Comic Cuts — 28 August 2026

If there was a progress bar attached to the latest Bear Alley books, it would take a little jump forward for the work that has been completed this week. I finally managed to get through all the artwork for what will be two volumes and did a little bit of rewriting on one of the introductions. The marvellous Martin Baines has a PDF of the artwork and I'm sure he will be doing his usual bang-up job with the covers; I'm writing this Thursday morning because I'm planning to get the artwork together this afternoon to illustrate the introductions and that may involve some scanning and/or cleaning.

I think I'm still on target to get the first volume out in September, and I'll probably do the second in November — I'm aware that people are likely to be paying off their credit card bills following family holidays at the moment, and that they'll also be thinking of Christmas by November, but splitting the cost seems the right thing to do. It also means I can split my costs across a couple of months.

With up-front licensing costs and up-front printing costs and various other associated costs, it takes a while for a book to go into profit. Not a precise figure, but a rule of thumb is that the first thirty or forty books pay off the various fees and costs, depending on the size of the book and whether it is in colour. I'm pleased to say that THE SHRINKER is officially in profit, although not by much. Now, hopefully, over the next few years it will pay off the time I spent making the book that will eventually add up to a liveable wage. 

My books (thankfully) have a long tail and even the oldest title still in print has sold two (count 'em!) copies this year. Books published in the past two years make up about three-quarters of my annual sales, with older books making up that last quarter. It would be lovely to instantly sell a few hundred copies of a book, but that's unlikely to happen. The ACTION: THE SEVENPENNY NIGHTMARE was the closest I got to an instant seller for many years, although even that has slowed considerably.

Enough of this... I'm rambling. As usual. It has been a bit of a dull week, and I don't mean that in a negative way. We've had cloud cover, keeping the heat down to very comfortable levels, and today (Thursday, remember) we've had a half hour of slow and steady rain. I went outside and just stood in it to remind myself what it felt like.

I hacked back some more of the trees at the front of the house, a task I have been doing in fits and spurts for the past month — neither Mel nor I drive, so we have to rely on the fortnightly council green waste pick-ups, and chopping back trees fills up the bin very quickly, especially as we still have bags of hedge cuttings left over from early July and pond sludge from last week that might take until October to dispose of.

There's more still to do. The ivy needs to be destroyed with fire tamed and the path needs to be cleared of grass and weeds before winter as the drive is steep and can get dangerously slippery if we get any snow. You have to think of these things way in advance if you only get the bins collected twice a month. Only eight more collections 'till Christmas!

When THE SHRINKER came out, I treated myself to a couple of books that I had been eyeing up on eBay. And so, from the remarkable Zardoz Books came three old Fifties paperbacks, two 'gangsters' and a salacious tale of "love, luxury and lust in Latin America". The two gangsters were early Ben Sarto crime novels with HW Perl covers, the third a copy of Ladies of the Red Lamp with a gorgeous Heade cover. I will say I got a very good deal on them because I don't mind a few chips and creases — I will be reading these at some point when I do a study of Modern Fiction, Archer Press and other paperback publishers of the era. 

I haven't abandoned paperbacks, but books can take some time to put together. I have a notion to do one on Scion Ltd. in the same style of the Badger book (BEYOND THE VOID), but that means sourcing cover images and then cleaning them up. I have a couple of hundred cleaned (not always high quality, but good enough to reproduce small), and only a dozen or so more to go (I did a couple yesterday). However, that's only a small fraction of the total output of Scion and related companies (Milestone, Chariot, Dragon, Gannet Press, et al) so I need a plan of action so that I can illustrate the book to the same degree that I did with the Badger and Utopian (DREAMING OF UTOPIA).

Back in the olden times when I was a kid, the library was filled with the Hardy Boys novels by Franklin W. Dixon, which I loved; I also read the Nancy Drew novels by Caroline Keene. I read over 40 of the novels — I know this because at some point I totted up how many I'd read and it came to 41, equal to the number of John Creasey novels I had read, and one ahead of the Enid Blytons. I read more after that from all three authors; there can't be many modern authors where you can read 50+ novels, unless you're a fan of James Patterson (over 300 novels in 50 years, although he's now a writing factory) or Nora Roberts (225 novels in 45 years). 

There are always writers who can knock out a novel, but the market is very different nowadays and most writers aren't doing more than one a year (unless you're Adrian Tchaikovsky). I put out four books a year maybe, but I'm not writing all of them (then again, Tchaikovsky isn't designing his books and packing them and running them down to the post office.) I've also slowed down considerably from the days when I was writing a quarter of a million words a year for magazines (early 1990s). 

While that sounds a lot, old Ben Sarto (F. Dubrez Fawcett) was writing four times that amount, as were many others during the 1950s paperback boom. John William Jennison was writing a novel every week (they were about 40,000 words, so 2 million words a year). Probably the most prolific paperback author of the mushroom jungle era.

What prompted this was not just that I bought a couple of Ben Sarto novels, but that I found four Hardy Boys novels out in the wild. Should I read them and rediscover some lost gems that used to light up my life, or will I discover that they were actually not very good and no wonder I moved onto reading science fiction at the age of 13. I might risk dipping into one before moving them on...