FAB 65 Now Available

The latest issue of FAB published by Fanderson, the Gerry Anderson Appreciation Society, is now out. FAB is a 64 page A5 full colour fanzine published quarterly and available exclusively to Fanderson members.

Behind a Space Precinct cover the issue covers the proposed new UFO movie, the first part of a detailed interview with actor Shane Rimmer who was the voice of Thunderbird 1 pilot Scott Tracy as well as many other Anderson characters, a breakdown of the Thunderbirds episode The Midas Touch as well as features on Gerry Anderson's live action shows Space Precinct and Space:1999.

For British comics fans the issue includes the fourth part of SF author Stephen Baxter's ongoing series of articles on the various comics that have featured comic strips from Gerry Anderson series. This excellent and very detailed series reaches Lady Penelope comic and covers both the weekly title and its annuals and includes the rebirth of the title as simply Penelope. The article runs to a 12 colour pages.

In addition FAB 65 includes, on the back cover, the second page of The Secret Service comic strip by artist Jon Davis originally published in Countdown comic.

• FAB Magazine is available exclusively to Fanderson members. A one year membership costs £22 plus the appropriate postage and also gives you the chance purchase the Club's remarkable range of merchandise including books, CDs, DVDs badges and patches. More details on how to join are on Fanderson's website.

FAB Gerry Anderson Comics

The latest issue of FAB published by Fanderson, the Gerry Anderson Appreciation Society, is now out. FAB is a 64 page A5 full colour fanzine published quarterly and available exclusively to Fanderson members.

Issue 64 includes the third part of the SHADO Personnel Dossier detailing all the characters and actors that worked on Anderson's first live action series UFO, a gallery of behind the scenes photos from the making of Stingray, a feature on the different spaceships that appeared in Fireball XL5, the first part of a series of articles on the making of Space:1999 and an appraisal of the New (CGI) Captain Scarlet episode Grey Skulls.

For British comics fans the issue includes the third part of SF author Stephen Baxter's ongoing series of articles on the various comics that have featured comic strips from Gerry Anderson series. This excellent and very detailed series of articles reaches the little known Candy and Solo comics, respectively the TV21 nursery and junior comics (effectively to TV21 what Robin and Swift were to Eagle). The article runs to a mammoth 14 pages and the issue includes, on the back cover, a page of The Secret Service comic strip from Countdown issue 2 by artist Jon Davis.

• FAB Magazine is available exclusively to Fanderson members. A one year membership costs £22 plus the appropriate postage and also gives you the chance purchase the Club's brilliant range of merchandise - books, CDs, DVDs and much more. Find out how to join and order your membership online here: www.fanderson.org.uk/aboutfanderson.html

Tube Surfing: Anderson events, Dan Dare Toys and a Cartoon Classroom update

• Gerry Anderson official fan club Fanderson have announced they will be staging their first major convention for four years next year. TV21: Adventure in the 21st Century will be based at the Ramada Bristol City - the same venue as the Comics Expo - taking place on the weekend of Friday 22nd to Sunday 24th October 2010.

The event will feature special guests from the worlds of Gerry Anderson, screenings of favourite episodes and rare material on the big screen, workshops where you can develop your interest in the Anderson productions beyond reading the organisation's FAB Magazine and watching DVDs. There will be merchandise for sale and a stunning model and art exhibition, including many pieces not seen before at a Fanderson event. For more info, visit the Fanderson web site

• Talking of things Anderson, several downthetubes readers have been in touch to tell us that Sylvia Anderson, Gerry's former wife, is doing a tour of the UK next year, in conversation with musician David Courtney, to promote her new autobiographical book, My FAB Years, which has been out for a while. Prices vary between venues but are around £15 per person plus booking fees. The duration, according to one of the venues, is a remarkable two hours 20 minutes. More info here on David Courtney's web site: be patient, it seems to take a while for the page to load.

• Nick Barley has been named the new director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which annually brings more than 700 author events and over 200,000 visitors to its tented auditoriums on Charlotte Square, and has been talking up the possibility of comics guests at the major event. Talking to The Scotsman, Mr Barley, a former executive director of the Lighthouse architecture and design centre in Glasgow which sadly went into administration earlier this year, said experts could be brought in to run parts of the festival's programming, such as Scottish writer Grant Morrison for a section on graphic novels. We have to say that we're unaware of Mr Morrison making many appearances at Scottish writing events. Perhaps John and Sandra from Metaphrog would probably be a better call, or Alan Grant?

