Commando 5027-5030

Commando issues on sale 15 June 2017

Brand new Commando issues 5027-5030 are incoming, ready for all Commando fans to take home!

Size doesn’t matter in this Commando bundle, as our heroes range from the mighty John Littlejohn, a big Commando with an even bigger attitude, to weedy West Virginian combat medic Jimmy Hopper. But in Commando it’s about bravery, not bulk, and our heroes have it in stacks!

5027: A Game of Hostages
The third instalment of Lieutenant Tom Dell and his S.A.S. squad’s adventures doesn’t disappoint as our boys prove they are still just as adept at landing themselves in trouble as they are at shooting their way out of it. But when their Yankee friend, Major Jake Ryan, rescues a reluctant German scientist, he is quickly dashed away to a secret soviet bunker, used as a hostage to negotiate the release of the scientist, for whom the Russians have their own nefarious plans….
    All this is wrapped up in Ian Kennedy’s stunning pastel cover, in which we see soviet soldiers’ silhouettes shooting from the mist, an eerie fairground and Commando first, glowing in the background. Meanwhile, a departure from Muller’s stylistic interior artwork in ‘Hunt and Harass’ (Commando No 5015), Vila and Morhain’s character designs still match their previous iterations, but with their own flair, opting for a more classic Commando look.

Story: George Low
Art: Vila & Morhain
Cover: Ian Kennedy

5028: Rogue Commando
Powell’s massive Commando John Littlejohn domineers the pages of R. Fuente’s illustrations, filling panels from head to toe! There’s an especially thrilling scene, justly captured in Jamieson’s cover in which a Yugoslavian partisan clings to a snapped rope, hanging perilously over a ravine, while the mighty Littlejohn bridges the frayed ends with only his muscles.
    But big as he may be, Littlejohn also manages to find himself in trouble.  And hot-tempered, he was no stranger to a fight, be that with Italians, Nazis, the Yugoslavians he’s trying to help or even his fellow Commandos…

Story: Powell
Art: R. Fuente
Cover: Jamieson
Originally Commando No 349 (August 1968)

5029: Hopper’s War
Jimmy Hopper’s cousin Rick always bullied him. Jimmy was an average kid, he never made the effort. But Rick was different, he joined the army the day he turned eighteen, never shying away from anything, so maybe he was right to judge him. But when Jimmy was drafted in 1968, he wasn’t ready to fight. He wasn’t happy with killing. That was when he decided to become a medic – saving lives instead of taking them. But when Rick is reunited with Jimmy amidst the violence of Vietnam, he sees him as only a coward, the bad blood still running between them…
    Using this unusual perspective for a Commando issue, Janek’s cover, while dramatic, with windswept jungle, a smoking flare and medics hurriedly loading a wounded soldier onto the helicopter, attention is instantly drawn to the medical red cross, a stand out theme in the issue.
    Also, like his work in ‘A Game of Hostages’, Morhain’s thick black lines take inspiration from Commando artists from the Golden era of pocket libraries, giving Commando its instantly recognisable artwork. But adding his own style, his illustrations use of white space during lulls in the fighting works as an excellent contrast to the use of dark, heavy blacks during the action, perfectly encapsulating the confusion and horror of battle.

Story: Ferg Handley
Art: Morhain
Cover: Janek Matysiak:

5030: Cold Sweat
Trust is the key theme in Costello’s Silver Age story from the 1990s. After Colin Copper falls off an icy slope and is left behind in a blizzard during the British retreat in Norway he is saved from death by a Norwegian villager. But, as the Nazis tighten their grip on Norway, Colin has to get out. Shown the way by the Norwegian’s son, Leif, Colin is soon captured by Nazis. Was is Leif? Has Colin been betrayed by the son of his saviour? Find out in this issue!
    With a setting like Norway, it’s easy to show flat barren snows capes, but Rigby simply does not allow this, dotting the panels with tall, thick pines and carefully shaded slopes. As a result, this dramatic setting is not lost in Phil Gascoine’s dark and moody cover, with Colin, caught in fear and surprise as two German soldiers take aim at him, framing the cover and barring all escape.

