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London Comic Mart August 2026

So, on August 16th, I visited the almost-legendary London Comic Mart at the Royal National Hotel for the first time since the autumn of 2008.

Why so long?!

I don’t know. I hadn’t been to London at all since December 2018, when Steve and I had lunch with the late movie director Norman J Warren. Norman was a very nice guy, BTW. But as to the marts… this was something I did go to semi-regularly for a number of years… the habit just lapsed, I suppose.

I met Paul G at Euston around 1pm, All the trains were running a bit late on this particular day. In spite of rumours to the contrary, London seemed about the same as the last time I saw it. The mart venue itself was not greatly changed from 18 years ago—the outdoor seating area was corralled, and I believe that wasn’t the case in ’08 (do I remember wrongly?!), but otherwise no notable changes. I had not done anything the least bit comicsy for so long, I found the mart a little disorientating for a while.

London Comic Mart August 16 2026
Blurry shot of the first room of the mart. Sorry, screwed this up a bit.

Glad to say, most of the mart prices were not unpardonably steep and I picked up a copy of the recent facsimile of the 1978 Superman vs. Muhammad Ali treasury special for £12.50. Strange but true: I have never previously owned a copy of this book, which in spite of the absurd concept happens to carry one of Neal Adams’s best art jobs. This was a good score, I think.
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Hard Luck City Promo 2026

Hard Luck City is a seemingly ill-fated project I first created way back in 1993. Every so often, I will dust it off and fiddle around with it, but nothing much ever culminates. Maybe someday?!

This time I did a simple page summarising some of the basic themes. For fun, mostly. Who knows. I guess the pinnacle of the idea was getting Gene Colan to draw one of the demonic characters back in 2006 (see below!), for the cover art of a comics anthology project (with Paul Gravett), which would have featured HLC amongst other things.

Hard Luck City Promo 2026
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Club Comicana-Vamporama at 20

NOTE: After you’ve read all the posting below (and I hope you do!), please go look at the 2021 posting “The Last Club Vamporama”—I had sadly accidentally deleted the original version of this posting, rather than making it private, forcing me to recreate it—and it’d be really cool if you could leave some new feedback & comments there! Thanks.

While on the theme of 20th anniversaries… I did my first Club Comicana strip around October 2006. To celebrate, let’s have a bit of history and rare art!

That first strip was going to be dropped into my regular “Networks” column for Comics International #201—however, Dez abruptly sold the magazine, and I didn’t get along with the bumbling fool who was tasked with killing it off taking it over… so I didn’t continue working for the mag.

Club Comicana 1 2006

But in actual fact, the very first (unfinished) strip was started in the summer of 2006. And I recently realised, I had never posted it on here. So here it is…
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Daredevil: Born Again… is OK

Daredevil: Born Again Promo

I mean, it’s not up to the standard of the three series of Daredevil that were on Netflix, c. 2015-18. The third season of that (actually a version of F Miller’s Born Again storyline) is about as good as live-action superhero material gets. Notwithstanding my reservations about superhero stuff which excludes kids… and this most certainly does, in all its incarnations… the Netflix show, but especially season three, was excellent.

Netflix Daredevil
Netflix DAREDEVIL. Who’d think that DD played by a Brit would be so good?

Born Again of course is full-on Disney/MCU/Kevin Feige territory. This left some people to dismiss it as foredoomed junk from the outset. Not entirely without reason, perhaps, but……
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