Comic Cuts - 4 February 2011

A somewhat disorganized week and a rather disheveled me at the end of it. We spent Thursday helping Mel's parents move house and I tried to cram in the rest of the weekly chores around that. Didn't do too badly, although everything was a bit last minute and the George Moreno and Hugh Gladwish pieces were written up in the wee hours of the morning so that I had something to post. Whilst I enjoy writing, the best bit is the research, which I find quite relaxing and entertaining as I'm discovering new things... the writing can also be fun as it's putting that fresh information into some kind of logical order and make it interesting to read. It's very rare that I consider doing something for Bear Alley a chore, but occasionally—this week being a prime example—it does mean the difference between getting to bed at a reasonable hour or crawling into bed at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning.

So... apart from the aching limbs and back pains—I haven't moved this many boxes since before Christmas!—the week has been a mad dash. I've started laying out the first volume of the new indexes and there's been some frantic mailing of scans out to friends to confirm artists' work and fill in the final few gaps. Also seen two interesting books by other people in rough that I'll be able to talk about at some point (one I mentioned as an exciting—if unnamed—project months ago, the other I only heard about recently as I've been hired as a 'reader' by the British Library, who are the potential publishers). And later today I'm talking to Radio 4 about something they've got coming up. I may be broke, but at least my life's not dull!

Bit of a Short Cuts column this week (geddit?) as I need to catch up on a few things. There are a couple of newsy bits that I'll try to write up later.

Today's random scans... a trio of covers by an artist called Jeff Cook. I know nothing about him and he seems to have been limited to a little publisher who popped up during the war called Everybody's Books. These slim pamphlets are incredibly scarce, so a tip of the hat to Morgan Wallace who sent me the original scans of books from his collection, which I've tried to clean up the best I can. Cook seems to have worked for them for a very short period, 1943-44, and may well have been called up

See you next week...