Comic Cuts - 3 June 2011

Well, May wasn't the best of months, was it? Problems with the computer have made it a pretty stressful few weeks; although it's working at this precise moment, it has struggled to boot up on a couple of mornings and I thought it had gone to silicon heaven after the (brief) power cut we had on Wednesday. I'm a bit fearful that one day very soon it isn't going to boot up at all, so I'm investigating the price of a new machine and seeing how that balances out against the size of my bank account.

The month did at least end on a relaxing note as we headed off to the May Fair and sat in a crowded field (see photo above) watching local bands playing and soaking up the sunshine. We didn't stay for the whole event but saw a few good bands that I'd be happy to see again - I'm terrible with names but two that I can remember were Out of  Nowhere (photo below; there's a rather poor video of them here on YouTube) and The Charley Bird Band.

Apparently there was some trouble, according to the local paper, although this seems to have involved a bunch of drunks. Three arrests and nothing like the 200-300 causing trouble that one of the papers reported.

Bear Alley Books News: The second volume of Eagles Over the Western Front will shortly be back from the printers and I will be shipping pre-ordered copies out next week. I'll post a note when they start going out. If you haven't ordered your copy yet, follow this link.

The revision of The Mike Western Story is moving on apace. There's an awful lot of digging involved and I'm reading through some quite substantial runs of strips; plus there's a lot of scanning and cleaning up examples of his many strips and covers. Although I'm working on it every chance that I get, it is still going to take me some weeks to get the bulk of the text together and after that I've still got to lay out the pages. At the moment I'm still looking for a suitable cover image.

If anyone has sketches drawn by Mike or original artwork, please drop me a line. My e-mail address is top left, just below the photo.

Gordon Davies cover? I had an enquiry from someone who has recently bought a piece of original artwork by the fabulous Gordon Davies. It certainly looks like a piece of wraparound cover art to me, but can anyone identify the book? If I was to take a stab, it could well be New English Library or Pan cover from the 1970s.

Random Scans in Space! David Jackson sent me over the following scans of covers he did for a couple of James White novels back in 1988. I've added them to the James White gallery (part 1, part 2), but thought I'd slip them in here.

Next week: The Paul Temple strip may have came to an end yesterday but I have some other bits of Paul Temple bonus material that I'll be running next week, plus a few odds and ends that I've spotted during my Mike Western diggings.