Paul Neary in Cannon Hill Park 1975

Paul Neary in Cannon Hill Park

I am in awe of those bloggers who manage to post new material on a daily basis.  With the best of intentions, I sit here every day and then, somehow, I am surfing the details of something interesting but adding nothing new here.

An open mind is likely to wander and as an ancient school report card states,"He would rather watch a fly, crawling up the wall, than pay attention to the lessons we are teaching".  The responsibility rests with me and I will try to do better.

I want to share a memory of a slideshow and talk that was given by the young Paul Neary.  The year, as far as I can tell, was 1975 because that is the year that Eerie #69 came out, that collected the first series of "Hunter" and Mister Neary referred to it in the talk.

This was a long time ago and unfortunately, the details have become a trifle hazy but here are the facts as I remember them.

The sponsor of the event was Phil Clarke, who had probably just begun to sell comic books out of his earliest incarnation of "Nostalgia & Comics", which, at that time, probably inhabited #1 or #4,5 & 6 Hurst Street Subway in downtown Birmingham, England.

The venue, although I can not be sure, was an auditorium located in Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham.  I remember tiered seating, rising gently away from a semi-circular stage, in a space that was small enough to feel intimate.  For some reason, I think the price of a ticket was five shillings or 25 New Pence and that the event took place on a sunday afternoon.

For an aspiring cartoonist, like my younger self, it was heavenly.  I had never met a artist that worked for the American Publishers before and here was Paul Neary, the earliest Brit to have "crossed the pond" after Barry Smith in the late Sixty's.

The strongest memory I have of the event, is one of the technical points of drawing comics for the American Market that Mister Neary recounted.  On the very first page of the very first Hunter strip, he had split the page into two vertical panels, not realizing that he was breaking an unwritten rule of comic book layout.  As a consequence, he had repaired this "mistake" by drawing a new opening page, as a "splash" page, for the new collected edition.  Riveting stuff, I know but at the time it was akin to receiving pearls of wisdom from Olympus!

The Original first page of Hunter from the pages of Eerie #52

The revised first page of Hunter from Eerie #69

I have often wondered whether anyone else, out there in the land of ancient comic book collectors, was there at the event and could add anything to my remembrances.