Comic Cuts — 13 September 2024

Since I was born on a Friday the 13th, I've never been superstitious about them. It's called paraskevidekatriaphobia and it's an irrational fear that some believe in, as is triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen. I had a look at Wikipedia to check the spelling and it seems to have been something that developed in the early 20th century alongside various other obsessions with the paranormal.

That it's all nonsense is easily proven: how many bad events can you say were the fault of the 13th of the month falling on a Friday? And there have been 688 of them in the past 400 years, so surely there should be at least 688 terrible accidents, emergencies or eruptions... and what do you blame the bad things happening on other days on? Titanic hit an iceberg on a Sunday the 11th, Hindenburg went up in flames on Thursday the 6th, and Krakatoa almost ripped an island apart on Monday the 27th.

There's nothing to fear and a lot to celebrate: and that's what I'm doing today and have been since Wednesday, because Rebellion signed off on THE PHANTOM PATROL and once I have a final printed proof in hand, it should be out towards the end of the month.

I have been tinkering with the Utopian book, having now cleaned up all the scans I have (some good, some not so good); there's a second section about the guy who wrote a lot of the stories for the magazines Utopian put out (Norman Firth) and I need to sort out the scans I have of his books, but it's moving in the right direction.

I'm also working up some material for the next comic strip reprint, a big sprawling essay about the writer of the strip, which I'll probably chop up into a couple of parts as this version includes everything I can, including the kitchen sink. Or should that be kitchen sink drama, because there was certainly some of that in his work.

This is a short column, because I spent quite a chunk of time this week cleaning and cropping photos for the Invasion Colchester column (below if you're on the main page, here if you've come from Facebook), and I need to crack on with all the odds and ends that putting out a new book entails. Fingers crossed, I might have figured out a release date by our next Comic Cuts column.