Bear Alley

• 29 Mar. Over on Substack, Grant Morrison has published the script for the lost Seaguy sequel, Seaguy Eternal.  "Fun fact: when I announced that the title of the next Seaguy volume would be Seaguy Eternal, it didn’t take long before the name was nicked for Batman!!! Typical billionaire!" Meanwhile, Comicsbeat has published its list of their 10 Best Grant Morrison Comics.
• 25 Mar. Dave Gibbons was recently asked whether he if he would ever be open to publishing the Watchmen scripts by Alan Moore, which he still has. "Dave Gibbons answered that it was certainly an idea. His art agent, Joseph Melchoir, then asked from the audience, 'who actually had the Watchmen scripts?' Dave Gibbons answered emphatically with a smile, 'ME.'"
• 21 Mar. Phillip Vaughan takes viewers on a guided tour of the Ian Kennedy Exbibition at the Lamb Gallery, University of Dundee. The exhibition runs until 6 May. (video, 25m)
  
• 20 Mar.  "Shaky Kane and The Call of the Kraken": Steve Cook reveals how he decided to make a documentary about Shaky: "Armed with just a very small recording device called a Sony HD Bloggie, we set about making this rather absurd film that we decided to call Shaky Kane Unravelled. There was no script, no lighting equipment other than a torch, and we made the whole thing up as we went along."
• 13 Mar. Down the Tubes has an interview with Paul Gravett. "Letting go of Escape was not easy for me and Peter. I was very lucky to build a different career still in comics. By 1989, I was already working for the Angoulême Festival on the curation “God Save the Comics!”, still the largest exhibition of original artwork from British comics yet staged anywhere, for the new Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image."
• 9 Mar. New Yorker cartoonist Jason Chatfield takes a look back over the career of Ronald Searle.
  

• 6 Mar. Sexton Blake is returning in the autumn in a newly expanded edition of Caribbean Crisis, written by Michael Moorcock from an idea by Jim Cawthorn. The revision has been done by Moorcock and Mark Hodder, reversing some editorial changes made to the original and adding 10,000 words to the original 29,000; in addition a second, 42,000-word Moorcock/Hodder collaboration, Voodoo Island, will appear in the same volume, to be published by Rebellion.
  
• 6 Mar. Lily Collins and Jennifer Saunders explore the world of Tove Jansson's Moomins in a new podcast,  The Moomin Phenomenon, available from all your usual podcast providers.
  
• 6 Mar. Posy Simmonds has received the Sergio Aragones Award at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. In a video message, she said: “I’m very pleased and excited to accept the Award, and I would like to thank the NCS very, very much for this great honour.”
• 3 Mar. News of the death of Wally Fawkes is making it into a few news sites: Metro, The Daily Cartoonist, The Times (behind a paywall), The Independent, The Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph (behind a paywall), ...
• 3 Mar. Frank Quitely (Vincent Deighan) recently appeared on the BBC2 The Great British Menu. Rich Johnson describes how "During the show, Frank Quitely talked about his work and career, showed off a few original artwork pages of Sandman, talked about how Desperate Dan influences his version of Superman..."
• 1 Mar. Michael Molchar's I Am The Law reviewed. "Molcher discusses topics including police violence, unemployment, moral panics and institutional racism via multiple flash points and conflicts of the last several decades, many of them injustices with no shortage of culpability to go around." Molchar is also interviewed at Forbidden Planet TV (video, 39m)
  
• 27 Feb. Interview: Al Ewing at Off Panel. "Ewing discusses managing the work, what drives his schedule, where pitches fit in, dealing with external forces, constraints as opportunities, Fury's evolving identity, Immortal Hulk's structure, no longer being the space guy, avoiding repetition, mic drop moments, realizing the potential of characters, the secret to tie-ins, how he works with artists, pushing himself as a writer, and more." (audio, 1h 23m)
  
• 26 Feb. Michael Moorcock is the latest interviewee at Mandy Jackson-Beverly's The Bookshop Podcast (audio, 54m) "In this episode, I chat with author Michael Moorcock about growing up in London during WW II, his life as a journalist, writing Gloriana, Or The Unfulfill'd Queen, and his latest music."
• 24 Feb. The Panel Gallery in Northampton has announced a Jock exhibition showcasing over 40 pieces of art by the Scottish artist. It will run between April 1st and 29th.
  
• 20 Feb. Want a free preview to Rebellion's upcoming Battle-Action 5-issue mini-series? Well, you can download a 36-page issue zero here.
  
