Comic Cuts —2 October 2026

At last! After trailing the publication of SEXTON BLAKE VOLUME 1 for the past two weeks, I can now say... contracts were signed yesterday and the book will be officially launched at the Colchester Swap Meet on Saturday, October 10th. 

In the meantime, the order page is up and running (link to the right) and if you want to take advantage of our early-bird discount, please go visit the page. You can pay by Paypal. For those of you who don't have money in your Paypal account, you can still use them to pay by credit card.

I should have some copies available at the Swap Meet, and if any are left I'll have the book up on my Ebay store a day or two after, so it will be available there if that's how you prefer to order. I'm only doing a very short initial run to make sure the book gets on the press and printed copies arrive in time! I'll do a longer print run later in the month, ahead of getting SEXTON BLAKE VOLUME 2 out in about six weeks. 

That volume is awaiting a second proof, but the first one looked pretty good, aside from a little glitch on the spine where I forgot to change volume 1 to volume 2. D'oh!

In the meantime, I have been back working on the PIRATES project, about the little independent publishers that popped up like mushrooms after the Second World War. As I've previously mentioned, a lot of this was written back in the 1990s when I was editing a collecting magazine, so I've thirty years of additional research to incorporate—some of it extensive, some of it a line here and there. 

This week I have been tackling the back story of Captain Marvel, but also looking at a couple of British publishers of superheroes, including Cartoon Art and Scion Ltd. who find themselves woven into the fabric of that chapter as publishers of early British superhero characters—characters with names like Powerman and Litening. Once I've finished on this section of the book, I'll probably get going on the next index.

I'm keeping this short as it's late and I need to get some sleep as launch day usually starts early and there are lots of things to do that will keep my brain racing. Unfortunately, I'm of an age now where it's not the excitement that gets me up so early but my bladder. If you don't know what I mean, just wait a few years.

Comic Cuts — 25 September 2026

I promised last time that I'd be doing a full cover reveal this week... and there it is above these words. A remarkable image based on a drawing by Mike Western, interpreted by the highly talented Martin Baines.

By a lucky coincidence, I have found a scan of the original artwork in an old Fleetway Press Pack put out at the time to coincide with a party celebrating the success of various Sexton Blake ventures that was held on 14 December 1967 — just ahead of the appearance of Blake in Valiant issue for 13 January 1968.

By then, Blake was almost 75 years old and was struggling in his natural form — the short novel — that had been his forte since almost the beginning; Blake had run through Union Jack (37,000 words) and the Sexton Blake Library (50,000 words) but had stumbled, with Mayflower bringing their paperback series to an end in 1968 after 45 novels. Editor W. Howard Baker picked up the series again and published a few novels in hardback in 1969, and in a series of omnibus editions until 1972.

Blake's brief flourishing began in 1965 with the first Mayflower paperback replacing the defunct Sexton Blake Library; the BBC broadcast a 17-week run of Blake adventures on the Home Service and Rediffusion launched a Blake TV show in September 1967; you could get bubblegum cards and even a 'Sexton Blake Detection Kit'.

Sadly it was all over too soon, the comic strip lost to a relaunch in May 1970, and the last of the TV shows broadcast in January 1971. Blake made it back onto the TV in 1978 in an ill-conceived 6-parter, and almost made it back into comics had IPC not licensed the publishing rights. 

This was unfortunate for me, as I had been reading and enjoying the comic strip for only a few months before it came to an end. Thankfully, when I began going to comic marts up at Westminster and doing a few deals with people to fill out my Valiant collection, I was able to pick up the issues in that 1968-69 period fairly quickly and was able to indulge myself, reading some of those stories for the first time.

That would have been some time in the mid-1980s, and they've stuck with me ever since. Forty years on I'm incredibly happy to have put together the complete series — not only the weekly adventures but stories from Valiant Annual and The Valiant Book of Sexton Blake — for everyone to enjoy. The two volumes will appear about six or seven weeks apart to give me a chance to recover some of my costs before the second volume comes out. But I'll be offering an early order discount as usual, on both volumes, and will have them both available from my usual outlets (directly from me, Ebay) before Christmas, if you're struggling to think of a present for your partner.

