Colin Smith 💙 🇺🇦 #Xdissentersさんのイラストまとめ

And always, with unbelievable creativity & consistency, week after week after week, John Wagner's scripts, whether alone or with his laudable writing partner Alan Grant, once Pat Mills had moved on after his own brilliant stint on JD. It's all so ludicrously splendid.

Some of others I think I can work out. Is that p'haps @seanpphillips - it was his cover! - & @mccreaman? Then (2) Alan McKenzie & Graham Higgins, (3) Dave King, and is (4) Steve Pugh?

I wonder who Vicki was? I do genuinely hope she enjoyed the book.

I do love 1970's US rock mags. Their pop culture take was so unlike the UK music papers I grew up devouring. eg 1977's Circus 169, where you could almost believe the UK & USA weren't so much different nations as seperate planets. Still, there were some common points of reference:

This isn't how I expected to be spending my days in lockdown. Rather than missing the sport or obsessing over the news, I'm just working my way through a pile of classics that I'd put aside for a rainy day & feared I might never get around to. Small mercies,silver linings etc etc

I've posted the photo before. Forgive me. But then, it was a snapshot from a largely forgotten day. I've always been a touch dubious of the benefits of personal diaries & mundane personal details. But 'yesterday' soon becomes 'long ago', & I'm glad for the record now, 36 yrs on

Barely any mail in weeks & then the welcome subscription copies of @empiremagazine, @SFXmagazine & @MOJOmagazine all arrive with a thump. Hurrah! It's grand to have a pile'o'mags to read. One more lockdown afternoon instantly transformed into something to look forward to.

A new ritual of ours that really helps: at 3pm, whenever possible, we stop for an episode of a classic serial together. We've just finished 1979's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - which is still wonderful - & start 1982's Smiley's People today. Alec Guinness: so breathtakingly good.

Richard Fletcher's book on the centrality of blood feuds to Anglo Saxon England makes for fascinating -& somewhat terrifying- reading. In places, hard going for general readers like m'self, but there's so much to appreciate, as here, on how boredom can keep blood feuds festering:

There doesn't seem to be anything these things have in common. But I fell in love with all of them, & I'm still just as in love with them now. So much that I thought would stay with me hasn't. But time never tarnishes Seurat & Battlestar Galactica, John Peel & David Low. (2/3)

St Francis and the Birds, Stanley Spencer, 1935.