Comic Cuts — 18 August 2023

I've had my designer hat on this week, trying to nail down some pages of the upcoming book on Badger Books, to the exclusion of all else. Nearly all else. And it's not really a designer hat because when it comes to doing layouts I'm of the "Fake it until you make it" school.

A professional designer—someone with training and talent—would have an overall vision of what they want to do with a book and would look at the text and images available and be able to see in their mind's eye how they could potentially fit together. My approach is more like a child who finds themselves in a room with a box of toys—before long, the box is empty and the toys are all over the floor. Some of the toys may have escaped the room.

So after staring at the blank page layout for ten minutes in the hope that I'll achieve enlightenment like some zen master, I drop all the text and illustrations onto the page and just keep rearranging them until they fit and look OK. I then show it to people (Mel, my mum) and pretend that I'd planned that particular layout from the beginning.

The other thing that has slowed me down is that InDesign (the programme I'm using) doesn't always pick up some of the things I have done with the text in Word. I spent ages the other day indenting all the story titles in the index, for instance, but none of that formatting survived the transfer, so I'm spending another age redoing it. It does look better, so it's worth doing... but there's fifteen pages of tiny text and almost every other line needs to be highlighted and the indent for that 'paragraph' changed.

Also causing me to work in the lowest gear available is a pathological desire to clean up faults in the scans I've made of my Badger collection. Even a relatively good-looking book will have bumps and creases. The cheaper end of the paperback market were often held together by staples the cover was then glued down over them, so where the staples has rusted over the years the covers are stained a nasty brown; sometimes the staples have eaten through the cover. Time has taken its toll on a lot of these covers... and then you have human interference: tears, tape repairs, sticker tears and people writing prices in biro or felt tip  across the artwork.

In short, they're a mess and can take upwards of a hour to clean. And when you have up to nine pictures on a page, you'll understand why I'm not the world's fastest designer.

That said, I'm putting the hours in and have almost 50 pages finished, 20 of them a checklist of everything John Spencer/Badger published and 30 the section relating to cover artists. I've covered Ed Blandford, Dave Dimmock, Henry Fox, Norman Light, Stanley Nicholson and 'Paul' and I still have Dan Rainey and Ray Theobald to complete. Some of them are informative little essays, but for one or two I've had to admit that, even after forty plus years of digging, I still know nothing. But they merit a nice little gallery.

The authors I'm covering will be John F. Watt, Tom W. Wade, Gerald Evans, John Glasby, Lionel Fanthorpe, Tony Glynn, William H. Fear and B. Ward. Most of these were involved with the SF magazines that John Spencer published, so there will be lots of nice covers, some quite awful covers, and lots of quotes of frankly terrible tales.

I'm planning a break for a couple of days next week to try and clear the decks of other work so I can finish Badger in a timely fashion. Timely being still quite a few weeks, but hopefully not a few months!