Bear Alley: Comic Cuts - 21 March 2014

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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, March 21, 2014

Comic Cuts - 21 March 2014

Another solid week of work on the Countdown/TV Action book. Thanks to Robin Hilborn, Countdown's first assistant editor, and Roger Perry, the paper's art editor, I have been able to add some colour to what might otherwise be a rather drab account of what strips appeared when. Anyone who has bought one of my previous indexes will know that I try to cram the introductions with lots of detail and what happened behind the scenes is as much fun to explore as the comics themselves.

On Wednesday I also did a little virtual street tour via Google Maps and Google Streetview to see if I could find the building in which Countdown was created. You can see the building above, although I'm hoping that someone in London who happens to be near Church Street Market with a camera might be able to get a better shot for use in the book.

Just think: out of that one set of offices came TV Comic, Pippin, Playland and Countdown. I believe Polystyle had offices there until late 1983 or 1984, and only moved elsewhere in the latter days of TV Comic. What it was like inside . . . well, you'll just have to wait for the book.

I was saddened to hear that Steve Moore died on Sunday at the age of 64. Steve had been an on/off correspondent since the 1990s and we'd last exchanged e-mails six weeks ago when I was running the Bionic Woman Annual strips he wrote for Ian Gibson.

Steve had a career in comics that lasted 45 years, from his early days as an office boy at Odhams in 1967, all the way through to the two Hercules mini-series that were published a couple of years ago. His novel Somnium appeared in 2011 and I believe he had completed work – or at least completed a first draft – of a non-fiction book about his passion, the moon-goddess Selene and her lover Endymion. He was also working with his best friend Alan Moore on a number of projects, editing Alan's novel Jerusalem and co-writing The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic for Top Shelf. Steve was the subject of Alan's Unearthing, released on CD in 2010.

I'm hoping to write something more substantial about Steve shortly so I'll leave it there for the moment. No random scans today. It's one o'clock in the morning and I still haven't really processed the news. I might post some more after I've had some sleep. We shall see.