Alias Colonel Blood part 14

(* © Mercury Features.)

Alias Colonel Blood part 13

(* © Mercury Features.)

Alias Colonel Blood part 12

(* © Mercury Features.)

Alias Colonel Blood part 11

(* © Mercury Features.)

Chuck Palahniuk cover gallery

Like many, I first noticed Chuck Palahniuk's name while I was watching David Fincher's movie version of Fight Club. It was a Wednesday afternoon in November 1999 and at our local Odeon that meant a ticket cost £2.20. I was often the only person in the cinema's Screen 2 and had my favourite seat, dead centre, four rows back. Just before the film started, someone else walked in and sat in the row behind me, looking over my shoulder.

The film blew me away. I loved it and turned to my near neighbour, who turned out to be a women possibly in her fifties and who had also sat through the credits at the end of the movie. "What did you think?" she asked. "Brilliant!" I said. She nodded.

I walked out of the Odeon, across town to Waterstones and bought the book. That Saturday, I bought Survivor and later picked up Palahniuk's other books as they came out for a few years. Work and a slowing-down of my reading pace has meant I've not picked up any of his books for a few years, but he's certainly an author I keep my eye out for.

Fight Club (1996)
Vintage 0099-76521-7, 1997, 208pp, £6.99. Cover photo by Kjell Ekhorn
Vintage 978-0099-55215-4, £5.99
Vintage 978-0099-76521-9 [27th imp.] c.2011, 218pp, £8.99. Design by Michael Salu

Survivor (1999)
Jonathan Cape 0224-06010-4, 1999. 289pp, £10.00. Cover photo by Jake Walters/Kjell Ekhorn
Vintage 978-0099-28264-8, £8.99

Invisible Monsters (1999)
Jonathan Cape
Vintage 978-0099-28544-1, 2000, 297pp, £8.99. Cover by Cannon and Skellett
---- [imp.] c.2003.

Choke (2001)
Jonathan Cape 0224-06190-9, 2001, 292pp, £10.00. Cover photo by Karin Taylor
Vintage 0099-42268-9, 2002
---- [5th imp.] 2003, 292pp, £6.99.
---- 978-0099-53525-6, £7.99

Lullaby (2002)
Jonathan Cape, 2002
Vintage 0099-43796-1, 2003, 260pp, £6.99. Cover photo by Salia Fatima/Photonica

Diary (2003)
Jonathan Cape 0224-06389-8, 2003, 260pp, £10.00.
Vintage 0099-45398-3, 2004, 260pp, £6.99.

Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003)
Vintage 978-0099-46467-9, £7.99

Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (2004; as Non-Fiction)
Jonathan Cape 0224-06302-2, 2004, 233pp, £10.99. Cover by David Foldvari

Haunted (2005)
Jonathan Cape 978-0224-07695-1, 2005, 404pp. [tpb]
Vintage 978-0099-45837-1, 2006, 412pp, £7.99. Cover by Stephen Parker

Rant (2007)
Vintage 978-0099-49936-7, 2008, 316pp, £8.99. Cover by Corbis

Snuff (2008)
Vintage 978-0099-49937-4, £7.99

Pygmy (2009)
Vintage 978-0099-52697-1, 2010, 241pp, £7.99. Cover by Rodrigo Corral
---- [4th imp.]

Tell-All (2010)
Vintage 978-0099-52698-8, 2011, 179pp, £7.99. Cover photo by Horace Bristol/Corbis

Damned (2011)
Vintage 978-0099-55259-8, 2012, 247pp, £7.99. Cover by Jen Munford

Invisible Monsters Remix (2012)
Vintage 978-0099-57505-4, £9.99.

Doomed (2013)
Vintage 978-0099-55263-5, 2014.

Beautiful You (2014)
Vintage 978-0099-58767-5, 2015, 221pp, £8.99. Cover by James Jones

Make Something Up Stories You Can't Unread (2015)
Jonathan Cape 978-0224-09908-0, 2015. [tpb]

Michael Ogden, R.N.

Lieut.-Commander Michael Ogden, R.N. was credited with a serialised feature in Ranger about the sinking of the Scharnhorst. The famous battle took place in December 1943 and was originally written up by Ogden for his 1962 book The Battle of North Cape (London, William Kimber, 1962). This was abridged as Destroy the Scharnhorst for Fleetway's Colourbacks paperback series in 1963.

Ogden was born on 5 April 1923 in Mombasa, Kenya, his full name being John Michael Hubert Ogden. He was the son of John Ogden, a shipping exporter, and his wife Louise (nee Clark). Ogden was educated privately and at schools in England, earning his school certificate from the Polytechnic, London, in 1939. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1941 and, at the end of the war, joined the ROyal Navy as an officer and pilot.