• 18 Feb. François Peneaud takes a look at the history of the double-page spread from the 1940s to the 1960s, including examples by Peter Jackson Patrick Nicolle, Eric Parker, Frank Bellamy and Ron Embleton. The video is in French but has English subtitles. (video, 9m)
  
• 13 Feb. The BMJ (British Medical Journal) continues its campaign against fast food advertising on the Beano's website with their latest podcast. "Claire Mulrenan, specialist registrar in public health, and Mark Petticrew, professor of public health evaluation, both working at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine were surprised to see high-fat, high-salt fast food brands being featured heavily on the website of one of the UK's most beloved children's comics." (audio, 18m)
  
• 12 Feb. It's awards time: the ComicScene Awards 2023 have been announced and the winners are... too many. Follow the link for the full list.
• 8 Feb. COMICA celebrates 20 years with month-long series of talks in March with talks featuring Posy Simmonds (2nd March), Charles Peattie & Russell Taylor (7th), Brian Bolland & Dave Gibbons (14th), Armando Iannucci, Michael Lake, Tim Searle & Patrick Walters (22nd), Lucie Sullivan & Lucie Arnoux (23rd), Dave McKean & Iain Sinclair (28th) and Martin Rowson (30th).
  
• 7 Feb. 'Beyond Pickwick – Robert Seymour and late Regency caricature in Britain' by Brian Maidment. "If known at all, Robert Seymour is remembered as the first illustrator of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836). He was, nonetheless, a well-established and prolific comic draughtsman in his own right by the 1830s." (video, 1hr 1m)
  
• 6 Feb. Brian Bolland is dissects Batman: The Killing Joke for Cartoonist Kayfabe. (video, 1hr 50m).
  6 Feb. The Guardian's obituary for David Sutherland. "The Beano’s publisher, DC Thomson, knew that the wilder and more chaotic the characters, the more the readers loved them. The comic had let loose a legion of unruly heroes who brought pandemonium to parents, teachers and officials in ways their 1950s readers never could."
  
• 4 Feb. An interview with Tim Quinn. Tim is organising a new event in Liverpool and here is where you can find out all about it. (video, 1hr 14m)
  
• 2 Feb. Accusations have been made that the Beano website is promoting high fat, salt and sugar junk food. "An investigation by the British Medical Journal found the website – promoted as a digital hub for six- to 12-year-olds – showcases products from well-known brands that are harmful to children, including fast food, confectionery, soft drinks and ultra-processed food." The original British Medical Journal article has a follow-up editorial in which editor-in-chief Kamran Abbasi says: "Inadvertently or not, the Beano is promoting junk food to children, to the detriment of public health, and it should stop. Today’s “innocent fun” is tomorrow’s health crisis."
• 25 Jan. The Comics Journal's Tom Shapira investigates "A Very British Scandal" — the missing writer of the Captain Britain Omnibus. "The other name on the cover is Jamie Delano, and that is a rather strange choice. Delano doesn’t appear until about halfway through the book, and he doesn’t stay until the end."
• 18 Jan.  AWA picks Peter Milligan as its creator of the month. "I think one of my problems is I didn’t have a real influencer either positive or negative. Thus have I remained rudderless, drifting from one disaster to the next.". (A late post from last August, but worth a read.)
  
• 16 Jan. The Comicscene Awards 2023 voting form has been posted. So where am I... um... well, that'll teach me not to put anything out last year. Mind you, I was involved one way or another with two books in the Best Comic Collection UK (Captain Condor, Trigan Empire Vol IV), neither of which can match the sheer mightiness of my mate David Roach's two Apex Collection volumes. Even I'm voting for them... but which to choose...?
• 9 Jan. Chloe Maveal demands that the judges at the Will Eisner Awards "just put John Wagner in the Hall of Fame already"! "This is a ramble that friends and unfortunate family have heard me grumble about after a drink or two: that Wagner is one of the minds that, over the course of a career spanning half a century, has molded and raised the bar on comics and what we can expect of them, but remains criminally unrecognized for his contributions"
• 9 Jan. A look back at the Bristol Comic Expo by Charles Ep Murphy. "My young self was exposed to a mass of comics I’d never heard of before and all the small presses and the contemporary big websites and, dear reader, there was SO MUCH STUFF."
• 4 Jan 2023. The Comics Journal interviews Peter Milligan.  "I think all forms of storytelling actually are a kind of wrestling with the past, a kind of wrestling with this stuff that’s gone on before us. And I think that comics, films, novels - I think that time is key to all of that, and I think that comic books have a certain relationship to time which is different from novels or different from films, and that’s why certain stories work really well in certain mediums and some don’t."
• 31 Dec. Beano legend David Sutherland has been recognised in the New Year's Honours list. The 90-year-old was given an OBE for his services to illustration. “Working on The Bash Street Kids for so long, these mischievous kids have become a second family to me, and I continue to love spending time in their company. To them – Danny, Toots and the rest – I’d like to extend my thanks, and of course to the readers, who I hope continue to enjoy reading about them as much as I enjoy drawing them.”
  
