I've had a couple of busy days trying to research some artists who worked on The Spider and lost track of time, so I will have to keep this short.
I have been writing introductions for a series of Spanish reprints of the infamous Lion strip and we're on volume five (of six), so I have covered a lot of what was interesting about the strip and stories. I thought for this one I would look at the Fleetway Super Library and the thirteen issues that appeared in the Stupendous Series in 1967-68.
Of the five artists, I had written up only one — Francisco Cueto. I did a little essay about his work when I put together the two Longbow volumes as he was one of the contributors to that series in the pages of Swift. That leaves four other artists about whom I had a passing knowledge of two. Back on Monday, I thought that, if I was to research the four artists, I might as well write them up properly. Now, on Friday, I'm still writing, because I'd forgotten how long these things can take. I'm looking for information online about artists who are Italian, Spanish and Argentinean, so there's almost nothing extensive written in English. Everything has to be translated.
In the case of one artist, Giorgio Trevisan, I had a lengthy interview published in an Italian magazine that I have, so that meant typing the whole interview into Google Translate so I could get some direct information and quotes. It took quite some time, as I was also Google translating a couple of other pieces... and that was what I was doing rather than writing this column last night.
I also need to remember that writing up these little essays isn't actually getting the Introduction written. All it means is that I'm properly aware of the highlights of the various artists' careers when I come to mention them. Here's the thing: I have been enjoying the whole process enormously. I'm delving into artists I know little about and trying to make sense of how their contributions to UK comics fits in with their wider careers; I'm also looking at a ton of fantastic comic strips, most of which I've never heard of.
What could be better than that? Certainly the rest of my week hasn't been nearly as exciting. I finished transferring DVDs to carry cases and have been left with six bin bags of empty DVD cases. And I've defrosted the fridge because the ice box was getting a bit 'snowy'.
Anyway, I'm going back to packing up books, hopefully with some good news due about getting rid of them. I'm hoping that we'll shortly have some space to manoeuvre and that there will then be a small chance that I'll have my desk moved by the end of the month. Fingers crossed.
In my experience getting rid of stuff is something that's hard to get started, it's a lot of hard work when actually doing it but boy, there's such a feeling of satisfaction when it's done, especially when it means clearing space.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I always said that once I hit a certain age I would start to declutter and this is a good excuse to do it. I have been packing books into boxes most of the morning... photos to follow at some point!
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