Comic Cuts - 17 November 2017

After a week-long break, I'm back working on the Forgotten Authors book, finalising the contents for the first ebook collection. I was planning for the first volume to contain 11 essays, but I've added a couple more to bring the word count up to 60,000 words. So the authors covered will be W. Stephens Hayward, Anonyma, Stella M. During, Edric Vredenburg, Morley Adams, Gerald Biss, W. Holt White, Alphonse Courlander, Ella M. Scrymsour, Alexander Wilson, Guy Ramsey, E. T. Portwin and Dail Ambler.

I'm waiting on one bit of information, but I've spent the week going through each of these 13 essays, giving them a little tweak here and I'm now convinced that everything, including the kitchen sink, has been included. There's not one iota of extra information I can squeeze in. I'm hoping to have the book laid out in rough in a day or two and I'm working on a cover that I'll hopefully have finished shortly.

A quick update on the totals. I've finished 23 essays (although a couple of them are waiting on some minor information before I sign off of them) bringing the currant wordage to... 100,300! I was hoping that the final book – the Fifty Forgotten Authors collection – would be around 150,000 words, but I'm now wondering whether I'll even be finished at 200,000. That'll teach me to include the kitchen sink every time.

The current essay I'm working on is likely to be another long one, but I'm hoping to have some shorter ones to work on after that. I might do a volume which is made up of much shorter pieces where, perhaps, there isn't much information. It might give me a chance to breeze through some essays that don't utterly consume my every waking hour for two weeks.

What else has happened this week? I broke one of my hard drives by dropping it on the floor. Thankfully, it wasn't one of the drives I use to back up my computer. This was one I used to transfer files around the house and, stupidly, I was holding it by the USB cable as I walked through the kitchen when the cable and drive parted company. Although it only fell about three feet, it was onto hard floor, not carpet. A few more steps and it might have survived.

The new drive arrived on Thursday afternoon and I'm still copying odds and ends over to it.

Sadly, that really is all that's happened this week. A broken hard drive. I remember the old days when I used to do interesting things...

Random scans this week are a few SF novels (and a lovely space reference book) I've picked up recently that don't fit into any other gallery.

Comic Cuts - 19 September 2014

Anyone following the progress of the latest book from Bear Alley will be pleased to hear that the release date should only be a matter of weeks. I finished the layouts on Tuesday and I'm now waiting on a proof copy. There's an approval process that I need to go through with the copyright holders but they've been very receptive so far and I'm not expecting any problems.

The final book is 140 pages, with a couple of introductions, one relating to the creators of the strip and a second about gladiatorial combat past, present and future. The latter is a little self-indulgent, and at over 4,400 words a lot longer than I'd planned, but as I'd already had to set the price when we were negotiating the license, it hasn't made any difference to the cover price and the book won't cost you a penny more just because I've added half a dozen more pages.

Within the next couple of weeks I should be able to confirm the release date and will have everything set up to take payments over on the Bear Alley Books site.

I have a couple of ideas for what to do next; hopefully another strip collection. But as I haven't even started the negotiations yet, I'd better not jinx the notion by talking about it too early.

I'm in a weird state of post-book euphoria. While I'm waiting on the proof, and before I get cracking on the next book, I want to nudge a couple of other projects along. One is to rewrite the Harry Bensley/Man in the Iron Mask material that I published on Bear Alley a few weeks ago and put out an e-book. I have a little additional information on his travels, more on his marriages and have discovered a previously unmentioned child.

I also want to revisit another old rogue that I've written about in the past. I spent Wednesday ferreting around the pages of newspapers from between the wars and turned up a lot of new and interesting information. I've also nailed down details of his birth and discovered the curious story of his father.

And I'm now going to be a rotten sod and not say his name. I don't want to give away all the surprises.

Let's talk about something else. Weight watchers will be pleased to hear that I haven't put on any weight or pissed off (on my behalf) to hear that I haven't lost any weight. I'm stuck on 101 kilos and have been for two months. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've been working on the new book for precisely that period. Although I haven't missed any of my walks and only missed a handful of rides on the exercise bike, I haven't really done much else. So while I've found the level of exercise that will keep my weight steady, I need to push it that extra mile, or an extra ten minutes, if I'm to burn off a few calories.

Tomato season is almost  over. For a pair of non-gardeners with the black, twisted fingers of death rather than green fingers, Mel and I have done pretty well with our pair of tomato plants. We've had over 200 tomatoes – had some with out macaroni cheese last night! – but we're thinking that next weekend we'll pluck off any remaining fruits and just leave them on the window sill. If they ripen, great. If not, we can fry them, right?

Our random scans this week are a couple of SF Masterworks titles that I've picked up recently. I can't believe I sold off a load of these many years ago. It really is an astonishing series containing an amazing line-up of novels. If you ever needed to recommend any science fiction titles to anyone, you could do a lot worse than saying "Just pick up any title with the SF Masterworks brand and you'll be holding a classic."

Perhaps Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed wouldn't be the best place to start for anyone coming to SF new. Politics and sociology aren't what people expect of science fiction and a novel like The Dispossessed can be a bit of a struggle for the novice. I like the fact that the SF Masterworks series began with The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson and Cities in Flight by James Blish, which are all good starter novels if you want to get into SF.

Samuel R. Delany's books had some of the best covers around when I was buying paperbacks in the 1970s. Some fabulous work by Chris Foss, Peter Elson, Angus McKie and Tony Roberts – I'm going by memory, so forgive me if I'm wrong. My original copy of Nova has a couple of spaceships in an asteroid field with a distant sun and a lot lens flare. The book has been gone for twenty years but I can still see it. [In fact, I found a scan online – very poor but I've included it above so you can see what I'm talking about.]]

