Tuesday, 21 June 2016

From Cents to Pence! - summer update!!

As promised, a quick update on the progress of the final read-through of the history part of From Cents to Pence! - and it's all good news, as a small window of time has opened up, allowing me to blitz a good proportion of the remaining chapters. A few of the latter ones will require material jettisoned from an earlier chapter stitching into place, and the final chapter will require the insertion of a lot of extra material to bring the story up-to-date. So, apart from a few details to be fed in earlier on, I'm delighted to report that progress is all good!
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8 comments:

  1. John Pitt23 October 2016 at 06:42

    http://starlogged.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/1989-amazing-spider-man-great-rain.html?m=1
    Rob, just came across this! Hope you already knew about it!?

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  2. Rob Kirby26 October 2016 at 11:06

    Hi John, thanks for the tip-off. I've just posted there, but I was aware there was a range, although I haven't seen this particular book. I have a Hulk edition.

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  3. Davide30 October 2016 at 04:14

    Hello Rob, I'm an (Italian) Marvel fan who is trying to track down every obscure Marvel UK comic that's ever been published. And I'm eagerly waiting for your book (any info on approximately when it might / should be published?).

    The books you're talking about here ("Spider-Man: The Great Rain Robbery" and the Hulk book you mentioned (which, I'm assuming, is "The Incredible Hulk: The Search for Hulk")) are both part of a line of Marvel UK digest-sized TPBs for children that featured stories narrated in both text and comic form (basically, the page on the left was a (very simple) text page and the page on the right was a comic book page).

    I managed to identify SIXTEEN books in this series. There might be others, but here are the sixteen I found:

    _AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: THE GREAT RAIN ROBBERY
    _AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: SPIDER-MAN TO THE RESCUE
    _COUNT DUCKULA: DUCKULA ON BROADWAY
    _COUNT DUCKULA: DUCKULA IN TROUBLE
    _THE FLINTSTONES: DINO GOES TO HOLLYROCK
    _THE INCREDIBLE HULK: THE SEARCH FOR HULK
    _THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS: THE RETURN OF MR. STAY PUFT
    _THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS AND THE GHOSTLY SHARK
    _THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS: FOUR GHOSTBUSTERS AND A BABY
    _THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS: GOOD-BYE TO SLIMER
    _THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS AT THE FOREVER FAIR
    _THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS AND THE PHANTOM PHARAOH
    _THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS AND THE GHOSTLY BROTHERS GRIMM
    _THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS AND EGON'S NEW INVENTION
    _SUPERTED: COOKIE CAPERS!
    _FIREMAN SAM: CATCH THAT CAT!

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  4. Rob Kirby16 November 2016 at 11:01

    Hi Davide, lovely to hear from you, and thanks so much for this info - that's saved me a long rummage :) Any chance that you might be able to e-mail me some 300dpi quality jpeg scans of their covers?
    How did/does Marvel appear over in Italian comics? I know that there was eventually a Marvel Italia division formed after Marvel US got frustrated with different licensees publishing material of different vintages at the same time. Is that still going?
    And thanks for the kind words on the book. I'm back at the grindstone now. All the extra information that came out of the Neil Tennant interview has been fed into teh text and I'm just plugging in a few stray items before I do a final review of all the chapters leading up to the final three or four that need rewrites and updates to bring them up to the same quality as earlier chapters that have had a lot more time spent on them in recent years and to take them up to present day.
    Hopefully I'll have more to say at last on the other side of the impending holiday season.
    Rob

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  5. Davide20 November 2016 at 05:31

    Hello Rob, I'm glad I managed to help :) Unfortunately, though, I don't have any cover scan of those issues, especially not in high quality. I found some images here and there on the Internet and I saw the issues at the British Library, but I didn't save copies of the cover for me...

    Marvel comics have always fared quite well here in Italy, I think that we've always had the most complete and up-to-date production of Marvel comics outside the US and the UK. Yes, Marvel comics here are published by "Marvel Italia", which is a division of Panini Comics. Sales are much worse nowadays than they were 20 years ago, but that's the case everywehere.

    Anyway, I wanted to ask you something: is your book going to cover only the superhero / "post-teen" Marvel UK comics or are you going to index all the children comics that Marvel UK produced? (I have a list of (nearly?) every children series published Marvel UK, if it can help -just the name of the series, the years in which it was published and in most cases how many issues did it last.)

    And finally, I know it's difficult to make an estimation, but do you know whether the book will be published in 2017?

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  6. Rob Kirby3 December 2016 at 13:15

    Hi Davide, thanks so much for the update on Marvel Italia - I'd suspected it must have nee taken over by Panini as well, along with their other European books, but go to now that is the case.

    I'm afraid that your hunch is correct. Because I'd never planned to write a book about Marvel's UK activities, I hardly picked up any of the comics outside of the Superhero/post-teen titles, unless they also featured US content too, such as Transformers and Thundercats - although, of course, the originated content in both of those titles quickly outshone the US reprints! This has made impossible to research those titles in the same that i have been able to with all the complete runs of the other title that I do have (a few latter issues of Thundercats aside, due to a funding crisis at the time after a redundancy, that I still haven't found all the remaining copies I need).

    I have, nevertheless, certainly discussed upon the 'nursery' and younger reader titles during the course of the history part of the book, so they haven't been ignored, even though for the moment I'm unable to index those titles. I had some very fragmentary info on some of the 'nursery' books, and someone kindly forwarded me some more info recently, but the more the merrier - you might well be able to fill in some more gaps. I'll send you an e-mail from the account linked to this blog, so that you can mail everything direct to there rather than having to paste all up on to here.

    I think that I'm close enough to the end of the project now to say that I will finally be finished early next year, but with various clearances and the publishing decisions to make after that before assembling the final work outside of a demanding full-time day job, I can't see it being published next year... unless I get very lucky on the lottery, of course ;)

    Appreciate your help!

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  7. Unknown27 February 2018 at 03:27

    How's the book coming? Can't wait

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  8. Rob Kirby30 March 2018 at 11:02

    Hi,

    Very well, now that I've finally been able to get back to work on it, after some health issues last year that kept me out of work, and also off a keyboard, for about five months last year. Obviously, that's put me behind somewhat, but things are going well, so I hope to have final rewrites dealt with by the autumn, if not sooner.

    Then we can finally get to the planning, design and publication of the darn thing :)

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