Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Comic Clippings - 20 June

This is turning into a really bad week. Tuesday morning I did my back in (recurrent problem I've had since I was in my early twenties) and today, propped up in my chair with pillows, a filling dropped out. No connection between them, just a coincidence. Or can I expect to be run over or struck by lightning as I do my old man's shuffle down to the dentist tomorrow morning. Tomorrow is the longest day. Today just feels like it.

Thankfully it hasn't been all bad news today. The War Libraries book is on its way to the printers and we should have proofs next week. All being well, we will have finished copies in early August. And it looks like we will be giving Frank Bellamy's 'Robin Hood' strip an outing shortly as part of the deal between Look and Learn and ROK. It'll be the first time the strip has been seen since it was reprinted (in an abridged and bowdlerised form) in the mid-1960s. This will be the original Swift version which looks as fresh today as it did back in 1956.

* Titan are launching a new comic entitled DreamWorks Tales based on various characters from their animated movies -- Shrek, Madagascar, Shark Tales and Over the Hedge. The first issue goes on sale 21 June.

* Missed this from a while back: 'Back to the Future' by Neil Gaiman (The Times, 9 June), an abridged version of his introduction to the collection The Country of the Blind and Other Selected Stories published by Penguin Classics on 14 June. Gaiman's short story 'How to Talk to Girls at Parties' has just won the Locus Award (announced 16 June) and he was recently interviewed about the upcoming Stardust movie and various other projects at AICN (14 June).

4 comments:

  1. Reprints of Bellamy's Robin Hood are great news. But what's this about ROK? Are we only going to be able to read this on mobile phones?

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  2. Steve,

    I don't want to jump the gun but we're looking at a couple of options about reprinting the Bellamy Robin Hood strips in book form. I thought I'd mention the ROK version because it's a done deal -- all 134 pages are scanned and I'm sure John Freeman will announce when ROK have them ready for downloading. And I needed something positive to say about the day for reasons mentioned in the original post!

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  3. As a matter of interest Steve the strip was also reprinted in 'Story Land' during the mid 1980s by Leonard Matthews' Martspress.

    - Phil Rushton

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  4. Hi Phil,

    Thanks for that. I wasn't aware that it had been reprinted again... do you have any details? Story Land is one of many papers I've no checklist of contents for. Didn't it become Rupert (Bear) in Story Land or something like that?

    ReplyDelete

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