Comic Cuts - 7 August 2015

This was my last full week on the magazine: we're off to the printers on Tuesday and I'm then planning to take a couple of days off. Not that I'm going to have much time between issues this month as our October number will be a show issue with extra pages. Ad sales may mean we get in plenty of advertorial material, but this often doesn't come in – or, indeed, isn't sold in – until the last minute. It's my job to assume that there won't be any and I'll be filling all the gaps between the adverts without any help from the advertisers. So I'm going to be kept busy.

In the gaps between work, we've been watching quite a lot of TV, catching up on shows like Humans (fine SF drama about synthetic humans possibly with human feelings) and Sabotage (about the bombing of the heavy water factory in Norway in WW2); we've slipped seamlessly into watching the third season of American fantasy/horror series Grimm and Belgian disease-outbreak drama Cordon. It's a barrel of laughs round here!

Actually, we do leaven all this drama with lots of comedy. It seems that they've boosted the signal strength and we've been receiving some of the freeview channels that we hadn't previously been able to get. So I've introduced Mel to Alan Davis's As Yet Untitled and Dave Gorman's Modern Life Is Goodish, which I used to watch on my laptop through Dave On Demand. There are definitely some advantages to working from home. We've also added Taskmaster to the weekly schedule, which already includes The Last Leg, which is the funniest thing on TV at the moment.

But what about your tomatoes?, I hear you cry. OK, some tomato news: we've had 90 so far this year, the bulk coming from one hanging basket which still has loads of fruits left. We have only had two cucumbers and the leaves of the plant are turning yellow. I think that's it for cucumbers. We've about five reasonably sized runner beans, but I'm not 100% sure when it's best to pick them.

Things in the way of the path news: I was commenting about this a couple of weeks ago and this week another diversion appeared on the path, ten yards in front of the one already there. It only lasted a couple of days, but the original diversion is still in place with no sign of it leaving. It did, however, pick up a new sign... I wonder who Mavis is?

 

Random scans. It's been a few weeks since we last had anything by Oliver Brabbins, so here are a handful of covers from around 1949, the first for Hamilton & Co., the three western covers for Grant Hughes.

 

 

I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to write up any more notes from Caught in the Act. We shall just have to wait and see. There is likely to be some bits about artist Fred Bennett as I've just dug out some old photocopies of some of his artwork.

(* The photo at the top is actually four photos merged. This is the view along the Colne from a promenade that we wander onto most Sundays when we're out for a walk. I had to go back a bit – to 7 July – to find some nice sunny shots, but even when it's a little cloudy it's still a gorgeous view.)