Wednesday, 15 July 2020

A Little Midnight Horror circa 2002

Quick addenda: Yes. I am quite dull. It does say "Werewolf" as the title. Dilworth's fault -too much cross hatching 😂😂😂😂😂
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Back in 2000-2004 I used a Canon FC220 desk top photocopier to print off comics and mags. I decided that, because colour covers would mean going to a secondary source to print them, I would simply use colour paper covers -red, yellow, blue, green and so on.

A Little Midnight Horror was one of the titles. A one off for a very good reason. All the copies handed over to a certain zione service and the Travelling Man comic shop sold. Neither seller paid me. So I was out on the paper as well as the toner cartridge which at that time I was getting 'cheap' at £50  a go, I never got my money for other books either. Basically, crooked sellers killed off the publishing where two postal strikes and fraud by a bank that saw me lose £500 had failed. Titles I got ripped off on included Classic Western Action and the buky Comic Bits 1 and 2.

Sat up at 02:00hrs I noticed the red cover so got up and pulled out the book. It contains the original Rev Merriwether story -The Horror of 25 Hob Street- as well as Marked -later retitled to Village of the Damned. There was also David Stephenson's Hellfire & Brimstone (no idea what happened to David as he just vanished and never responded to letters). Pekka Manninen's Captain Gangrene strip Over the Edge was present.  Then there was an untitled werewolf strip written and drawn by Ben Dilworth.

Initially Dilworth and Andrew (Fantomex) Hope published A Little Midnight Horror and then a follow-up A Little Christmas Horror (not sure whether Hope had pulled out of the project by then and I am not pulling out boxes to get to the issue!).  I got various advance views of art and as soon as I saw the werewolf strip I went "ooh" and waxed lyrical over it to Mr Paul Brown over it.

So when I wanted to do a one off horror comic I included the strip -I believe it was initially printed on light blue paper) but in my version of ALMH it was on white paper which I think made the art stand out more. No credits or date given in the strip itself but I believe this was from 1986/1987?

The cover was by David or Chris Kelly (I'll need to dig out my old files to find out) who produced lots of super illoes for zines at the time including Arkensword. Again, Kelly vanished and if your letters never got a response you assume they had gotten "real jobs" and left comics!

But here is the werewolf strip I titled The Night Is Red.











(c)2020 Ben R Dilworth and Black Tower Comics & Books -all rights reserved

3 comments:

  1. brings back memories of oh so long ago. 'Run', of course, relates to 'escape', 'blood' and 'blood line'... it runs in the family ? My daughter didn't get it, so... ah. Nostalgia. I like mixing it up. Too much? I dunno. Time to sleep. TTFN.

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  2. Stop trying to be so bloody clever, boy! 8 out of 10 and you take the seat in the lavvie for the next class. I still think the strip works and, of couirse, it reads "Werewolf" on page 1. D'uuuh! I need my eyes checked :-) :-)

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  3. i think The Night Is Red is a good title - i'll go with that   night.out.zzz.

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