I've had a bit of a slow week and there isn't much to report. I haven't managed to get much else done beyond the regular daily chores, bar a little cover cleaning for some future galleries.
With that being the case, I'll head straight into a couple of bits of news.
It's good to hear of a comic creator of the golden age who is still active. Charles Chilton, now aged 94, has been promoting his autobiography,
Auntie's Charlie, at the Comedy Club on Chiswick High Street. He was interviewed on stage and answered questions from the audience before signing copies of his book and the first volume of Journey Into Space -
Operation Luna - which has been reprinted in hardcover. The other two novels -
The Red Planet and
The World in Peril - are due to be published in November and February 2012 respectively.
The autobiography is available from
Fantom Books, who have produced it as a limited edition of 200 numbered and signed hardback copies. Ordering information for the novels
can be found here.
I notice that the BBC have repackaged the three original
Journey Into Space radio serials, which can be ordered via Amazon for with an up to 50% discount:
Operation Luna,
The Red Planet,
The World in Peril. And they also have the revived stories that were broadcast in 2008 and 2009 going cheap:
Frozen in Time,
The Host.
Bob Edmands alerted me to an
eBay sale of a rather nondescript copy of
Sun #324 from 1955. Normally you would expect copies to sell for around a fiver, maybe £5 to £10 on a good day, but for some reason this issue soared, with fifteen bids pushing the price up to £71.00. But that wasn't the end of it. I notice that a couple of days earlier
another copy of
Sun (#320) from the same seller sold for an astonishing £102.00 and
a third copy (#270) for £70.88, with 22 bids registered, while other issues being sold were in the expected price range. Seems like Billy the Kid has a following.
So here are today's random scans. What spare time I've had I've spent cleaning up a lot of science fiction covers of late, so, for a change of pace, here are a couple of Digits by William Ard from 1960.
Cry Scandal and
The Naked and the Innocent (originally published as
Hell is a City). The latter has a cover reprinted from the USA; I have the artist listed as Kalin in my notes but on closer inspection (and the signature is partly hidden) it looks more like Katy L----. Can anyone help?
The second batch are a pair of Fontana covers by our old friend John L. Baker, who has featured here many times, but not recently.
Next week: more from The Man Who Searched for Fear and whatever else I can dream up over the next couple of days. One bit of good news is that I have been sent another Paul Temple yarn, so that will be appearing at some point, probably early next month as the tail end of next week will see our regular Recent and Upcoming Releases columns.
The artist on the second digit is Victor Kalin, signature partially obscured by the authors name, but I don't recognize what US book it's swiped from. The first digit is definitely also a swipe, but again I can't remember where I've seen it originally.
ReplyDeleteI guess I'm pleased that my original notes were right... but I still can't help thinking that the signature looks odd. I guess it would look better without the author's name plastered all over it.
ReplyDeleteDefinitly Kalin. He signed his full name on the covers. The word that looks like "Katy" is actually "Victor"
ReplyDelete