The South West kick starts the Convention season with a special one day celebration of
Mike Allwood
Producerwww.fantasyevents.org
Mike Allwood
Producerwww.fantasyevents.org
Over the last couple of weeks the “End of Mankind” teaser for the 2014 Green Skies book has received almost 3,000 hits. Other items on CBO get similar large hit numbers.
In November, 2013, there were some 139,325 page views for CBO. That comes out at around 34,831.25 page views per week.
So, you might think that this means it helps sell my Black Tower Comics and Books? Nope. November saw 3 books sold. My online store is here, by-the-way:
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/hoopercomicsuk
David Gordon’s (see the Chang3lings link to right) interview and look at his Chang3lings/My Excess business has received 1,699 views. I haven’t heard reports of a Scotsman running around screaming “I’m rich! I’m rich!”
Titan Book, Cinebook and Casterman reviews as well as the review of the Kick-Ass DVD have also received high numbers of hits. How that has affected their sales I have no idea.
But this is publishing. People will snap up free pdf of books and ask question after stupid question about books….and NEVER buy a copy. And what do I, as a publisher, do about this? Let me tell you.
There are over 70 collected books or individual books in the online store covering science fiction, horror, fantasy, super heroes, haiku (!) and books on world mysteries and wildlife. As of 1st January, 2014, BTCG will not be publishing any more new books -we’ve a massive inventory allready. What will happen is that occasionally, Black Tower Super Heroes will appear but most other things are on hold until June and “The Green Skies” -an epic in itself.
There are no “discount sales” or “special offer” reduction prices because, the way POD (print on Demand) works I am getting the barest minimum for a sale. The highest price book, once sold, will earn me around £3 or $6. Not a lot when you consider all the hard work involved. I need to sell a heck of a lot of books to make anywhere near decent money.
In some cases, where I have worked with an artist on a book, I will be looking for a non-UK publisher interested in publishing that work under license so the artist can earn something!
So, Black Tower is NOT closing down -just taking a little snooze!
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RRP £19.99 BUY NOW
Comics writer Garth Ennis, selects his favourite stories from the seminal 1970s British boys’ comic Battle. Included in this fantastic volume for the very first time is the complete HMS Nightshade, and the never-before-reprinted The General Dies At Dawn.
With insights and introductions by Ennis himself, this collection of war comic rarities is not to be missed!
I am far less interested in what Garth Ennis has to say, but a fan of British weekly war comics needed to offer some kind of introduction and Ennis is a fan.
What can I write? Titan Books has cornered the market in producing beautifully produced and packaged collections.
I have written before how newspaper strips such as James Bond or Modesty Blaise could suffer in the printing process –the perils of newsprint. The same equally applies to the weekly comics such as Battle. I have some of the strips in this collection in their original weekly format. Printing from the next page has seeped through, the “solid blacks” are far from solid and, of course, with age, the paper the comics are printed on has become even more delicate –and it wasn’t that good back in the day. Here the pages gush with lovely solid blacks –all balanced out well on the page as only true pros like Mike Western, John Cooper and Can Kennedy could.
If I have one complaint it is that no one has ever collected Mike’s The Leopard From Lime Street together in one book. The other –really MAJOR- complaint is that we simply do not have enough collected work from one of thegreats of British comics –John Cooper. Coop needs far more of his work collected together. “The General Dies At Dawn” is a now almost forgotten classic –and I do mean classic- and here you have it printed in true quality.
This is true, gritty and hard war action comics at their best –and even US creators such as Wally Wood were inspired by British war comics.
To those wannabe comic artists I’d say study these strips. See how they were quality and all drawn by hand –no computer in sight. LEARN the skills of drawing the way a real man draws (spits out chewed tobacco and gets dirty look from cat). Until you’ve the ink stains on your fingers and the taste of India ink on your biscuits or sandwiches you aint a real man (or woman –we don’t want to get into trouble here). Waking up to the smell of drawing ink early in the morning. Better’n napalm.
A bit too late for Christmas maybe but this is one of a delayed gift to give a comicker. A great, hefty collection that is a must by!!
LONDON (AP) — Peter O’Toole, the charismatic actor who achieved instant stardom as Lawrence of Arabia and was nominated eight times for an Academy Award, has died, his agent said Sunday. He was 81.
O’Toole died Saturday after a long illness, Steve Kenis said in a brief statement.
The family was overwhelmed “by the outpouring of real love and affection being expressed towards him, and to us, during this unhappy time. … In due course there will be a memorial filled with song and good cheer, as he would have wished,” O’Toole’s daughter Kate said in the statement.
O’Toole got his first Oscar nomination for 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” his last for “Venus” in 2006. With that he set the record for most nominations without ever winning, though he had accepted an honorary Oscar in 2003.
A reformed — but unrepentant — hell-raiser, O’Toole long suffered from ill health. Always thin, he had grown wraithlike in later years, his famously handsome face eroded by years of hard drinking.
