Comic Cuts - 22 January 2010

Here I am again with the familiar mantra of "not much to report". The Wells Fargo book is almost done, only a few days away from being completed. I'm on the last leg of the introduction and have started doing a second pass over the artwork to make sure I've not mucked anything up. There's about six pages I want to redo as I'm not happy with the way they've turned out. Without original artwork, we're at the mercy of the original printing and the quality varied from one week to the next (and, indeed, from one copy to the next). That said, having put quite a few weeks into this so far, I think everyone will be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Talking of original artwork... I've just received about ten huge bags full of artwork for upcoming projects. Some of it is simply stunning and I'll be teasing you with some scans over the coming weeks.

Some good news for fans of Eagles Over the Western Front is that more original artwork has turned up, so when I finally get the books into print, around half the pages will have been reproduced from artwork. It's going to delay publication for a bit, but the books will be all the better for it.

A couple of blogs that you might want to check out. Peter Richardson has been running some nice comic art and book covers recently on his Cloud 109 blog, recent posts including artwork by Fortunino Matania, Ron Embleton and a slew of book covers by Denis McLoughlin.

The second is a new blog looking at the history of The Beezer, which ran from 1956 to 1981. Not much to see at the moment but hopefully it will grow and grow.

Which reminds me of something I've been meaning to ask for some time: does anyone know what happened to the Wizard blog? Has it disappeared completely or has it moved?

A final bit of Bear Alley news (talking of things that disappeared...): I've finally completed the 5th episode of the comics novelisations and tie-ins listing and I'll be posting it over the weekend. Only one more part to go and I'll gather them all together and put in an easy to follow link.

Today's random scan celebrates the upcoming Lil Del 'n' Rodney show Rock & Chips, the youthful adventures of the Trotters from Only Fools & Horses. And I've a bit of a confession... I can't remember who sent this to me. It was a reader who wanted to know where the illustration had appeared and I'm pretty sure I completely failed to i.d. the source or the artist.