Comic Cuts - 22 April 2016

As previously mentioned, it was my birthday last week so I kicked back for a few days, working on a couple of little pieces that I wanted to write. One is about the late Scott Goodall, who I occasionally  corresponded with over the years. He was a highly prolific writer for British comics and wrote a huge number of adventure strips for the boys and humour papers published by Fleetway. I'm still trying to confirm some of them through the people who worked with him, so I'm not sure when I'll have a finished draft.

I also spent some time catching up on e-mail messages at home and sorting out a lengthy piece on British writers who penned original material for the Scandinavian market. I also have a couple of little cover galleries lined up to appear over the next few weeks.

After three days ignoring them, I came back to Hotel Business and over 180 unanswered e-mails, which I trudged through over the next couple of days. At about 9:15 am on Wednesday I found myself in the astonishing position of having answered all of them and all my home e-mails.

I've put the time to good use and cleaned up some nice artwork that has been sent my way by Henny Groenewoud. Our random scans below are a handful of covers for later Corgi titles by J. T. Edson, with covers almost certainly by Mike Codd. On Satuday, we'll also be running a little gallery of some images from the pages of Mayfair by Mike, continuing a little series that I began back in 2008!

It's time to bid farewell to our motion activated anti-cat repellers... after 9 or 10 days in the garden, one of them stopped working and failed utterly to power-up even when I put it in direct sunlight—it being a solar-powered device. But it was as dead as the dodo. The seller accepted returns, but as they were bought as a pair, we have had to return both. And, rather more frustratingly, we could only return them rather than replace them. As they seemed to be working, I ordered replacements... unfortunately, missing out on the original offer price, so the replacements are going to cost £5 more than the originals. Hopefully the new ones will survive longer.

The idea was to stop a pair of neighbouring kittens (nicknamed the shittens) doing their business on the lawn. It seems to have worked. But now we have another mystery.

We recently had a new fence put up because some creature—possibly a fox but more likely a badger—was digging up the lawn. I watched, yesterday, as one of the kitty cats crawled under the fence. Now, I can't see the cat digging a little tunnel—they're large enough to jump over the fence. So I presume it's using a tunnel that some other creature has dug. I'm guessing a hedgehog, but I really have no idea.

We've let the foliage around the pond grow out while we've had frogs spawning. It was meant to protect the frogs a bit—last year we had a magpie scooping out the frog spawn with a stone, which proves their smart birds. The kittys are intrigued, as you can see from the photo at the column top.

 

 

 

 

 

Next week: we're on the run-up to the climax of Ace O'Hara. I'm not quite sure what to do next. I may have another full Ace story, but I may also have access to another old, lost strip. I shall have to figure out whether I have a full tale or not for either character.