Comic Cuts - 23 June 2017

I'm pleased to say that my erratic internet connection has been working well all week. Now, excuse me while I go and find some wood to touch. It's a pointless superstition but one I've never been able to wean myself off. Why would "touching wood" cause Fate to respond to someone making a confident statement by sending them bad luck?

Elsewhere in the world, the phrase "knock on wood" seems to be more common, and it would appear that the phrase dates back to the age of Pagans who believed fairies, sprites, dryads and other mystical creatures lived in the trees. So you would knock or touch the tree if you wanted good luck.

Since most of the shelves surrounding me are laminated chipboard, but some of the old magazines I own are made from wood pulp, would I be better off touching them? How much more luck do you get from a pulp magazine rather than a newspaper? And by the time the wood has been cut, pulped, soaked and reconstituted as paper, sliced into sheets and rebound as books, how many of them contain a whole fairy? How much luck is there in half a sprite or random bits of dryad?

These are the sort of questions we need Q.I. for.

After mentioning the death of Alan Austin last week. I heard of two more deaths relating to British comics on Monday: Carlos Prunes, a Spanish artist who worked over here for twenty-odd years, and Gordon Livingstone, one of the main figures who shaped Commando, drawing 372 issues, roughly two-thirds of which have been reprinted. That means Livingstone was responsible for an eighth of Commando's total run of just over 5,000 issues.

I managed to write up a piece for Prunes (scroll down for which) and we will be running an obituary for Gordon shortly.

I haven't had a chance to get back to the Valiant index for a couple of weeks, so I'm hoping to maybe spend a couple of days on it next week. I mentioned a book that someone had said they were putting out some years ago and said that the author should get their finger out... only to realise that it has been a couple of years since I managed to get one of these indexes out, so I'm not exactly in a position to cast aspersions.

We have the first tomatoes on our tomato plants. Judging by the number of flowers, we should have a reasonable crop. And on that good news....

Random scans: I have some "Red" themed covers left over from last week: