Graeme Neil Reid: Walking on the Moon

Here's the latest contribution to our marking of the 40th Anniversary of the first Moon Landing: "Walking on the Moon", a stunning piece of art by top Scottish illustrator and comics artist Graeme Neil Reid, whose credits include the Radio Times and is one of the contributors to Scotch Corner, a new combi-blog for Scottish artists.

Graeme is a freelance illustrator based in Edinburgh, Scotland, mostly known for comic work for various publishers including Image Comics and Caliber Comics. He's also worked in the advertising and marketing industry for over 15 years. Working with both traditional tools and computer software such as Photoshop, Painter and Illustrator, Graeme is probably best known for his strong ink line and computer colouring - but he's also happy to get his hands dirty with oil paints when needed!

His illustration will soon join our "Moon Landing 40th Anniversary: A Comics Celebration" - a gallery of illustrations and comic art inspired by space exploration - which includes art by Martin Baines, Nick Abadzis, Colin Howard, Mike Nicoll and others.

Further contributions are very welcome: if you don't want to join our forum and upload art but would like to join in with the celebrations, simply send your work to johnfreeman6-moonlandinganniversaryart@yahoo.co.uk.

Please ensure images are no larger than 2MB in size and include a brief bio and web link so we can give you deserved credit.

On today, the actual anniversary of the landing, our thanks to everyone who found time to contribute in their busy schedules so far!

• Read the latest news on the work of much-in-demand artist Graeme Neil Reid on his blog at www.gnreid.blogspot.com

Moon Landing: T Minus 0 Days - The Eagle Has Landed

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin boarded the Lunar Module, Eagle, and undocked from the Command Service Module, Columbia. Leaving Mike Collins alone in the CSM in lunar orbit, they descended towards the Moon's surface where Eagle safely touched down in the Sea of Tranquility at 8:17pm GMT.

Wilf Hardy's illustration from Look and Learn issue 907, dated 19 May 1979, shows the Lunar Module flying separately from the CSM as it descends towards the Moon's surface while this illustration from him shows the LM the moment before touchdown.

This is the cover for the LP recording of Journey To The Moon, a factual album from Gerry Anderson's Century 21 organisation which used the cast of Fireball XL5 to tell what was to them the historical event of the first moon landing. Today it makes for an interesting listen as its writer, Alan Fennell, has to put into the past tense events that were still in the future as far as its young listeners in 1965 were concerned. This album is better known from its rerelease in the 7 inch EP format by Century 21 records as the first of their "21 Minutes Of Adventure" mini albums and it has also been remastered recently onto CD by the Gerry Anderson club Fanderson. As such it has shrunk in size as recording technology has changed in the last four decades.

The final illustration is from Rockets and Spacecraft Book 1 and shows an early concept of how the Lander would have looked on the surface. As this book was published early in the Apollo program and as with the record sleeve above, it shows the then current design of a circular hatchway for the astronauts to exit the vehicle through, which was soon changed to a more rectangular design to allow the astronauts to get their backpacks through it more easily. Interestingly, the uncredited artist does not include a ladder for the astronauts to descend to the surface on...

Americans would have us believe that Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969 because they saw it happen in their late evening. However British television audiences saw it happen in the early hours of Monday 21 July 1969. Since NASA operates on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which to all intensive purposes is Greenwich Mean Time, they also consider that the first footsteps on the Moon took place on 21 July.

Yesterday – What Could Go Wrong
Tomorrow - First Footsteps

• Coinciding with Jeremy's countdown to the 40th Anniversary of the first Moon Landing, downthetubes is publishing "Moon Landing 40th Anniversary: A Comics Celebration" - a gallery of illustrations and comic art inspired by space exploration.
Contributions are very welcome: if you don't want to join our forum and upload art but would like to join in with the celebrations, simply send your work to johnfreeman6-moonlandinganniversaryart@yahoo.co.uk. Please ensure images are no larger than 2MB in size and include a brief bio and web link so we can give you deserved credit.

Nick Abadzis: Apollo Remembered

Here's a fab image from Nick Abadzis he's sent us for our Moon Landing Comics Celebration album.

Nick should need no introduction here: his comics and contributions to British comics are legendary, with strips featured in The Times and elsewhere.

"I did this portrait of the Apollo 11 crew for a strip that ran in a DK book," he says, "but then later tweaked it just for my own satisfaction."

Nick is of course no stranger to using space travel as a story theme. His superb graphic novel, Laika, a wonderful story inspired by the first dog in space, was released in 2007, and is highly recommended...

He's also written two Torchwood strips for Titan's official magazine, coming out next month and the month after, drawn by the excellent Paul Grist.

"Everything else I'm doing is long-term stuff," he reveals, "the follow-up to Laika for First Second, etc..." Whatever he's doing it will be worth the wait and we're delighted he found time to join in with our Moon Landing comics project.