• 30 Dec. Paul Di Filippo reviews Alan Moore's Illuminations. "All the fiction showcases Moore’s patented virtues: spirituality blended with worldliness; transgressiveness mixed with honor for traditions and the classics; a maximalist approach to style and plot; and a prose that’s sometimes recondite but always assimilable, asking the reader to be a full partner."
• 20 Dec. The next writer to script an Asterix book has been announced. It is novelist and comic book author Fabcaro. Didier Conrad will continue to draw the character.
  
• 6 Dec. A timely look at the classic 'The Art of Kenny Who?' in these days of AI-generated art."In 2022, still reeling from the odd obsession with NFTs, the world of visual art found something new to obsess over: AI Art."
• 24 Nov. Seamas O'Reilly interviews Alan Moore. [L]eaving comics is one thing — and I’d done that, which seemed like a massive relief — but stopping thinking about comics is another. Especially when you’ve been working at them for forty years, which is a fairly long career by anyone’s standards. So, I tend to find these annoying, often negative, thoughts about comics swirling up in my mind when I didn’t want them there."
• 24 Nov. David Roach has penned a fine tribute to Kevin O'Neill. "In the early years of the '80s there was this sense that 2000 AD's two great maverick artists—Mike McMahon and Kevin O’Neill—were spurring each other on to ever more abstracted, gritty, imaginative work, to be reflected in their masterpieces; McMahon's run on Sláine and Book Three of Nemesis ran concurrently in 2000 AD in late 1983."
• 16 Nov. Johnny Red and Commando artist Keith Burns shows off some of his models to James Bacon. "I use models to help me get the angle and pose the ships,” he says of his working process, “just like I do with World War Two aircraft, vehicles and ships, trying to capture the physics and kinetic energy of flight."
• 16 Nov. Grant Morrison looks back at some of his older comic strips. "For three decades we of the working class got to express ourselves, and then they shut us down again. But in those three decades, tons of really cool stuff happened. You got the Beatles, you got psychedelia, you got punk rock and it was all because of the working class drive to talk until we’re shut up again."
• 16 Nov. Neil Gaiman takes on the haters of The Sandman TV show. "Occasionally, you get people shouting at us for having made up all of these gay characters who weren’t in the comics, and then we’d go ‘Have you read the comics?’ And they’d go ‘No.’ And we’d go, ‘They were gay in the comics.’ And they’d go ‘You’re just woke and nobody is going to watch your horrible show.’"
• 12 Nov. There have been a number of tributes paid to Kevin O'Neill. As always, John Freeman's Down the Tubes carries a comprehensive "In Memorium" piece. John Siuntres has released a 2009 interview with Kev in which he discusses the third League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volume (1hr 3m, audio on YouTube).
  
• 7 Nov. John Freeman at Down the Tubes takes a look back over the career of Angus McKie.
  
• 3 Nov. Interview: Alan Moore. "We had a local market called Sid’s Market Stall. It sold magazines—men’s magazines, ones with sweating GIs being whipped by Nazi women wearing swastika armbands in their underwear, which made me think the American experience of the war seemed to have been very different from what my dad told me about."
• 3 Nov. Netflix has confirmed that there is to be a second season of The Sandman, based on the Neil Gaiman comic book series. "There are some astonishing stories waiting for Morpheus and the rest of them (not to mention more members of the Endless Family to meet)," says Gaiman. "Nobody is going to be happier about this than the Sandman cast and crew: they are the biggest Sandman fans there are.
• 31 Oct. Interview: Mark Millar. "Nemesis was just a wee four issue series I did over a decade ago with co-creator Steve McNiven and it’s probably the series I’m most asked about returning." Millar has also launched a Youtube channel, Millar Time, for interviews, the first with Gerry Conway (video, 1h 9m)
  
• 31 Oct. Interview: Woodrow Phoenix. "The thing that fascinated me about comics as a child is the thing that still fascinates me, and that is the way a strip exists inside and outside time."
• 31 Oct. The New York Times has a Neil Gaiman quiz.
  
• 31 Oct. Matt Pritchett, the Telegraph's gifted cartoonist sketches Britain's tragicomedy.
  
