Comics Week and FCBD 2019

This will probably be a bit of a rambling post, so apologies in advance. This week is a shorter working week due to the bank holiday for Easter, so there will be fewer entries. Friday just gone was a bank holiday too, so last week was also a shorter week, but it passed me by due to not being in work and hence why I made a blog entry every day. I am hoping to blog every week day whilst I am not working to give me something to do as a break from looking for work and therefore keeping my sanity a bit longer. It sure beats watching day time TV (which I don't do anyway) or just staring at the same four walls (or procrastinating for hours on end). That said, I do keep myself busy by doing the household chores, going to the gym, running and prepping minatures for painting in between the hours I spend trawling the net for a new role.

So, now that all of my Lord of the Rings figures are prepped in readiness for undercoating and a bit of putty work (I still need to source some decent, easily workable stuff) I have time to re-order my comics collection some more whilst awaiting some good spraying weather - that said, I did manage to get a few miniatures undercoated on bank holiday Monday as a tester for how long they will take to do (it turns out I can do around 9 minis per 15 minutes, or 36 an hour provided all goes well).

As mentioned in previous posts I avidly collect 2000AD and Judge Dredd comics, but I also like the various Robert E. Howard characters that have made it into pictorial print (Conan, Red Sonja, Kull and Solomon Kane to name just the main ones). There are other IPs I dip into occasionally too, but these are the main ones.

As Star Wars day this year (May the Fourth) is also Free Comic Book Day, I wanted to sort out what I am going to be reading over the coming months and what I want to pick up at the three comic shops I usually visit on this year's FCBD. Also, this year, at GOSH Comics in London, they are running a children's art workshop which I am hoping to take my youngest son to.

On FCBD I usually visit three London shops (Forbidden Planet, GOSH and Orbital comics) to collect as many comics as I can, grab a few beers and a burger, and then head off to a pub to see out the rest of the evening. This year will be a little different if my youngest is with me as the beers will be replaced by soft drinks and the evening will end a lot earlier. I am sure he will want to grab a few bags full of goodies as well as working with comics artists to find out where his talents lie.

Anyway, onto what I am hoping to achieve this week. I am aiming to sort out and catalogue all of the REH character comics I have collected over the last decade but not read yet. I have been receiving a couple of small parcels of comics every month/week (American comics and Judge Dredd Megazine every month, and 2000AD every week) but they have all just been stored in a variety of boxes until I could get around to reading them. As mentioned a few times elsewhere (and therefore apologies if I am repeating myself too often), I have (re-)read 2000AD and Judge Dredd up to the end of 2014 (only 4 and a bit years to go now!), read Red Sonja and now need to sort out Kull, Solomon Kane and Conan.

I have started reading The Chronicles of Kull, so these will be the first set of comics to be featured and catalogued, followed by Solomon Kane, then Conan, and after that, I am not sure yet. I will decide as the days go by and the boxes are sorted.