We're getting closer to the release of the first two volumes of Mytek the Mighty. There has been a bit of a delay due to the group of people who need to get together to sort out permissions and licenses have been at Book Fair's in London and Bologna. I've been asked to make the addition of a trademark "TM" and there was a couple of corrections that Richard Sheaf, who generously took time out from his Boys' Adventure Comics blog to pop on his proof-reader hat (it's very smart and makes him look both sophisticated and dashing), pointed out.
In the meantime, I've had proof copies of all four volumes delivered and I'm very pleased with the overall quality. I think anyone buying the books will be very happy with them on their graphic novel shelf.
As anyone who has followed the progress of my books before, these have followed the usual course: silence about a "secret project" for months followed by a couple of weeks of "this is the project" followed by "this is still the project" for couple of weeks while you wait in frustration for the final details... and then it's out. And this one will be out the moment the ink dries on the contract and I have a cheque in the post.
As previously mentioned, the early stories were so long that I had to split one across two volumes, so I'll be releasing the first two volumes together. That's quite useful because one of the introductory essays has also been split over the two volumes – one of the longest pieces I've written for any of the reprint books I've done for Bear Alley.
More news soon.
It does mean that I'm not able to write at my usual pace. I try to hit 1,000 words a day, but that's not always possible with these kinds of piece as so much of it involves translating information from Spanish or Italian. The secondary problem is that in quite a few cases I can't just name a strip, because it won't mean anything to British readers — I can say 'Mytek the Mighty' and most of you will know what I'm talking about, but I can't say ‘Orizzonti Perditi’ and expect you to know it's a science fiction strip in which a search for a lost crew man results in one of the spacemen using a biomolecular convertor to turn himself into an Amazonian warrior. (Just your everyday comic strip in Europe and South America. Having comics only for kids is very much a British thing.)
The additional research is proving invaluable. I've added two artists that we previously didn't know contributed to Air Ace, and corrected some misspellings that have been accidentally left on the lists for years. I began compiling them (as did David Roach, independently) in the early 1980s, and I published the first version of a checklist to War Picture Library way back in 1990-91 (serialised in Denis Gifford's Association of Comics Enthusiasts' Newsletter). I've been tinkering with the lists for forty years, so it's no surprise that the odd mistake has managed to creep in. I'm doing the best I can to send the creeps packing!
(OK, so we have the third Mytek cover as our header. The other pic is the opening page of a strip by Juan Zanotto that, thankfully, is one of the few that has been translated into English, appearing as Downtime many years ago. But only in black & white. Zanotto is one of the artists I have been looking into this week—a tough job, but somebody's got to do it.)
