Bear Alley: Comic Cuts - 1 April 2011

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, April 01, 2011

Comic Cuts - 1 April 2011

As this is April Fool's Day I'm a little loath to say anything of great importance just in case it's taken as a joke. I'll just stick to what I've been up to.

I spent most of the weekend working on Eagles Over the Western Front, sorting out the original artwork scans that I'd done the week before. I've made a first pass of all 89 pages, although there's a certain amount of work still to do on every page as they need to be cleaned, cropped and resized; I also need to replace all the missing title panels and double-check to make sure all the pages are up to scratch. Once that's done, I'll be able to add them to the folder with all the other pages - which include another 50+ pages of original artwork scans that I did a couple of years ago and the other 80 or so pages which were scanned off the page but at very high resolution and carefully cleaned up. Hopefully you won't see a huge difference.

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Wednesday I started work on the covers for all three volumes and I'm quietly pleased with the results. Next week I shall be noisily pleased, but at the moment I still have some text to add before I start showing them off. It's a shame that Bill Lacey didn't produce any covers relating to the strip; instead I've picked out some artwork by Graham Coton and Wilf Hardy, which, with a little fiddling around with, has worked out very nicely. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Copies of Mean Streetmaps are now in and the book is now being packaged up and sent out. I'm a little disappointed at the level of pre-orders but it was always going to be a hard one to sell. The Hurricane & Champion is doing about what I expected and should improve once some reviews start appearing, although I've had some very nice comments via e-mail from people who have received copies, one even suggesting I should receive an honorary degree in Panelology Science!

The other good news is that both The Thriller Libraries index and Wells Fargo & Pony Express are in the country and were due to arrive at the Book Palace warehouse yesterday afternoon. And I also noticed that the pocket edition of Sci-Fi Art that I worked on for Ilex Books a couple of years ago (still available!) is also out. Unbelievably I've had four books out this week and five within a fortnight. I'll try to hustle together some information relating to all these as quickly as I can.

Over the weekend I'll have the third and final part of the Mickey Spillane cover gallery and a little something on Ron Embleton. Next week we should have some more Hurricane Annuals - and I'd like to take this opportunity to say a public Thank You to David Taylor and Ivo Milicevic for filling in a few gaps - and some more episodes of 'The Man Who Searched for Fear' if I can get them cleaned up on Sunday.

And finally... today's random scans. I've not had too much time for cleaning up artwork this week but here are a handful of issues of Confessions Library that I managed to squeeze in. You wouldn't want to mess with these ladies!