• 31 Oct. Britain's political cartoons, speaking truth to power for 200 years.
• 27 Oct. Neil Gaiman has announced his debut album, Signs of Life, a collaboration with Australia's FourPlay String Quartet, will be released on 28 April 2023. "The finished album comprises collaborative songs between Gaiman and the quartet, as well as poems and stories written by Gaiman set to the quartet’s music, two 'covers' of songs from Gaiman’s previous projects, and an instrumental inspired by Gaiman’s work."
• 24 Oct. Hibernia's David McDonald discusses current and upcoming titles from the small press publisher. "We have pushed back Sergeant Strong  to the new year because of the looming postal strikes in the UK. Time Quake should be out in time for Starlord’s 45th anniversary in May 2023.  We have plans to put together a Comic Archive to celebrate that anniversary as well. I’m a big fan of Starlord!"
• 24 Oct. The family of artist and cartoonist David Williams are looking for information on some of his surviving artwork, including the character 'Dr Panzwarmer'.
• 14 Oct. Alan Moore is definitely done with comics. “I haven’t written one for getting on for five years. I will always love and adore the comics medium but the comics industry and all of the stuff attached to it just became unbearable.” His short story collection, Illuminations, is reviewed here by David M. Higgins: "Moore’s Watchmen has been described as a deconstruction of the “silver age” superhero genre, painstakingly exposing its conventions in order to subvert its entire undertaking. What We Can Know About Thunderman may be said to offer a similar deconstruction of the American comics industry itself."
• 14 Oct. Ben Kingsley is to play the lead in an adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's graphic novel Violent Cases. The film is being led by the creative team behind the BAFTA-nominated The Girl With All the Gifts, including writer Mike Carey, director Colm McCarthy and producer Camille Gatin. "As an aspiring writer back in the late ’80s reading Violent Cases was a revelation and a joy for me,” says Carey. “Its darkness and playfulness defined a new approach to storytelling. Thirty-five years on, it’s still unique, and bringing it across into a new medium feels like discovering it again for the first time."
• 14 Oct. Brian Bolland and Dave Gibbons are interviewed on The Comics Cube, speaking about their friendship, their careers, how they've grown as artists and how they've helped each other grow as artists. (video, 1hr20m)
• 14 Oct. An interview with Duncan Fegrado. "As I kid I read any comics I could get my hands on. For the most part that meant British humor comics, simply because that was what was available. I suspect they were mostly passed on to us, we didn’t have a lot of money to spend on such things. Stuff like The Beano, The Dandy, Beezer, some boys adventure stuff like The Hotspur. The little pocket money I had went on Whizzer and Chips."
• 5 Oct. Neil Gaiman will be inducted into the Harvey Awards' Hall of Fame on Friday (7th Oct.) alongside Roy Thomas, Gilbert Shelton and Marge Buell. Gaiman says: "The first time I was given a Harvey Award, it was 1991, 31 years ago, I had a whole career or two ahead of me and Harvey Kurtzman was still alive. It was the award that bore his name and was thus the most important award I had ever received."
• 5 Oct. Rich Johnson has some extracts from Stewart Lee's interview with Alan Moore conducted recently for The Guardian. "I've got a bit of a track record for making up really unpleasant things for stories and having them become real" says Alan Moore. "And government policy" says Lee as V for Vendetta is getting more and more like a documentary.
• 2 Oct. Interview: Chris Weston. Part 1."My first great “comic love” was Vulcan Weekly. It reprinted the best of Fleetway’s strips like Robot Archie, The Steel Claw and The Spider. The quality of artwork on those last two strips was astonishing. However, the highlight of that comic was The Trigan Empire, painted in full-colour by Don Lawrence. It blew my mind when I first saw it at the age of six."
• 30 Sep. Interview: Si Spurrier and Charlie Adlard on their new series Damn Them All. Si Spurrier: "The lazy elevator pitch we’ve been using is, “Get Carter meets The Exorcist. We’ve got London-based organized crime in a sort of very grimy but also slightly Guy Ritchie pie-and-chips kind of way, but intersected by all the things that I love most in the storytelling stuff I’ve tended to do, which is supernatural, magical realism, and occultism."
  
• 30 Sep. Interview: Owen Johnson on editing The Best of 2000 AD. "When deciding to make a book trade product you’re looking at readers who may be very different kinds of comic reader. So we went back to the content and filtered out anything that needed prior knowledge or continuity ties. Every comic is someone’s first comic, and accessibility became the primary drive for everything. We just doubled down on that because if you enjoy this then the other stuff is waiting for you."
• 24 Sep. In a 2-part article, Andy Oliver examines how Brexit has impacted Britain's small press. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. "A significant amount of lost income was a common thread with major problems in selling to Europe also frequently mentioned. From the loss of major employment opportunities in the EU to the growing isolation of the UK scene from important markets, through to the health issues resulting from the anxiety and fear Brexit has caused and having to deal with unrestrained xenophobia, it all makes for grim reading indeed." 
• 24 Sep. Neil Gaiman has been clarifying the situation with The Sandman which has yet to have a second season confirmed, although some have believed that comments made by VFX Supervisor Ian Markiewicz that a renewal order had been given. "We don't have a season 2," says Gaiman. "But the scripts have been written and the VFX department has been working on it."
• 24 Sep. France's Association des Critiques et Journalistes de Bande Dessinée, awarded their 2022 Critics' Comics Prize of English-originated work to Barry Windsor-Smith's Monsters. "The newest work of an artist who marked pop-culture as much as the comic-book industry, Monsters is brilliantly at the crossroads between the superhero comic-book and the independent comic-book. A true visual performance worthy of the best illustrators and writers, this book is as much a graphic slap as it is an emotional and intellectual powerhouse."
• 23 Sep. Mike Mungarvan might not immediately ring a bell with British comics fans, but he has a place in their history as he was the actor who played intrepid journalist Howard Harvey in the first photo series of 'Doomlord' in Eagle. Bob Fischer has tracked him down for an interview. "[S]omebody suggested I sent my pictures to IPC Magazines, who were based just along the Embankment ... So I did that, and was quickly asked to do a photo-strip love story for one of their teenage magazines. Photo-Love, I think. And then, when Eagle was relaunched, I got another call..."
• 21 Sep. James Tomlinson discusses writing Ring Raiders: "Bomber Blues was very much my sort of story, with all my kind of ingredients. I’d always been a fan of stories about the Flying Fortress of WW2. This big plane with a big crew and a ton of guns really caught my imagination."
• 21 Sep. Ian Kennedy's final cover, a wrap-around cover produced for Welsh health charity Re-Live, and their comic Coming Home, featuring the mental health stories of military veterans. THe publication also includes contributions by Keith Page, Mike Donaldson, Clark Bint, and Emma Vieceli.
  
