Some BIG news... I've finally signed the contract for THE PHANTOM PATROL. It's definitely happening and the book will be out next month... I'll add "If all goes to plan" because people with long memories will recall me saying something similar back in 2009 shortly before everything went to hell in a handcart.
Only fifteen years late. But what's a decade and a half between friends?
What can I tell you... well, it's 129 pages, has three introductory essays—a general intro plus essays on Willie Patterson and Gerry Embleton—and then the complete Phantom Patrol, beautifully drawn by Embleton using line & wash, with Zipatone used for emphasis and effects. I first saw this in a 2000 AD Annual and wanted desperately to read the whole story. It took almost 30 years, but I finally got to read the whole thing when Look & Learn (where I was working at the time) bought IPC's old nursery comics and the bound volumes for Swift and other titles were shipped to our home in Colchester.
There were a handful of strips retained by IPC, including Phantom Patrol due, I suspect, because of its 2000 AD connection or because holding one or two back made it look like there had been some high-stakes negotiation.
When the work ran out at Look & Learn, I started thinking about getting some of the strips I'd been reading back into print, and Phantom Patrol was one of the first I thought of. I first alluded to it in a Comic Cuts post way back in May 2009 when I appear to have been working on six books at once, including the Frank Bellamy's The Story of World War 1 and the Don Lawrence-drawn Wells Fargo books that came out from Book Palace in 2009 and 2010. Then there were four that I was looking to publish: "The first is well underway; I've a complete set of scans for another; a third is partly scanned; and I've located copies of the fourth, which will be going onto the scanner at the first opportunity. I've cover artists lined up for three of the four."
Well, I can tell you that the four were The Phantom Patrol, Cursitor Doom, Slave of the Screamer and Johnny Future (in two volumes). And the cover artists were Chris Weston, John Ridgway and Garry Leach.
Sadly, Bear Alley Books got off to a faltering start. I couldn't get the deal I wanted with the rights holders and we were informed by our landlord that he was planning to sell the house we were in. Between finding somewhere to live, the cost of moving and the huge disruption that would cause, I had to put publishing to one side and concentrate on work that would pay. By the time Mel and I were settled in Wivenhoe, it was January 2011 and I began work on the Hurricane & Champion Index, which appeared in March, and Eagles Over the Western Front, which originally appeared in three volumes in May, June and July.
Happy days. There have been a few bumps in the road since, but Bear Alley has published 43 books since then—three of them this year—and I have one on the stocks, one in production and four volumes of a classic comic series planned to start later this year. I guess I'll have to start thinking about what I can do for our 50th book.
