I'm writing this a little earlier than normal as I want to take a day off on Thursday, when I would normally be writing. It's only so I can head into nearby Colchester and pick up a few things—nothing exciting: I need a couple of new shirts and it'll be nice to potter around in the charity shops.
I did the layouts for the final pages of the main history for ACTION: THE SEVENPENNY NIGHTMARE on Friday and have spent the last few days working on the various checklists (Action 1st series, Action 2nd series, Summer Specials and Annuals), compiling a creators' index, and doing the layouts at the back end of the book. The final pagination total is 179, which is a little longer than I had planned for (I thought it would be about 160-170), but not so far out that it will make me change my plans to publish in full colour. Yes, an awful lot of pages will be black & white, but with printing its all or nothing.
The book will be a bit more expensive to print, but I'll absorb the additional cost so the price will be about £25—not much more than the MYTEK books, which were b/w but for which I've had to pay a licence fee to Rebellion, who own the publishing rights. It's the same price as BEYOND THE VOID, the book about Badger Books that was published back in March 2024. I'll do the usual "early bird" discount. I'm aiming to have copies on sale at the Glasgow Comic Swapmeet on March 21st, after which I'll start selling as normal, firstly through Paypal and then through Ebay.
By the time you read this I will have ordered a couple of proof copies to make sure that the colour and printing works correctly as I don't want a repeat of what happened with the first MYTEK books! If I've used a font that's any way out of the normal, it has been converted into a jpg, so it will print properly.
A couple of people require thanks—indeed, they deserve THANKS!—because they have been responsible for the book getting off to the printers on time. Martin Baines is Bear Alley's ever-reliable cover artist. I do quite a few of the designs myself if there is existing artwork, as has been the case with quite a few of the indexes; anything that actually requires artistic talent and skills I pass over to Martin. And the reason the text was ready is because Richard Sheaf turned around the proofing incredibly fast, despite minor distractions like the Winter Olympics and major distractions like work and being away from home.
So, that's it for the moment. 70,000 words of comics' history finally about to see print.
What's next? As I mentioned last year, I'm looking at a couple of reprint titles before cracking on with more comics history. Probably the Valiant index or the War Picture Library Companion. That said, sometimes a piece of research will set me off on a surprising track—this is what happened with ROCKET: THE SPACE-AGE WEEKLY, which took me by surprise. And the book on RANGER wasn't a title I'd planned as the immediate follow-up to BOYS' WORLD. So there's a chance that something might get in the way of my carefully laid plans.
The following day...
So my plans changed when I looked at the weather and discovered that it was going to be raining all morning. I'll go into town on Friday. Instead, I began sorting out a few books on the shelves of my former office (the garage!) in the hope that by using some sort of Escher magic, I can create space out of thin air.
The shelves I was working on had a random selection of paperbacks, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. By coincidence, one of the first books I stumbled across was Shark Attack by H. David Baldridge, an officer-scientist with the U.S. Navy. It was published on 15 January 1976, almost exactly one month before Hook Jaw began to rip its way through the oceans of Action.
I mention Gunnar Asch in the Action book as an example of war novels with German heroes that influenced Hellman of Hammer Force. And Linda Lovelace also gets a mention, specifically the book Inside Linda Lovelace. As I've run the cover of that book in The Sevenpenny Nightmare, I'll show off a different title from Lovelace here.
And then there's the Football Factory trilogy about football hooliganism—The Football Factory (1997), Headhunters (1997) and England Away (1998)—and his later novel Human Punk, which begins in 1977. Of course, back in the early 1970s we had Richard Allen writing about Skinheads and Boot Boys and, by 1977, about Mods and Punks in books that mythologised youth cultures. But that's another story entirely.
As you can see, even when I take a day off I can't escape ACTION: THE SEVENPENNY NIGHTMARE!
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