Materia Osscura

A Happy New Year to you all. I hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year - although I think 2012 is going to be a really rough one, especially if you're in the creative market. All my friends in the States tell me that both the publishing and comics business as we know it is going downhill and they doubt if it will pull back. I tend to agree. Comics are now being digitalised and the choice is now so restricted that I don't see how it can pull back to what it was even several years ago. Having said that, on New Years Eve, the postman knocked my door and handed me a package. And when I opened it I can now truthfully say that I've got my name on the front of a recent comic. It was Materia Osscura which I'm told means Dark Matter, a collection of stories illustrated by David Lloyd who did the original V for Vendetta comic strip and it was published in Italy - in Tuscany I think. So it's sitting here beside me on my work desk as I write and it looks very well. But outside of Italy there doesn't seem to be much going on in the comic world. Certainly not here in Britain . Does anyone know if 2000 AD is still running? I haven't bought it for years and when I asked about it in one of the Northern Ireland newsagents I was told that they didn't bring it in from England any more as there was no in terest in it. I asked Adrian who works in Belfast and he said that he hadn't seen an issue for a long time, even in Forbidden Planet. So maybe it's stopped publishing. The last issue I saw of it was dreadful so I wouldn't be surprised. On the other hand, I lifted a copy of The Times today and found a weekend comic. However, it's all the usual stuff but it's good to see that some of the newspapers are taking comings a bit more seriously, even if it is The Times. I wonder how long it'll last though - I seem to recall that some other paper tried something similar a little while ago and the comic folded pretty quickly. It's aimed at children and how many children take an interest in The Times? So let's see what 2012 brings - after all it is a time when Britian is supposed to be investing in culture with the Year of the Olympics and so forth. And we'll see what American comics do - everybody I talk to in the States say that they're on their last legs, that all creativity's gone and merchandising has taken over. However, I live in hope. We can do little else. Have a great New Year and we'll all talk soon