I've been keeping an eye on the books I've been reading as I want to read more. It's ridiculous that I continue to bring more books into the house at a way faster rate than I could ever read them. And there are many old books on the shelves here that I want to re-read. Over the past two months I've finished eight books, including the seventh Slough House novel by Mick Herron, which was an improvement over the previous book (I'm saying that the previous book, Joe Country, was bad, but there have been better books in the series, including this one). 

I wanted to get it read before the new TV series—based on those two book—started. I love the TV series and would happily watch all six episodes of each season in one sitting. 

I wasn't as impressed by Time is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis as I expected to be. She's an exceptionally good writer and has interesting ideas for stories; the first of her stories I would have read in Asimov's in 1982, but a change of circumstances around that time meant I didn't get to read much for the next five or so years so I didn't get to follow up as I had done in the late Seventies with authors like John Varley, Joe Haldeman and George RR Martin. I had her Best of on my tablet but had only read a couple of stories before it died, so I asked Mel to pick up the SF Masterworks edition for my birthday. 

I've dipped into it over a period of six months and, while I recognise the quality of the writing, I wasn't always excited to pick it up to read another couple of stories. I'll jump ahead here because I have just today finished reading Damnation Alley by Roger Zelazny and that I read because a shorter version appears in The Best of Roger Zelazny, another SF Masterworks volume I got for my birthday. I started reading a couple of stories last week and was immediately hooked—I should say hooked again—by Zelazny's writing, which I was enamoured with in my teens and twenties. All the books I have of his date from the late 1970s/early 1980s.

The Best of includes a couple of short novels. I noticed that the version printed in the book was abridged, so I ended up reading my old paperback. Cost me 30p and I probably read it in two days. I'm looking forward to revisiting more of his short stories and that second novel.

After Time is the Fire, I turned to an old favourite: Mission of Gravity. Again, this is the copy I bought second hand in around 1977. I've read it three or four times now, and I'm still captivated by the scientific wonder that is the planet Mesklin and its tubular. caterpillar-like inhabitants. Barlennan and his crew set off on a journey to help the human explorers extract data from a rocket that has crashed near the pole, where gravity is a crushing 600g.

I have this beat-up old reading copy, but I also have it in a hardcover omnibus along with its sequel and a couple of short stories, which I'll get around to in the not-too-distant future.

The Spike Milligan was a book found in the wild and it's great for when you need a laugh. I also found myself dipping into an old volume of The Perishers and immediately sent back to childhood when I read this and Garth every day in my Dad's paper. We had to wait almost a year for the appearance of the crabs in the crab pool and I was looking forward to revisiting them in this volume... only to find that they weren't included, dammit! They do appear in volume 16, so I'll be reading that soon.

Ken MacLeod's Newton's Wake appears on numerous lists of best modern space operas, and I just fancied reading something modern and potentially fast-paced and trashy. It didn't quite live up to the hype or my wishes. He's a good writer and I still have unread MacLeod's that I'll get to; this one just wasn't what I wanted. 

Instead I read an absolutely fast-paced piece of trash, Pinday and the "White Slaver" by Ben Sarto (F. Dubrez Fawcett), a 1947 British gangster novel about young girls being hired as dancers and then being trafficked to Panama's dance clubs for the entertainment of greasy, disgusting men. I read a load of Fawcett's novels years ago and he was, to my mind, one of the most outrageous and entertaining of the gangster novelists. This one was a bit hum-drum compared to Fawcett at his best.

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!

Comic Cuts — 11 September 2026

Good news, everybody! The imaginary progress bar attached to the latest Bear Alley Books' title has reached 100%. On Wednesday I sent the files to our printer and should receive a proof copy in 8-10 days, hopefully sooner. I have some proofing to do, but hopefully I've already caught any errors. If everything works out, I should have the book on sale at the Colchester Swap Meet at the Baptist Church on 10 October. I'll be offering the usual advance order discount to everyone who can't make it to the capital of Roman Britain.

I always wait until contracts have been signed before announcing titles, and hopefully that will be done within the next week or so and I'll be able to show off the cover. Then I knuckle down to the second volume of this set which I'm hoping will be out in November. Before Christmas, anyway. The gap just helps me to spread costs a little.