He retired in 1958, after 3,500 hours of flying time in British forces. He was the first air detail over Inchon beachhead in 1950 and flew support missions for U.S. Marines in the Korean War.

In 1958 he began freelance writing and contributed stories to Chamber's Journal,  Fighting Forces, the Sheffield Weekly Telegraph and other magazines. He was a lecturer in creative writing at South Dorset Technical College in 1960-63.

In the late 1960s, he became chief flying instructor of the Singapore Air Defence Command and was a freelance military aviation training advisor. 

He was married in 1946 to Peggy L. Allsopp and had two children; he married secondly to Ivy Doreen Naish and had a son. He lived at various times in Southsea and Walton-on-Thames. He died in 1994, aged 71.

PUBLICATIONS

No Calm in the Morning. London, William Kimber & Co., 1960.
The Battle of the North Cape. London, William Kimber & Co., 1962; abridged as Destroy the Scharnhorst, London, Fleetway Colourbacks, 1963.

Comic Cuts - 15 February 2013

The life of a freelance writer is a rather dull life if you're not, say, Neil Gaiman ... and I'm sure he also has weeks where he just has to get his head down and do some writing. So this week I have been concentrating solely on Ranger, trying to hustle the introduction into some sort of readable shape and wrestling with the index, adding details to some of the sparse entries that I've had listed for years.

To give you an idea of the mundane work that has to be done, I spent a good hunk of Wednesday listing 67 individually titled photo features that weren't otherwise covered in the index. And it was as exciting as it sounds, turning pages gently so as not to tear already tattered and fragile copies of the magazine, pausing on spreads and jotting down such titles as ''Master Fisherman at Work' or 'Ranger Takes You to the Motor Show', noting how they were illustrated, noting the date, then moving on to the next feature.

Well, someone's got to do it.

By the way, our column header is the cover I'm thinking of using on the book, based on the cover from the first issue.

Meanwhile, for those of you who have been introduced to Lesley Shane through the reprinting of one of her detective tales, I may have some good news. Some art pulls have come to light of a far higher quality than the strips currently being reproduced here on Bear Alley. Good enough for a possible Bear Alley Book. We shall just have to wait and see.

Random scans... this week we celebrate the appearance of 2012 DA14, the 50-metre-long asteroid currently racing towards Earth. It will arrive at its closest approach, missing us by some 27,500 kilometres (17,100 miles) – well within the orbit of the moon and inside the orbit of some TV satellites – at 7:26 this evening. As you might expect, meteors and asteroids have been a popular subject for causing devastation on Earth in science fiction novels for many years. Here's a selection...

Russian meteorite  - video posted this (Friday) morning

Next week: I have a couple of items lined up for the weekend, one of them a sketch of writer Michael Ogden. And we're back on the trail with Lesley Shane from Monday as Edward Yates tries to figure out how to get £1 million's worth of stolen jewels out of the country.

Alias Colonel Blood part 10

(* © Mercury Features.)

Commando 4575-4578

Commando releases on sale 14 February 2013.

Commando No 4575 – Drop Zone Danger

Loading supplies on to C47 Dakotas wasn’t the most glamorous job in the Far East. Hard work even for strong men and vitally important but hardly the stuff of death- defying adventures.
   So, as Private Seth Yarrow and his mates diligently got on with their back-breaking chores, they never once imagined that they’d end up alongside a unit of Chindits – fighting the Japanese deep in the heart of the Burmese jungle!

Story: Bill Styles
Art: Olivera
Cover: Janek Matysiak

Commando No 4576 – Voyage Of The Valkyrie

With six-inch guns, torpedo tubes and a Freidrichshafen-33 floatplane to hunt out targets for her, the German commerce raider Valkyrie was feared by British merchant crews in the South Atlantic in the early years of the First World War. So much so that the Royal Navy sent an M-Class destroyer to track her down, and destroy her.
   However it was another, much more unexpected, enemy that the Valkyrie’s crew had to fear…

Story: Alan Hebden
Art: Rezzonico
Cover: Ian Kennedy

Commando No 4577 – The Iron Man

Six words. Just six small words were all it took to turn the tough, loyal team that formed the crew of a fighting desert tank into a bunch of snarling, suspicious enemies.
   And those were the words Jack Baker, tank commander, heard from Military Intelligence only minutes before he was due to leave on a dangerous operation —
“THERE IS A TRAITOR AMONG YOU…”

Introduction

Early Commando stories can be pretty gritty at times – there’s an early scene here which pulls no punches – principally because the Second World War was in the very recent past and many of the comics’ creators had “done their bit.” This tale is no exception; there are details in the story which add an air of authenticity difficult to give a story nowadays because knowledge of these minutiae have been lost.
   So grab yourself a slice of the real stuff while you can.

