Comic Cuts - 30 September 2011

With plenty more to look at today - just scroll down if you're after the upcoming releases listings and the latest episode of Paul Temple - I'm going to keep this short.

Work: going OK. I'm still doing the same job - I've done about two and a half thousand images over the past couple of months and I've no idea how many more I still have to go.

Bear Alley Books: I managed to sort out a few more pages including the one you can see at the top of this column. I've still to make a final decision but I'm 90% certain the collection will be called The Black Pirate and Other Stories. C. L. Doughty is the artist and, to my mind, he's one of the finest artists to have worked in British comics - also a fantastic painter and illustrator. I'm hopeful that this little collection will earn Doughty a few more well-deserved fans.

With Commando earning a few column inches in newspapers during its 50th anniversary celebrations, I thought I'd mention another D. C. Thomson related reprint project: the Comic Art Website has been producing screenprints based on various Thomson characters for about eight years. Former Rover and Victor reader John Patrick Reynolds, who runs the site, tells me he is in the process of producign a new series of Victor prints to celebrate that title's 50th anniversary, the first of which you can see pictured above, based on an image from a 1960s Victor Book. John has little prints, big prints and canvas prints on offer, so you should be able to find something to fit any gap on your wall you need filling.

And so... this week's set of random scans is a whole series of books. The Mortal Engines quartet (also known as the Hungry City Chronicles) is an award-winning series by Philip Reeve, a childrens' book illustrator turned childrens' book writer. I spotted them in a charity shop last weekend and took a peek at Chapter one of Mortal Engines, which opens with a mobile city of London hunting a small mining town across the dry bed of what was once the North Sea. After an opening paragraph like that I couldn't resist buying the lot!

Reeve is certainly worth checking out and there are plenty of bargains to be had at Amazon where you can buy sets of the four original books and copies of the series' prequel, the Fever Crumb quartet, of which three books - Fever Crumb, A Web of Air, Scrivener's Moon - have currently been published.

The covers of the four titles show below are by David Frankland.

Next week: a hopefully less cluttered blog and more Paul Temple.