Comic Cuts — 28 February 2025

I've had to treat this week as almost like a holiday. Apart from a bit of work completing the insides of the upcoming comic reprints from Bear Alley, I didn't manage to do a great deal after writing last week's post.

I had to travel on Sunday to stay overnight with my sister in Surrey as there was a family funeral on Monday. It was quite an interesting night as I woke up at four in the morning knowing that if I went for a pee it would set off the hounds and everyone would be awake. So I lay there and at five was visited by one of my sister's three dogs, who wandered over, accepted a bit of petting and then lay down on the "bed" (a mattress on the floor). She wandered off a little while later and I managed to hold out until six before desperation got the better of me and the subsequent barking made sure everyone was awake.

As a family we celebrate rather than mourn, and while it was still a sombre occasion, we still managed to smile and laugh our way through the day. We don't see each other that often (I think there was a 37-year gap in one case), but we're good when we do get together. Sadly, that now seems to only be for funerals. I'm of that age.

As we were driving to Epsom to meet up with everyone, we dropped in at Button House—actually West Horsley Place in West Horsley near Leatherhead. Button House was the location for Ghosts, the comedy series starring Charlotte Ritchie and Kiell Smith-Bynoe as a couple who inherit Ritchie's ancestral home and try to turn it into a hotel. A bump on the head means that Ritchie can see the ghosts that are trapped in the house and gardens, some recently deceased, one a caveman. It ran for five series, ending in 2023 and inspired a not-bad American version that's still running.

Although it's out of season, visitors can still walk around the grounds and visit the building, but there are no tours at this time of year and no open coffee shop. But it was a nice chance to walk around, gather our thoughts and prepare ourselves ahead of the funeral.

Tuesday I planned as a day off, and spent the whole day just catching up on things; Wednesday I should have worked on the book covers that need designing, but I fancied doing some writing instead, so I put in a bit a time on the upcoming Express Weekly index. How many people do you know who get their pleasure from researching printer's strikes of the 1950s? One at least.

I did end up spending an extraordinary amount of time trying to locate the death dates of William Banks Levy and his family, without any luck or conclusion. Levy was an American who came to England in the early 1930s and was responsible for distributing and promoting Walt Disney's cartoons. He was the founder of Mickey Mouse Weekly, an innovative and hugely popular comic first published in 1936. Banks (born in Statesville, N. Carolina, on 19 December 1898) married Fehima Evelyn Suleiman (born in London on 16 September 1906) in 1932 and they had a son, Walter Neville Levy, born in 1938.

The problem is that they never died... well, they seem to disappear from official records in the UK and USA. Fehima Levy was naturalized as an American citizen in July 1957, but the last trace of her as far as I can see if a travel record from October 1962. She was travelling alone... the last time I can find her travelling with her husband in 1956, which makes me wonder whether William died at some point between 1956 and 1962 when he was in his late fifties or early sixties.

For someone who was such a major part of British Disney, there is still so little known about him. There is only one known picture, discovered by Didier Ghez and posted on his Disney History blog in 2012.

I'm going to stop banging my head against this particular brick wall. If anyone can tell me when each of them died (and why their son, despite being born in England, seems to have no birth record) I would be a very happy man.

And to cap the week off, we have someone coming over to check our electricity (part of the regular safety checks done by our landlady), so the power will be off and I'll only be able to work as long as the battery does in my laptop. The PC won't be working, the phones won't be working, and more importantly the kettle won't be working! Well, for part of the day, anyway. And I can boil water on the (gas) stove.

We have people over on Saturday, so it looks like I might not get back to normal until Sunday, and by then I'll probably want a day off! Expect a report about my lack of progress on everything next week!