Comic Cuts — 16 June 2023

I've had a busy and enjoyable week, split between sorting out a number of different projects. The easiest was pulling together the scans I needed for a German publisher who wants to include the Longbow episodes drawn by Don Lawrence in a compilation of Lawrence's work, a sequel to the German-language edition of my Don Lawrence Scrapbook. That book was slightly different to the UK edition (which was published as an Illustrators Special); as well as printing all the material I had gathered (the UK version dropped 16 or so pages), the German edition was a very nice hardback, as you can see from the cover to the right.

It may be a while before the follow-up appears, but I've done most of my bit — the supply of 59 pages of Don Lawrence artwork. That just leaves a little introduction to write, but I'll wait to see what else the editor chooses to include before I settle down to put pen to paper... or fingers to keyboard... or let ChatGPT scan my brain and produce what it thinks is an introduction.

For various reasons I'm concentrating on paying work at the moment, hence the design job I have been doing for George Coates' memoir of his trip around the globe by motorcycle that I mentioned last week. The good news is that I have the whole book laid out and we had a meeting and he was happy with the results. We both still have work to do — I left him to write the dozens of captions the book will require, and he left me with some additional photos that I want to scan.

I wasn't far off when I said it would run to 160 pages. The current last page is 156!

So while I'm waiting on the next round of work on that book I have finally taken the plunge and began going through my book The Trials of Hank Janson so that I can get a new edition out this year ahead of the 70th anniversary of poor Hank being condemned for obscene libel.

I'm not expecting to make many changes; just a little tinker here and there where I have made some additional discoveries. I was looking at Steve Frances's family tree on Thursday and discovered that his maternal grandparents had nine children, not eight, for instance. And Julius Reiter was sent to Australia, not (as Steve Frances remembered) Canada, to be interned during the war. It's that kind of level of correction for the most part, although I will probably include some extra material about his publishers in later chapters.

The book is now nearly twenty years old and I have some incredibly fond memories of it. It was written in a kind of white heat at the rate of a chapter a day, so that the whole 100,000+ words was completed in three weeks. Of course, I had been researching the book for twenty years so I knew the history like the back of my hand, but that was still some going.

I also remember Mel and I travelling up to London to attend the dinner and award ceremony when the book was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger for Non-fiction by the Crime Writers' Association. We met some amazing people, including the woman whose book beat Trials, which was about how she had been trafficked from Africa... it really was a harrowing story and deserved to win.

I need to get some work out in pretty short order because funds are low thanks to one company being so incredibly slow in paying invoices. Hence pulling out all the stops to get a couple of books on the market. If the blog or my Facebook feed goes quiet (although I'm trying to keep up with everything) you'll know the reason. (I have to confess I'm finishing this rather late on Thursday because I derailed my good intentions of getting it written early by pulling Stephen Walker's Hank Janson Under Cover off the shelf and spending way too long staring at all those glorious Heade covers. And me trying to keep my blood pressure down!)