Bear Alley: Comic Cuts - 13 January 2012

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"The narrative is packed with action and I think readers will have a lot of fun with [Hercules, Esq.] and there are some genuine moments of laugh out loud humour. I can understand why the film rights for this book were snapped up and even today I could envisage it being a very enjoyable one-off TV series." — Cross Examining Crime.
"Although there’s some criminous stuff going on and Bill often finds himself vying against or working with various lawbreakers, the stakes are never really life and death in this book ... There is some slam-bang action, though, as well as a smart, really likable protagonist and a lot of really clever plot twists, but what really makes HERCULES ESQ. work is Evans’s style, which is consistently breezy, fast-paced, and funny." — James Reasoner, Rough Edges.

Friday, January 13, 2012

Comic Cuts - 13 January 2012

And the good news for today is that the proof of Pages from History Illustrated by C. L. Doughty is in and I'm very pleased with the way the book has come out. There is still some minor adjustments to be made and I'm waiting on reports from my little team of proofreaders, but I'm not anticipating any major problems.

With that in mind, the book is now available for pre-order and I'm anticipating copies will be available within the next few weeks... at the moment I'm putting the official release date as 6 February but I'm hopeful that we may have copies ready for distribution a few days ahead of that. With that in mind, I'm thinking that it would be nice to reward people who pre-order the book — I appreciate the fact that readers have shown a lot of trust by ordering titles from Bear Alley Books ahead of publication and this seems to be the best way to reward them. So I'm thinking that for the next three weeks I will offer the book at a special pre-order price and knock 10% off the cover price on any order between now and Friday, 3 February. Hopefully that will allow everyone who gets paid at the end of the month to benefit from the offer.

Random scans. Following on from last week's Oliver Brabbins' special — well, a handful of the hardboiled covers he produced for Corgi — I thought you might like to see some of the covers he produced for westerns. Brabbins was a regular cover artist for Hamilton & Co. and Grant Hughes in the late 1940s and, although he was far from the best figure artist of the era, he was a master of colourful action as these examples show.

Next week: While I'm doing the final proofing and tweaking on the book we will be running some more images from World of Wonder. I will also be showing off some more pages from the book. And, hopefully, the week after that we'll begin another Paul Temple strip.