And here it is! This exists only as an app! Whatever an app is. This is one of my earliest books. It was last published all in one place in 1993. All the extras take the page count up to twice the original!


Itunes USA*******UK******Australia

In the Days of the Ace Rock'n'Roll Club was a book, or an ongoing series of 7-page stories which I drew between March 1978 and March 1979. The stories interlocked in various ways, with characters from one piece showing up in another. The 'arc', as we say nowadays, came to a logical conclusion after the eighth story, by which time Dapper John had emerged as the main character. A proto-Alec MacGarry appears as the second key character. It was in these pages that I started to get the idea of using autobiography as a starting point for a big serious book.

(The artistic observer might notice that this is where I started all that experimentation with the zip-a-tones.)

I had self-published an earlier book in 1975 (when I was 19) and with that I had realized the hard fact that I knew no way of selling 500 copies of a book. Unwilling to venture into that again, but still clinging to the notion that I was a comics author of some merit, the completely finished art for the ACE book sat on the floor of my Southend bedsit in a neatly folded bright blue plastic laundry bag for the next three years. The parts first saw the light of day in the years 1982-83, in random sequence, in a variety of small press photocopied booklets. Alan Moore was writing a review column (in addition to his many more important endeavors) in 1983 and he reviewed one of these little chapters. This was the first contact between me and Alan, and well, you know where that led.

The package contains, in addition to the core stories, all the relevant small press covers, with their hand-colouring, the Alan Moore review in full, a couple of 7-page tangent stories, all the extra introductory pages in comics form both for the Harrier 1988 printing (cover and six pages- never reprinted), the Fantagraphics 1993 collected edition (cover and three pages, which was the last time I ever drew Dapper John until the cover for the App above), a wise introduction by me at the front and a decent interview with me at the back in which my editor attempts to extract exactly what that 'Rock'n'roll' thing was all about. There is a selection of old photos and news cuttings relating to the subject, with a running humorous commentary by me. And the interview is adorned with some previously unseen pieces of painted colour art. My editor was so pleased with all the extra stuff I supplied that he bought me an ipad! Now I can find out what an app is. When I get the thing off my daughter Erin.