Story: Costello
Art: C. T. Rigby
Cover: Phil Gascoine
Originally Commando No 2613 (November 1992)

Rebellion Releases (2000AD)

Rebellion releases for 14–15 June 2017.

2000AD Prog 2035
Cover: Richard Elson
Judge Dredd: The Fields by Rob Williams (w) Chris Weston (a) Dylan Teague (c) Annie Parkhouse (l)
Brink: Skeleton Life by Dan Abnett (w) INJ Culbard (a) Simon Bowland (l)
Defoe: Diehards by Pat Mills (w) Colin MacNeil (a) Ellie De Ville (l)
Grey Area: Back in Black by Dan Abnett (w) Mark Harrison (a) Annie Parkhouse (l)
Hunted: Furies by Gordon Rennie (w) PJ Holden (a) Len O'Grady (c) Ellie De Ville (l)

The Complete Skizz by Alan Moore and Jim Baikie
Rebellion ISBN 978-1781-08542-4, 15 June 2017, 272pp, £19.99 / $25.00. Available from Amazon.
The ultimate illegal alien! Alan Moore's out of print classic returns in a brand new complete collection! When Interpreter Zhcchz of the Tau-Ceti Imperium crashed his ship into the small blue "Hellworld"-classed planet, the odds of surviving were stacked against him. Stranded in the polluted, hostile British city of Birmingham, Skizz is befriended by Roxy, a plucky young local girl. But danger is ever present - from bad food to Prime Minister Thatcher's hostile government alien-hunters, this E.T. may soon be R.I.P!

One-Eyed Jack by John Wagner, Gerry Finley-Day and John Cooper
Rebellion ISBN 978-1781-08572-1, 15 June 2017, 156pp, £14.99. Available from Amazon.
John Wagner's take-no-prisoners-cop and the forerunner to Judge Dredd is collected for the very first time! Part Dirty Harry, part Judge Dredd, all badass! Police Detective Jack McBane is the toughest, meanest law enforcer in 1970's New York City. Having lost his left eye in the line of duty, McBane will stop at nothing to rid the crime-infested streets of scumbags and villains - even if it means having to occasionally break the rules! This is the first collection from Rebellion's dedicated Treasury of British Comics line, collecting lost comics from the golden age of British comics.

Lawless: Welcome to Badrock by Dan Abnett and Phil Winslade
Rebellion ISBN 978-1781-08543-1, 15 June 2017, 179pp, £14.99 / $20.00. Available from Amazon.
The first collection of 2000 AD's latest breakout success set in the Judge Dredd universe, with an incredible new female Judge. The backwater planet of 43 Rega has spent five years recovering from an invasion of aliens known as the Zhind. isolated and a hotbed for trouble makers, Badrock is an colony township desperate for a strong law enforcer to take charge. Enter Colonial. Marshal Meta Lawson. Tough, surly and determined, Lawson seems to be ideal for the role. But is this law-woman exactly who she claims to be?

One-Eyed Jack

(* To celebrate the release of One-Eyed Jack by Rebellion, I'm happy to present the following abridged extract from my upcoming Valiant index; the text will almost certainly be revised between now and publication, but this will give you a taste of the book.)

But it was the third strip that readers really responded to. One-Eyed Jack was a police officer the likes of which had never been seen in British comics, where readers were more likely to be offered ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ or stories in a “spot the clue” format—‘Brett Marlowe, Detective’ (Lion) or ‘Can You Catch a Crook?’ (Eagle, Swift), for example. The only American cop in British comics at that time was Zip Nolan, a motorcycle officer with the Highway Patrol who had been appearing on and off in the pages of Valiant since it merged with Lion in 1974. In fact, Nolan was one of the characters dropped to make way for newcomer Jack McBane, although he reappeared, albeit briefly, a month later.

