Bear Alley: Comic Cuts - 15 October 2010

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS

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The Bill Kellaway Quartet by Gwyn Evans
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"The narrative is packed with action and I think readers will have a lot of fun with [Hercules, Esq.] and there are some genuine moments of laugh out loud humour. I can understand why the film rights for this book were snapped up and even today I could envisage it being a very enjoyable one-off TV series." — Cross Examining Crime.
"Although there’s some criminous stuff going on and Bill often finds himself vying against or working with various lawbreakers, the stakes are never really life and death in this book ... There is some slam-bang action, though, as well as a smart, really likable protagonist and a lot of really clever plot twists, but what really makes HERCULES ESQ. work is Evans’s style, which is consistently breezy, fast-paced, and funny." — James Reasoner, Rough Edges.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Comic Cuts - 15 October 2010

I started the week with good intentions to catch up on a few things but the days have flown by and I don't seem to have achieved much. If you take my unanswered e-mails as an indicator of how things have gone, I started to week with 333 and have finished the week with 327, a net gain of six.

There was some additional work on the Don Lawrence book that needed doing which I managed to complete on Sunday, then spent Monday doing a couple of pieces for the Illustration Art Gallery blog, the first of which—about C. E. Brock—was posted on Wednesday. Tuesday was dedicated to the Look and Learn blog, where I write short historical pieces tied in with anniversaries to promote the Look and Learn picture library. Wednesday was interrupted by a guy coming round to fix the loo and Thursday was given over to writing meta data on a load of covers. Squeezed into the minutes in between, I managed to finish off a piece on Josephine Tey, which will appear on Sunday, put in some work cleaning up covers for a couple of other large galleries that will be arriving shortly and trying to sort out my DVD collection—about 600 of them. I did catch up on a couple of episodes of Whites, the new Alan Davies comedy, but I didn't manage to read last weekend's newspaper. Or answer much e-mail. Or do much else.

Even my plans for Bear Alley, which was to post some more material related to old British TV cop shows, slipped away from me. I had the scans for The Invaders books to hand for future use in a science fiction themed week. There may be a little bit more of this randomness to come while I get things sorted out and some posts properly lined up. One constant niggling problem is that I keep running out of space on my computer and book scans are being shunted off to external hard drives which are themselves running short of space. Not surprising when you think that I've probably generated about 40GB of book cover scans in the past five months and, rather than face the trauma of losing scans again (as happened last year), everything has to be saved in more than one place so I'm using up space at twice the pace I used to.

And there's some really nice scans that I want to share. For instance, I scanned three dozen or so Thriller Book Club dust jackets before I offloaded them in July and I still haven't got around to tidying them up for a column or two. Not quite true... I've just cleaned up one to use as a column header.

Today's random scan... and as I've been concentrating on book covers all week, here's a comic cover. This is scanned from the original artwork for Thriller Comics Library 157, which adapted Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. It's a little known fact that, although its author was American, the novel's first edition was published in London by Richard Bentley as The Whale. And it was inspired by a true story.