of the building work hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles and the Kitchen Ceiling of Damocles also needs looking at, although that won't be for a couple of weeks.

I noticed that Against All Odds: War Picture Library Vol. 2 shot up in the Amazon charts—at one point it was their #2 best-selling book on the Second World War!—but has now slumped back to #10 because they're temporarily out of stock. I'm sure that situation will be remedied promptly, so please continue ordering your copies with confidence. I'm still waiting on word about the next batch that are due out from Carlton on the 1st of September (Love on Ward B: Hospital Nurse Romance Library, The Best of Boyfriend and The Biggest Jackie Annual Ever!). No word yet on precisely when the Karl the Viking box-set and the next two Storm The Collection volumes will be released, although everything seems to be in hand with the Frank Bellamy's King Arthur. Like any author, I'm like an expectant father waiting in the wings for news. What proofs I've seen have looked fine but until I'm holding the squalling little brat... er, book in my hands I'll hold off on the cigar.

The Hugo Awards have just been announced. As expected, Stephen Moffatt's Doctor Who episode 'Blink' won the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form award. Stardust, based on the Neil Gaiman & Charles Vess graphic novel, adapted by Jane Goldman & Matthew Vaughn, won the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, beating out Heroes season one, but there wasn't much of a British showing elsewhere despite nominations for Ian McDonald, Charles Stross, Stephen Baxter, Ken McLeod and other Brits in various categories. I'm going to have to make an effort to read some of the nominees. I was quite surprised that the Hugos got a mention in the Guardian last Thursday, aptly a blog piece by Sam Jordison about how little recognition the awards get in the mainstream press.

Today's Observer (10 August) has an interview with Raymond Briggs about his career and the re-release of Gentleman Jim, originally published in 1980 and just reissued by Jonathan Cape. The interesting news from the interview is that Briggs is working... "On a book about old age and death, which is what you tend to think about when you get to 70. I've finished the writing. Now I've just got about five years of illustrating to do. The donkey work!"

Compiling the listing of authors who had contributed to The Children's Newspaper this morning I was struck by how many 'classics' I'd read in one form or another through comics. The hey-day was already past before I started reading them in the 1960s but, via Look and Learn and other papers, I read versions of books by Haggard, Dumas, Greek myths, Shakespeare, Defoe, Swift, Verne and dozens of others even when my tastes ran more to crime and science fiction.

It was interesting to read recently that Ofsted, the education regulator, has suggested that schools stock "action-packed stories about danger or sport to inspire [boys] in lessons." Precisely what we used to get in the days when you could pick up half a dozen boys' comics every week.

Of course, the old story papers—full of action-packed stories of danger and sports—were the very papers that were being condemned by educators fifty years and more ago as dumbing down children with their easily understood, direct language and turning them into juvenile delinquents with, er, action-packed stories of danger and sports. It's amazing how far the pendulum has swung in fifty years: nowadays one in five adults struggle with reading and writing (says this BBC Magazine report, 30 July) and parents would love to see their children reading anything, let alone a comic or story paper. In the UK, the comics were badly hit by the oil crisis in the early 1970s which pretty much wrecked the market. A decade later, by the mid-1980s, the comics industry was almost entirely gone. Although there is still a thriving pre-school comics market, there's nothing to progress onto that children can read other than books, although, thankfully, post-Harry Potter, the publishing industry has twigged onto the fact that there is a large market for children's books and 'young adult' novels. Maybe, eventually, the pendulum will swing far enough for publishers to risk thinking about putting out a comic aimed at children. The DFC is a tentative step in that direction and, if I can blow my own trumpet, Look and Learn was the first attempt to do this when it was relaunched in January 2007.

If only someone would take the terrible risk of putting a new comic onto the newsstands that wasn't aimed at 4-year-olds or based on a TV show... not necessarily the comic you or I would want (which, I suspect, would be the new Warrior for the noughties) but a stepping stone between the pre-school comics and 2000AD positioned where, say, the old 'New' Eagle was in the 1980s, or, going back even further, Tiger was in the 1950s-70s, allowing the Beano and Dandy to feed 7-year-olds to more adventure-based comics.

Have I a clue whether this would work? Of course not. But it's an idea that ought to be explored.