Comic Cuts - 4 November 2011

I've spent a good chunk of the week working on the upcoming Bear Alley book collecting some of the works of C. L. Doughty. Having worked my way through a thousand copies of Look and Learn I'm now — at the time of writing, that is — looking through a few hundred copies of World of Wonder for examples of his artwork. I've always been a little dismissive of the latter, putting it down as the poor man's Look and Learn. But there are some astonishingly good illustrations in it.

If I remember correctly, I've not really touched on World of Wonder here on Bear Alley, so, once I've got the Doughty book a little more advanced, I'll be firing up the scanner and sharing some finds from the paper with you. I don't have a full run, and some of the copies I have are a bit tatty, but I can promise you some nice eye candy — like our column header — from the likes of Ron Embleton, Gerry Embleton, Angus McBride (lots of McBride!), Don Lawrence and many others.

Random scannage: I recently wrote up some additional information on cover artist Bruce Windo, having finally made some headway with discovering who he was. You can see the results over on the Illustration Art Gallery blog. As a treat, I've put together the following little gallery with some of the works mentioned, starting with an advertising poster, a Pan Book signed 'Bruce' from 1947 and two later Pan Books signed in full from around 1956.

 

 

As we've now come to the end of our run of 'The Man Who Searched for Fear', I'll be starting something new next week. There's an artist whose work I quite like called Bill Baker who did a whole bunch of strips adapting literary classics for Look and Learn, so I'm thinking of digging one or two out for reprinting here. We shall just have to see how I get on over the weekend.

And don't forget, if you're celebrating this weekend...