Honey, I'm Home!

Well, long time between posts again. I have no excuses to make...
I'm going to begin posting edited duplicates of some of the items I put here onto my Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=141148839261602#!/profile.php?id=694430869 - and vice versa, for the reason that many times I get round to attending to that page whilst not keeping up with this one. I make certain I put news of signings and stuff here, at least, so that any of you folks who are interested in what I do can get to see me and talk to me about it if you'd like to, which I'm very glad to do ( it's one of the best parts of my job ), but I would prefer to put much more than that up here more often. And, as I always say, I will always try to do that!
This post I'm answering a question I've been asked a couple of times by people who've seen my Honey West cover. Are the pics in the frames on the cover from an upcoming issue that I've drawn? The answer is no. When I was asked to do the cover, I immediately thought of doing something retro in design, as the character and tv series is a Sixties product. Anyway, it occurred to me that it would be a nice idea to have Honey in the middle of a bunch of strip panels - amongst them, as if just out of them, and kind of presenting them, in her new incarnation as a strip heroine. But I didn't plan to draw those panels I wanted. I had some unused sample strips of mine that were completely appropriate for the task - stuff that had never been seen, was my copyright because it was unused, and were as retro as Honey is. Well, almost as retro I should say, because they're from the mid-70's, drawn as samples for Look-In - a British weekly specialising in TV adaptations. This was in the grim days when I was struggling to get work. They're from Bionic Woman and Six Million Dollar Man submissions, from scripts I'd written myself. At the time I was a great admirer of what the amazing John M Burns was doing with the spectacular adventures of Jamie Sommers - seen below on the right - and I was sure I could make a good fist of trying to match the quality of it. That turned out to be a delusion, but it was definitely worth the attempt. Needless to say, I didn't get any work from Look-In, otherwise I would have begun my career in this business much earlier. But I enjoyed being able to use that work I'd done in the past for something worthwhile at last, and it was nice to visit the material of old struggles with a good feeling rather than looking back grimly at the inadequacies of my then-raw skills. A bit like going back to old home territory you were glad to get away from at the time and thinking, ' Well, it wasn't really so bad to be here '...
Back soon, folks - he said, hopefully : )