Jackson Delaware McBane (to give him his full name) was a no-nonsense cop with the 94th Precinct who has played by the rulebook his whole career until he and his partner, Willy Novak, answer an emergency call about an armed robbery. A shot creases Jack’s face and he loses an eye. Now wearing an eye patch, he storms into the office of Lieutenant Carelli at the 94th and angrily confronts his boss after reading that the kid responsible has been acquitted. “Someone got to the jury,” growls Carelli. “The punk must have friends.”

McBane attacks the boy in a pool hall and learns that Tony Valenti was responsible for buying the jury. The mobster springs a trap for McBane in a warehouse, but McBane kills him without mercy.

McBane sums up the credo of the strip in the final frame of the first episode: “I was a good cop. I played it by the book for ten years, but not any more. As long as there are scum like Tony Valenti about, there’ll be a place for one-eyed Jack.”

The strip was contemporary—the very first caption read “New York, December 1975”—violent and fast moving. It couldn’t be anything else if it was to fit a story with a beginning, a middle and an end into three or four pages. Of the 38 McBane stories in Valiant, 33 were complete stories and the longest serial ran to three episodes. This didn’t leave any space for characters to be developed, so making McBane a single-minded, justice seeking missile side-stepped the problem of also trying to make him human, or even likeable.

John Wagner would later say he was inspired by “every American cop show I’d ever seen, but Dirty Harry was the main one.” The look was also based on Hollywood’s depiction of New York. John Cooper had never been to America but had watched “millions” of American films. “That’s where I got most of the look from. The film Bullitt with Steve McQueen – he had a Mustang. I based his car more or less on that, something similar.”

Despite his lack of first hand experience, Cooper was called upon to depict real life locations, from Manhattan apartments and Central Park to Hell’s Kitchen’s back alleys and the docklands along the East River. The 94th is a real NYPD precinct, based at Greenpoint, Brooklyn. How true to life Cooper made any of these was immaterial to Valiant’s readers, whose own experiences of New York were almost certainly limited to the same movies Cooper was watching.

The attraction wasn’t the realism but the frenetic and violent action. In his second outing, McBane connects the deaths of a seemingly random pair of people killed by a sniper to the trial of an ex-Vietnam Marine Corps. marksman, Charles Edward Vosper. By using another witness as bait, McBane draws out Vosper and kills him. “You call it murder, friend… I call it justice,” he tells a shocked civilian.

Murder was not always McBane’s end game: when he lures the leader of a Brooklyn bike gang into an ambush, he begins beating him ruthlessly but Novak warns him: “Easy, Jack. We want him in one piece for the trial.” “Yeah… you’re right, Novak,” replies Jack. “No sense soiling my hands. Book him!”

The stories were written by John Wagner, M. Scott Goodall, Gerry Finley-Day and possibly others. Some of the most notable stories included the tale in which McBane was framed for the death of informant “Gimpy” Kowalski; McBane tracks down the real killer, Manny Zeigler, but his plan to rattle him to get a confession backfires when Zeigler dies and he is found kneeling over the dead killer’s body by a patrolman.

The Jigsaw Killer was a 2-parter which began with the discovery of a body in a classy Manhattan apartment, the only clue a jigsaw piece. Over the next two days, two more bodies are found with jigsaw pieces which begin to build into a picture of a face.

Other stories involved bombing campaigns in Chinatown as part of a protection racket and in Madison Square and Broadway by a bomber demanding a ransom of one million dollars; bank, jewellery and security van heists; McBane takes down crooked financiers, plane hijackers, corrupt labour unions and a gang of enforcers who call themselves the Donald Duck Wrecking Company.

One of the most intense stories was the final serial to appear in Valiant before it merged with Battle. It begins with a robbery at a fur warehouse, McBane nad Novak arriving just in time to be rammed out off the road by the robbers’ truck. McBane shoots one of the crooks and when his mask is removed it reveals Nicky Cantrell… his nephew!

The measure of the strip's success was that it had started as the third of three new strips, tucked away in the back of the paper. Two months later, when Valiant was again being promoted through a toy bargains collecting scheme and adding another new strip, ‘One-Eyed Jack’ moved to pole position and remained as the paper’s lead story for the next eight months. “Jack was an instant hit,” recalls John Wagner. “The first week he appeared he leapt to the top of the readers’ poll, scoring twice as many votes as the previous regular top story, ‘Captain Hurricane’. It was a position he never lost in my few remaining months as Valiant editor."

