I'm waiting on contracts, now that the books are finished. I had some minor corrections that needed to be fixed, which I did over Sunday and Monday, so everything is ready to go once the paperwork is signed and the license fee paid.
So I'm happily cracking on with the Air Ace Companion book, writing little essays about Italian and Argentinian comic artists whose work has been part of the bedrock of British comics in the Sixties and Seventies. Over the decades, Argentina has contributed something like 80-100 different artists who worked in British comics, and I imagine that number can be at least trebled for Italian and Spanish artists.
Some of the greatest names in European and South American comics have contributed a strip or two (or in the case of F. Solano Lopez, dozens) to UK comics. Some of the most prized are Hugo Pratt's contributions to the war libraries, but there are also strays that only a handful of people know about, like a reprint of 'Anna della Jungla' in a British weekly. How about one of the most famous Italian comics strips, Storia del West drawn by Gino D'Antonio and others... celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017 because nobody realised it had actually debuted the year before in the UK.
And new information is coming to light daily. I mentioned last week that I'd discovered a couple of extra names who had contributed to UK comics; well I can add another this week: no less a person than Juan Gimenez, artist of the saga of the Metabarons written by Alejandro Jodorowsky and dozens of other volumes that are celebrated across Europe (but not here, because, y'know, comics are for kids). There have been a few translations over the years (Humanoids deserves a big THANK YOU), but these comics are still almost unknown.
Mind you, there are some excellent English language reprints out there that I know nothing about... usually because they've appeared in the USA and haven't appeared over here except maybe Forbidden Planet or Gosh! Comics. Oh, and I'm broke most of the time, so even if they do appear I'm not in a position to buy them.
One I do have is El Eternauta by Hector German Oesterheld and F. Solano Lopez, published by Fantagraphics in 2015. I've just checked on Ebay and there's one copy available, price $390 + $25 shipping, another at $250 + $43 shipping. Some lucky person snagged a copy in the UK for £85, but they're mostly selling for between $200-400 in the USA.
I'm especially excited about El Eternauta because it is being made into a TV series, due out at the end of the month on Netflix. Six hour-long episodes shot in Buenos Aires in Spanish ... so not your usual Netflix series. It was originally announced five years ago!
Talking of comic-related TV shows, Mel and I have managed our watch-through of Daredevil, spread over 26 evenings in January (Season 2) and March (Season 3). This is the second time I've watched it, and it's still fantastic, with Vincent D'Onofrio's Kingpin the most chilling portrayal of a villain in TV history, and probably in the history of the MCU, as he's now canon.
I wasn't that fussed by Thanos in the Avengers movies, probably because the finger-snap thing halving the population... he'd have to circle the whole universe every few decades because losing half the population only slows population growth. If Thanos was to snap his fingers today (population roughly 8 billion in 2024) and the population is reduced to 4 billion, or 1974 levels, we should have achieved 8 billion again in 50 years. I doubt even an intergalactic supervillain could revisit every advanced civilisation every five decades. It's not like he's a god, just a powerful villain with a powerful weapon (the infinity gauntlet).
The other thing that bugs me about those movies—I may as well get this off my chest at the same time—is that they are tending towards a big, twenty-minute CGI punch-up at the finale, usually accompanied by some kind of sky beam. They're all getting a bit samey.
And I'm not hopeful for the next Avengers movie, Avengers: Doomsday. While I love many of the characters (and also most of the films), have you seen the line-up for this fifth Avengers movie? Over thirty major characters, including former Avengers, the Fantastic Four, some X-Men, and more. They're going to need a five hour movie for them all to have any meaningful story arcs and the CGI punch-up with Doctor Doom's cohorts will have to last an hour so everyone can get a few jabs in.
And (finally) it won't have an ending, because there's a sequel already set for 2027. I can't tell you how frustrating I find waiting a year (and sometimes longer) for the conclusion of a film. My memory is terrible at the best of times, but being battered by a cinema sound-system, watching a movie with a too-big cast who are replaced by computer-generated doppelgangers for the ending, and then discover that it is "To Be Continued" is the reason I don't go to the cinema any more. I'll wait until I can see it on my adequately large, adequately loud TV from the comfort of my own sofa.
