Comic Cuts — 26 July 2024

For once I've had a packed week, so I'm wondering where to start...

At the weekend I received a box of printed copies of HIGH SEAS AND HIGH ADVENTURES, so the book is officially out. The kind folk who had pre-ordered started receiving copies on Friday (19th July), so I'm going to count that as the release date (a meaningless term these days, but I'm traditionalist enough to want a nice, neat date on which a book was published, even if it's just for my own records).

With copies in hand, I was able to set up links to my eBay shop and to Amazon, which is where most of my sales come from these days; PayPal buttons are now all but impossible to set up (they are to me, anyway). The old ones still work, and anyone can still e-mail me direct if they want to pay via PayPal or by cheque (yes, I still accept cheques!). If you want to buy copies from outside the UK, drop me a line (the e-mail address is top left, below the photo) as there are a couple of different options.

With that book under my belt, it's time to work on the next and you'll be pleased... nay, astonished! to hear that, just fifteen years late, I will finally be publishing THE PHANTOM PATROL! Negotiations have been underway behind the scenes for this "secret project" that I've mentioned a couple of times and I have been careful not to mention it until now. I've reached an agreement with Rebellion that won't bankrupt me and we're just dotting the i's and crossing the t's. This time it will definitely happen!

The book will have an introduction plus a couple of biographical essays on Willie Patterson and Gerry Embleton, and the whole strip as it originally appeared in Swift, after Swift was reinvented as a boys' paper rather than the boys' and girls' paper for little kids too old for Robin but not old enough for Eagle or Girl.

It's a terrific, twisty time-travel story, one of the lost gems that lurk in Rebellion's archives. They've done a good job of rescuing some strips—as have Hibernia Comics and Book Palace—but I'm especially pleased that Bear Alley Books will finally be publishing THE PHANTOM PATROL. Back when I started thinking about publishing some books, this was one of the first strips that came to mind as deserving to be rescued. I had been working for Look and Learn and helped negotiate the deal that led to the company buying up the old Fleetway nursery comics. It also meant that I had copies of a few thousand issues of the likes of Playhour, Jack & Jill, Teddy Bear, Robin and Swift cluttering up my office for a couple of years before I left and had to return them. (*sniff*)

For the first time I got to read the whole strip, having first encountered the story in various 2000 AD reprints. I fell in love with the story... and I think you will, too.

After that... well, I have an even bigger project in mind... but that's for another day.

While all this has been in negotiation, I decided to work on a lengthy essay about an old paperback publisher Scion Ltd., which was as far from comics reprints as I could get—although they did publish quite a few comics themselves, but... well, you know what I mean: I was basically distracting myself so that I wasn't thinking about comic reprints 24 hours a day.

I mentioned last week that I'd set myself a deadline to complete the first draft because we were planning a day out mid-week. The good news: I finished it on Monday. Clocking in at a solid 20,000 words, its just over the length of the Badger history I wrote for BEYOND THE VOID. If I can now get hold of enough scans, we're looking at another substantial book.

The introduction is just one part of what needs to be written. I now need to look at some of the authors who wrote for Scion and think about writing some essays about them. One I definitely want to write is the story of Vic (V.C.G.) Norwood, a compulsive writer whose real-life adventures matched anything he wrote in his novels. Indeed, much of his life seemed to be fiction.

With the essay finished, I could enjoy what turned out to be a glorious sunny day in Frinton-on-Sea. which I haven't visited since I was young. Beautiful beaches aside, Frinton had one advantage over nearby Jaywick, Clacton or Walton: there was nothing to do except go on the beach! In other words, youngsters wouldn't be pestering their parents to go on the pier (there wasn't one) or the penny arcades (there were none). At the end of the afternoon, after a picnic on the esplanade, we might drive along the coast for a brief visit to somewhere more exciting, but by then we only had a short time to spend all our pocket money.

On the home front, I'm waiting on the grass seed I planted to grow but the photo shows how much ground we've recovered: over 100 square feet of lawn in two strips roughly 14 x 4 feet and 13 x 3 feet.

And, finally, showing a typical lack of joined-up thinking, there has been roadworks nearby of late, some of it late into the night, to re-tarmac the road. Now, I'm not convinced that there was a huge pothole problem along the road that has been worked on as it was resurfaced a few years ago. The one area that does need work is the bridge over the railway, where the road is constantly being patched and opened up by traffic so that you can see the superstructure under the tarmac. That hasn't been done... the new work stops a few feet away.

So the roads that didn't really need doing were re-done in early July—the whole area was shut down between the July 1st and 4th. All beautifully surfaced and white and yellow lines painted. And 11 days later, starting on July 15th, part of the new road has been dug up again for a gas pipe to be laid.

I can't remember whether I turned into a grumpy old man overnight or whether it has crept up on me over the years since I had to start paying council tax, but this kind of stupidity annoys the hell out of me.