Reading Steve Holland’s excellent, Bear Alley blog this morning I was delighted to see that Carlton books’ reprints of British Pocket Libraries edit by Steve are moving beyond war Stories.

With a number of books reprinting old issues of War and Battle Picture Library already out or planned, this autumn sees the publication of High Noon, a collection from Cowboy Picture Library and (cheers) Rick Random – Space Detective.

HIGH NOON

I’m not a huge fan of Westerns, but any book reprinting stories drawn by Jesus Belasco, best known for The Steel Claw, is all right by me. The book also has strips by Ron Embelton’s younger brother Gerry and Alberto Breccia.

I’ve seen some of Embelton’s work recently, in the 80’s version of the Eagle where he drew Dan Dare for a while, but by all accounts his B&W art is far superior and well worth a look.

But it is the work of Alberto Breccia, that is really exciting me about this book. I had never heard of him, or rather his name had not stuck with me, but a quick ‘Google’ and I can hardly wait to see these strips. He was known in Europe as ‘the Master of Black and White” and what I have seen of his work is stylish and atmospheric. I’m almost certain that some of his work was reprinted in early issues of Heavy Metal but I have not been able to confirm that just yet, but this book looks well worth looking out for.

His son, Enrique, was the artist on Vertigo’s Lovecraft Graphic Novel and the recent Swamp Thing series.

RICK RANDOM

Twelve stories (or ten – if you believe the Amazon description) by the definitive ‘Space Artist’ of British comics, Ron Turner, with four of them written by Harry Harrison.

Turner worked in British comics for almost 40 years. From the ‘Atomic Mole’ strips he produced for ‘Big’, which I have never seen, through Thunderbirds and the Daleks for TV21 and finally producing one painted Dalek strip for Dr Who Monthly in the nineties. Along the way he worked on war and humour strips and even drew a few of the early Judge Dredd stories. But his clean-style and imagination was more suited to ‘retro’ science fiction. In was the future of the fifties that he excelled at and this I will be looking forward to Oct this year to finally get to read some of these stories. 

Now if we could just have a collection of the Robot Archie stories from Lion Picture LIbrary.....