Comic Cuts - 24 August 2018

As promised, the Iron Mask book is now available, updated and at a slightly cheaper price, via Amazon. The first (A4) edition is now officially out of print. The text is also available on Kindle. The update tidies up the text, which was potentially confusing in places thanks to people sharing the same names (I've included family trees in the book to make things clearer); discusses a couple of incidents that I've only recently discovered; and weeds out a couple of errors that had crept in (a Dorothy had become Doris; the same couple of sentences quoted in two different places).

I'll set up links to the paperback and Kindle versions of the book on the Bear Alley Books page. I should have the Kindle links up shortly... still waiting to hear about the paperback. I'll put in an update here when everything is live. UPDATE: You can now visit the Bear Alley Books page to find out more, plus links to the paperback and Kindle editions.

Not much else to report. We've been trying to catch up on a number of TV shows and we're currently being utterly baffled by Legion season two. Its like Noah Hawley, the show's creator and executive producer, has agreed that we can come along for the ride, but only if we can cling on to the side of a clown car that is randomly shedding bits of itself.

Thankfully we've had Gotham to finish off, an everyday story of a police detective tracking down escapees from an asylum in America's crime capital with the aid of an utterly corrupted police force, a stroppy teenage billionaire and his butler. It's consistently one of the best shows on TV. Next season (season five) will be the last, which means the show will hopefully go out on a high rather than having the arse dragged out of it. I'm not sure that we need a spin-off show about Alfred, but with Bruce Heller in charge (who did The Mentalist before Gotham), it might turn out OK.

On a different tack altogether, I really enjoyed Picnic at Hanging Rock, which adapted the novel beautifully. I had wondered whether they were going to continue the story into the excised final chapter that author Joan Lindsay was persuaded to drop ahead of publication and, from what I can gather from Wikipedia, there are elements taken from that final chapter (the removing and throwing away of corsets) but the TV show sensibly retained the ambiguity of the novel (as originally published) and the film adaptation.

During the week we also reached the end of Unforgotten with the wonderful Nicola Walker, who never seems to put a foot wrong in her choices of roles. If she's in it, the show is probably worth watching. I think I've probably seen most of her appearances on TV for the past twenty years and Mel has been a fan since her electrifying appearance in Scott & Bailey.

Since I published the list of upcoming releases in Rebellion's Treasury of British Comics, they have announced that they will be doing a 250-copy limited edition hardcover of The Thirteenth Floor, which will be available through the 2000AD shop. It will be released on 17 October.

Also due in October is another bookazine from D C Thomson celebrating the 65th birthday of Minnie the Minx. It can be pre-ordered from the DCT website, which is sparse on details – it's 68 pages and £6.99 and DCT promise "We cover everything from the story of her creation in 1953, to the artists who have illustrated her adventures, and finally to her rise to Beano cover star today! With behind the scenes secrets and specially selected reprints from the archive, this is the definitive story of the world's most famous Minx!" Nigel Parkinson has said, "Expect some Leo Baxendale, a lot of Jim Petrie, a little Ken Harrison, Tom Paterson, Paul Palmer and something from me." This should also be available from W H Smiths from 3 October.

The random scans this week are a couple of books by Australian author Jon Cleary and a handful of books that I've added to various past cover galleries recently. I try to update galleries whenever I get a chance to buy copies of books (usually in charity shops) or stumble across new covers on the net. The galleries concentrate on British paperback editions for each author and the best way to find out if I've covered a particular author is to do a search for the author's name and "bear alley". That's usually how I find out if I've done a gallery or not... my memory is definitely not what it was!