Tube Surfing: 26 January 2009

• (with thanks to Chris Wasshuber): Who created Lucky Luke? The cowboy, published by Dargaud and the creation of Morris, has been a beloved fictitious cowboy in Europe for the past 60 years bringing joy and entertainment to many readers and audiences. A recent discovery reported on Lybarary.com has unveiled a Lucky Luke cowboy created by an American, Arthur A. Dailey, at least as early as 1934. Mr. Dailey, in 1934, created and wrote a series of radio programs for boys and girls called "Lucky Luke" – a cowboy who had many adventures in the Old West. Were the radio shows syndicated to Europe and heard by Morris? The Lybrary article points out some interesting similarities...

• Neill Cameron has posted some stunning Doctor Who samples on his blog, hoping someone, somewhere on the Internet will see them and, I'd argue, have the good sense to commission him. Neill sent me the pages a while back and I offered a few suggestions based on my past experience as a former Doctor Who Magazine editor which I'm sure he didn't really need. Check them out here

• Sean Phillips has just posted a cover sketch for the Incognito project he's working on, written by Ed Brubaker. Sean's been publishing several art pages at various stages of development on his blog which will be of interest not only to his fans but artists, too.

• For just 99p you can hear Simon Guerrier's first episode of his new Doctor Who play, The Judgement of Isskar. The accompanying Prisoner's Dilemma is also out now, too.

• Over the last 18 months, 2000AD artist Colin Wilson has been working closely with Melbourne playwright Tom Taylor on a variety of comic projects, and the first of these to surface looks like being in Flinch, a new anthology title of Australian comic talent published by Gestalt Comics. "This lovely little book, with contributions from, amongst other, Chris Bones, Christian Read, Bobby.N, Justin Randall," he notes on his blog. The anthology features a cover by Shaun Tan, has recently surfaced on amazon.com, with a planned publication date of May."

• (via FPI Blog): At the end of the week rumours started circulating that Captain Britain & MI-13, written by Paul Cornell, has been cancelled. The good news is that those rumours were just rumours; Captain Britain & MI-13 is not cancelled, and according to the piece on Newsarama, Marvel assures everyone that it’s a healthy book.
Paul himself notes the collected edition of the first four issues of Captain Britain and MI-13: Secret Invasion, has already sold out and will shortly be going to a second printing. "It seems we're currently at number five in the UK graphic novel sales charts! " he comments. "I'm thoroughly chuffed."