Comic Cuts — 6 February 2026

Not much news is good news in the case of the ACTION: THE SEVENPENNY NIGHTMARE book. It means that I've been working fairly solidly on the layouts without huge interruptions. Last week I was about 70 pages in, and this week I've gone over the 100 page mark, about two-thirds of the way through the text. I'm still looking at a finished book of around 160-170 pages. Full colour. Expensive, but hopefully worth the cost.

I haven't been up to much else. Eating, sleeping and buying a few books. I sold a few books recently—mostly modern crime and romance that I pick up for my Mum—and thought I'd put the £30 or so towards buying a few things I wanted. 

I've been looking over my collection these past few months to see what I think is missing. There are some gaps in my reading over the years that I'll try to fill over the next few years because at some point I'm going to have to start getting rid of books and not just trying to squeeze more onto already overburdened shelves. 

My focus has always been on British paperbacks and I've built up collections a number of times. I've had to sell occasionally: once when I was skint, and once for space when I sold about 400 SF books and magazines to a dealer. Over the years I have refilled many of those gaps, sadly not always with books in the best of condition. I try to keep my books looking mint, so no spine or cover creases. The books have lived in boxes or on shelves, so I don't roll the spines, I don't put cups of coffee on them, and I don't dog-ear the pages.

Over the years I've had a scattergun approach to buying, and have picked up all sorts of books that some more sensible folks would choose as their core collection. So I have some Pan Books, some Penguin Books, some Corgi Books, some Digit Books, some Badger Books (lots of Badger Books, in fact), I have crime novels, war novels, mainstream novels, TV tie-ins (quite a few of them), a smattering of SF magazines, reference books, graphic novels, books for kids, etc., etc. 

Between those and the comics and the DVDs, what little spare money I've had over the years has been spread thin, so I've never been a completist. What I have been over the past fifty years is persistent, so there are authors whose works I have completed. I have one copy of every Agatha Christie crime novel, for instance, but they're a mixture of Penguin, Pan, Fontana (yellow spines), Fontana (Tom Adams covers) and whatever else I could lay my hands on to complete a run. Once completed, I haven't felt the urge to go back to upgrade or to specialise (i.e. get all the books with Adams covers or collect the "Penguin Tens" editions). I might pick up a cheap pre-decimal edition I like the look of, but for the most part I'm happy to say I'm done with collecting Christie. 

I need to do this in other areas. 

I've also started looking at a few authors and figuring out what I'm missing that I should have. I was watching Pluribus when Rhea Seehorn was wandering around in a frozen food warehouse and I jokingly said to Mel: "Soylent Green is people!" Which reminded me of the movie... which reminded me that I'd never read Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room!, which is the basis for the movie Soylent Green. Not only have I never read the book, I've never owned a copy.

This is precisely the kind of book that I need for my collection. Fortunately, I managed to track down a reasonably priced copy, imperfect but acceptable, for a couple of quid. The same deal also brought me a copy (NEL SF Master Series, 1976) of A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, another Harry Harrison novel missing from my collection since the days of the "great sell-off" three decades ago.

The only negative to all this is that my Wants lists are growing bigger by the day.

Talking of books from the 1970s, I was sad to see that Bob Layzell died on Thursday, January 29th, aged 85. Robert G. Layzell was born in Brighton in 1940 and grew up on Eagle, Flash Gordon and Journey Into Space, although it was as a hippy in the 1960s, while producing watercolours on fantasy subjects, that he was inspired to draw a spaceship while listening to Pink Floyd's 'Interstellar Overdrive'.

He studied the works of Chris Foss and Bruce Pennington and eventually found favour with Pan's David Larkin, who said his work required tightening up and more detail. His first work was published in Science Fiction Monthly but I first remember him from a run of Mike Ashley's books: The History of the Science Fiction Magazine Volume 3, The Best of British SF volumes 1 & 2, and SF Choice '77. 

I've dug out a few covers that were close to hand. Typically, the Ashley anthologies are nowhere to be found! But I hope you'll enjoy these...