Comic Cuts — 6 March 2026

It's a good news week. The first proof for ACTION: THE SEVENPENNY NIGHTMARE has arrived and I've looked through it and found very little that needed changing. I've now put in a print order that and that means I have copies of the book for sale at the Glasgow Swap Meet on March 21st. 

The print order also included some additional stock so that I also have other books on sale. I'm not taking every book Bear Alley has published, but I should have a couple of copies of each of the strip reprints and the indexes. I will have copies of recent books, the four MYTEK THE MIGHTY reprints and the AIR ACE COMPANION and will be offering them post-free to anyone attending. Special show discount!

As there's no rest for the wicked, I've already started work on what I hope will be the next couple of books. These will be comic reprints and I've been running the scanner hot for the past few days making sure I have all the pages. Now comes the rather more tedious job... cleaning and doing the occasional repair (I noticed a couple of torn pages when the comics went on the scanner). That will take some weeks as there are a lot of pages to get through. One strip will be published in two volumes, so that will probably mean writing a couple of introductions—which is the bit that I enjoy most, so I leave it as a reward for when I finish the artwork.

I've recorded a couple of little bits of video while I was waiting for the proof to arrive which will give you a bit of background to the book, its tortuous history, and my own history as a reader. That's if they've come out. I haven't watched any of the bits back yet. It might be too awful to inflict on you, dear reader. 

I'll leave you with a few random covers. I mentioned last week that I'd gone into town to trawl through the charity shops. Some of the covers have already gone into their various author's cover galleries, but here are a few strays. The first was a surprise... the first Badger seen out in the wild for many years and it happens to be one I don't have. The Spinrad I didn't recognise, but it turns out I had an earlier Sphere edition. Not to worry as it was only a couple of quid. The Arkady Martine I saw a few years ago in a charity shop for £1, but it was in such a state I didn't want to buy it even as a stop-gap shelf-filler. So I left it. I was regretting not buying it all the way home. Fast forward about four years and I now have a £1.99 copy that is good as new. There's a moral to this story: pick the damned book up when you see it! You'll regret not buying it, and a better copy might turn up later.

One of my greatest regrets is getting rid of my Poul Anderson books when I had a cull many years ago. I've replaced some whenever I see them, but they don't often turn up and some I have are not in great condition. To think I bought quite a few new and kept them as mint as I could... *sniff* 

The Bees I bought thinking it was a science fiction set in a dystopian society on an alien planet... but it turns out to be about bees. Gwyneth Jones liked it, so I'll hang on to it, although it's not high on my list of books to read.

The gem of the day was a hardback first of M. John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. I don't think I'm missing any of his sf novels—I know I don't have his non-sf Climbers—so I only need his memoir Wish I Was Here and that will complete my Harrison library! Wish I could say that of my Poul Anderson collection...