Comic Cuts - 9 June 2017

If like me you're fed up with the election, I'll try to keep this column politics-free. I don't have a clue how the voting went, as I'm writing this Thursday morning, long before the polling stations close. We have a ritual for days like these which involves heading out to vote and then rewarding ourselves with fish & chips. We have two very good fish & chip shops here in Wivenhoe, one of which has won national awards. Of course, we use the other one because it's closer, but the service is friendly and the portions are generous. What more could you want?

I managed to put in an enjoyable couple of days on the Valiant index, adding another 1,500 words to the introduction (now standing at roughly 39,000 words) about the tail-end of the original run of 'The Steel Claw'. This was the era that I first read Valiant, so I remember some of the stories very fondly, although now that I've got some distance from that early excitement I must admit that some of the situations Louis Crandell found himself in were daft in the extreme. (See below... this is the first episode I read when I found a copy of Valiant (8 Feb 1969) belonging to the older brother of a schoolfriend I was visiting. I started buying Valiant in late November or early December 1969, when I was 7.)

It's one of the reasons why, when asked what my favourite strip was from my childhood, I shouldn't really say 'The Steel Claw'. What I actually mean is 'The Return of the Claw' which took the character back to basics; the suited superhero who could punch through walls and gasped "Great dynamos!" every five minutes was dumped in favour of a miserable, haunted Louis Crandell facing dangers he had no desire to face. The new strip was drawn by Jesus Blasco... and this was the first time I was seeing his version of the character as, back in 1969-70, Carlos Cruz was the regular Claw artist.

The Claw departed again in 1973, but in 1975 Vulcan began reprinting all the early adventures drawn by Blasco. For the first time I discovered how Crandell joined the Shadow Squad. The stories were so brilliant that, aged 13, I "novelised" one of them, the neatly hand-written story taking up thirty or forty pages of a large notebook. Sadly, the notebook was thrown out when I moved out of the family home and into a shared flat.

I rather wish I'd kept it. For someone who can't throw anything away ("just in case"), I was surprisingly unsentimental about personal stuff. Very little has survived from that era apart from a couple of school projects - one on trees and one on Winston Churchill. The one I wish I still had was the project I did on a science fiction magazine called Outlands, but it was handed in for marking and I never saw it again.

It was a project that ran away from me... I was heavily into science fiction and had just discovered Mike Ashley's History of the Science Fiction Magazine in paperback. (I was aware of some of the history as I was a reader of Science Fiction Monthly, whose posters adorned my walls when I was a kid, and Mike had written a series for that mag. on the subject.) To cut a long story short, I decided to write about British SF magazines, started researching the subject (which involved a couple of trips to Dagenham where the British SF Association had their library) and the more I read, the narrower the focus became. So from "all" SF magazines it became "early" (1930s to 1950s) and then, eventually, it boiled right down to one magazine that had one issue in 1946.

Forty years later I still let projects get away from me. The Valiant index is just the latest of a long line!

Random scans today for some reason on the subject of change...

Rebellion Releases (2000AD)

Rebellion releases for 7 June 2017.

2000AD Prog 2034
Cover: Brendan McCarthy
Judge Dredd: Hoverods by TC Eglington (w) Brendan McCarthy (a) Dom Reagan/McCarthy (c) Annie Parkhouse (l)
Defoe: Diehards by Pat Mills (w) Colin MacNeil (a) Ellie De Ville (l)
Brink: Skeleton Life by Dan Abnett (w) INJ Culbard (a) Simon Bowland (l)
Scarlet Traces: Cold War - Book 2 by Ian Edginton (w) D'Israeli (a) Annie Parkhouse (l)
Cursed: The Fall of Deadworld by Kek-W (w) Dave Kendall (a) Annie Parkhouse (l)