• View Moon Landing 40th Anniversary: A Comics Celebration" - a gallery of illustrations and comic art inspired by space exploration.
Contributions are still very welcome: latest additions include an illustration by Chris Wood, who runs the British Horror Films website, and a humour strip by Paul Eldridge.

If you don't want to join our forum and upload art but would like to join in with the celebrations, simply send your work to johnfreeman6-moonlandinganniversaryart@yahoo.co.uk. Please ensure images are no larger than 2MB in size and include a brief bio and web link so we can give you deserved credit. Thanks!

Tube Surfing: Cursitor Doom, Nitro!, More Moon Stuff and Comics in Limbo...

• Bear Alley Books has just published the first inked and colour 'rough' for their upcoming Cursitor Doom collection. "I've put this together from a low-res scan e-mailed by artist John Ridgway, so this isn't the final version," says publisher Steve Holland, "But I probably won't change much. I was going to try and do something clever with the original logo but it's not something I ever particularly liked and I do like the elegant simplicity of the type."
You can now pre-order both Phantom Patrol (which features a cover by Chris Weston) and Cursitor Doom, due for relase in August, from the Bear Alley Books web site.

• UK publisher Future is to re-launch its UK boys 5-13 targeted Official Jetix Magazine as Nitro! in September. The first issue will feature kid-related news, toys, comic strips and features, covering characters from TV, movies and games. It's expected to have a 45,000 copy launch run and will offer at least four 'covermounted' gifts per foil-bagged issue.

• More Moon stuff: The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum has created a website that allows visitors to relive the flight of Apollo 11 and the Moon landing. Called We Choose the Moon, you can follow the mission from pre-launch to blast-off to the actual Moon landing on Monday.

• BleedingCool has a another feature on Comics We Just Can't Wait For – But Have To, including Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran’s Stealth Tribes – a sci-fi cloudsourcing cyberpunk original graphic novel Collen is still apparently drawing it for Vertigo - but has been for five years; and Warchild by Alan Moore, a series script bought by Rob Liefeld, he hasn’t progressed publication because he says he hasn’t found an artists who is up to the script.

• The Forbidden Planet International blog reports that comics creator Simon Gurr, who collaborated with Eugene Byrne on the special (and well received) Darwin graphic biography for the great scientist’s 200th anniversary earlier this year, has been chosen for a high profile public artwork celebrating famous Bristolians.
Bristol Festival of Ideas and Bristol Cultural Development Partnership recently announced that Simon Gurr, Bristol artist and illustrator, has been chosen to create a new permanent artwork on the theme of Some Who Have Made Bristol Famous, following a citywide call for ideas and submission of proposals. The commission, worth £10,000, is funded by donations from two Bristol patrons. Read the full FPI piece here

• Good news for Futurama fans. Not only is it be returning to our small screens, but more toys are on the way. io9 reports KidRobot is coming out with this cute line of Futurama dolls, due for release next month.

• Gaming news site Kaoktu reports that 2000AD owners Rebellion have been picking through the remains of games company Vivendi’s old portfolio of intellectual property, discarded amidst the company’s merger with Activision, and have found a number of bargains. Among the unwanted, unloved IPs now obtained are Ground Control, Evil Genius, Empire Earth, Lords of the Realm and Lords of Magic. They just can't seem to stop buying stuff, can they? But surely they must now have enough cool properties to launch a game title-based comic as well as 2000AD?

The Doctor Lands on the Moon for the BBC

London Underground Comics organiser Oli Smith has penned a new Doctor Who short story for the BBC Doctor Who web site to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of man first stepping foot on the Moon.

Blue Moon, which begins today on the official site, is a completely new adventure that puts the Doctor slap bang in the middle of the first Apollo Moon landing. It's set during the tumultuous days of 16th, 17th and 20th July, 1969 and the next three parts will run on those dates, with the first part published today, Wednesday, 15th July.

There's everything you could want from a story set during such a crucial moment in Earth's history - mysterious aliens, sinister US agents, a threat to the future of mankind and, err, BBC Radio 4's The Archers.

"I’ve tried to make this story as ‘real time’ as possible," says Oli of the story on on his web site. "The events in the story correspond to the day that each part is put up. I’m really proud of it." In fact, he enjoyed it so much he's done a bit of fan art for the story (above) which he hopes will whet your appetite.

"I didn't want the Doctor to take anything away from the achievements of the Apollo mission," he says of the story on the BBC site, "but rather to prevent outside influences, both extra terrestrial and closer to home, from manipulating events for their own ends."

This is Oli's second short story for Doctor Who, his first being “Total Eclipse of the Heart” for the Doctor Who Storybook 2010 (Annual), out on 1st August, illustrated by the brilliant Martin Geraghty.

"Surprisingly," says Oli, "both stories are pretty hard sci fi (well, for Doctor Who anyway) but both have been a complete blast to write so long may my adventuring with the Doctor continue."

