Comic Cuts

It has been a slow couple of weeks for news. After the mad rush of titles released in September and October for the Christmas market, things have started to settle down a little. There are still new releases coming out but nowhere nearly as many: 8 titles for November compared to almost 50 in the past two months (and that's not counting annuals).

I'm still trying to catch up with some of the books, although review copies have been thin on the ground (I've had a couple from Titan but precious few from other publishers). Some publishers seem to have a strange idea of promoting their books: half the searches that bring people to Bear Alley are people looking for information on specific book titles (there's a bewildering range that makes up the other half—and these are genuine searches from the past two hours: Mick Anglo, Eleanor Boorman, The Aeronauts, Gerald Bateman, Aileen Burke, Charlie Bears, G. W. Backhouse, Dennis Duckworth, Charley's War, Hook Jaw).

Since finishing off the Trigan books and the book dummy I've been catching up on a few things—e-mail was one (still not quite answered everyone!) and some work on the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, which involves a lot of digging for what's often a slim set of results. Also sorting out books (hence the spate of cover galleries); the recent building work meant everything got packed away and thrown back onto shelves when it was unpacked. I'm now in the process of trying to get all the books back in alphabetical order, weeding out duplicates and replacing a few of the most dog-eared. I still need to record the last few vinyl LPs, too, but I've ploughed through almost 200 so far.

We've had house guests and more building work over the past week, so precious blogging hours have been lost. But, as I said earlier, there hasn't been much of interest to report.

Um... that's all... see what happens when I don't have a deadline looming? Once I get back into work mode I should be able to turn out something a bit more interesting than this.