I received news today, when catching up with my email from the Christmas period, that Gerry Anderson's creations are about to star on British stamps from 11th January! What a new year's surprise.
These photographs look really nice and Royal Mail have done some lovely items for the launch date of 11th January 2011. Click on the link to see presentation sets, first day covers and so on.
So where's the Bellamy connection?
Scificollector @ The Stamp Centre, who are based in the Strand, London, produce many Anderson, Doctor Who and other products and their signed First Day Covers have always appealed to me. As I'm sure a lot of you philatelists will know the Royal Mail produce special First Day Covers for the launch event of any new set of commemorative stamps. But The Stamp Centre have gone one better by inviting Gerry Anderson to sign their unique covers.
As they say on the website:
Gerry Anderson 2011 Limited Edition First Day Comic Strip Covers
On January 11th 2011, the Royal Mail are issuing a set of 6 stamps to celebrate the genius of Gerry Anderson M.B.E..
We are immensely proud to have been exclusively authorised by Gerry to produce a range of fan dedicated collectable First Day Covers to complement the 10 stamps.
There are six 'comic strip' covers each featuring one of the main six stamps and combine to create a comprehensive set, which is stylistically consistent and inspired by the works of, amongst others, Frank Bellamy. Each cover also features a special postmark, dated on the day of issue and each piece is individually marked with its unique edition number. All the covers will also be signed in person by Gerry Anderson, making for a truly wonderful collectable.
The set of six is available to pre-order now for £80 post-free UK or they can be pre-ordered individually by making your selection/s below for £15+£1 P&P each.
Also released by the Royal Mail is a Thunderbirds Miniature Sheet, featuring for the first time a lenticular moving image design showing the Thunderbirds countdown sequence. A separate cover adorned with this sheet is also available, as are 3 different 'behind the scenes' covers which carry the full set of the six main stamps.
For the Thunderbird cover they've used Frank Bellamy's drawing from TV21 (plus Embleton, Noble and others for the remaining covers). If you're visiting them, take a look attheir other Anderson set too
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| The Stamp Centre's covers |
It seems Titan is reprinting Heros the Spartan:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Heros-Spartan-Tom-Tully/dp/1848568932
So, Titan is reprinting "Heros the Spartan":
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Heros-Spartan-Tom-Tully/dp/1848568932
And it seems the format can be a little problematic:
http://gadsircomics.blogspot.com/2007/07/uncollected-heros-spartan.html
"One problem with reprinting Heros is its format: it appeared stretched across the centrespread of the tabloid sized Eagle comic, treating the whole area as a single page. The landscape pages of Frank Miller’s 300 - a story and format inspired by Heros - are not much more than a quarter of that size.
If my quick calculations are right, all of Heros the Spartan would fit on to only about 100 big, wide pages. Even at 360mm by 580mm, that needn’t be a wrist breaker."
________
Now, will Titan dare to do justice to the work with a big landscape format? Especially considering there are pages not in that format:
http://bp1.blogger.com/_YQVD6Kvrkk8/R0AlP1nMFTI/AAAAAAAAAcs/N5cPzyy4kKA/s1600-h/heros1.jpg
Although I think they're not by Bellamy but by other artist. Will Titan reprint only the Bellamy stuff?
I hope Titan deliver the goods but I would almost preferred a superexpensive, impeccably restored, Absolute-ish edition like Book Palace's "Wulf the Briton" brick, because the material seems to deserve it.
In fact, looking at the figures...
WULF's size is 11" x 14" (270mm x 360mm)
HEROS' original size is 14" x 22.8" (360mm by 580mm)
Both come from old British tabloid sized comics, but the latter is composed of double landscape pages, so it's just twice as big as the former, which is composed of single regular pages.
Now, there's no way Titan's book will be remotely near that size. It'll be probably something similar to their usual Dan Dare of Charley's War reprints, and probably not in a landscape format so we better start praying for a first rate sewn binding to avoid any dreadful gutter loss. I seem to remember there was a similar case recently (Absolute Promethea? anyone has it?).
What boggles my little mind is that, given the chance, I have a feeling the crazy Book Palace guys would have the balls to do it as the Good Lord intended:
A landscape 14" x 22.8" slipcased deluxe hardcover retailing for $500.00.
Imagine the Wulf book, with the same height, but twice as wide.
And god help me, I would have been crazy enough to buy it.