Bear Alley: Comic Cuts

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS

AVAILABLE NOW!
The Bill Kellaway Quartet by Gwyn Evans
Click here for details and payment options.
"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.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Comic Cuts - 18 October

End of a busy week. The never ending saga of Essential Cult Books continues... two weeks ago I mentioned that I was getting towards the end of the work when we discovered a section that hadn't been assigned, meaning there was more left than anticipated. Well, I'd got it down to about a dozen reviews left when it was found that one section was coming in under size because of the proposed layout, so five reviews needed to be expanded to about three times the original length. Oh, and one section had a book missing. So I didn't get the book finished this week as planned.

Oh, well... there's always next week.

Had a meeting on Friday to discuss future titles from Book Palace Books, so I've some work lined up. We're aiming to put out some more titles in the same format as the Robin Hood and King Arthur books, including a collection of Don Lawrence Western strips and a collection of H. Rider Haggard adaptations, the latter drawn by Mike Hubbard and Jesus Blasco. The latter will be reproduced from original artwork where possible so it should look spectacular.

Add to that my work on Eagles Over the Western Front and I'm going to have a busy couple of months on the run up to Christmas. Mention of Eagles reminds me: I'm looking for a clean copy of Look and Learn issue 565 (11 November 1972). My copy is a bit grim, so I need a couple of pages scanned to save me some hard work restoring the pages to print quality.

As you'll know, I'm never shy when it comes to plugging friends who have contributed to Bear Alley in one way or another... well, Romano Felmang has sent over some information and a couple of pics about a new collection of cover art from the Italian erotic comic Lucifera. As its an adult comic, I've posted the information here. I'm not prudish about this kind of thing—I quite like it, in fact—but because I cover children's books and nursery comics, we do get some young visitors here at Bear Alley, hence the little side alley whenever nudity is involved.

Today's Gem from the Charity Shops has a comics connection. David Satherley's Private Navy, our column header, was quite a big seller when it first appeared but, like most authors, Satherley needed a sideline to earn a living, which he did by writing comic strips. War Picture Library had just started appearing on the newsstands and David became an occasional contributor, although he was primarily a novelist. Private Navy, and his earlier The Tin Armada, was based on some of his own wartime experiences with Combined Ops Special Forces. He's probably the only person I've ever corresponded with who was mentioned in despatches on D-Day.