Comic Cuts — 21 February 2025

So this week saw a leap forward in the next group of books that I'll be publishing under the Bear Alley banner. The insides of all four books are now in place, introductions are designed, page numbers added and I'm working on the covers.

There's still some proofing, and getting printed proofs, and getting the copyright holder to sign off on everything, and finding the money to pay for the license fee, but expect a reveal in the near future.

Another new index is moving along slowly but steadily. I have been doing a little research on Junior Express, which became Express Weekly / TV Express Weekly, home of the much-loved 'Wulf the Briton' and including work from many fine British and European artists, adaptations of Biggles and No Hiding Place, and adaptations of movies ranging from Reach For the Sky to Campbell's Kingdom.

It's a paper I have only ever had a partial index to, so on its 70th anniversary last year, I suggested to a friend that it would be a good project to work on. We've both dipped into it over the past few months—I mentioned a month or so ago that I had been sidelined into writing about newsprint rationing... well, it was this that led me to doing that research. There's a slightly odd reason why Junior Express (and its rival Junior Mirror) was launched.

The reason I had a partial list is because I once had access to quite an extensive collection, that of the late John Allen-Clark, who lived locally. I was a regular visitor and would sit chatting while jotting down notes from various papers in his collection. Sadly, John died in 2015 and his collection was sold off. (A little more on John's influence on the early indexes can be found here.)

I mention this because it impacts the index greatly because there are parts of the run of the paper that I don't have any illustrations for. So I'm putting out a plea for help to see if anyone out there has some of the early issues of Junior Express, especially if they have a copy of the very first issue, and to ask them to get in touch. My email address is top left, under the photo.

I also spent a bit of time this week experimenting with book repairs. I recently picked up copies of some old John Harvey crime novels that were in a bit of a state, suffering especially from spine roll. I'd seen a video of someone heating the spine and knocking the curved pages back into shape. So I thought I'd give it a (literal) bash.

I used a hairdryer, keeping it moving up and down the spine until it felt hot—this was to soften the glue that holds the cover to the spine. Putting the curved spine on a flat surface (a table in my case), gently tap the pages that are pushed out of alignment with a soft hammer.

I then clamped the spine using a couple of small (2 inch) G-clamps and left the glue to harden again. The results were... imperfect but interesting. You can see from the photo below that there has been some small improvement, but not as much as I'd have liked. This could be down to a couple of things: either the books are so warped they're beyond repair; or (and I think this is the more likely option) I need to spend longer on the spine with the hairdryer and heat up the glue even more to make sure that the pages will slip back into shape.

I saw an alternative method, which involved running a hot iron up and down the spine, which might soften the glue better than a hairdryer. I need to find some more books that I can afford to sacrifice before I put an iron anywhere near any of the books I collect.