Saturday, 29 February 2020
Obscure British Heroes and Crime-Fighters and Finding Them
I have to say that I have never heard of the book The British Superhero By Christopher Murray. Pity really as a friend just sent me a screen shot of a paragraph from the book:
Now I'll thank Christopher for the mention and it repeats something I have heard over and over again -Yahoo groups, old Google Plus and so on: even comic enthusiasts are often taken aback by some of my finds. Comic strips in boys' papers when the 'experts' claim these never existed (my thanks to Bob for that discovery -I only published and added to it); masked and costumed and even super powered characters -ahem- 'before' super heroes were created in the United States and going back to the mid 1800s and possibly earlier. We never called them "super heroes" but "masked/costumed crime fighters" or even what we would later term anti-heroes.
Men dressed in theatrical costumes. Men spitting fire, taking huge leaps, deflecting gun-fire, wearing devil masks, domino masks, hoods or even real horns. Or characters like The Iron Man dating back to the turn of the 20th century. My greatest discovery -please, as a Nation ensure that this is engraved upon my monument- that there were so many flying, gliding bat-winged costumed villains, heroes, anti-heroes in British pulps, boys papers and comics between the late 1800s to early 1940s that Bob Kane would faint -yes, the UK had Bat-men long before the United States had a Bat-Man! I am not showing off my incredible talents here but...I found another one last week!!
Oh, despite all the problems there is one thing that I cannot be shaken from -a love of comics as well as weird and bizarre characters (I first started research Spring-Heeled Jack -all of them- in 1980). I refer to a certain character and someone invariably asks "Who??" because I get too engrossed in the work and assume that everyone with an interest in the subject knows everything I do.
Before my old PC and all of its programs went I began work on compiling all of the characters into a Who's Who. Those bloody bat-men took some work!
Think of Slicksure the detective come spy and super spy tackling not just clever villains but a mole machine, werewolf and, uh, flying bat-man, Yet Harry Banger (pron. as in "Ranger") renowned for his humour strips pulled it all off. Glenn Protheroe was known for his "Brain's Trust" strip and the "puppet-like characters" yet he drew a few action strips in a serious style. Believe me when I say that when I find an obscure character -very old or from pre-1990- that I have never seen or heard mention of before I smile widely. I've been told I do by someone who saw my face light up when I did.
It is nice to get credit occasionally and I would like to thank those who have either corrected the source of some scans to me and have appreciated the (fun) hard work that goes into this.
THANK YOU
ps -I also have an online store and books
Friday, 28 February 2020
Cinebook the 9th Art Newsletter 146 - February 2020
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The Date Is Set
I have spent over a decade providing brief, indepth and even mega posts for readers of the UK Golden Age and Black Tower blogs. Some two decades on Comic Bits Online but....
I really cannot afford to waste time writing further indepth posts -they simply waste my time. I decided a year ago that if things had not changed by the time of the 2020 San Diego Comic Con then CBO was going. That still stands.
Quite obviously no one gives a fuck so come SDCC it'll be a relief to quit and you can all go off to try to find another blog.
Thursday, 27 February 2020
Wednesday, 26 February 2020
Tuesday, 25 February 2020
14,000 video views in total...hmm
The Iron Warrior V Big Bong -3.7k
What's My Name -The Purple Hood -7.3k
Grave Yard -3k
Unfortunately no new ones have been made since finances mean I cannot replace the old software I had back then.
But with a total of over 14000 views even these have not resulted in sales.
I am not telling new publishers out there not to try this: if you can then try it and everything else you can to get your books noticed -it may work for YOU!
No New Books
As far as I am concerned, after 11 years of problem after problem with my Print on Demand company (Lulu), I am no longer publishing using it.
Apologies if I repost something from yesterday here:
Being paranoid when it comes to pdf files and page sizes, whenever I get completed books together I will double, triple and quadruple check every page and make sure the sizes are right.
I got sent a link to a free PDF converter and it only does pages in batches of 20s so an 80 book equals 4 PDF files that then get combined into one 80 pager.
