Comic Cuts — 18 September 2026

Time to reveal the latest book from Bear Alley Books.

I have been a fan of Sexton Blake for years... and it seems to be a family trait. My Mum tells me that she used to read Sexton Blake stories that had been bought by her Mum to read. The first Blake story I ever read was 'The Slaying of Julian Summers' by Richard Williams, which my Dad had left lying around.

I knew Sexton Blake a few years before I found him in book form. Blake was appearing in Valiant when I began reading it at the age of 7, The earliest Blake stories I read won't be appearing in the first volume as the strip had already been running for more than 18 months before I became a regular reader (I had seen and read an early episode from the very first Blake strip in an old issue I found at a friend's house.)

I loved that strip! I had no idea it was based on a TV series. In retrospect, the plotting is similar to an entirely different TV series, Scooby Doo, with haunted buildings, secret passageways, underground chambers, trap doors in the floors and stairways, blades that drop or swing over a trapped body, and spiked walls that will slowly crush people. There's also the Blake equivalent to the Mystery Machine (the Silver Panther) and a big dog (Pedro).

Where Scooby Doo is played for comedy, Sexton Blake is deadly serious (emphasis on the deadly). Dark and Gothic, each episode ends in a chilling cliffhanger that was guaranteed to send you back to the newsagents a week later to find out what happened. Scooby Doo meets Dick Barton.

I'm doing the whole series, which includes all the strips from Valiant, Valiant Annual and Valiant Book of Sexton Blake, in two volumes of roughly 165 pages apiece, priced £22.95, although I'll be doing the usual early-bird order offer. I haven't worked out the dates yet, but I'm hoping to have copies available at the Colchester Swap Meet on October 10th. That means I'll start taking orders somewhere around the 28th of this month. So, ten days. I'm waiting on a proof copy and that should allow me to make any minor corrections necessary before offering it to readers, and to put in an order for a full print-run.

I'm in this weird hinterland of having finished the book but I'm still waiting on the proof (due to arrive in the next day or two). Not that I'm expecting problems, but I want to see how it prints before completing volume two. Which, by the way, will follow in November.

I'm back to writing my own introductions, after taking a break for THE SHRINKER: volume one's intro is 'Sexton Blake and the Comics of a Thousand Perils', which traces the Scooby Doo meets Dick Barton style of storytelling back to an earlier era of Sexton Blake, and specifically to a 1948 Blake story in Knockout. and then via Dick Turpin, Jack o' Justice and Maxwell Hawke to what Valiant published two decades later.

Volume two has a piece entitled 'The New Order of Detectives' and is about the origins of Sexton Blake and the story of his creator, Harry Blyth. 

Enjoy the pages here... I'll reveal the full colour cover of the first volume next week. C'mon, I've got to keep something back. I've got three weeks' of columns to fill before the book goes on sale!