Heros the Spartan reprint ever nearer

Book Palace reprint cover announced!

Peter Richardson has kindly updated me (and you!) about the Heros the Spartan reprint volume that Geoff West and friends are working on.

The Book Palace Books blog has an article which I can't see needs improving, so please head over there via this link

Every time the issue of reprinting of Bellamy's double page spreads is discussed fans get a bit silly, in my opinion. Peter explains how Geoff and he considered printing 2 pages on one to avoid spoiling the view of the "gutter" - the bit where two pages meet. It's easy to read in Eagle or TV21 when you can lay them flat, but a bound book is a different matter. I loved the recent Century 21 reprints for the clarity of reproduction but felt it was a shame about the gutter! But, as Peter says

"So in the end sanity prevailed, we went back and looked at the double page spread in Ron Embleton's Wulf the Briton: The Complete Adventures (there is one from Christmas 1959) and looked at the all important gutter. The wonderful thing about Prolong is the quality of their binding, the books are bound in signatures of three sheets and open out flat with no problem whatsoever, so in the end we decided that the answer to our problem was right under our noses. In addition the book will be much easier to handle and more of a reading experience. Plus it will greatly help in keeping the cost of this book down. So all in all we decided it was by far the best route to take."

He also sent me a few pictures to share which will help those of you who haven't seen Heros to appreciate why a lot of people - including John Byrne, Walt Simonson, Barry Smith, Dave Gibbons amongst others are very excited by this venture

Heros the Spartan episode 24 from Eagle 6 April 1963 Vol. 14:14

This is the famous - oft quoted - battle scene that Barry Windsor-Smith showed the Academy of Comic Book Artists back in the early 1970s (read about here and here) . Imagine opening your Eagle comic in the early 60s and seeing this eye-popping double page spread!

Heros the Spartan episode 2 from Eagle 3 November 1962 Vol 13:43

And the latter shows us where the reprint cover has come from.