Went through the New Project phase with my POD and then uploaded the file.....
Rejected because pages were of differing sizes.
WTF??!
So I checked all the pages and made the PDF from start again then uploaded.
rejected due to different page sizes.
Double checked and all pages are okay so tried up,loading three more times (Robert the Bruce would be proud of me). Failed.
So I contacted the site assistant who asked me to upload the file to My Files so she could check it. That upload was rejected every time for the same reasons. Then it uploaded. So off went the lady to check the file and I downloaded it to see if I could see a problem. Everything looked perfect so I wrote back stating this and she told me that the file looked perfect so she tried uploading it for me....failed due to page size difference. Now she is asking their useless tech people to open a case file and look into it.
Four hours wasted.
Remember when you slapped the art pages onto a photocopier platten and made your own comics without this crap? Anyway, I was promoting the books until about 0200 hrs today and this morning I get this:
"Dear Terry,
"Thank you for contacting our support team at Lulu.com. My name is Julia and we chatted earlier this afternoon.
"Thank you for your patience as one of our print team members was taking a look at your file. She let me know that she had some trouble finding out what program you used to produce the file. She also suggested that you open the file in the source program that was used to create it and manually set the size of the pages in that program.
"Here is a message from her:
"I would suggest exporting the file to PDF using our job options profile. I can tell he's publishing using the A4 size, which calls for 8.26 x 11.69 in. pages, and his PDF is sized at 8.35x11.81. Our joboptions save the PDF as version 1.3 which prevents transparencies from flattening with boxes, and basically heads off a bunch of issues."
"You can download the Lulu Job Options .zip file at the very bottom of this article. She also mentioned to me that your PDF version is of Adobe 1.7, which our system doesn't work very well with. Our system works best with version 1.6 or older, so this is another thing to keep in mind.
"I hope this helps! If you try these suggestions and are still experiencing problems uploading the file, please let me know.
Kind regards,
Julia D."
I have not changed or done anything different than when I have published every other one of the 90 plus books with the company. These are scanned art pages of the correct dimension and size as always and I double checked every page of the document -as did their support agent and like her found everything was okay.
So going through the document to re-size the pages to the size they are...?
Oh, and the Lulu Job Options pdf is basically a beginners guide and after 11 years I do not think that I need to learn how to do this again. I ought to point out that I do not need to flatten any boxes either....:-/
Lulu appears to have such an old system that it cannot even offer basic functions -I once asked about a stat counter to see how many visited the online store: "We are not considering that but if we upgrade our system we might one day". Analytics? "No".
Mysterious and Strange Beasts and Strange and Mysterious Beasts (same book but different size formats) were published in 2018 but Lulu's programming listed it in the store as "Only ships from North America". The thought of international postage put people off and when I realised what was going on I contacted Lulu support. They promised tech support would deal with the matter as it was a problem with their system. Two years later after repeatedly asking for this to be dealt with...nothing.
I will point out again that the books are printed "locally" to where the person ordering lives. There is NO INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING involved.
I think it says it all that their techie had no idea what system I used but then goes on to clearly identify Adobe but their system can only cope with much older ones.
I have 8 books each of 80 pages that, according to Lulu I am now going to have to re-size to the size that they are....but the books will still be rejected because their old system cannot handle anything but older programs. The Green Skies is 500 plus pages....you know what Lulu can go and do there!
Here is an example of how old Lulu's system is: back in 2010 I opened a similar Print on Demand account in India with a company called Pothi. At the time the printing was cheap and the intention was to buy in bulk but then the new shipping costs(it was international shipping) kicked that in the head. However, Pothi was new and I made the mistake of uploading the wrong book file (I have a LOT of files stored so they all have unique IDs now!) and it had some pages that were the wrong size. I got a message from Pothi that some pages were not the correct size...but they had adjusted the sizes and sent me the PDF to double check.
HOW could Pothi carry out this Herculean task of changing pages that were the wrong size in a PDF???!!
