Here, there and everywhere.

First review of The Black Diamond Detective Agency appears in Kirkus Reviews this week, 15 jan. You can read the first sentence then you need an account. I'm sure my publisher will have it up in a few days.

While you're looking for it over there at First Second, Part two of the interview I did with Lat is promised to be up today. I have a few of Lat's books, but my pal mr j made up the deficit by lending me the rest so that I could do the email chat with the great cartoonist from Malaysia.

You will remember mr j from his previous appearances on this blog, here, here, here and here. Here's one you haven't seen before, just to remind you whom we're talking about.



Well, Hayley Campbell Funnies has lately evolved into a different strip titled On the Mat, which is about wrestling and the daft characters you find there. he's done loads of them already and they're starting to surface here and there. j warns these links may not be very permanent, but they're working as of this minute.

The same Hayley Campbell sat my old pal Ed Hillyer down in front of her laptop so I could talk to him via skype this morning ( I always hear of these things two weeks before Google buys them up for 19 fersquillion dollars). Ed drew two of the Bacchus volumes (2 and 4), which are both out of print at the moment. Forgot to ask him whether he knows he gave that lady two left feet in the image I reproduced here yesterday (in the floatation thingy, click to enlarge). Happens to all of us, my old friend (but not me this time, which is why I'm laughing my head off). Needed Hayley Campbell to point it out though.

Next panel's from my favourite scene in Bacchus: the Gods of Business. Ed drew the finished art over my roughs, an arrangement he was never happy about (my goodness, this would have been 18 years ago, even before From Hell). Ed's style is more frenetic than mine, so he felt quite cramped. This is from the Italian edition which came out three or four years back, but I can't find a date on it.



Following is the cover of same. This was one of my favourites (issue #5) from the Bacchus comic book series. Looks like all mine except for the painted colour which Pete Mullins took care of beautifully. On the Eyeball Kid's coat I made him use those colouring markers the kids play with, where when you use the white one over the others it changes all the colours where it touches them. Actually, it looks like my own hand in that part; in retrospect I wish I'd left it all to Pete to do it his own way. It's probably not very permanent and whoever bought the original will have noticed it change over the years no doubt (I'm sure I would have warned them about it at the time). We used the markers more successfuly on the following issue's cover (the background 'noise') and then lost interest in them and gave them back to whichever kid we pinched them from in the first place. I kept good photos for the purpose of using the images again, as in this Italian edition. A crucial part of the composition however, was the word balloon. The guy holding the gun is saying "YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT!". For some reason the Italian publisher, Alta Fedelta, has removed that. Maybe it's only funny in English. Perhaps in Italy the Polizia don't say a great deal as they bundle you into the wagon. Perhaps my regular correspondent, Nathalie, can tell me. Anyway, as you can see, there was a lot of police-procedural malarkey in this story.



Ed edited a big book of Manga for the English speaking market recently, and there's a good interview with him at the Forbidden Planet blog.

My editor mark Siegel once had a suspicion that I was acquiring a habit of quoting from Beatles songs, which the title of today's post will not dispel. And tomorrow's post will be my fiftieth consecutive day of blogging !! However, since I am now off to my pal Slattery's (mr Duds for anybody who has been studiously following the comments sections... he wrote and drew a classic one-off comic titled Everybody Loves the Lizardman) stag afternoon (they start early here in Australia*, but I hope to effect an exit well before my bedtime), do not expect it to make a lot of sense. (like this last sentence...but that's me off out the door. too late)

(*The time of day here does not correspond to the time on my blog as I have set it to USA east coast time.)