Upcoming releases

Comic Book Hero: Working with Britain's picture strip legends by Barry Tomlinson.
Pitch Publishing 978-1785-31324-0, 1 September 2017, 224pp, £14.99. Pre-order from Amazon.
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s, children's comics were a massive part of a young person's life. Comic Book Hero tells the inside story of how Barrie Tomlinson built up a successful boys' publishing group at IPC Magazines - now the stuff of legend among nostalgic and modern-day fans of the UK comic scene and its surrounding culture. Barrie started on Tiger comic as a subeditor, went on to be editor and eventually became head of the Boys' Sport and Adventure Department, in which capacity he launched Roy of the Rovers comic, the new Eagle, Scream, Speed, Wildcat, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and Toxic Crusaders. The book tells about the Geoff Boycott, Big Daddy and Suzie Dando annuals he produced, and the 22 years spent writing the Scorer picture-strip for the Daily Mirror. Barrie also reveals dealings with the top stars as they joined Tiger, to make the title one of the most famous comics in Britain.

Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! 2000 AD & Judge Dredd: The Secret History by Pat Mills.
Millsverse, 6 June 2017. Available on Kindle from Amazon.

Extract from a recent interview with Pat Mills:

As much as I love the documentary Future Shock, I found myself watching back and wondering “Why am I the only one to be saying these slightly edgy things” and considering that, I decided Fuck it I’m going to write this book and bring it all out anyway...
    I read somewhere, some fan was saying, Dredd was inspired by Clint Eastwood, well, if only it were that bloody simple! The whole process of creating characters is long, painful and in the British comic book industry, financially – it’s a nightmare and so I think that needed correcting as well.
Now whether that’s something that people want to read about or know, I’m not sure, I mean…for example all my favourite authors, when I was reading them, in my teens and twenties and thirties, perhaps to my shame, I had no interest in who they were, or what they did, or how they came up with stories. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller for example, I was never curious about it, I thought “Hey it’s a great book” but I think I’m in a minority there.
    So it’s all those reasons [why the book was written], to really get under the bonnet of what 2000AD is about.

Hook Jaw by Pat Mills, Ken Armstrong & Ramon Sola.
Titan Books ISBN 978-1782-76804-3, 12 September 2017, 136pp, £20.00 / $34.99. Pre-order from Amazon.

Hook Jaw - the comic so controversial, it got banned! Pat Mills and Ramon Sola's classic 70s 'sharksploitation' strip is collected in one volume by Titan Comics, featuring the great white shark that targets the corrupt and greedy!
Titan Books are following up their Hook Jaw mini-series revival by Si Spurier & Conor Boyle with a reprint of the original strip from the pages of Action. The strip has been a popular choice for revival over the years: in 2007, Spitfire Comics reprinted the bulk of the original Action strip from the period before it was pulled from the newsstands. The Spitfire Comics book went to a second edition in 2009—although both editions were short print runs.
     The new Titan edition, at 136 pages in hardback compared to Spitfire's 96-page softcover, will presumably reprint more of the story as it appeared in the revived Action and, one hopes, some introductory material. The cover credit to writers Pat Mills and Ken Armstrong and artist Ramon Sola, seems to ignore the work of the strip's other artists, as did the Spitfire edition. 

Dan Dare: Mission of the Earthmen by Eric Eden, Don Harley & Bruce Cornwell.
Titan Books ISBN 978-1785-86289-2, 24 October 2017, 160pp. Pre-order from Amazon.
Whilst on a mission to explore a distant galaxy, Dan and Dibgy set out in a scout ship and are forced to crash land on the planet Zyl by a race of scientifically advanced beings called the Zylans. They are currently at war with the inhabitants of the planet Vort, a war-like, barbarian race and need warriors to help them defeat their enemies. Their choice of Dare and Digby brings a most unexpected conclusion to their plans of planter domination.
    Picking up from the earlier titles from Titan, this volume contains "Mission of the Earthmen" and "The Solid Space Mystery".

Henry Sutton cover gallery

NOVELS

Gorleston (Sceptre, 1995)
Sceptre 0340-64987-9, (Jun) 1996, 246pp.