It was explained to me that it only took a brief adjustment on their system and all the pages were then the right size.
Over the last decade or so a number of people in the UK have set up POD companies. They are all gone now as the businesses were profitable but involved much more work than they thought (I am not kidding as I just double checked the old emails from two of them). I talked to these people and varying page sizes in PDF came up as it was a common mistake amongst people producing their first comics. I was told "It just needs you to auto reset to the page size required and that's it".
Lulu used to -still does?- attend conventions pushing its 'product' and it has been doing this for a couple decades now yet has a system that throws up so many problems and is so old and always notes how it is the document creators fault -as in the current case even though their own support person checked the document and found no problems.
If you can put up with that sort of thing then go for it but if you upload the correct sized file and it gets rejected over and over and you are willing to take the blame for that then go for it. I just printed out the entire book and every page came out perfectly and I've a crappy old Canon printer not a hi-tech laser printer.
The Green Skies will not be published as intended. Too many problems and I have no faith in Lulu which should have updated its system LONG AGO. The 80 pagers? Ditto. And, yes, I did try uploading one of the previously accepted PDF to Lulu to check -it was rejected due to "different sized pages" (I once had a book rejected because the "image on page 43 is low res and must be at least 300 dpi to print correctly" -they were talking about a 300 dpi comic page and when I asked they referred to one panel on the page !! Their system misidentified the panel as an image in a prose book....my fault of course).
Until I can afford to get books printed by someone competent nothing new is going to appear. The internet has proven itself to be useful but it's the people you deal with that is the problem.
Monday, 24 February 2020
CBO went over 4 million (again)....time to toy review?
HOW blogger, after all the views over the last four days does the stats count go back down to 3,857,473???
For those interested (that'll be my little left toe) CBO went over 4 million (again).
On my FB page someone asked if I was going to review action figures and toys now since it seems the most popular topic.
Well, I get sent something I review it -I am NOT going out buying toys! :-) :-)
"Where's the Photocopier -I Hate Print on Demand!
Being paranoid when it comes to pdf files and page sizes, whenever I get completed books together I will double, triple and quadruple check every page and make sure the sizes are right.
I got sent a link to a free PDF converter and it only does pages in batches of 20s so an 80 book equals 4 PDF files that then get combined into one 80 pager.
Went through the New Project phase with my POD and then uploaded the file.....
Rejected because pages were of differing sizes.
Rejected because pages were of differing sizes.
WTF??!
So I checked all the pages and made the PDF from start again then uploaded.
rejected due to different page sizes.
Double checked and all pages are okay so tried up,loading three more times (Robert the Bruce would be proud of me). Failed.
So I contacted the site assistant who asked me to upload the file to My Files so she could check it. That upload was rejected every time for the same reasons. Then it uploaded. So off went the lady to check the file and I downloaded it to see if I could see a problem.
Everything looked perfect so I wrote back stating this and she told me that the file looked perfect so she tried uploading it for me....failed due to page size difference. Now she is asking their useless tech people to open a case file and look into it.
Four hours wasted.
Remember when you slapped the art pages onto a photocopier platten and made your own comics without this crap?
I'm just lost for words
I tried an experiment over the weekend. Every toy fair or San Diego Comic Con I post new links to video and news as they appear and save visitors to this blog many hours of scrolling around.
Between Friday and last night I posted over 150 times, mostly on CBO but also on the Black Tower and British Golden Age blogs. I am excluding the posting to Twitter and Face Book. Not just toy fair was covered but the whole Dan Didio mess.
Views went up by a few thousand.
Not one single comment, "thanks for the link" or any words from all of those visitors.
As I wrote before, the future of CBO is dependent on the next month or so but I just looked at the views for each post and realised I should not have bothered and just used it and not shared. The ingratitude, through being ignorant, is like a blazing beacon.
Zero support. I'm just lost for words to describe how I feel about the grab and don't even say thank you comic culture.