• During his interview, Mr Barley mentions The Death of Bunny Munro by musician and author Nick Cave, launched by Edinburgh-based publishing company Canongate as the world's first novel in the form of an iPhone application. Cave has composed a soundtrack tailor-made to complement the audio book of his new novel, working with musician Warren Ellis - not to be confused with comics writer Ellis and they appeared on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Monday to examine whether audio books are an unexploited medium. You can listen here for a few more days. Today is now asking for people to suggest a soundtrack for their favourite book - you can suggest Watchmen or The Ballad of Halo Jones here, perhaps...

• Dan Dare action figures and spaceships are on their way, based on designs inspired by the original Frank Hampson character of Eagle fame. The products are the work of Day2Day Trading, who also hold licenses for characters such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon (an example of their work above, more here). Their work to date looks amazing - they kindly sent a stunning pre-production image of the Cyclops from their Sinbad range. Expect to see the new Dan Dare items in shops sometime next year.

• More events: Pádraig Ó Méalóid writes to say Friday & Saturday 28th & 29th May 2010 will see a conference in The University of Northampton called <em>Magus: Transdisciplinary approaches to the work of Alan Moore. More about it here. "I wrote to them to mention my interest in such matters and, to cut a long story short, I'll be there, giving a paper (i.e. a 20 minute talk) on Collecting Alan Moore." Also at this academic conference will be Gary Lloyd, who collaborated musically with Alan and also with Iain Banks.

• The Cartoon Classroom is now fully up and running: if you registered before on this while it was being tested, co-organiser David Lloyd advises you will have to do so again now it's totally operational. "In these early days, what we need most of all is for colleges, schools, libraries, local museums and galleries to know about the site - so any help you can give with that would be invaluable," David asks. "And give us any info you think we should have on the site that you can't see there. Is there a gallery near you showing cartoon art, which isn't listed on our site or registered with us? Tell us. Tell them about us. Is a library offering cartoon workshops near you which isn't shown on our site? Tell us." Send info to contactcartoonclassroom@yahoo.co.uk.

• Complied with thanks to Jeremy Briggs, Jay Mullins Katie Bleathman and Pádraig Ó Méalóid

Fanderson Forum Gets Online Makeover

The official fan club for Thunderbirds co-creator Gerry Anderson, Fanderson, officially launched its new online Forum to replace the club's ageing Yahoo group yesterday (on the 10th anniversary of the day the earth was blown out of Earth's orbit in Space: 1999!).

The new online offshoot for the popular club - which has featured Anderson-related comics coverage in the past - consists of a public forum that anyone can join and contribute to and also a private forum for paid up Fanderson members only.

• See the new forum for more details: www.fanderson.org.uk/forum

Fanderson's FAB (Magazine, That Is...)

FAB 63, the latest issue of the Gerry Anderson Fanderson club, now in the post to all Fanderson members, is a bit of Thunderbirds special and includes some not-to-be-missed comics attractions, including the finale of an epic Fireball XL5 strip and a feature by acclaimed sci-fi author Stephen Baxter continuing his exploration of post-TV 21 comics with Lady Penelope.

With more information on the mooted UFO feature film in the club's FAB News web page (there has been a lot of media attention over Gerry Anderson's UFO since the recent press release that legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans is working with ITV Global to make a movie based on the 1970 series), now's also a good time to catch up on the cast and characters from the original series with the second part of a SHADO Personnel Dossier.

The magazine also examines four of the original Thunderbirds TV show scripts that provide a unique insight into the making of the series, an fans memories are put to the test about the Thunderbirds Are Go feature film.

Also included is an exclusive interview with producer Tim Mallett of Kindred Productions on the making of Fanderson's Stingray Soundtrack CD and a glowing reappraisal of a certain Space:1999 Year 2 episode..

• FAB Magazine is available exclusively to Fanderson members. A one year membership also gives you the chance purchase the Club's brilliant range of merchandise - books, CDs, DVDs and much more. Find out how to join and order your membership online here: www.fanderson.org.uk/aboutfanderson.html

Standby For Stingray Music

Fanderson, the official Gerry Anderson Appreciation Society, have released the soundtrack for the puppet series Stingray on CD for the first time. The double CD has a total of 54 tracks consisting of over two and a half hours of Barry Gray's original music for the series.

