Comic Cuts - 10 January 2020

Well, wasn't that fun? I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and New Year. I had a fine old time with family staying over Christmas. I hadn't seen my sister for some while as she doesn't live locally, so it was greeat to catch up with her. We had a bit of a house full because she had three dogs in tow. It was nice to be met with a waggy tail every morning. (I'll leave you to make your own jokes.)

New Year was spent at a friend's house chatting about life, the universe and everything, with a pause at midnight to welcome in twenty-twenty—the year of perfect vision. In China it's the Year of the Owl.

Only kidding. It's actually the year of the metal rat, which immediately brings to mind Harry Harrison and his Stainless Steel Rat saga. I really ought to dig those out to read.

One glitch in the festivities occurred soon after New Year when my tablet informed me there was a Windows update. After two days attempting to update, all it does now is turn on and immediately turn off. It was doing it for five hours before I figured out how to do a hard exit to turn it off. Tried rebooting it a couple of times with exactly the same result. And I have no idea how to do a factory reset as the manual doesn't offer that information and all online advice refers to a silver button... there is no silver button on the tablet!

With the usual zeal of a new year, I've started having another clear out. I spent too long last year trying to sort out boxes of stuff, especially old magazines, which meant that we were living in a bit of a tip towards the end of the year. I've just realised that the last photo I posted was just before Christmas and everything was still a mess. To the right you'll see a picture taken on Christmas Eve after the clear-up operation was complete.

Looking forward, we have to move two shelves in the near future, so that gives me a target... as each shelf is around a yard wide, I'm going to try to clear out ten yards of books. I'm concentrating on modern authors as I can reasonably easily replace them should I need to at any point, either with physical books or e-books, but I'm going to swing the axe hard and get rid of everything by them. First authors for the chop have been Ian Rankin and Frederick Forsyth, not for any reasons relating to the quality of their work but because they were the two authors I could see taking up shelf space as I looked down through the office to the far shelf. As that's where a lot of crime novels live, expect to hear of a few other very good authors being culled.

I'll be listing some of the books for sale through Bear Alley, and some I might put up on Ebay.

I spent a couple of days shelf clearing to get myself off to a good start, but it has had to take a bit of a back seat as I've started work on another little index, this one covering the 1950s tabloid SF comic, Rocket. It only lasted 32 issues, so I'm hoping to have it finished in reasonable time. I've found a few things that don't seem to be common knowledge, so I'm pleased to think that I'm bringing something new to the project.

I've also been asked to write a short introduction to an upcoming Rebellion collection. It's only a little 'un. It's a shame, really, as I've always tried to make the introductions a big part of the titles I've worked on in the past. My Frontline UK had 16 pages of material over four articles, as did my Arena reprint. One of the articles in the latter was about this history of – and future of – gladiatorial games and the televising of violent future sports which included the suggestion of texting #thumbsdown to have a contestant murdered. There you go, Black Mirror. That one's for you.

I hope you enjoyed the Tug Transom strip over the Chrismas and New Year holidays. It struck me that I haven't done enough of these for the past couple of years. I'll have to dig out some more and see if I can come up with any obscurities to tease you with.