• 19 Sep. Interview: Nigel Auchterlounie.  "For me, a good BEANO strip is for all ages. A universal humour. Not like The Simpsons, or Shrek, where kids can watch and the jokes for the grown-ups go over their heads, but solid gags that everyone can get. Part of that is not talking down to kids. Kids are smart and switched on. You don’t need to dumb down."
• 19 Sep. Interview: Mike Perkins. "I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of my artistic heroes but there are a few I haven’t met yet: Cam Kennedy, Ian Gibson, Neil Gaiman. All inspirations."
• 15 Sep. The Oink! Blog talks to Barrie Tomlinson about editing Ring Raiders.  "Once upon a time, the delivery of the weekly comic was a big event in a child’s life. It was delivered with the morning paper. Dad read it as well."
• 15 Sep. Rich Johnson looks at how Mark Buckinham has completely redrawn  Miracleman: The Silver Age. "He is completely redrawing it from the original Neil Gaiman script from thirty years ago."
• 14 Sep. Interview: Sean Phillips and Ed Brubaker take Ethan Reckless to San Francisco in Follow Me Down. "This latest Image Comics hardcover features typically powerful crime genre writing from Ed, beautifully seedy 80s LA artwork from Sean and what Ed describes as gorgeous "twilight of memory colouring" from Jacob Phillips." (video, 36m)
• 12 Sep. Interview: David Roach.  "The first piece of original artwork I bought was a cover prelim by Dave Cockrum for a Peter Parker cover. It was £1 which was all I could afford at the time, I would have been 14 I think, picked up at the first convention I went to, and this would have been the 1979 Birmingham comic Con."
• 11 Sep. Grant Morrison interviewed on Late Night with Seth Meyers. " Grant Morrison comments on the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, their debut novel Luda and fielding questions about comic book characters from fans." Also mentioned, Grant's days in a punk band and the influence of Danny Merlin, the TV21 fantasy series. (video, 10m)
  
• 10 Sep. Grant Morrison's debut novel, Luda, reviewed. "Like Morrison’s work on everything from Batman to the X-Men, except even more so, the book is wildly and sometimes tediously self-indulgent. Also like the comics, it is in parts wildly, and weirdly, brilliant." The Comics Journal describes it as "set in and around a staging of Aladdin [the novel] unpicks the philosophy of pantomime with very small tweezers while presenting a bumper selection of allusions to the writer's established canon." Kirkus believes it to be "A sparkling, self-indulgent novel that revels in the transformative and grotesque."
• 10 Sep. On Thursday, 8 Sep., a blue plaque was unveiled in tribute of the Rev. Marcus Morris, founding editor of The Eagle, in Great Yarmouth, where he was once the curate at St Nicholas Church in the 1940s. "Rev Morris then became an admirer of the style of American horror comics, but was not keen on their subject matter - leading to him setting up the Eagle." Um... nope.
• 9 Sep. Interview: Bryan Talbot talks about his autobiography, co-written with J.D. Harlock. "Writing the book has taken about two years. I work seven days a week here in my studio, and for two years, I stopped at eight every night, worked on the book, and then had dinner at nine. It’s nearly 400 pages, but we’ve got this designer, Alan Fisher, on board who’s done a great job putting together the book. It’s lavishly illustrated all the way through."
• ... more from Bryan as he discusses The Legend of Luther Arkwright (video, 13m)
  
• 6 Sep. Interview: John Freeman.  "Interest in all things space was at fever pitch, and I remember my mum waking me up to watch the moon landing a few days later. The future was everywhere!"
• 6 Sep. The financial failure of Dredd remains a tragedy.  "The film opened on September 7 in the U.K. and got off to a slow start, debuting at just $1.6 million. But when it opened in the U.S. a few weeks later on September 21, it was a catastrophe."
  
