Comic Cuts - 24 February 2012

I've had a relatively quiet week news-wise as I've been desperately trying to catch up on some metadata work for the Look & Learn Picture Library and spending spare moments trying to put together the next book from Bear Alley. Both jobs involve generating text at a rate of knots, so I'm going to keep this fairly short.

The new book on twenties and thirties thriller writer Gwyn Evans is moving along nicely. The main biographical essay—which runs to around 15,000 words—is written but probably needs some tweaking and I have been working on the bibliography, which covers 56 books and about 130 stories, serials and articles. The plan at the moment is to also include two very rare short stories: 'The Idol of Isis', which was his first, anonymously published story, and 'Kensington Cavalcade', which was published as a chapbook to promote local pubs in the Kensington area. I'm also cleaning up a few classic crime-noir style illustrations like the ones above and below. More news next week.

Random scans this week are all from regular Bear Alley readers. Jamie Sturgeon supplies a quartet of Margery Allingham Penguin covers that were missing when I compiled my original Allingham cover gallery (part 1, part 2); I've now put these in placea, but they deserve a showing here. And David Ainsworth has sent over a Hodder Yellowback from 1954 to brighten up our day.

 

 

Next week: The Hugo Winners series continues over the weekend into ends on Monday. During the week I'll be updating our regular Upcoming Releases and Recent Releases columns and, hopefully, running the next batch of World of Wonder illustrations. That should keep me busy over the next few days...