Tube Surfing: 13 June 2008

• We're pleased to report that our report by David Baillie on the recent No Barcodes event in Camden Market, organised by London Underground Comics is online. You can read it here.
Don't forget LUC are at Camden Market every Saturday.

• The Forbidden Planet International blog features the first part of a major interview with writer and mage, Alan Moore: a second part will follow sometime next week. Moore talks about reaction to The Lost Girls, his views on the changing face of comics (and the treatment of comics creators by publishers) and the upcoming League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century.

• Debate continues to rage about the new DFC comic in several quarters: on the downthetubes Ning forum (membership required to comment), discussion has just turned to the issue of bad language in the John Blake strip by Phillip Pullman...

• New British publisher Blank Slate, whose titles include Oliver East's Trains are Mint and Mawil's We can Still Be Friends has a new blog. They've kindly sent us copies of both books and we should have reviews up next week, along with more details about their publishing plans.

• Lew Stringer reports that while, traditionally, the publication time for Christmas annuals is late August / early September, in a canny move to cash in on this year's blockbuster movies, Panini UK have released two of their 2009 dated annuals early. Read his review on Blimey! It's Another Blog About Comics where he also writes about some rare advertising for the very first issue of Valiant comic back in the 1960s.

• Over on Bear Alley, Steve Holland has posted his review of The Best of Roy of the Rovers: The 1980s, now on sale (don't forget to enter our competition!). "The Best of Roy of the Rovers: The 1980s is a bit of a misnomer for a book that reprints a straight two-year run of stories," he writes. "Ironically, it is one of the strengths of the Roy of the Rovers strip that is proving to be a pain from a marketing point of view—the Roy strip was a soap-opera with a series of storylines that would dramatically (often very dramatically) reboot the strip.
"You cannot easily choose a random group of episodes as representative because overarching plots would sometimes take a whole season to unfold, come to fruition and reach some sort of resolution; the resolution could very well involve the demise of major characters in the best soap-opera tradition of, say, EastEnders. Unlike EastEnders, however (and, it must be said, American comics), dead characters were never brought back to life in desperate grabs for ratings or sales. Read the full review