Comic Cuts - 10 September

It has been a bit of a dull, plodding week with nothing terribly exciting to report. I'm still emptying boxes and stuffing books onto shelves and looking at the huge pile of boxes still remaining. I'm hoping that things will speed up in a week or two and we can really get cracking on Box Mountain. At the moment I'm still trying to figure out what ought to go where to make maximum use of the space available.

The scanning of book covers has been moving on apace and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as the TV tie-ins are concerned with maybe another 150 to go. I had hoped to have them all finished this week but there have been a couple of distractions and, to be honest, even I get bored doing the same thing over and over again and need the occasional mental break... which is why I posted the Raymond Stark cover gallery yesterday.

On the work front I've just about completed the proofs of The Thriller Index. A couple of  minor corrections still need to be made but I'm now pretty sure that all the scans I need to do are done. The book is jam-packed with illustrations, including a few dozen examples of original artwork, including some incredibly beautiful Thriller Comics covers by the likes of Sep. E. Scott, H. M. Brock, J. Millar-Watt and James E. McConnell. Just the fact that the artwork has survived all these years and has found its way into the hands of collectors is a miracle. We also now have the covers of every comic and annual we're including in the index—over 1,200 covers. Add to that the indexes themselves and you can see why this has been three years in the making!

Our column header is an example of original Thriller cover art. This was by Nino Caroselli and published as the cover of Thriller Picture Library 302 (January 1960). Why I've picked out this particular piece is because it has featured on Bear Alley before, nine months ago when it was pointed out that the artwork was a swipe of a 1958 cover drawn by Arturo Del Castillo for the Argentinean magazine Horo Cero Supplemento Semanal. See here for the full story with pictures.

Hopefully I'll have a couple of projects to announce in the not too distant future. One I mentioned last week without naming—it's still classified but moving forward. And there are two books for Book Palace Books that I desperately want to do but we're still negotiating with the copyright holder and it may be some months before we have any news. It'll probably all boil down to money, which is unfortunate, because that can often be the stumbling block between having books on my shelf and not having them. (It's at this point that everyone mutters "Heros the Spartan" under their breath.)

Today's random scan.

Mel found a book with pictures of Wivenhoe from the past so I thought I'd try to recreate one of them to show how the village has changed. The first pic. shows the Park Hotel (left) with a horse-drawn wagonette or brake standing out front. The hotel was built in 1863, although the picture, looking down the High Street, was taken in 1905.

Above is how the same view looks today. The hotel became a pub which has now closed; out of shot just off to the left of the picture it is obvious that there has been some building work going on and the former bar has been converted into a coffee shop. We haven't been in yet, but it seems to be quite popular.