Bank Holiday Monday
Sceptre 0340-64989-5, (Mar) 1997, 245pp.

The Househunter
Sceptre 0340-71731-9, (Jan) 1999, 240pp.

Flying
Sceptre 0340-71733-2, (Jan) 2001, 240pp.

Kids' Stuff
Serpent's Tail 1852-42837-6, (Nov) 2003, 256pp.

Thong Nation
Serpent's Tail 978-1852-42894-5, (Jun) 2005, 224pp.

Get Me Out of Here (Harvill Secker, 2010)
Vintage 978-0088-53562-1, (Mar) 2011, £7.99.

My Criminal World (Harvill Secker, 2013)
Vintage 978-0099-57856-7, (Apr) 2014, 279pp, £8.99. Cover by Geoff Grandfield

NOVELS AS JAMES HENRY

First Frost [co-written with James Garbutt] (2011)
Corgi Books 978-0552-16176-3, 2011, 460pp, £6.99. Cover photos by Ilona Wellman / Yolande de Kort; design by Claire Ward

NOVELS AS HARRY BRETT

Time To Win (Little Brown, Apr 2017)
X

NON-FICTION

UAE MA Creative Writing Anthologies 2015: Prose Fiction, edited with  Jean McNeil.
Egg Box Publishing 978-0993-29621-5, (Nov) 2015, 176pp.

Walter Wyles (1925-2017)

Walter Wyles, whose illustrations graced women's magazines from the fifties to the seventies when they were selling up to three and a half million copies every week, and who was the first British illustrator to be commissioned to draw romantic illustrations by an American magazine (Redbook in 1964), died in April 2017. Known for his exceptional ability at drawing women, which meant that many authors asked that he should provide illustrations for their stories and novels, he worked as a book cover artist for Corgi, Fontana, Star and Bantam, amongst others. While the bulk of his work appeared on novels by the likes of Claire Lorrimer and Catherine Marchant, Wyles also produced covers for Beasts of Gor by John Norman and Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock.

Walter Wyles was born in Canterbury, Kent in 1925, the son of Walter HenryWyles, a solder in the British Army, and Francesca Calvente, from Malaga, southern Spain. In childhood he suffered from poliomyelitis, which left him with a permanent pronounced limp.

Thanks to a recommendation from a primary school teacher, he began attending the Sidney Cooper Art School in Canterbury on a part-time basis; in 1939, at the age of 14, he was awarded a full scholarship but attended for only four months. When World War II broke out, he first began training as a book binder before becoming a junior draughtsman, working for two aircraft manufacturing companies between 1940 and 1942. He then worked for a display company in the West End of London whilst also serving as a part-time Air Raid Warden on the roof of the building where he was employed.

During this period he attended art classes in his spare time at a school off Fleet Street and began working for War Artists and at Cavendish Studios, producing large paintings of battles. After the war he began freelancing fashion illustrations for various trade magazines, including Tailor & Cutter, Man & His Clothes and The Draper's Record.

In the 1950s he began freelancing illustrations to Woman where he was encouraged by editors Mary Grieve and George Watts to experiment with his art, producing detailed oil paintings for historical subjects and more painterly watercolours for more contemporary images. A brief biography at the Lever Gallery says of Wyles' work:

Encouraged by increasingly radical art directors, Wyles’ style continued to develop and push boundaries.  During the 1960s, Wyles’ work evolved from standard realism to a style more reflective of other influences notably American illustrators who incorporated more high contrast colours, Japanese woodcuts, Old Masters (Series done for Woman in 1961) and science fiction.
   Partly as a result of his early experience as a technical fashion illustrator, Wyles was known for exceptional portraits of women. These portraits show an artistic sensibility and fascination with the human form that captures a mood well beyond technical drawing.  For his book cover portraits, Wyles was known for using “real women” rather than fashion models. While this often suited clients, as professional models were expensive to hire, for Wyles this was a creative preference for life drawing over working from photographs.

