Comic Cuts - 4 October 2009

After last week's excitement I have almost nothing newsworthy to post about. Almost all efforts have been concentrated on getting these Essential Cult Books reviews done. I'd got down to under 25 remaining when we noticed a slight hiccup: some of the books hadn't been assigned to anyone. So I took on a few extra titles, worked on a bunch this week and I'm pretty much back to where I was the last time I checked.

I always thought I was reasonably well-read and well-informed about literature. Turns out I'm not, as I'm proving to myself daily. At the very least I'll leave this project knowing a little more about everyone from Aristotle to the Marquis de Sade, although maybe not enough to hold my own in an argument about capitalism versus collectivism in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I also know that it won't be long before I've forgotten the lot. Come back in about five weeks and all I'll remember about Aristotle is that he was a bugger for the bottle.

One brilliant bit of news. During the week I received a package containing 55 pages of original Eagles Over the Western Front artwork. That's the first episode at the top of this column. The surviving art is a bit random but I'm planning to use it all in the upcoming Eagles collections. It'll give me something to aim for when I'm cleaning up the other pages, as I'll be rescanning the lot. I think I've mentioned before that the scans I've used to serialise the strip here on Bear Alley were from a rough set we had produced when I was working at Look and Learn and were only intended for our own reference, never for print.

In memory of the passing of Carlos Roume, our next daily strip reprint will be "Fighting Flynn", set in the world of bare-fist prize-fighting. It's quite a long story so I'll end by saying to all you Harry Hawkes fans, fear not: he will be back and I'll run the next story as soon as Flynn has fought his final battle.