Between Friday and last night I posted over 150 times, mostly on CBO but also on the Black Tower and British Golden Age blogs. I am excluding the posting to Twitter and Face Book. Not just toy fair was covered but the whole Dan Didio mess.
Views went up by a few thousand.
Not one single comment, "thanks for the link" or any words from all of those visitors.
As I wrote before, the future of CBO is dependent on the next month or so but I just looked at the views for each post and realised I should not have bothered and just used it and not shared. The ingratitude, through being ignorant, is like a blazing beacon.
Zero support. I'm just lost for words to describe how I feel about the grab and don't even say thank you comic culture.
Sunday, 23 February 2020
D-Gruppe EP 667: The Grandfather Paradox...Now
EP 667, or Earth Parallel 667, was created for a very specific reason: Ben R. Dilworth. The problem was that I knew what was going on with characters, etc, in the Black Tower Universe but Ben, living in Japan and not on the internet had no idea.
Yet Ben kept coming up with really good ideas/strips that did not fit in. I could not use them because it meant there was no real continuity. However, I could use them if I created a parallel Earth for his Missing Link, D-Gruppe and other strips. A little voice in my head literally said "EP 667" and I thought, "What a genius you are, Terry!" and there you go.
So read and enjoy!
Yet Ben kept coming up with really good ideas/strips that did not fit in. I could not use them because it meant there was no real continuity. However, I could use them if I created a parallel Earth for his Missing Link, D-Gruppe and other strips. A little voice in my head literally said "EP 667" and I thought, "What a genius you are, Terry!" and there you go.
So read and enjoy!
Tom Elmes -DESCENT
Paperback
A4
B&W
104 Pages
Price: £9.00 (excl. VAT)Prints in 3-5 business days
With DESCENT Elmes returns to his comic roots having spent some years involved in animation. In this 104 page classic only one prisoner aboard a space craft awakes from stasis alive. All the others are dead..well, the living dead! Can the lone surviving prisoner and the guards survive the zombie onslaught? Who knows -but we can tell you this is the most zombie fun you’ll get outside of the Resident Evil movies!!
If John Erasmus is a vastly under-rated talent then not far behind him is Tom Elmes who has worked on international award winning animation outside of comics. When Tom said: “Do you want to publish a couple books of mine?” I must admit I thought long and hard -I think 1.3 microseconds!
I did wonder whether he might still have that “edge” after all these years. He has.
In the 1980s Tom Elmes was earning himself the title “King of the Zine Nasty” -classic, somewhat gorey, stories such as “The Man Who Ate Himself To Death” are still enough to make you go “URGH!” after all these years.
With DESCENT Elmes returned to his comic roots having spent some years involved in animation. In this 104 page classic only one prisoner aboard a space craft awakes from stasis alive. All the others are dead..well, the living dead! Can the lone surviving prisoner and the guards survive the zombie onslaught? Who knows -but we can tell you this is the most zombie fun you’ll get outside of the Resident Evil movies!!
Below are a few selected pages all (c)2011 T. Elmes/BTCG
If John Erasmus is a vastly under-rated talent then not far behind him is Tom Elmes who has worked on international award winning animation outside of comics. When Tom said: “Do you want to publish a couple books of mine?” I must admit I thought long and hard -I think 1.3 microseconds!
I did wonder whether he might still have that “edge” after all these years. He has.
In the 1980s Tom Elmes was earning himself the title “King of the Zine Nasty” -classic, somewhat gorey, stories such as “The Man Who Ate Himself To Death” are still enough to make you go “URGH!” after all these years.
With DESCENT Elmes returned to his comic roots having spent some years involved in animation. In this 104 page classic only one prisoner aboard a space craft awakes from stasis alive. All the others are dead..well, the living dead! Can the lone surviving prisoner and the guards survive the zombie onslaught? Who knows -but we can tell you this is the most zombie fun you’ll get outside of the Resident Evil movies!!
Below are a few selected pages all (c)2011 T. Elmes/BTCG
