Tube Surfing : Country Surfing with Commando, Marvelman & Rainbow Orchid

Scotland: One of the latest batch of Commandos, issue 4329 Divided Aces, written by Scot Ferg Handley and illustrated by Argentinian Jose Maria Jorge, is set in and around Edinburgh and includes the familiar Forth Rail Bridge on its cover. Unsurprisingly this was picked up in the Scottish press with a long piece on Ferg and the story in the Edinburgh Evening News.

America: Back when we mentioned Marvelman Family's Finest issue 1, the first Marvel publication of Mick Anglo's Marvelman character, we suggested that it would be interesting to see the difference in the sales figures between issue 1 and further issues to see if readers expecting to read Warrior/Miracleman style stories would remain interested in the juvenile 1950s stories that the comic reprinted.

Comparing the sales figures for July and August on ICv2 shows a 48% reduction in sales for issue 2 when compared with issue 1. Now while ICv2's sales figures are for Diamond US and do not include Diamond UK and we would expect any given issue 1 to sell more than an issue 2, loosing almost half your readers is a big drop.

Holland: Rainbow Orchid writer and artist Garen Ewing reports that the first volume of the adventures of Julius Chancer will be released in Dutch by publisher Silvester Strips under the title De Regenboog Orchidee. There was some debate as to whether the main character would be renamed to Tom Tipps which apparently is easier for the Dutch to pronounce but it seems as if the publisher has decided to stick with Julius Chancer. Of course it could have been worse and they could have decided to call him PG Tipps. In the meantime over on his blog, Garen has started to show specially selected panels from the final book in The Rainbow Orchid trilogy which is due to be published in 2011.