• 29 Aug. Interview: Simon Davis.  "There are only two ways of doing comics, regardless of how you produce them. They are either done well or they are done badly ... When I started, there was a lot of sub-Bisley painting going on and now there are only a handful remaining now."
• 26 Aug. Congratulations to Bryan Talbot whose biography (co-written with J. D. Harlock) Bryan Talbot: Father of the British Graphic Novel was funded on Zoop on day one and has now reached double its target.
• 23 Aug. Interview: Barrie Tomlinson talks Tiger, Roy of the Rovers and (New) Eagle. "I enjoyed every minute of editing and writing.  I had the best job in the world."
• 23 Aug. Interview: Neil Gaiman on the power of fantasy (audio, 17m). "My job is to make you believe in something that is not true and did not happen to people who do not exist and to make you care about those people and those things that did not happen, that I'm just making up. If I do my job correctly, to send you back into your life, feeling different, feeling like you've experienced something that you haven't experienced before, maybe even seeing the world a little bit differently."
  
• 21 Aug. Interview: Hunt Emerson. "In the early days, when I was first doing comics, we were doing underground comix. When they were first done in America they were spelt c-o-m-i-x, to differentiate them from mainstream comics. So when it came to doing the strip I took phenomena and comix, and got Phenomenomix from them."
• 20 Aug. If you haven't noticed, a secret episode of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman TV show dropped on Netflix to everyone's surprise. Here's the full story. The show has been doing well, but needs to do fantastically well. Released on 5 August, a renewal would often already have been announced, which is not the case here. Gaiman has been tweeting about The Sandman being "a really expensive show" and has asked all his followers to "encourage all your friends to watch Sandman [and to] encourage all your friends who have begun to watch Sandman but got distracted by life to finish watching Sandman." Maybe it worked, because the DC Entertainment Facebook page subsequently posted that "Netflix is reportedly working on 'The Sandman' season 2 already."
  
• 18 Aug. First review of Illuminations, Alan Moore's short prose story collection. "The stand-out short novel, “What We Can Know About Thunderman,” is a scathing take on the American comic book industry and its impact on popular culture and politics, and will undoubtedly attract the most attention, given Moore’s history with the genre."
• 9 Aug. Creating comics with Mark Millar, is the latest edition of Comics By Perch! (video, 1hr25m). And there's more... Millar is also interviewed by Thinking Critical about his career (video, 1hr). If that's not enough, here's another interview at the Drinker's VIP Lounge (video, 2hrs27m). No time for videos... well, here's a print interview at CBR. "Millarworld prides itself on asking artists what they get paid at Marvel and DC and INCREASING that rate to get them to work for us so we're very aware of the numbers involved, but at the same time I really want to try a crazy experiment." That experiment? A $1.99 comic.
  
• 8 Aug. Neil Gaiman explains why Netflix's The Sandman exists outside the DC Universe, while the graphic novels intersect with it. “We didn’t want a TV show where you felt that you had to have read a whole bunch of comics published in 1988 and 1989 to understand what was going on.”
• 5 Aug. Rebecca Nicholson reviews The Sandman and claims Neil Gaiman "has created 2022's single greatest hour of TV drama." "It is transportive, playful at times, and certainly grand. But above all, it is dark. Bodies explode, limbs are severed, and demons crawl out of the mouths of professional footballers, fist-first. Nestled in among its more grotesque spectacles, though, is an emotional depth that elevates this far beyond the usual “let’s see what we can blow the CGI budget on” fantasy fodder." Not everyone agrees that the show is near perfect: the Washington Post headlines its review: "‘The Sandman’ suggests some comics are better left off-screen" and notes: "Given the pure comic-bookiness of the source material, the show is a feat of print-to-screen translation, with enough narrative rearrangement to create convincing through lines across the season. And yet the overall results are so shaggy and uneven, with characters and incidents from the comics that add little to the story on screen, that the reasons to adapt “The Sandman” never exceed the reasons not to have done so."
• 4 Aug. Neil Gaiman interviewed on WTF with Marc Maron (1hr40m). "Marc talks with Neil about how his early work sidestepped the pre-adolescent male power fantasies of most contemporary comic books and helped connect with a broad and enduring fanbase. They also talk about the new adaptation of The Sandman for Netflix and why Neil believes his past experiences in TV led him to make the ideal filmed version of his work."
• 4 Aug. Neil Gaiman and David S. Goyer talk Sandman adaptation. “I was walking around the props and being shown stuff, and there in front of me was the copy of a Sun newspaper dated September 2022, and ‘Tug of Love Baby Eaten by Cows’ was the headline. I thought, ‘It’s actually happening, and it’s real, and it’s being made by people who care and who love the original.’”
• While The Sandman is getting a lot of press, there has also been a lot of coverage to the news that the Batgirl movie is being shelved and will not be shown on HBO Max as originally planned, or anywhere else. A number of other cancellations have been lost in the white noise, but they include a ton of comic adaptations: Naomi, Legends of Tomorrow, Batwoman, The Flash (all The CW) and  Snowpiercer (TNT), which was in production of its fourth and final season. The CW has only two remaining DC shows, Superman & Lois and the upcoming Gotham Knights. Riverdale (based on the old Archie comics) is also coming to an end after seven seasons. I mention this because it throws a harsh light on DC tie-in shows when compared to Marvel's shows on Disney+. They still have some movies coming up (The Flash, Black Adam, Shazam: Fury of the Gods), but I'm with Heidi MacDonald's description that "The DCEU is fine, if by fine you mean a flaming dumpster fire perched on the edge of a volcano full of poison sharks."
• 4 Aug. Interview: Dave McKean on the Virtual Memories podcast (1hr28m) “For AI, comic storytelling is really difficult, when from panel to panel you need to show specific angles, the same characters doing specific things. So that part of what I do — narrative storytelling — seems to be in a safer place at the moment. But these people seem determined to crack every single problem, so I’m sure they’ll get there somehow.” (There are quite a few interesting interviews in this series — here's an alphabetical list of guests.)
  
