Bear Alley: Comic Cuts - 3 January 2011

BEAR ALLEY BOOKS

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The Bill Kellaway Quartet by Gwyn Evans
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"The narrative is packed with action and I think readers will have a lot of fun with [Hercules, Esq.] and there are some genuine moments of laugh out loud humour. I can understand why the film rights for this book were snapped up and even today I could envisage it being a very enjoyable one-off TV series." — Cross Examining Crime.
"Although there’s some criminous stuff going on and Bill often finds himself vying against or working with various lawbreakers, the stakes are never really life and death in this book ... There is some slam-bang action, though, as well as a smart, really likable protagonist and a lot of really clever plot twists, but what really makes HERCULES ESQ. work is Evans’s style, which is consistently breezy, fast-paced, and funny." — James Reasoner, Rough Edges.

Friday, January 07, 2011

Comic Cuts - 3 January 2011

Hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and New Year. This is the first Comic Cuts column of 2011 and I don't really have an awful lot of news as I've spent most of the past few days catching up on various things after having a lively New Year and spent a couple of days relaxing to recover, catching up on some TV and wearing in some new socks and slippers--once you reach my age, the comfort of your feet suddenly becomes vitally important, especially if you work from home and wear slippers all day, every day.

I'm going to have to keep this short as I'm feeling knackered. It's late and I was planning to have an early night, only to get caught up in another bibliographical manhunt regarding an author called Bernard Home. I'll post the results tomorrow once I've wrangled the information into some sort of order. But that means that this column is being written with one drooping eye on the screen and the other on the little clock in the corner which is creeping inexorably towards one o'clock.

The reason for this is that we upped the number of entries I'm writing for the Look and Learn blog to four a day and I'm desperately trying to get ahead so that I can concentrate on a couple of longer articles. Individually they're not that taxing, but leaping from one subject to another and changing tack 15 times a day can be exhausting. I feel like a computer that's been running too long and programmes are starting to act up. I need to turn myself off and on again to reset everything back to the factory settings.

A couple of bits of news that have arrived in the (e-)mail: The recently launched Modern Language Association (MLA) Discussion Group on Comics and Graphic Narratives have launched their own blog, which will be of interest to anyone with an academic leaning towards the study of comics.

And Paul Gravett and Alex Fitch are helping to organize the Comics & Conflicts Conference to be held at the Imperial War Museum on 18 and 19 August 2011. Guests and speakers will include Pat Mills, Martin Barker, Roger Sabin, Garth Ennis, Jacques Tardi and Jean-Pierre Verney. Further details to be announced but you can see some preliminary information here.

Alex Fitch adds that his Panel Borders site is now back online.

Dez Skinn has updated his website again with some additional bits added to his Comic Conventions history and more about his time at Marvel UK. There are lots of links but if you've not read Dez's ongoing biographical meanderings of a life spent in comics and magazines, here's a good jumping in point.

I think I'll have to call it a night.

A couple of random scans today. Over the past couple of years I've compiled quite a few cover galleries relating to authors I like. One of the earliest was A. E. Van Vogt and I've added a number of scans over the past 30 or so months. Two more books came to light when I was emptying boxes just before Christmas and I managed to get them on the scanner this morning. If you've not seen the gallery: part 1 here, part 2 here. But it would be a shame if these weren't seen by a wider audience.