Comic Cuts

I was a bit astonished to discover tonight that I'd posted over 3,000 images over the past couple of years and with the blog now two years old, it's about due a little maintenance. This is post number 825 and I'm starting to run out of space, having used up 90% of the allotment I get from Blogger.

As I want to keep going as long as possible without having to pay for additional space, I've decided to migrate the Comics Bibliography over to what's called an aStore on Amazon. Since I included links to Amazon on all the books anyway, this seemed a logical move as it means I can remove a ton of pictures and free up some much needed space without losing all those cover images, which are now helpfully stored by Amazon. Things might look a bit patchy in places as I've got to locate and delete over 400 pictures, some of which I've used more than once so they're dotted around various different albums.

The new Comics Bibliography can be found just below the Amazon search box over to your right. Apart from producing a list of my own books, I've taken the opportunity to break down the lists into smaller, more easily digestible chunks. So what was a hugely cumbersome listing of Rebellion/2000AD graphic novels is now broken down into smaller categories (Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, etc. plus a miscellaneous section), the rambling reference sections and publishers listings are split up by characters and creators (e.g. Dan Dare, Brian Bolland) and I've also added a lot of other related links (such as the Black Flame 2000AD novels). The original idea was to produce a list of all the reprints that began appearing a couple of years ago and it very quickly got out of hand... hopefully you'll agree that the solution is more viewer friendly and easier to navigate.

I've still got some sections to add and, no doubt, I'll think of a lot more categories over the coming months. Eventually I'll also go through a lot of the Comic Cuts news columns and weed out material that's out of date, updated in later columns (such as the Upcoming Books news that appears here regularly) or has been proved to be wildly inaccurate (mostly release dates).

I can hardly believe that Bear Alley is two years old. I started it on a whim as I didn't have an outlet to publish any of the odd bits of research I was doing. As with most things I do, I didn't really have a clue what to expect or any particular plan of action. Just write stuff... post it... see if anyone finds it interesting.

Anyone coming to the site for the first time might wonder why it's called Bear Alley, which was explained in the very first post on 15 August 2006.