Calum Laird, Editor

Story: Kellie
Art: Martin
Cover: Ken Barr
Originally Commando No78 (July 1963), re-issued as No547 (May 1971)

Commando No 4578 – Call To Battle

Sergeant Tim Sanderson had heard all about The Fighting Hawk from a dying relative. It was an old and priceless carving on an ebony staff, encrusted with fabulous jewels, used by an Arab tribe to call their brethren to battle. But that was in the distant past and he half-suspected that the whole thing was just a myth with no place in the savage desert clashes of nineteen-forty-two.
   Luckily he was better at fighting than seeing into the future…

Introduction

The arid wastes of the North African desert have provided Commando writers with seemingly endless story opportunities. Over the year, too, we’ve seen many a tale based on quests to rediscover ancient artefacts imbued with power, whether symbolic or mystical.
   In this case the prized object is a magnificent, jewel-encrusted staff used to by an Arab tribe to rally its warriors in an eponymous “Call To Battle.” But it is not just for them. The staff is something from an old, never-forgotten tale that also galvanises our everyman Commando hero, Sergeant Tim Sanderson, into action.

Scott Montgomery, Deputy Editor

Story: Ken Gentry
Art: Denis Mcloughlin
Cover: Jeff Bevan
Ooriginally Commando No 2229 (November 1988)

Alias Colonel Blood part 9

(* © Mercury Features.)

Alias Colonel Blood part 8

(* © Mercury Features.)

Alias Colonel Blood part 7

(* © Mercury Features.)

Alias Colonel Blood part 6

(* © Mercury Features.)

Edward de Roo

Edward de Roo has turned up on Bear Alley before, at which time I had a dig around and found out zero about him. I thought I'd have another stab at it and found a little; and this time I've also made an attempt to compile a list of his work.

Edward John De Roo was born in Rochester, New York, on 7 July 1922, the son of Isaac De Roo and his wife Hazel. Isaac was a first generation American, his parents having imigrated from Holland. Their son — and a daughter, Ruth, born a year later — were both born in New York. He was raised in Rochester and lived in New York most of his life following periods in Cleveland, New Haven, Colorado and Hollywood.

After obtaining his master's degree at the University of Denver, he studied at Yale University (1947-50) and received his Master of Fine Arts in June 1950, his thesis being a production and study of Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic and Old Lace. It was noted in a 1956 newspaper report that he "developed his interest in the stage as one of the organizers of the Quilting Club and president of the Stagers." (Rochester Review, November 1956) At that time, he was working as an instructor in radio and television production at the University of Southern California, where he also produced a TV show, Halls of Science, in cooperation with NBC. Five years earlier, he had worked for the American Telecasting Corporation, a TV training school in Hollywood, where he taught future directors, actors, cameramen and writers.

He also produced a radio series for the Ford Foundation which he narrated and directed. America: Fifty Years of Growth was distributed by the Educational Television Radio Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

He later worked as a Professor of Communications at Nassau Community College, where he taught many young men and women how to communicate. He died on  20 June 1988.

The Digit cover for The Big Rumble was a reprint of an unsigned Ace paperback, D for Delinquent by Bud Clifton (D-270) from 1959. The cover for Go, Man, Go! was from the Ace edition of the same book.

Novels
The Fires of Youth. New York, Ace Books (S-105), May 1955.
The Young Wolves. New York, Ace Books (D-343), Feb 1959.
Go, Man, Go!. New York, Ace Books (D-406), Dec 1959, London, Digit Books (R357), May 1960.
Rumble at the Housing Project. New York, Ace Books (D-417), Jan 1960; as The Big Rumble, London, Digit Books (R360), Jun 1960.
The Little Caesars. New York, Ace Books (D-486), Jan 1961.

Plays
The Armpit, 1967
Call Me Ethel, 1967
That's Where All the Money Is, 1970

Non-fiction
Recommendations for the teaching of a beginning course in playwriting for college students. Teachers College, 1969.

The original artwork for D for Delinquent was auctioned some years ago. The artwork was reused on the cover of the first (1997) edition of Teenage Confidential: An Illustrated History of the American Teen by Michael Barson and Steven Heller.

(My thanks for Deborah De Roo for additional information. This is a greatly-expanded version of a column originally published 28 January 2012.)