Saturday Event

On Saturday I'm giving a talk-with-clips about my TV career at the Lass O'Gowrie on Charles Street in Manchester, and as the day gets closer I'm growing convinced that no one is going to turn up. If you've an events diary or similar feature and might be interested in giving it a mention, feel free to pass the information on.

I was born in Salford so this is a homecoming for me. I'll be covering ground from my start with Doctor Who through working with Brian Clemens on BUGS in the 90s with side-trips into TV horror and Rosemary & Thyme, right up to the experience of remaking Eleventh Hour in Hollywood for Jerry Bruckheimer (the first version, with Patrick Stewart, was shot in Manchester).

The talk's in an upstairs room of the Lass at 6.30, right after my old friend Bryan Talbot speaking about his Grandville graphic novels. It follows a day of events with Johnny Vegas, who I suspect will have no trouble pulling an audience.

Bryan Talbot, Fantasycon GoH

It's thanks to my old friend Bryan Talbot that I could legitimately put 'model' on my CV, if I were so inclined... back when he was living in Preston and creating The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan pressed my entire family into service to help with the photoreference for some of the frames. That's me, the dodgy salesman who tries it on with Helen Potter and succeeds only in wrecking his car, the red 480 that I was driving at the time. My wife sat in for the adult Helen and my daughter posed as Helen-in-childhood. I'm the only one out of the three of us who's recognisable... which makes it rather a shame that these were my moustache-and-mullet days.


Not a bad souvenir of that time in our lives, though.

Now a mailout from the British Fantasy Society tells me that Bryan will be joining Garry Kilworth and Lisa Tuttle as a guest of honour at this year's Fantasycon in September. Here's what they say:

Bryan Talbot has produced underground and alternative comics, notably Brainstorm!, science fiction and superhero stories such as Judge Dredd, Nemesis the Warlock, Teknophage, The Nazz and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight.

He’s worked on DC Vertigo titles including Hellblazer, Sandman, The Dreaming and Fables and has written and drawn the graphic novels for which he is best known: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Heart of Empire, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland and Grandville.

For more on all of that, Bryan's site is here.

Green Lantern

YouTube carries more than one fan mashup trailer for a nonexistent live-action Green Lantern film using reprocessed clips from existing blockbusters. This one craftily blends in shots of Nathan Fillion in the Hal Jordan role.



Great casting idea. The Fillion Green Lantern is a movie that I'd happily pay money to see.

For the moment we'll have to make do with an animated GL, to be released in July; over on the Writers' Guild blog there's this preview and a link to an interview with screenwriter Alan Burnett.

Coming up next (growly voice):

Tom Cruise IS... "The Atom"...

HELLBLAZER: Joyride

From Vertigo this month:

A major new era in the Hellblazer saga begins as John Constantine gets back in the trenchcoat, and starts to put his life back together. Of course, things never go that smoothly, as a harrowing trip to Newcastle and near-drowning at the hands of a brutal gangster leads John to a community where the wronged take brutal and lethal magical revenge, and introduces a major new enemy! Red-hot writer Andy Diggle (Swamp Thing) and regular series artist Leonardo Manco take Constantine back to basics - with a bang!

Here's the best part of the Amazon listing:

by Andy Diggle (Author), Leonardo Manco (Illustrator), Stephen Gallagher (Introduction)

Equal billing for my miserable little 500-word intro! There's an art to it, I'm telling ya.