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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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Mom: 20 Years On

I can’t believe I’m writing down that it’s TWENTY YEARS since my mother died. In all kinds of ways it seems surreal, improbable and deeply perplexing to try to process this apparent fact of chronology.

And yet, there it is. I have lately been rebuilding/restoring the old archives on this blog, dating back to December 7th 2000 (how naïve it all seemed back then), more than half of which are now back online, with much more to come… and there’s no doubting that these events happened a full two decades ago. The same day Alex Toth died; the birthday of both Vincent Price and Christopher Lee—what is it about May 27th?!

Mom August 1956
This is mom in August 1956, aged 13. She was a cool teen.

If you haven’t already, I hope you go and read the blog I wrote back on May 27th 2006 (and indeed my contribution in the comments thread). These posts say it all, with much more clarity and raw immediacy than I can hope to summon today. I was curiously impressed, looking back, at how articulate I was. I’m not sure I’d handle it as well today. I know I wasn’t, in fact, handling it well at all at that time (who does?)—but I was expressing myself extremely well.

I would like to use the second half of this post to… go deeper. But first, the positive stuff. I have a photo album page, fully restored and updated, dedicated to mom—which I will update over time, as I continue to scan more of the best old photos I have. You can view the page as it stands here:

In Memory of Mom.
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Me & Mom & Horror (and More)

Some memories of mom as we approach the 20th anniversary of her death…

I got my love of horror from mom. Where mom got it from, who knows. But she was hooked on weird stuff fairly early on. One of my favourite stories that she liked to tell also explains her approach to me and horror movies when I was a kid.

In the summer of 1958, the UK was buzzing with the release of Hammer’s first entry in their Dracula series. Starring Christopher Lee as the Count and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, the word was that this movie was seriously, hard-core scary and maybe, too, a little bit (GASP!) sexy!

Dracula Poster 1958

Mom was 15 years old on August 13th 1958. Dracula was an “X” certificate—she was too young to see it.
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Battle of the Bulge

(Top note: the personal posts are back!! Please tell me this isn’t a mistake.)

NEWSFLASH: I need to lose weight.

REWIND: I think it’s fair to say that I’ve had my ups-and-downs, weight-wise!

I was always pretty skinny up until about 1988, when I first gained a bit of weight. And I do mean a bit. At the time I was drinking some alcohol and also smoking an amount of pot (which, I’m sure many of you know, gives you “the munchies”). So, I was aghast enough, after seeing a photo where I looked kinda round-faced, to go on a diet! I probably weighed 11 stones. But by mid-1989, I weighed a mere nine stones—the lightest I’ve been my entire adult life. In fact, I was a bit too light. I am, after all, 5’8″, and my build, while not large, is not petite—so nine stones was pushing it!

It didn’t last long. I was back up to maybe 10.5 after a few months. And that, to my mind, was a good weight for me. Anyhow, I have to say that at the age of 20, losing weight was a breeze. I had a simple method: I just ate exactly half of every meal. The weight came right off, quickly & efficiently.
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Fiddling With The Site

I used to make a habit of it back in the day—restless tinkering, never quite being satisfied. In the last decade, although this site has been through a number of changes, I’ve been less inclined and not even sure what purpose the site served. For a long time the Portfolio section attempted to be an all-encompassing summary of everything I supposedly do, for example, and it never quite worked. So this time out I have focused it just on my artwork.

LOL, look—some people think my artwork is crap! But I have as much right as anyone to improve. I believe my portrait work has improved significantly in the last six years. Overall my stuff has enjoyed a more modest improvement. No doubt I have weak areas. But it makes sense to me to focus the Website on something in particular. It gets messy otherwise.
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The Blog Is Back

Oh, no, really?!

Worse than that, I am slowly reviving all the old archives going back to December 2000. It will take a while, updating & adding categories & tags, checking old links, adding or upgrading images where possible, etc. But yeah. I wanted the history back in place.
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