Comic Cuts - 18 June

I managed to pick up a cold last weekend which knocked me for six on Tuesday and Wednesday although it seems to be wearing off as I write this. As someone who claims they're usually not susceptible to colds, that's the second or third one this year. Must be my age.

The big news is that we've found somewhere to live. Contracts arrived Tuesday and we take over the house on the 17th of July. That could mean a mad rush to get out by the 20th from where we are now... or, if our landlord is OK with it, we'll pay the rent up to the end of the month and move at a more leisurely pace. I'd prefer the latter as it means we can move ourselves rather than try to find the better part of £2,000 to pay someone else to move us. Even renting a van, paying for petrol, paying drivers and buying dinners for helpers is going to work out a hell of a lot cheaper.

For those of you following the saga of the great clear-out, 38 bin bags of rubbish have so far left the house (this in addition to our usual weekly output). I've packed 678 books that I'm selling to a dealer... if you recall last week I mentioned I was aiming to clear 1,000 books from my shelves and I'm now well on my way to hitting that figure. I've scanned the covers of around 500 of those books so I have some record of them. A few of them have already turned up here on Bear Alley and I imaging a few more will be appearing in the coming days and weeks as I get around to cleaning them up. I've now finished going through all my old movie tie-ins and I'm taking a hard, cold look at my SF shelves, trying to figure out which authors I'm likely to re-read.

I have a few comic-related titles pictured below which are for sale, so scroll down to take a look. I'm not planning to sell vast amounts from my comics' collection but a few I'll probably have some more books up for grabs over the weekend or early next week, so keep visiting.

I've not had a chance to sort out any comic strips for Bear Alley of late—there simply hasn't been the time while I've dedicated every scanning moment to book covers. But I'll see what I can get together for a run of something soon... if not next week the week after.

I did have time to make a few additions to my Comics' Novelisations and Tie-ins listing which you can find here. The list is in six parts which I've re-ordered so they come up alphabetically. You'll have to hit the "older posts" links because the individual parts are so long, but it should be a lot easier to navigate. I've put in a permanent link in the Navigation area in the right hand column.

With everything steadily becoming more chaotic, I haven't been keeping up with the news, although I heard that Al Williamson had died. Although I collect and study British comics, even an Anglophile like me can appreciate such a huge talent as Williamson (who acknowledged his own debt to Frank Bellamy).

A couple of brief news bites...

A new website dedicated to the Eagle Annual has opened up at EagleAnnual.info.

And BBC Four included Viz and various political cartoonists (Gerald Scarfe, Steve Bell, Martin Rowson) in their series Rude Britannia, broadcast on Wednesday but which you can catch up on on the BBC iPlayer (if you're in the UK... I'm not sure if it's available abroad).

(* Today's column header is from Hora Cera Extra issue 64 (1962). Look closely at the credits and you'll see that it was scripted by J. Steinbeck and drawn by N. Rokwell (sic)... although this must have been a joke from the Argentinian editors. It's actually drawn by Graham Coton and reprints an old Thriller Picture Library story, itself a reprint of an even older Super Detective Library story from the 1950s. My thanks to Domingos Isabelinho for sending this over to me. Our random scan is the wraparound cover for Tanith Lee's The Storm Lord (Orbit, 1977), featuring a beautiful painting by Peter Jones, chosen simply because it was the last thing I scanned before I started writing.)