Remarkably the soundtrack for Stingray, which was first broadcast on television in 1965, has never been released before on CD, or even vinyl, with only the theme music and Aqua Marina, the end credits song, being readily available so this double album marks a major coup for the fan club.

Over the years Fanderson have released many soundtrack albums of Barry Gray's music from the various Anderson series. Their licensing agreement with copyright holder ITV Global Entertainment means that only 1000 copies can be pressed and that they can only be sold to Fanderson members. This means that once the albums sell out, as most previous releases have done, they become highly collectible and often sell for over £100 on internet auction sites.



Indeed at least one copy of the new Stingray album has already appeared on eBay with the seller obviously hoping that some gullible buyer would not realise that it would be cheaper to join Fanderson for one year and buy the album directly from them than it would to be to pay his seriously inflated starting price. The album was removed from sale after Fanderson contacted the seller directly while the club have already noticed an increase in new membership applications since they started advertising the new album for sale.

Due to the limited nature of the release the cost, £29.99, is high but this is not some knocked up fan CDR but a fully realised double album with a full colour glossy 28 page booklet included, making it a better product than many soundtrack albums you would buy on the high street.

A one year membership of Fanderson costs £25 in the UK, £28 in Europe and £31 for the rest of the world for which, in addition to the access to their impressive sales list, members get three copies of their A5 glossy full colour fanzine FAB and a membership premium of an exclusive perpetual Century 21 Diary. The diary which is formatted as one week to one page is a tribute to the TV21 diary that Letts produced during the 1960s and is filled with colour photos from the various Gerry Anderson TV series. For the comics fan, the diary includes the cover of one Anderson related comic per week, from the obvious TV Century 21 and Lady Penelope to the less well known New Captain Scarlet and Space Precinct titles.

• More details about the Stingray soundtrack album are available on the Fanderson website which also includes details of how to join the club.

Tube Surfing: Gerry Anderson

British publisher Reynolds and Hearn are to release two books reprinting strips from TV Century 21 comic and other titles first published by City Editions in the 1960s such as Joe 90.

Scheduled for release early next year and titled Century 21 - Classic Comic Strips from the Worlds of Gerry Anderson, they're being complied by regular Anderson author Chris Bentley, who has written the The Complete Book of Thunderbirds and the The Complete Book of Gerry Anderson's UFO as well as the The Complete Gerry Anderson, now in its fourth edition.

“This is a subject close to our hearts, and we’ve been working on it for quite a few months,” publisher Marcus Hearn told downthetubes, who kindly supplied us with this exclusive provisional cover, left. “We can’t really describe these books as TV21 compilations because they will also contain material from other publications, such as some of Frank Langford’s work from Lady Penelope and some of Martin Asbury’s strips from Joe 90.

"We've got a team of four designers nearing the end of some pretty intensive restoration, and I think the results are stunning. Gerry Anderson has been working with us since day one, and has written the introduction to Volume One.”

The two 160 page softcover books are currently scheduled for publication on 31 March 2009.

Back in September we told you about the second of FTL Publication's Thunderbirds novels. With the first novel Countdown To Action! released earlier this year, the second novel Action Alert! is now available.

Both novels were written by Joan Marie Verba and are officially only available in the United States and Canada under the terms of the license FTL have with Carlton, the Thunderbirds copyright holder. This hasn't stopped copies arriving in the UK via Amazon.com and from UK based Gerry Anderson dealers. The first chapters of both books are available to read on-line, with Countdown To Action! here and Action Alert! here.

And finally to the man himself. Gerry Anderson will be 80 on his next birthday but still has no plans to retire. He has maintained an office at Pinewood Studios for the last number of years which is where he was interviewed for the Dick Spanner PI DVD extra.

While there has been many rumours over the last year that he has been talking to ITV about a new series nothing has yet been confirmed. That said, Pinewood Studios management have told Gerry that they don't have space for the foreseeable future to house a production of the scale he expects, so he is downsizing his office there whilst he waits a production green light and then looks for alternative studio space.

Now, Fanderson, the Gerry Anderson Appreciation Society, have announced an auction of the contents of Gerry's current office to be conducted by Comet Miniatures. The auction will take place in Battersea Arts Centre in London on Saturday 7 February 2009 and there are more details on the Fanderson website.