Alongside Blue Moon the BBC is also a publishing material looking at representations of the Moon in Doctor Who. There's a new Lunar Gallery showing some striking imagery from several moon-related stories.

Some of those adventures are briefly revisited in a series of Video Clips and they also present The Dark Side of the Moon, a precise history of how the silvery satellite has been depicted in Doctor Who.

Moon Landing Comics Celebration: Andrew Cheverton

This is Andrew Cheverton's contribution to the downthetubes "Moon Landing 40th Anniversary: A Comics Celebration" - a gallery of illustrations and comic art inspired by the Apollo expedition and space exploration which is being published on the downthetubes forum.

It sums up perfectly how I felt about the Moon Landing back in 1969 (yes, I know I'm showing my age!), so I have no hesitation in giving it wider exposure this morning.

Andrew creates small press comics under the Angry Candy name, ranging in genre from westerns to science fiction to horror and all those odd little spaces in between. Check out his work at angrycandy.co.uk

More contributions to our Moon Landing celebrations are very welcome: if you don't want to join our forum and upload art but would like to join in with the celebrations, simply send your work to johnfreeman6-moonlandinganniversaryart@yahoo.co.uk. Please ensure images are no larger than 2MB in size and include a brief bio and web link so we can give you deserved credit.

Tube Surfing, 11 July 2009: Starblazer Sculptures, Moon Landings and an Oxfam ComicFest

• Dundee-based artist Trevor Gordon has been in touch, to let you us of a collaborative art project going ahead in Dundee at the Mills Observatory. "I am working with archival material from DC Thomsons and creating sculptural pieces influenced by the work," he reveals. "There will a number of original Starblazer works on display and a number of strange sculptural pieces in a range of mediums.
"[DC Thomson staffer and former Starblazer editor] Bill McLoughlin has been extremely friendly and supportive throughout the process and it has been a joy to get my hands on these cherished images," Trevor reveals, " and [artist] Enrique Alcatena has also been a delight and there will be a wee note on his thoughts on Starblazer also." More details as soon as we get them: meanwhle, check out Trevor's work at www.trevoragordon.com

• Jeremy Briggs has completed a series of Moon Landing Anniversary posts for downthetubes, which will be published daily starting on Wednesday (15th July). The posts feature art and comics work published during or after the first Moon Landing. Meanwhile, our Comics Celebration of the 40th Anniversary gathers pace, with our album of art now featuring work by Adam Grose, Martin Baines, Ian Duerden and others. The album can be embedded on any web site to help celebrate this major endeavour of human exploration. Further art - illustration, strip, cartoons is welcome: If you don't want to join our forum and upload art but would like to join in with the celebrations, simply send your work to johnfreeman6-moonlandinganniversaryart@yahoo.co.uk. Please ensure images are no larger than 2MB in size.

• Talking of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, we spotted a reprint of the Daily Mirror for 21 July or thereabouts in WH Smiths today, complete with DVD of footage of the Apollo landing: it will be interesting to see what Garth was up to (and The Perishers!) on that momentous day in 1969...

• The British Film Institute's "One Giant Leap" season in London continues this coming week with screenings of the films 2001: A Space Odyssey, Countdown and Moonwalk One, the premiere of newly remastered Director's Cut in high definition of Theo Kamecke's film, commissioned by NASA to cover their historic Apollo 11 moonshot. With an atmospheric original score by Charles Morrow and a moody narration by Laurence Luckinbill, Kamecke's documentary has been described as perhaps the most significant time-capsule record of Apollo 11 ever made.

• Our thanks to comic creator Emma Vieceli, who kindly gave downthtubes a positive plug on her blog (despite Jeremy Briggs saying that she looked like a Manga character...) - view her comments here. Emma was recently interviewed for BBC Blast, revealing How To Get Creative!

• Graeme Neil Reid has announced he will be joining a huge number of comic creators at the Thought Bubble in Leeds at the end of November, so if you are thinking of going to any comic cons this year that would be one to consider.

• Talking of events, Insomnia Publications will be part of the line up at the Oxfam Comics Fest on 18th July at Macdonald Road, Edinburgh from 12 noon to 3.00pm. We've given this a plug recently, but Oxfam has been in touch with an update, reporting there will be discussion panels on Comics In Scotland and The Ups And Downs Of Small Press Publishing, featuring writers Ferg Handley (Marvel Heroes, Commando) and David Bishop (2000AD, Doctor Who) and other guests.
"We'll be holding a silent auction of some great comic book related merchandise, including a piece of original artwork from Spectacular Spider-Man," reveals organiser James McConnell, "signed by the artist, presented with a page of the script, signed by the writer, and other excellent items.
"There will also be an exclusive sneak peek at some never before seen pages from the upcoming Burke & Hare graphic novel from Insomnia Publications, and a stall selling comics and graphic novels."
•Tickets are £3.00 at all Oxfam Bookshops in Edinburgh, on sale now!