Comic Cuts — 4 March 2022

On Tuesday I became the proud owner of yet more storage space, thanks to the arrival of a new external hard drive. This one is an 8 terabyte drive (really more like 7½ tb of actual space) as I have been running short of space again, and I have quite a lot of scanning work lined up. I'm paranoid enough to want to make sure I have copies of everything safely stashed away — twice — so that if anything goes wrong I can fall back on my back-ups

I also need to back up my computer more often. It has been at least six months since the last one and I tinker with hundreds of dozens every week, adding bits of information whenever I stumble across it to the thousands of documents I have in my author and artist files. I also gather articles and audio & video files at a rate of knots that seems to increase every year as more people turn to podcasting and vlogging about comics. I try to gather any information I can about creators who have worked for British comics (including Italian, Spanish and South American artists), the results of which are dotted around pretty much everything I write. There will be a few pieces on foreign artists in the Action history, for instance.

The scanning work has expanded: I'm currently working for two European publishers, one Spanish and one Italian. I've scanned material for two books for the latter and had one in the bag for the former until this week, when I completed the artwork side for a second book. I still have the introduction to write, but should hopefully have everything wrapped up by next week, when I start work on the next set of scans.

My current schedule is five more (one for Italy, four for Spain) and maybe more to come. It means a delay in completing the Action history, but I need to pay the rent.

With all this scanning in mind, I thought it was time to look at more storage space and while chatting to my Mum on Sunday, I thought I'd look around for something cheap and cheerful. What I spotted was an 8tb drive for £125, including p&p, and by the end of our conversation (which, I should add, wasn't all about hard drives!) I'd talked myself into buying it.

I spent Wednesday morning checking over the two 5tb drives I have, both of which should mirror the other (told you I was paranoid about losing data); they didn't quite match as I've managed to transfer the odd file to one but not the other, or copied a file into the wrong folder on occasion. Over a period of three years and a handful of months, mistakes can be made. Thankfully not too many, but it still took me over 2½ hours comparing each folder to make sure they were an exact match.

Once that was done, time to plug in the new drive and copy everything across... just not in one go. My computer is old and slow and copying from one drive to another takes ages. The first three folders have an estimated completion time of 14 hours, so I expect to be running this overnight and maybe into the weekend before everything is finished and I can then begin wiping selected files from the old drives, making sure I still have two copies of every single document and folder.

With only the very occasional drag and drop of a folder to worry about, I'm trying to do some relatively light work that won't slow down the copying process. I managed to do a bit of proofing for the book Rayguns and Rocketships by Rian Hughes, for which I've written the introduction. I managed to spot a handful of credit typos but not a lot else. Looking through page after page of the old-style painted artwork that appeared on British SF paperbacks (and a few hardbacks) is the most fun I've had for weeks. The range in quality is vast: there's a huge gulf between Ron Turner and Gerald Facey when it comes to imagination and artistic talent (although Facey was able to do much better — he was just the wrong choice for science fiction). There are books I remember fondly from back when I was writing Vultures of the Void and there are others that still make me chuckle. Some were just so bad they circled back upon themselves and became page turners; it was the ones that were just averagely incompetent that were the most disappointing.

What else have I done? I was involved in a small "round robin" discussion for an upcoming issue of Battling Britons and I'm reading some old Spider stories so that I can write about them for this Spanish collection. That's keeping me busy. And next week I'm expecting it to be much the same but with different characters, maybe Patty's World, maybe The Steel Claw, depending on what comes in first. It's still work, but I have to say I'm looking forward to it!