Comic Cuts - 16 November 2012

Click here to order now

and save yourself 10% off the cover price

I'm pleased to announce that the fourth and final Sexton Blake Annual will be going on sale at the end of November. It has been a long, hard haul to get these back into print but we've finally done it.

The fourth, 1942, annual contains ten stories and a handful of features, including three 'solve them yourself' stories. The ten tales include stories by Donald Stuart (better known to the collecting world as Gerald Verner), Gwyn Evans, George H. Teed, John Hunter, Anthony Parsons, Walter Sayer and Rex Hardinge. That's a darn fine line-up, as any Blake fan will tell you. John Hunter's yarn features Captain Dack, who also appeared in the 1941 annual. Rex Hardinge's story is headlined "from wild Africa to wilder England"!

As always (because I'm nice!) I'm offering a bit of a discount off the cover price for people who order the book ahead of publication, so you'll save yourself 10% by ordering now.

Bear Alley passed a minor milestone last Sunday when we clocked up our one millionth page view. I say "minor" milestone because this was only on the Google/Blogger stat counter, which started counting in July 2008. I've had a counter running since some time in 2007 and that tells me the site has already notched up over 1 1/2 million views. The site was actually launched in August 2006, so the figure is actually higher than that. But what the heck, a million has got to be worth celebrating however wildly inaccurate it is, yes?

OK, OK... it's not worth celebrating then.

I spent most of the week working on Lion King of Picture Story Papers which is chugging along nicely. The Introduction is finished (subject to tinkering) and clocks in at 19,000 words. I'm working on layouts and gathering information on annuals and summer specials. I still need some information on the latter, although my call for aid last week resulted in offers to fill many of the gaps. I'm still short of information on the Lion Book of How It Works, possibly the Lion Holiday Special 1972 and definitely some info. from the Lion and Valiant Special Extra 1970. If I can get information from these, I'll include them all in the book.

Random scans. Working on the Lion book hasn't left me much time and the only cover scans I cleaned up over the weekend are for a cover gallery I'm planning for the future. I generally have three or four galleries underway, usually waiting to reach a tipping point where I think I have enough to be representative, or – and this is the more likely of the two scenarios – I have nothing else to post (a bit like now!). So here are a few images from cover galleries of the future, plus the latest edition of Gateway which I picked up last weekend to add to the Hugo Award Winners gallery for the 1970s. If you follow this link and scroll down to 1978, you can see what the Boris Vallejo cover looked like before they drained the colour out of the cover image.

Next week sees the conclusion of 'Ben Hur'. I hope you've enjoyed the strip. I have another one planned for December; it's the return of an old favourite... Paul Temple. Should be starting in a couple of weeks time. In the meantime, I'll see what else I can find to entertain you with.

(* photo of Tard is from the Tard the Grumpy Cat tumblr.)