But nothing diminished his flamboyant manner and candor.
“If you can’t do something willingly and joyfully, then don’t do it,” he once said. “If you give up drinking, don’t go moaning about it; go back on the bottle. Do. As. Thou. Wilt.”
O’Toole began his acting career as one of the most exciting young talents on the British stage. His 1955 “Hamlet,” at the Bristol Old Vic, was critically acclaimed.
International stardom came in David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia.” With only a few minor movie roles behind him, O’Toole was unknown to most moviegoers when they first saw him as T.E. Lawrence, the mythic British World War I soldier and scholar who led an Arab rebellion against the Turks.
His sensitive portrayal of Lawrence’s complex character garnered O’Toole his first Oscar nomination.
O’Toole was tall, fair and strikingly handsome, and the image of his bright blue eyes peering out of an Arab headdress in Lean’s spectacularly photographed desert epic was unforgettable.
Playwright Noel Coward once said that if O’Toole had been any prettier, they would have had to call the movie “Florence of Arabia.”
In 1964’s “Becket,” O’Toole played King Henry II to Richard Burton’s Thomas Becket, and won another Oscar nomination. Burton shared O’Toole’s fondness for drinking, and their offset carousing made headlines.
O’Toole played Henry again in 1968 in “The Lion in Winter,” opposite Katharine Hepburn, for his third Oscar nomination.
Four more nominations followed: in 1968 for “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” in 1971 for “The Ruling Class,” in 1980 for “The Stunt Man,” and in 1982 for “My Favorite Year.” It was almost a quarter-century before he received his eighth and last, for “Venus.”
Seamus Peter O’Toole was born Aug. 2, 1932, the son of Irish bookie Patrick “Spats” O’Toole and his wife Constance. There is some question about whether Peter was born in Connemara, Ireland, or in Leeds, northern England, where he grew up.
After a teenage foray into journalism at the Yorkshire Evening Post and national military service with the navy, young O’Toole auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and won a scholarship.
He went from there to the Bristol Old Vic and soon was on his way to stardom, helped along by an early success in 1959 at London’s Royal Court Theatre in “The Long and The Short and The Tall.”
The image of the renegade hell-raiser stayed with O’Toole for decades, although he gave up drinking in 1975 following serious health problems and major surgery.
He did not, however, give up smoking unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes in an ebony holder. That and his penchant for green socks, voluminous overcoats and trailing scarves lent him a rakish air and suited his fondness for drama in the old-fashioned “bravura” manner.
A month before his 80th birthday in 2012, O’Toole announced his retirement from a career that he said had fulfilled him emotionally and financially, bringing “me together with fine people, good companions with whom I’ve shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits.”
“However, it’s my belief that one should decide for oneself when it is time to end one’s stay,” he said. “So I bid the profession a dry-eyed and profoundly grateful farewell.”
In retirement, O’Toole said he would focus on the third volume of his memoirs.
Good parts were sometimes few and far between, but “I take whatever good part comes along,” O’Toole told The Independent on Sunday newspaper in 1990.
“And if there isn’t a good part, then I do anything, just to pay the rent. Money is always a pressure. And waiting for the right part — you could wait forever. So I turn up and do the best I can.”
The 1980 “Macbeth” in which he starred was a critical disaster of heroic proportions. But it played to sellout audiences, largely because the savaging by the critics brought out the curiosity seekers.
“The thought of it makes my nose bleed,” he said years later.
In 1989, however, O’Toole had a big stage success with “Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell,” a comedy about his old drinking buddy, the legendary layabout and ladies’ man who wrote The Spectator magazine’s weekly “Low Life” column when he was sober enough to do so.
The honorary Oscar came 20 years after his seventh nomination for “My Favorite Year.” By then it seemed a safe bet that O’Toole’s prospects for another nomination were slim. He was still working regularly, but in smaller roles unlikely to earn awards attention.
O’Toole graciously accepted the honorary award, quipping, “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, my foot,” as he clutched his Oscar statuette.
He had nearly turned down the award, sending a letter asking that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hold off on the honorary Oscar until he turned 80.
Hoping another Oscar-worthy role would come his way, O’Toole wrote: “I am still in the game and might win the bugger outright.”
The last chance came in, for “Venus,” in which he played a lecherous old actor consigned to roles as feeble-minded royals or aged men on their death beds. By failing again to win, he broke the tie for futility which had been shared with his old drinking buddy, Richard Burton.
O’Toole divorced Welsh actress Sian Phillips in 1979 after 19 years of marriage. The couple had two daughters, Kate and Pat.
A brief relationship with American model Karen Somerville led to the birth of his son Lorcan in 1983, and a change of lifestyle for O’Toole.
After a long custody battle, a U.S. judge ruled Somerville should have her son during school vacations, and O’Toole would have custody during the school year.
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