looks like I'm doing some traveling this year after all. I'll be in Lucca, Italy, for the festival in the last week of October. And I'll follow that with a brief appearance in London.

Nestled in its stout ring of Renaissance walls now converted into an elegant promenade, the relaxed, gentle town of Lucca in Tuscany has little to betray its status as Italy's capital city of comics. That is, unless you happen to pass by the Museo Nazionale del Fumetto e dell'Immagine (National Museum of Comics) on Piazza San Romano, launched in 2001 to celebrate the best Italian comic characters and authors. Yet it's in the Fall, with the annual Lucca Comics & Games fair and convention, that the city's penchant for comics really bursts to life.

I'll be a guest of EdizioniBD, and it times nicely with the arrival of the eighth and final volume Of Bacchus translated to Italian. They've been bringing them out at the rate of one per year since 2002. It's 'curtains' for Bacchus in this one. I had an idea the title 'Banged Up' (locked up, or jailed) wouldn't travel well. The phrase doesn't even read clearly in America.


Curiously, the same publisher released A Disease of Language a few months back and I've only just discovered it. It's been attracting some great reviews. Well, they sound okay to me. Panorama.it: Un disturbo del linguaggio. Il genio visionario di Campbell e Moore. Mick Evans, who did all the design on it, thinks 'Disturbing Luggage' should have been the title from the get-go.


Then there's the one I spoke about two weeks ago here. ORPHANS! MAYHEM! TERROR!. Designer Charlie Orr put that along the top just to demonstrate a typographical approach. It cracked us up and we insisted it stay there.


To those three books newly printed in Italy, add a fourth, the old perennial, published, like the above, by Magic Press. No translation needed


A few years back Magic Press also published a book (now out of print) that never had an English language counterpart, my neglected Hellblazer run between shiny covers. It was a glossy tradepaperback using the cover of Hellblazer #90, June 1995, and the contents included all four of my parts of 'Warped notions', plus the issue Jamie Delano wrote to fill the gap while my thing was still gearing up, and the two issues following that were written by Paul Jenkins after my run concluded earlier than expected and somebody thought there were loose ends lying around. It was all a bit hectic and distressing I can tell ya. Vertigo thought my best idea was the one where I said, 'how about I just get off the book altogether'. You see, I never really 'got' Constantine. I mean he was good in the first place when Moore wrote him, and in the second place when Neil Gaiman put him in The Books of Magic ('how about you, John, have you ever travelled through time? Yeah, but only one minute after another, like everybody else.') (I'm pulling that out of my memory so it may not be exact). In those manifestations the character was a London wide-boy wandering about the occult end of the DC universe. By the time I arrived he was a London wide-boy wandering around... London. it seemed to have become a sixteen-year-old's idea of how a cool forty-year-old might behave. I didn't get it then and I still don't get it. Anyway, the book was a great cover-to-cover showcase of first rate early Sean Phillips art, and why it remains uncollected in English, when other baloney is published every month of the year, will have to remain a mystery. And 'I don't like myskeries on account of I cannot understan' 'em.' So there you go; Distorted Noses.


I'll note the London appearances when they're pinned down.