• 30 Jul. Interview: Neil Gaiman on comics, diversity and casting Death. “In 1986, I pitched a story about what was happening in comics,” he says. “At that point Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were all coming out. One newspaper replied: ‘We’ve written about Desperate Dan’s 50th anniversary this year – we can’t do another comics piece.’”
• 28 Jul. Neil Gaiman breaks down every shot of The Sandman trailer. (video 17m)
  
• 28 Jul. Barry Windsor Smith bagged three Will Eisner Awards at San Diego Comic-Con, with Monster winning Best Graphic Novel, and earning him awards for Best Writer/Artist and Best Lettering.
  
• 25 Jul. Interview: Mark Millar. "You know him as the author of Civil War, Old Man Logan, Kickass, Wanted, Kingsman and about a hundred other bestselling comics. Join me as I shoot the breeze with Mark Millar about his career, the MCU, cancel culture and changes afoot in the industry." (Drinker's VIP Lounge, video, 2h27m)
• 25 Jul. Neil Gaiman was at the San Diego Comic Con to talk about The Sandman TV show.  “What I’m really excited [about] is that in less than two weeks, everyone is going to get to see what we made,” Gaiman told the crowd. “It feels really good.”
• 25 Jul. Den of Geek have a sprawling interview with Ram V, Indian-born contributor to both UK and US comics. "[T]he immediate question when you start thinking about writing about death in comics is, “Y’know, what can I say that Neil Gaiman hasn’t said already?” Immediately my head went to this idea that Death is a cultural manifestation. She or it cannot be the same thing necessarily to different people."
• 22 Jul. Disney are to adapt Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book with Marc Forster set to direct. David (Life of Pi) Magee, who previously worked with Forster on Finding Neverland and the upcoming A Man Called Otto, is working on the script.
  
• 22 Jul. Dave McKean is publishing a new book at the end of the month. "A few weeks ago having digested the implications of image creation AI, I decided I could either retire or respond. Here's my response; a 96-page book of graphic shorts stories created in 12 days. Available at the end of July."
• 11 Jul. "Neil Gaiman's Books Have Enchanted Millions. Finally Hollywood Is on Board." Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson believes The Sandman and other morally complicated Gaiman creations are finding their way to the screens — just when we need them most. “All of the things that made ‘Sandman’ wonderful were the same things that made it almost impossible to adapt for film and television for 30 years,” says David S. Goyer, a filmmaker and producer who was a co-writer on the “Dark Knight” Batman trilogy. “All of the features that we love about ‘Sandman’ — that it is, in essence, a story about stories — are the bugs that stymied Hollywood.”
  