I've had my nose so tightly to the grindstone that I haven't really done anything other than laying out the pages for the new book. There has been one good bit of news: on Saturday, sales of ACTION: THE SEVENPENNY NIGHTMARE suddenly took off. Normally I sell a book or two every day across the whole selection of Bear Alley titles. Between about seven and ten in the evening I sold nine books, eight of them copies of Action. On Sunday I sold another five copies of Action, on Monday two and on Wednesday one.

Now, this was after a bit of a drought on sales of the book, which sold well in its first two months (March/April) and has been steadily selling since, but only at a rate of a couple per week. Someone, somewhere must have mentioned it, but all I can find is one mention on Facebook. I'm not exactly across all social media!

I'm certainly not complaining. I was a bit worried that I was about to run out of copies and had to promptly put in an order with the printer to restock. I need copies for the Swap Meet anyway, but I'm hoping that there might be another little run on the title, as I think it's one of the best things I've written and I'm especially proud of the way it looks as well as the way it reads. Took me ages to design, but it was worth the time and effort, I think. 

Saturday was also the annual Invasion: Colchester, which saw a record crowd packing their way into the town centre like sardines in a tin. After a while it became almost impossible to take photos without someone pushing past you, ducking in front of you (but still managing to ruin a shot), or you ended up simply taking photos of other people's kids. Thanks to Mel, I managed to put together a collection of reasonable photos for the blog on Sunday, which you can find by scrolling down (or clicking here, if you've arrived from Facebook).

Rather than ramble on, I'll post a few random cover scans. I should be able to reveal the title of the new book next week. 

Comic Cuts — 4 September 2026

Again, the imaginary progress bar showing how the next book is going took another jump towards being filled, although it did stutter, fall back a tiny amount, pause... before moving forward again. The stutter was caused by a logo that we wanted to use that I couldn't open on my old PC because the version of the programme I had was so ancient.

I'm not likely to be updating it any time soon because said programme is part of a suite that was purchased back in the early 2000s; the people who make it have now stopped selling their product and now only allow subscriptions. Since I don't use it for months at a time while I'm writing books, I don't want to subscribe. I'd prefer to buy it outright. Or buy the bits that I use outright.

My old PC is air-gapped, to make sure that it doesn't receive any unwanted updates or viruses. Microsoft stopped sending virus updates for Windows 10 some while back, so it might be vulnerable to attack. As I only use it for design work on my books and nothing else, I'm hoping that it will last for many years to come.

The old PC does have about 20gb of emails on it. And earlier this week I had 10gb of emails on my laptop, half of them unwanted.

The sorry saga began last Wednesday when I went online to read my emails and found one from my email provider which said "7-Day Alert" and told me to "Make sure you're all set for the switch." Well, that was the first I was aware that there was a switch due, and there were all kinds of scary bullet-points: 

• Before your migration, please download any folders of documents you want to keep.
• When you open your email client after moving to Professional Email powered by Titan, you may see your email redownload.

Um... I didn't have an "email client". For years I've gone online to read my mail. Online I had all my mails neatly moved to folders so I could track down book orders from people, book orders I had processed and book orders that had been completed; there was various folders of correspondence and payments; there was work related stuff and loads more. There were almost 10,000 messages — 5.1gb of mail.

So on Saturday, a friend came around and put Thunderbird on my laptop. This is actually the same email "client" that I had on my old PC, so at least I knew what to expect and how to use it. We went down the pub and left it downloading a few thousand emails.

It was only the next day that I realised it had only downloaded the inbox and none of the folders, so I spent the next couple of days moving messages in folders on the webmail server to the webmail inbox, so that Thunderbird downloaded them. I then had to go through the downloaded messages and move them into newly created folders. I moved the last of them on Monday — so much for having a day off!

On Tuesday I received a "24-Hour Alert", which told me pretty much the same thing as the earlier message. And on Wednesday a "10-Minute Alert" telling me to close or send any open emails I was working on. "If you're using an email client on your phone or computer, you won't need to reconfigure your settings."

Remember the warning about "you may see your email redownload"? That's precisely what happened. 9,494 messages re-downloaded, landing on the 3,350 messages I had still to move into folders. The 6,000+ messages I had carefully moved into folders were now duplicated in my inbox, leaving me with 13,000 messages that needed to be sorted out.

As you can imagine, I wasn't best pleased. I have managed to get that down to 7,104 messages, so I've about 3,750 more to find and delete. And every time I open Thunderbird, I get four or five random old messages download, not all of which I can immediately trace and delete. Mostly they're from 2022 for some reason.