His work appeared in all the major women's weekly and monthly magazines as well, weathering the downturn in the fortunes of these magazines as they began losing advertising revenue to television and photographs became a cheaper option to painted illustrations. In the early 1980s, Wyles suffered a series of heart attacks which led him to reduce his work commitments. Wyles began representing himself when he and other artists discovered that they had been swindled by their agent and had to take the agent to court to recover payments due.

In later years he continued to paint and took on portrait commissions which he painted in a purpose-built studio at his Canterbury home.

Wyles is survived by his wife Margaret (nee Jarrold), whom he met when she was a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. They married in 1954 and had two sons, Nick and Glyn.

(* Much of the information above was derived from Bryn Havord's article on Wyles in Illustrators #6, Winter 2013. Further examples of Wyles' work can be seen at this Flickr gallery.)

Comic Cuts - 2 June 2017

I have been concentrating on earning a little money too keep the roof over my head for the past week, so I have little to report by way of news on the Valiant index. In fact, it has been a fairly quiet week one way or another.

We spent some time in the garden over the bank holiday, so the lawn (which is more moss than grass) looks acceptable and the pond is again free of weeds. We tend to let the weeds grow at this time of year because they offer the frogs some protection from local cats, although with the quality of cat we seem to have in the area, I'm not sure the frogs need worry. One neighbourhood cat will stalk them but grow bored after only a few minutes and give up, instead finding a spot on the lawn where she will settle down to snooze for much of the day. I've never known cats to spend so much time sleeping on open, unprotected ground.

We have a couple of tomato plants and one cucumber plant but it will be some time before they begin producing anything. We only have two tomato plants this year (one black cherry, one Marmande), unlike last year where we also had a hanging basket, so I imagine we'll see rather less than the 110 tomatoes we grew last year. Our best year was 2015 when we had a bumper crop of 350 tomatoes from four plants.

I photographed the plants when they arrived two weeks ago and they've shot up thanks to the perfect mix of rain and sun we've been having.

 

These were taken with Mel's old camera, as I spent a couple of weeks trying to find a replacement locally for my old, broken camera. Unfortunately, the only ones I could find that were better were far more expensive. I just need something cheap that will take reasonable pictures and that is small enough for me to carry around in my pocket... and that was exactly what I had with my old Sony Cybershot, which is so small that I often forget that I have it on me. And I like to have it on me because I see like to snap photos of odd things that I spot on our walks, like this bit of wood...

...who may or may not be Groot.

One good bit of news. Although we've had two increases in postage costs this year, I've managed to absorb them as far as Bear Alley Books is concerned, so postage costs have remained the same. Because this is a one-man operation, I don't have the economies of scale of a larger company with a high turnover. What that means in practical terms is that buying packaging material so that books arrive safely costs a hell of a lot more for me than it does for Amazon. The packaging I was using proved hugely expensive: each sheet cost £1.40 and it wasn't possible to fold the sheet so that the book was snug. That meant that it couldn't be sent large letter rate but had to be sent as a small parcel, which cost £2.90 2nd class. So p&p for the UK was costing me £4.39... and I'm only charging £3.99.

Recycling kept loses down to a reasonable level, but I was about to run out of the book wrap style packaging and faced with the prospect of a hefty bill. The good news is that I've found a supply of rigid cardboard envelopes of the kind Amazon uses which should reduce my costs considerably. Postage will still be horribly expensive, but at least I can freeze postage and packing prices until next April.

Random scans. All Digit books but with no specific theme... over the years I've gathered up multiple copies of some covers, especially if I have a reasonably good copy that has some minor damage which I can repair using Photoshop and a slightly lower quality scan that is otherwise undamaged. This is true of Teenage Jungle below, where the higher resolution scan had been damaged by a sticker being removed at some point. A second copy, resized, meant I could clone the latter and paint over the damaged area of the former. The results are certainly good enough for the size I run images here on Bear Alley.

The first image—or two images—below are different editions of the same book. Maybe the leggy version was considered too sexually explicit... or maybe the lady in bed was considered too demure... I've never been able to figure out which came first. The others reprint American covers from Avon (art by Gilbert Fullington), Ace (Paul Rader) and Gold Medal (James Meese) respectively.