• 8 Jul. Interview: Ramzee (Ramsey Hassan). "It was whilst I was [at a small press show] that I discovered that regular people were making comics about anything and everything. It really lit a fire in me to start producing my own stuff which, after a few dodgy trial runs, eventually came out five years later and was immediately met with a great response."
• 5 Jul. Jude Noel explores the avant-garde musical legacy of The Moomins. "Inspired by the kosmische electronica of German acts like Cluster and Kraftwerk, the soundtrack was produced by Graeme Miller and Steve Shill, members of an avant-garde theater company called the Impact Theatre Co-operative (also notable for including Gang of Four drummer Hugo Burnham.) Its main theme, a threadbare jumble of ocarina, Wasp synth, and makeshift percussion, is equal parts folksy and futuristic, crafted using technology that was still quite new to the mainstream."
• 30 Jun. The anarchic world of Steve Dillon. David Barnett visits the exhibition of Dillon's work at the Hat House's Basement Gallery in Luton. "There were a couple of massive piss-ups after he died, one in New York, one in Luton, and at both of them I had the same feeling: this is a great celebration of a fantastic guy’s life, and he’d love seeing everyone like this," recalls Garth Ennis.
• 29 Jun. Garth Ennis's The Boys is losing its right-wing fan-base, who are beginning to realise that it is a satire aimed at them. "He is, without exaggeration, one of the most terrifying TV villains for years. The problem is, some of Homelander’s behaviour this season has seemed a little familiar. He’s given an open platform on a rightwing news network. His popularity soars after he starts saying the worst things possible. He becomes the head of an over-reaching corporation and immediately finds himself out of his depth. He’s a self-destructive mixture of professional ambition and personal insecurity. In other words, as if it needed to be spelled out, Homelander is Donald Trump."
  
• 25 Jun. Finally, Marvelman: The Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham is to be published in October. “Neil and I have had these stories in our heads since 1989 so it is amazing to finally be on the verge of sharing them with our readers.” The launch will coincide with a 40th anniversary issue zero, which (as Graeme McMillan notes) appears 40 years after Warrior #8, not Marvelman's debut.
• 25 Jun. Interview: Grant Morrison plus a previously unpublished excerpt from Supergods. "I’d kind of reached the end of doing the superhero stuff. And I just got into this whole idea of could I possibly make all that dead skin into something alive? Frankenstein it. Could I put it all together in a new way that kind of made that useful again and brought it back to life? So I came up with this story which is being told through the collage stuff which I’m doing myself."
• 20 Jun. Garth Ennis interviewed at Enniskillen (video, 32m). "Garth Ennis is the comic book writer behind Preacher, Punisher, And he wrote The Boys which was recently turned into a hit Amazon prime show starring Karl Urban. He’s also written other comics such as Hitman, Hellblazer, Section Eight, Sara, Johnny Red, Batman: Reptilian, Lion & The Eagle, Stringbags, Rover Red Charlie, Crossed, and more recently, The Battle Action Special!"
• 17 Jun. Dave McKean is drawing illustrations for the Folio Society's edition of the Gormanghast trilogy. With an introduction by Neil Gaiman, you'll need to dig deep, as one of the 750 copies of this limited edition hardcover will set you back £745. (video, 4m).
  
• 15 Jun. Liam Sharp says welcome to Starhenge. "It’s basically Terminator meets Excalibur via Dr Who!" And here's another interview: "In The Once and Future King, there’s this concept of Merlin being born in the future and dying in the past, and I thought, “why would he be coming to the past?”
• 12 Jun. "How to finally break Judge Dredd and 2000 AD into America (and the lessons in previous attempts). Graeme McMillan looks at the upcoming Best of 2000AD. "The six-issue quarterly anthology series Best of 2000 AD, launching this fall, is set to be the most aggressive push the title has seen in the US in decades. With each volume running in the region of 200 pages and retailing for $22.99 US (and £14.99 UK), Best of 2000 AD will combine classic material from the 2000 AD back catalog with design work from X-Men’s Tom Muller and new cover artwork from the likes of Jamie McKelvie, Becky Cloonan, Erica Henderson, and more."
• 12 Jun. Interview: Si Spurrier and Aaron Campbell discuss Suicide Squad: Blaze at AIPT Comics (podcast, 1hr 20m).
  
• 6 Jun. Interview: Peter Milligan on his new series Absolution. "It’s the near future.  Which means it’s future enough for certain technical advances to have been made which makes the story of Absolution possible--but it’s close enough to be a very recognizable world, with very recognizable people.  In some ways this is our world, a world where people increasingly experience life via the medium of the internet, a world of trolls and likes and obsessions."
• 6 Jun. The W. Heath Robinson Museum finally opens. "In March 2015, the [William Heath Robinson Trust] secured the paintings and drawings after being awarded grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) and the Art Fund, ensuring the works would stay together in the UK - and now in their new home in Pinner, London."
• 6 Jun. Chloe Maveal looks at 'Al's Baby' by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra. "I’m not going to tell you to read Al’s Baby for the plot, because however fun it may be, the plot is merely the cherry on top of what may be one of the most singularly enjoyable comics of the early 1990s."
• 6 Jun. Tom Shapira looks back at Judge Dredd: The Citadel and Judge Dredd at 45.
  
• 1 Jun. Interview: Garth Ennis discusses his personal campaign of creation behind his revival of IPC Magazines' classic Battle Action (video, 26m).
  
• 1 Jun. Interview: Ben Aaronovitch, writer Celeste Bronfman and script editor Andrew Cartmel talk Rivers of London: Deadly Ever After (video,  21m).