Comic Cuts - 29 July 2011

Our big news is that Eagles Over the Western Front volume 3 has been shipping since Monday and all advance orders have now been filled, as have the steady trickle of further orders that arrived during the week. I'm expecting more orders to come in over the weekend and next week as people get paid. There have also been a handful - more than a handful, in fact, but not quite two handfuls - of people ordering all three volumes, which is an option now available if you want to save a little on postage.

Other than that, it has been a week of steady work, pounding out artist biographies for the Look and Learn website. I've currently knocked out close to 100 of these - the 100th should appear next Friday. I spent Wednesday morning wrestling together a lengthy piece on Doc Savage artist James Bama for the Illustration Art Gallery blog and the time since has been dedicated to metadata - typing up information on more Vanity Fair cartoons for the Look and Learn picture library (nearly 700 at the last count).

There isn't much else to report, other than my Sunday roast was rather spoiled when my one and only filling fell out... again. Same thing happened back in June 2007 and that was the second time since my move to Colchester. I'm trying yet another dentist to see if I can actually get something that's permanent this time. At the moment I've something very temporary stopping my tongue exploring the gap every five seconds. I'm due to have an X-Ray on Monday. Hope they don't decide to remove the tooth as it's deep-rooted and would need an operation. Eek!

The Imperial War Museum is holding a two-day comics'-related event on 19-20 August (a Friday and Saturday) entitled The Comics and Conflicts Conference, with speakers including Pat Mills, Garth Ennis, Martin Barker, Roger Sabin and Francesca Cassavetti. You can find out more about the event here.

Today's random scans. I mentioned James Bama above so here's his cover for Tomboy by Hal Ellson. This is the Corgi edition, reprinting the cover that originally appeared on the Bantam edition in 1965.

The second scan is to celebrate the imminent arrival of my copy of Hardware: The Definitive SF Works of Chris Foss. When I started doing cover galleries - quite a few years ago now! - I began with mostly SF authors; then, in 2008 I wrote Sci-Fi Art: A Graphic History, which meant more scanning of SF covers. In early 2009 there was a disaster: two external harddrives blew within days of each other. Many months later, we were able to recover data from one drive, but the other was lost forever, including all the SF scans that I'd done for posts such as this gallery for E. E. 'Doc' Smith.

With any luck, and over time, I'll rescan all those old books. The Asimov happened to be close to hand and seemed as good a place to start as any.

I've truly no idea what will be happening next week. Probably more 'Man Who Searched for Fear' and whatever else I can squeeze in.