 

 

 

 

(* The header photo is of the building works opposite West Quay. I feel sorry for all the folks who bought houses—very expensive houses—on the river with a gorgeous view across fields and woodlands, only to have the whole area redeveloped.)

Commando 5023-5026

Brand new Commando issues are hot off the press, full of classic Commando heroes and antics!

Covering the skies, both our Gold and Silver reprints tackle the air battles of World War 2, fighting above Europe and North Africa, as our heroes face not only the enemy, but the Allies too.  Meanwhile, ‘Justice Served’ and ‘The Castle’ are both set in the heart of Europe during the fall of the Nazis as different nations rally together for the final push.

But no matter the setting, there’s always plenty of action wherever our Commandos go!

5023: Justice Served

In this all new adventure, George Low’s Tommy hero is Corporal Mike Lowry, the only survivor of S.S. Lieutenant Hans Hueter’s machine gun massacre. Nursed back to health by a French farmer, Mike trains to be a Commando and, determined to avenge his squad, returns to France ready to serve justice to the Nazi brutes.
    Complementing Low’s story, Janek’s cover hails just that justice – a Spitfire firing at retreating German half-tracks and, as usual, Rezzonico’s artwork is marvellous, taking full advantage of the story by filling the frames with detailed backgrounds and careful shading to add depth.

Story: George Low
Art: Rezzonico
Cover: Janek Matysiak

5024: Glory Hunter

Ken Barr’s dark, dramatic cover prepares and excites the reader for the noir depictions of sky battles in Auraleon’s interior artwork, as the thick paint strokes of red, blending into the violet night sky, provide a perfect contrast against the thin, smooth lines of the Halifax and crashing Junkers Ju 88.
    In McOwan’s story, Sam Blake wanted nothing more than to join the R.A.F. – even crossing the Atlantic from Canada to sign up. But when he gets there, none of the other pilots care about his aviation experience over the pond. Then, when Blake unknowingly shoots down an Allied plane and no one believes him, he is booted from fighter squadron and put in a bomber. But little does Blake know that one of his C.O.s has uncovered this accidental friendly fire and he wants Blake to pay…

Story: McOwan
Art: Auraleon
Cover: Ken Barr
Originally Commando No 309 (January 1968) Reprinted No 1007 (February 1976)

5025: The Castle

David Alexander’s moody cover shows the eponymous castle shrouded in fog and forest, towering over the mountains in the distance. But is this stone beacon of light enough to protect the Allied prisoners within from a German assault?
    Find out in Ferg Handley’s action packed story about Olympic medallist Marco Conte, an Italian P.O.W. held by the Nazis in Castle Falcone. That is, until April, 1945, when The Third Reich was on its knees, and the Nazi guards abandoned the castle, leaving the prisoners at the mercy of the heartless Oberst Horst Metzner, who was fast approaching…
    As always, Jaume Forns’s interior artwork is charming in its depiction of the characters, notably the smarmy, rat-faced Metzer, yet is also unswerving in its attention to the various uniforms and insignias.

Story: Ferg Handley
Art: Jaume Forns
Cover: David Alexander:

5026: To Be a Pilot…

In the Second World War, many sons followed their fathers into battle, and Jan Solecik, K.P. MacKenzie’s Polish pilot protagonist, was no different. But when Jan’s father is gunned down by Nazis, Jan is even more eager to take to the skies, certain that’s where the war will be won.
    Known for his thick, dark lines, Gordon C. Livingstone’s artwork is instantly recognised as a Commando favourite, though for this issue he forgoes producing the cover art, leaving that to Commando veteran Ian Kennedy. A stunning cover, as expected, Kennedy’s cover depicts another fiery sky battle, this time between a Wellington and Fiat CR42, though with a less brooding sky.

Story: K. P. MacKenzie
Art: Gordon C. Livingstone
Cover: Ian Kennedy
Originally Commando No 2058 (January 1987) Reprinted No 3467 (October 2001)