I'm in the eye of the storm as far as work is concerned, waiting for things to happen while various projects are swirling around me. There's MYTEK THE MIGHTY VOLUME 3 at the printers, the AIR ACE COMPANION being looked at by a couple of people and another project still being written.
I've spent the week looking into the careers of various Spanish and South American artists, which gave me a sense of deja vu as the AIR ACE book involved quite a bit of that. It's not the easiest thing to do as almost everything written needs to be translated, and although it's exponentially easier nowadays compared to even a few years ago thanks to the advances in translation software, it's still not easy double checking everything, like when and where strips appeared; thanks to the free flow of comic strips between South America and Europe (but not the UK, of course) and artists relocating (especially between Argentina and Italy), it isn't always obvious.
Also, there's a lot of information repeated and it isn't always right. I spent an hour trying to track down a strips entitled 'Marcie' which appears in Gustavo Trigo's Wikipedia page, his Tebeosfera biography, the biography at Bonelli Editore, and lots of sites that use these as sources. It was mentioned in so many places that I was convinced that it must exist—Wikipedia said that this was the strip that launched him in Europe—but was otherwise unrecorded on the internet. This is true for hundreds of British comic strips, so why not other European countries. It took a while to realise that the biographies that mentioned 'Marcie' did not mention another Trigo strip, '¡Marc!', about a former colonel in the French Army who now heads a special forces group dedicated to combating large gangs.
Now check everything else he's drawn. You begin to see why I'm something of a slow, methodical writer these days.
I'm not taking a poke at people writing on the internet—I use it to gather information as much as the next man—I'm just saying that mistakes can be made and we have to try and check what we can and try to make sure the right information ends up in print.
There are many examples of where I've got things wrong. One that has surfaced recently involves a couple of covers for recent/recently announced books from The Treasury of British Comics with a credit to artist Ted Kearon. This is an error that goes back to the 1980s and I think I know how it started: with Robot Archie. The writer was E. George Cowan, otherwise Edward George Cowan, otherwise Ted Cowan. The artist was known to be E. Kearon (Denis Gifford had him credited this way as early as 1974) and I suspect that, when asked his first name, someone mistakenly heard Cowan for Kearon and said Ted. Easily done, but the misinformation spread and ended up in my Fleetway Compaion book and various other indexes published in the early 1990s.
Fast forward some years and I had my mistake corrected by a family member... and I've spent the intervening years trying to get the error fixed wherever and whenever I can. In the recent cases of The Sludge and one of the Robot Archie books, the cover images up on Amazon and the like would have been submitted when the ISBN was registered. The books themselves have the corrected artist credit. (A shout-out to Keith Richardson at Rebellion who's usually at the end of my emails and has to deal with this kind of thing.)
The mistake still thrives. You'll still find websites crediting 'Wrath of the Gods' to Michael Moorcock, even tho' he categorically denied writing it and payment records proved that the writer was Willie Patterson. Thankfully that error is slowly disappearing and, fingers crossed, might be finally laid to rest thanks to the recent Book Palace reprinting of the story in a glorious hardcover volume.
One good bit of news: the problems I've had getting the MYTEK THE MIGHTY books printed are officially sorted. The last of the late books went out early this week and everyone who has waited patiently for up to six weeks will now have their books.
I have been sitting on a short print run of the first two volumes for a couple of weeks because I didn't want to start selling and having new orders arrive before the "early bird" orders were all fulfilled. Hopefully it means that I'll be able to list the books on Ebay now and can get back to the business of selling books.
And the second bit of good news relating to MYTEK is that I've just signed the contract for the third volume and it should be available next month. I'm not going to jinx things by trying to guess a more precise release date, not after the problems I've had with the first two volumes, but I'm confident that "next month" is a safe prediction.
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