The last of our quartet is a bit of an oddity. I have recently picked up a couple of novels by Neal Asher, but have yet to actually read one. The Engineer is an early collection published by a little Leicester outfit, Tanjen Ltd. I'd never heard of them until I picked up this book. They seem to have been a publisher of horror novels, collections and anthologies, active around the late 1990s/early 2000s. They published Asher's first novel, The Parasite in 1996.

Coming shortly: I have another excellent historical piece by Robert Kirkpatrick about penny dreadful publisher Henry Lea, which I will be running soon. I might – might – take a few days off to catch up with various tasks that need doing (back-ups, e-mail, etc.) and to get my Iron Mask e-book written. These things don't write themselves, you know!

Comic Cuts - 16 November 2012

Click here to order now

and save yourself 10% off the cover price

I'm pleased to announce that the fourth and final Sexton Blake Annual will be going on sale at the end of November. It has been a long, hard haul to get these back into print but we've finally done it.

The fourth, 1942, annual contains ten stories and a handful of features, including three 'solve them yourself' stories. The ten tales include stories by Donald Stuart (better known to the collecting world as Gerald Verner), Gwyn Evans, George H. Teed, John Hunter, Anthony Parsons, Walter Sayer and Rex Hardinge. That's a darn fine line-up, as any Blake fan will tell you. John Hunter's yarn features Captain Dack, who also appeared in the 1941 annual. Rex Hardinge's story is headlined "from wild Africa to wilder England"!

As always (because I'm nice!) I'm offering a bit of a discount off the cover price for people who order the book ahead of publication, so you'll save yourself 10% by ordering now.

Bear Alley passed a minor milestone last Sunday when we clocked up our one millionth page view. I say "minor" milestone because this was only on the Google/Blogger stat counter, which started counting in July 2008. I've had a counter running since some time in 2007 and that tells me the site has already notched up over 1 1/2 million views. The site was actually launched in August 2006, so the figure is actually higher than that. But what the heck, a million has got to be worth celebrating however wildly inaccurate it is, yes?

OK, OK... it's not worth celebrating then.

I spent most of the week working on Lion King of Picture Story Papers which is chugging along nicely. The Introduction is finished (subject to tinkering) and clocks in at 19,000 words. I'm working on layouts and gathering information on annuals and summer specials. I still need some information on the latter, although my call for aid last week resulted in offers to fill many of the gaps. I'm still short of information on the Lion Book of How It Works, possibly the Lion Holiday Special 1972 and definitely some info. from the Lion and Valiant Special Extra 1970. If I can get information from these, I'll include them all in the book.

Random scans. Working on the Lion book hasn't left me much time and the only cover scans I cleaned up over the weekend are for a cover gallery I'm planning for the future. I generally have three or four galleries underway, usually waiting to reach a tipping point where I think I have enough to be representative, or – and this is the more likely of the two scenarios – I have nothing else to post (a bit like now!). So here are a few images from cover galleries of the future, plus the latest edition of Gateway which I picked up last weekend to add to the Hugo Award Winners gallery for the 1970s. If you follow this link and scroll down to 1978, you can see what the Boris Vallejo cover looked like before they drained the colour out of the cover image.

Next week sees the conclusion of 'Ben Hur'. I hope you've enjoyed the strip. I have another one planned for December; it's the return of an old favourite... Paul Temple. Should be starting in a couple of weeks time. In the meantime, I'll see what else I can find to entertain you with.

(* photo of Tard is from the Tard the Grumpy Cat tumblr.)

Comic Cuts - 27 January 2012

I'm pleased to announce that the second proof of Pages from History arrived during the week and I'm putting in a print order today. So those of you who have been kind enought to pre-order the book should get their copies before the official publication date of 6 February. For those of you who get paid in the last week of the month, there's still time to order a copy at the discount rate. I wanted to reward the people who have shown a huge amount of faith in Bear Alley Books... but I will have to knock the discount on the head after 3 February.

Some of you may have noticed a lack of updates to the little rolling news column that sits over to the left of this central column.  I'm not sure why, but there was a problem with it that meant that, whilst I could write new entries, they weren't saving. I've resolved this by loading up a new widget and deleting the old one. Simples. Keeping up to date with the news, not so simples... but I'll do my best.

I had to buy myself another external hard drive to cope with the scans I have been generating for Bear Alley Books and to back up the work I have been doing for Look and Learn. All things expand to fill the space available, as they say, but I seem to be filling up hard drives at a crazy rate. The new computer was double the size of the old one but I've somehow filled an extra 200GB. That leaves me with a workspace of around 50GB, which sounds a lot but the latest folder of work that arrived was 49GB, so I've had to break it down into smaller, more manageable folders. Hence the need to buy a brand spanking new 2TB drive. And at some time I'm going to have to replace another one because I'm paranoid about losing data unless I have it backed up onto two drives. Long time readers will remember I had a couple of catastrophic external hard drive failures back in February 2009 and my computer went into meltdown last summer, so I'm speaking from experience when I say "Back everything up!" Believe me, you don't want to go through what I've had to go through in the past.

Amazing to think that I now have vastly more computing power than NASA had when they sent a rocket to the moon.

I spotted this some weeks ago and have been meaning to share it with you. I love this kind of thing. It's addictive... but I'm going to give you the link anyway. Go take a look at Alex Cherney's other videos at Vimeo.

Our random scans this week are four from Scion from the early 1950s. These were all in pretty bad condition and you'll see that it wasn't always possible to fix them. But I've done the best I can. I love these old gangster covers... so anyone who wants to send me any scans, please do. Condition not important, but reasonably big so I've got something to work with.

 

 

 

Next week: more Paul Temple and hopefully in the correct order. D'oh!