Comic Cuts - 25 January 2013

As expected, this week has been a bit of a disaster as far as work is concerned, beginning with a long weekend with Mel, who had taken a couple of days off. Having her home during the day can be distracting ... but when those distractions include, for instance, a trip down to the pub for lunch, you won't find me complaining!

With the workmen due on Wednesday and Thursday, I thought I'd work on something relatively easy. So I scanned and cleaned-up a strip that will be appearing in one of the Bear Alley books later this year. It was a nice change of pace. I've had some metadata work in, so there has been a short pause in the production of the next book. I should be back on it next week.

At eight o'clock Wednesday morning, the water went off as the workmen came in to remove the old boiler and replace it with a nice new one. A combination boiler, far more efficient than the old boiler, is now installed where we once had a hot water tank. I'm hoping that it will also save us on our water bill, as the old tank used to overflow if the hot water wasn't used immediately. This might not sound a huge problem, but it increased our water "consumption" by quite a bit and added at least £30-40 to our water bill.

Now, if we can just get the insulation done, that will be the cherry on the cake.

Pure coincidence, but on the same day I published some random scans relating to Lion's Epic summer special, Matt Emery blogged about some of the original boards for the strip Tobruk, which was the lead strip in that very issue.

You can read my review of Illustrators issue 2 at the Book Palace Books blog. It is a thing of beauty.

Talking of which, Ron Turner's Space Ace has made a colourful return to print thanks to John Lawrence. John has long championed Turner's work and, rather than wait for someone else to reprint it, has decided to publish a volume himself. Space Ace Vol. 1 is a 40-page A4 book with full-colour contents. Full-colour? Yes indeed! Turner's black & white originals have been coloured up by John Ridgway and they look superb. John's colouring has the quality of classic air-brushed comic strip artwork rather than modern-day computer-generated imagery and sits beautifully with Turners' artwork, which relied of chiaroscuro to create shape and texture.

The book costs £8.95 including p&p. I can vouch for the fact that John is pretty much selling at cost. "I'm doing it for the love of it and for keeping Ron's work alive," he says. Hopefully some readers of Bear Alley will play their part and send John a cheque (John Lawrence, 39 Carterweys, Dunstable, Beds. LU5 4RB) or pay via PayPal (larryjohn.21 AT tiscali.co.uk).

 

In celebration of the recent series of Father Brown yarns that appeared on the BBC, here's a selection of books by G. K. Chesterton for this week's random scans.

 

 

 

Next week will see the conclusion of our Treasure Island strip on Monday. I'll also be running our usual monthly upcoming and recent releases columns, plus whatever else I can squeeze in.