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Thursday 7 July 2011

Tube Surfing: Two, Four, Nine, Fifty

BBC2 Scotland Only: Monday 11 July 2011 10pm will see the broadcast of the BBC Artworks Scotland documentary about Scottish comics and comic writers which, unsurprisingly, will feature Alan Grant, Mark Millar and Grant Morrison talking about their work. While it is officially only being broadcast on BBC2 in Scotland, and presumably will be available to the entire UK on the BBC iPlayer for seven days afterwards, it is worth remembering that Sky viewers in the rest of the UK are able to access BBC2 Scotland on channel 990 and so can watch or record it at the same time as those north of the border. Details of the programme are on the Artworks Scotland webpage.

Four Cornerers: Four of the seven artists who make up the Scottish daily artblog Scotch Corner were at the Kingdom Of Adventure shop in Kirkcaldy last Saturday for a signing and the recording of a podcast. Jon Hodgson, Andy Hepworth, Graeme Neil Reid and Tom Crielly were joined by Simon Fraser for a short time via Skype but technical issues, otherwise known as a blown fuse, meant that his Skype feed could not be recorded for the podcast. The reason behind the gathering was to celebrate two years of the blog's existence and their birthday present to themselves was a month's holiday as they have handed the blog over to an impressive array of other artists to show off their work and answer a few questions. To date these have included Mick McMahon, Bob Eggleton, Jimmy Broxton, James Ryman, Chris Weston and Siku. The Scotch Corner blog is here.

The Curse Of Issue 9? It looks like CLiNT has survived the curse of issue 9 but only by the skin of its teeth with the magazine's frequency dropped from 13 to an unusual 9 issues a year. Of the recent batch of comics related magazines, both Alan Moore's Dodgem Logic and Alan Grant's Wasted have fallen by the wayside for one reason or another having reached issue 8. SFX's Comic Heroes is currently on issue 7 and has gone from 4 to 6 issues a year so we will keep our fingers crossed for it and, of course, will have everything crossed for Strip Magazine in October and The Phoenix Comic in January. With Wasted gone to the great newsagents in the sky, Tales Of The Buddha and Vampire Vixens Of The Wehrmacht are both now looking for new publishers, so fingers crossed for them also.

Commando Interrogation: With the fiftieth anniversary of the first issue of DC Thomson's Commando at the end of last month, you would have expected the company to cover, or at least mention, it in their daily Dundee Courier newspaper, but it was not to be. Instead Scottish readers were able to read the thoughts of editor Calum Laird, deputy editor Scott Montgomery, former editor George Low and writer Ferg Handley in the Daily Record (the Scottish version of the Daily Mirror). The on-line version of the article has an excellent picture of Scott, George and Calum with loads of original Commando artwork but the paper version also had this priceless pic of George wearing a WWII British helmet. The downthetubes Medal For Resisting Interrogation must go to Scott as the only one of the four who managed to not have his age revealed. The Daily Record interview is here.

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