Comic Cuts - 5 February 2010

Another good news week. Wells Fargo is finished! I did the last bits of artwork on Monday, read through the introduction and wrote a back cover blurb on Tuesday and that's all the work I need to do until I start getting proofs back from the designer.

For a change of pace, I've been finishing off The Thriller Index, which covers Cowboy Comics, Thriller Picture Library, Super Detective Library, the previously unindexed Australian A.P. comics, plus various annuals and anthologies. This is the follow-up volume to the War Libraries Index published back in 2007. A lot of the work was done in 2008, shortly after I was laid off from Look and Learn, but various delays have meant that I've only just gotten around to completing work on it. The artists' index took two days to compile but I'm hoping that I can have the authors' index finished today (Friday).

I finished work on the 19th Storm album The Return of the Red Prince last weekend and will hopefully have started working on number 20, The Von Neumann Machine, by the time you read this. So that will be the 10th volume of Storm—The Collection almost completed; volume 11, which completes the run of Don Lawrence's 22 albums, is in hand and I'll get to it shortly. Then it's a volume of H. Rider Haggard stories.

I must say 2010 is starting off at a hell of a clip! In fact, things picked up in December; I've written something like 68,000 words over the past two months—only 28,000 of which will actually earn me some money, admittedly, but I'm pleased to see I'm back up to averaging a thousand words a day. Nothing compared to Brian Stableford—who reveals in the latest Ansible that he knocked out 1.86 million words last year, which is over 5,700 words a day and no time off for good behaviour.

I'm happy to say that some of those words I write do actually get read. The Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic History book has made it onto the Locus Recommended Reading List for 2009 in the Art Books category.

And on that cheery note, I'm going to get back to my scriptwriter index. With any luck, by this time next week I'll be telling you that I've managed to complete three books in six weeks. Start placing your bets.

(* Our column header is an original board for "Pony Express" by Don Lawrence, one of the strips we'll be reprinting soon; artwork © Look and Learn Ltd.; the cover for Sci-Fi Art is by Vincent Di Fate.)