Some quick news items...
• (via the
Dan Dare Yahoo Group)
A bust of Dan Dare is now sitting comfortably on a beautifully made plinth in a prominent position in the library of
Southport College (where his creator, Frank Hampson and other original Dare team members, studied) as an inspiration to future budding Hampsons, Harold Johns or Eric Edens.
Once the library has been refurbished next year there is an intention to bring together a collection of
Eagle-related material and have a special section set aside to display it.
• Paul Birch has posted
an entertaining review of the Death's Head Volume 2 collection on Speech Balloons, noting the history of Marvel UK as both a publisher of licensed comics and publisher of many US format comics during Paul Neary's tenure as Editorial Director. "How many of the countless Marvel UK superheroes pumped out during that time can anyone remember fondly?" he challenges. "Aside from
Death's Head II by Dan Abnett and Liam Sharp that is? Not many, I'm sure..."
Off the top of my head? Warheads, Digitek, Motormouth and Killpower, Hell's Angel (re-named Dark Angel after legal threats from the Hells Angels), Gene Dogs, Shadow Riders. Admittedly, I did edit some of those titles so my memory might be better than others. More important, perhaps, than the characters, was the sheer number of talented folk Paul and the MUK team nurtured between them, now widely known to the general comic audience: artists like Bryan Hitch who had worked for MUK for some time but was rightly given the limelight along with Liam Sharp, Gary Frank and many more.
• Let me join in with the widespread disappointment
at the BBC's decision to totally ignore readers of science fiction and fantasy on
World Book Night in its BBC2 show,
The Books We Really Read: a Culture Show Special (currently available
here on iPlayer)
. Over
on the Forbidden Planet International blog, Joe Gordon notes there was "outraged chatter on Twitter about this over the weekend" over the slight.
"The simple fact is that SF&F novels absolutely dominate the bestseller charts and have done for a couple of decades now," notes Joe. "Terry Pratchett, Peter F Hamilton, Iain M Banks and many more almost always go right into the top ten national bestselling hardback list when their new books come out. You can’t do that if you are just a small, easily ignorable niche market." Too right.
Joe reports that long time SF&F commentator (and bestselling author in his own right now)
Stephen Hunt (founder of ace SF web site
www.sfcrowsnest.com) has decided that instead of our usual moaning of the mainstream media’s dismissive and ignorant approach to our beloved genre that something should actually be done and the BBC made aware of how poor their decision was and how it meant they failed to serve the interest of a large percentage of viewers (who are the ones who fund the Corporation, after all). He has a fairly flaming response to the lack of coverage
on his blog already.
"As the hour went by, strangely absent from this detailed parade of what people actually like to read was “a certain” genre, you know… the unclean one, speculative fiction, as in fantasy/horror/science fiction… which together accounts for between 20/30 per cent of the fiction market, depending on what measure you choose to believe.
"I can forgive the committee of World Book Night itself, whose selection of 25 titles to give one millions free copies away was made by a board which clearly apes the views of the Booker panel – which is that fantasy, horror and sci-fi, much like hardcore porn, has no place in any respectable fiction list, but the BBC?" (Philip Pulman's Northern Lights was on the World Book Night list, but only, the BBC made clear, as an example of Young Adult-crossover – heaven forbid it should be an actual example of fantasy).
Outraged, Stephen has set up
a Facebook page as well as planning a petition of Brit SF&F authors to complain at the complete lack of coverage by the BBC.
So if, as individual viewers based in the UK, you want to complain to the BBC about failing to cover a single fantasy, horror or science fiction novel, the online form to do this is located at... https://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/forms/ ... the more complaints, the better! Don't forget to mention the snobby show that started all this.
Perhaps, if enough people write in, we'll get a decent SF show on TV - and no, I'm not talking about Outcasts, which made it clear it was more about the "human condition" than SF, and has rightly bombed in the ratings as a result of boring its audience to death...