When I'm not wasting my time, I have been making some small progress with the next set of books, sorting out cover images and thinking about what I can do with the internal pages. While pondering, I've taken the opportunity to clean up a few old book covers that will be used when I do my next book about old paperbacks, although quite when that will be I don't know.

Talking of book covers, here are a few SF books I've picked up in the wild recently. Nothing too exciting, although I was very pleased to find the John Sladek with its Chris Foss cover. This was picked up from a local second-hand bookshop. The final two were Ebay purchases, but the rest I found around town.

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...

Comic Cuts — 21 August 2026

Not much to report as I've spent part of this week writing an introduction to the next Don Lawrence book, the fourth, to be reprinted by All Verlag in Germany. This one features 'Wells Fargo' and 'Longbow', and, although I've written about both in the past, I didn't think the introduction I wrote for the 2010 reprint of The Don Lawrence Westerns by Book Palace Books was appropriate. 

That said, I have to admit that I'm particularly proud of it—it traced the history of transport across America from the San Francisco gold rush to the modern National Highway System, but with a special emphasis on the story of overland delivery services Wells, Fargo and Company and the Pony Express. Seven chapters across 11,500 words, it took ages to research but it was a joy to put together.

This one's a little more on topic. 

I was never a big reader of westerns, but it was a hugely popular genre thanks in part to the mythologizing of real life cowboys like Buffalo Bill, who was only in his early twenties when a dime novelist named Edward Judson turned him into a dime novel hero. Kit Carson had to wait until he was 40. Aldine published over 1,280 stories in their Buffalo Bill Library, New Buffalo Bill Library and Buffalo Bill Novels series between 1899 and 1932. 

While doing the research for the new introduction, I couldn't help but think of how few Westerns I've read. My dad and my sister read westerns, mostly Louis L'Amour, but there are plenty of classics like Owen Wister's The Virginian, Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage, Ernest Haycox's Stage Coach to Lordsburg, L'Amour's Hondo, Jack Schaefer's Shane and plenty of others that I ought to read at some point. I always preferred science fiction, crime and thrillers and I have thousands filling my shelves, of which at least a couple of thousand are still unread.

Oh, and I bought a couple more this week, just in case I got sucked into another dimension and while I'm was trapped there I finish reading those thousands of books. I wouldn't want to risk running out. And, as of writing, I only have three more books on the way... oh, and three books in my basket on eBay.

Our water company (Affinity) brought in a hosepipe ban on Monday (17th) with immediate effect and we promptly had brief spells of rain over three nights after almost 50 days of dry weather which put the county into drought conditions. It feels like I'm back in my smoking days: the only way to get a bus to arrive was to light a cigarette.

The rain hasn't had much impact on the colour of the grass or the crust of crud that had formed on our pond. I had been meaning to so something about the pond for some while, and this seemed like an opportunity to get rid of at least some of the leaves, broken branches and general detritus that has joined forces with the algae to turn the pond into a pool of muck. 

I'm not sure how much of an improvement it has made, as there is now just a layer of damp mud and the tree that overhangs the pond thinks it's autumn already and is shedding leaves. We shall see what happens when we get some serious rain. Maybe we'll even get frogs back in the garden like we used to before new neighbours introduced a couple of cats into the equation and the frog population dropped to zero. They and their cats have moved, so maybe the frogs will come back...

THE SHRINKER received a nice 4-star review in SFX. Thanks to Stephen Jewell, who has given Bear Alley Books some nice reviews in the past. It's almost impossible to get our books mentioned in the mainstream press, and even in specialist magazines as they seem to dedicate so little space to reviews these days. Selling direct (as I do) also creates a barrier, as some newspapers and magazines will only reviews books with ISBN numbers (which can be expensive, up to £93 per book), which I did use in the early days, but found that dealing with wholesalers was a nightmare as they always paid late, when they could be bothered to pay at all.

I'll finish with a few random scans of books found in the wild. We have a couple of places around town where people put old books and, once in a while, something nice turns up. The oddest of the latest crop is a book by Willie Rushton, published by Four Square but in association with Sydney (Australia)-based Tudor Press and with a $1 price tag. Was it ever distributed in the UK, I wonder.