Bear Alley: Comic Cuts - 5 August 2016

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS

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The Bill Kellaway Quartet by Gwyn Evans
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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, August 05, 2016

Comic Cuts - 5 August 2016

A short column this week as I'm trying to get some feature material written up for the next issue of Hotel Business ahead of a busy week next week, which includes writing up a couple of regular columns for the magazine, a visit from my Mum—so hopefully the nice weather will hold so we can go out for lunch—and the fence next to my office being replaced.

We've only been waiting six months. The first bit of fence replacement took place in early February but the second has been the subject of much umming and ahhing. We had more trees down on 29 April and we've been waiting ever since for the fence to be fixed. I was hoping that the job would involve putting a fence around the front garden which currently is only partially fenced. However, that's not going to be the case... not yet, anyway. Maybe next year.

We managed to get out to see Star Trek Beyond, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The visual spectacle of the movie made it worth a trip to the cinema to see and the film felt as if it was trying to do something new within the world of the revamped Star Trek rather than a remake of the previous Trek movies, although elements of the earlier Star Trek III: The Search for Spock still exist, most notably the destruction of the Enterprise. I've always wondered whether the inclusion of a key element is necessary in order for Paramount to retain the rights and/or reduce costs paid to the rights holders by making each current movie a remake rather than a new work. I thought this was the case with the Superman reboot (the first reboot is about real estate with Superman vs. Lex Luthor; the second (Man of Steel) reintroduces General Zod and the Phantom Zone), the Star Wars reboots (both Phantom Menace and The Force Awakens are remakes of A New Hope; the first could be put down to Lucas, but there was no reason for the latest to mirror the original... it undercut what could have been a fantastic movie.

I'm still doing bits of research towards a future book—another comic index, revamping one of the old ones—which hasn't left me much time for anything else. I've just finished watching Dark Matter season 1, which ended on a bang and which I enjoyed. It's worth sticking with. Mel and I have watched all but the last episode of Preacher, which has been superb, and we've just started watching season 2 of Penny Dreadful, which has started well. I am secretly enjoying Quantico, which is as dumb as a Jeremy Kyle audience but annoyingly watchable.There have to be better ways of spending my time.

Random scans... inspired by the handful of SF Masterworks covers I posted back in February (which you'll see if you follow the link above), here are a handful of others.