Paul Cornell's Friday Newsletter

The Lychford Collection is Out Now!

In all good bookstores, real and online, now is The Lychford Collection, which contains my first three Lychford novellas. Read all about it, and find many different places to order from here.

How to Find Us at Thought Bubble!

Lizbeth Myles and I will once more be tabling at the wonderful Thought Bubble comic convention in Harrogate on November 15th and 16th. (You can find the full list of exhibitors here.) I’ve also once again been given guest status, bless them!

You’ll be able to find us at table D4 in the ComiXology Hall (along the right wall, right by the entrance!)

(We’ll have Rachael Smith on one side, which is handy for signing Who Killed Nessie? and Gary Erskine on the other, so we’re in lovely company.)

And if you’re an aspiring comicker, and want a pro to check out your portfolio, I’m one of many at the show who’s signed up to do just that! Check out all the details at the link.

And Vision & Labour: Making Comics, The Art Of Avery Hill Publishing is an exhibition at the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate which is going to be running between 18th October and 26th April. (Neatly over the weekend of Thought Bubble.) To quote from the press release:

‘Harrogate’s Mercer Art Gallery has teamed up with indie publisher Avery Hill Publishing to create an exhibition showcasing some of today’s most exciting comics creators. Opening in October in time for this year’s Thought Bubble Comic Art Festival, the exhibition offers a fascinating glimpse into the work of leading comic artists, and an important snapshot of the UK comics landscape over the past decade.’

And included in the exhibition will be a display case featuring the process of Rachael Smith and I making Who Killed Nessie?!

I’m really looking forward to it, and I very much want a copy of Kristyna Baczynski’s poster below.

The Mighty Avengers vs. the 1970s is Out Next Month!

On November 13th, I’ve got a book coming out from Bloomsbury that’s part of a new range of popular studies of Marvel Comics! The Mighty Avengers vs. the 1970s is fully illustrated with panels from the comics, and is my journey through how Marvel’s main super team navigated that difficult decade. You can read the announcement here at AP News. This is very much a labour of love for me, a book I’ve wanted to find a way to write for the longest time.

And you can now pre-order it from the publisher (and from all good booksellers), now with some preview pages at that link that really show off our full colour art!

Of Intrigue and Espionage

I have a story in this just-announced forthcoming volume from Stars and Sabers publishing, which is due out in October 2026. I’m in good company, as you can see from the full announcement here.

Cosmic Lighthouse and Salvation’s Child

Check out the new website for my comics company Cosmic Lighthouse, with a first glimpse at Sophie Aldred (Ace in Doctor Who) playing Adrian Tchaikovsky’s cloned soldiers The Partheni!

Cosmic Lighthouse is the brainchild of myself and Lee Harris, with Anthony Cronin helping out with the day to day business. I’m the Editor-in-Chief.

Our mission is to publish original graphic novels by bestselling SFF authors.

And here, via this news story at IGN, where you can see lots of preview pages, is our launch title!

Salvation’s Child is the digital graphic novel Prologue to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s best-selling SFF novel series The Final Architecture. (So new readers can start here!) It’s by Adrian himself, artist Mike Collins, colour artist Pippa Bowland and letterer Simon Bowland. We’re publishing it together with our partners ComiXology.

It’s 110 pages of comics, plus extras, at what we think is quite the wonderful price. (Under a fiver!)

Check out these pre-order links at Amazon US and Amazon UK.

You can read more about the company and the project, with biogs, blurbs and histories, in our press release here.

And you can find Cosmic Lighthouse at these links on BlueSky and Instagram.

Salvation’s Child will be released by ComiXology Originals on June 16th, 2026!

Telefantasy Time Jump

The new podcast from me and Lizbeth Myles covers the history of SFF on TV, from 1953 onward, with our regular episodes (on the 14th of every month) covering a show released that year in the UK, and the Patron Bonus episodes (on the 28th) covering a show from the rest of the world. The shows for October (covering 1962) are Fireball XL-5/Out of this World and Space Angel. The main episode is available free wherever you get your podcasts. To get the bonus episode, you need to follow us on Patreon at £3/$3 or above. (And you get access to seven years of Hammer House of Podcast bonus episodes!) You can find all the info here.

My Ko-fi and eBay Stores

Here’s my Ko-fi store, where you can buy my books and comics, signed and personalised, for shipping worldwide. And here’s my ebay store, full of Bronze Age Marvel comics at bargain prices.

My Linktrees

You can now find all my social media links, my website/blog and links to where you can buy my books, in one place here, thanks to Linktree! And here’s the one for Cosmic Lighthouse!

The Work of Friends

The great comics artist (and now writer) P.J. Holden (loads of 2000 A.D., D.C., World of Tanks!) has a new online SF strip out now, Terran Omega. It’s great stuff, reminiscent of classic 2000 A.D.. Do take a look.

“The Last Human in the galaxy. A floating space ship and the Ghosts of War. Terran Omega, forged to be a last ditch weapon in the event that humanity starts to lose a galaxy wide war, has woken up 10,000 years too late. The human race is gone and long forgotten. Now she looks for meaning by attempting to correct the crimes of mankind, and on a small dead salvage ship she finds something she hasn’t seen for millenia - a long forgotten weapon, a weapon that time has made stranger. Much much stranger. The Lazarus Engine.

A 48 page graphic novella told weekly at patreon. Black and white and spot colour is FREE! And tiers start at $1 which will give you the strip in full colour as well as early access and access to the Artists Edition, high res full colour scans of the artwork.”

And, charmingly, Kieron Gillen believes my endorsement will make a difference to the standing ovation that will shortly be coming his way in celebration of the return of Die, which I believe is his defining work. I’ve read the first issue and it is, of course, fantastic.

“Stephanie Hans, Clayton Cowles and I are returning to DIE, for a sequel, DIE: Loaded. It's out November 12th, and we're hitting final order cutoff at your local comic shop on October 20th.

DIE is very much more of our Goth Jumanji, but with a filter on a different bunch of obsessions - not least a whole bunch about Having A Kid In Your Forties. Don't worry, there's also fights with zombie orcs.”

You can find a primer and some sample pages here.

My Week

The signing event at Gosh Comics went really well, I thought. Loads of people in the store, after the usual closing time, hanging out with glasses of wine, while the four of us creators signed our Avery Hill titles and met the public. It was lovely to meet my fellow AH creators, and Rachael and I had a long catch-up.

I found I was doing my ‘street trader’ bit, going up to civilians who’d just wandered in and explaining what this was, in a way which didn’t send them running out of the shop, and told them they were welcome to just browse. Thus we met some new folk! It’s kind of the persona I’m in at the table at Thought Bubble, and it’s something I find really satisfying. It’s not often a freelancer gets to go sell their work hand to hand. It’s me actuallly doing something to make things better.

On Monday I drove to the town where Caroline trained to be a priest. I was picking up a couple of parcels that had been mis-delivered to the old address. I found to my slight surprise that I didn’t recognise anything much about the town. My memory of the past is that vague. I always say it keeps me looking forward, keeps me young, but sometimes I wonder if I’ve lost anything important, and, even more so, if I really have to hang on to all the bad and guilty memories when so much around them has vanished.

There were a couple of mournful days this week, where I dwelled on Thomas’ future prospects as a child with learning difficulties in what feels like a harsher and harsher world. Some of that is down to the darker mornings and evenings. I’m really not fond of this time of year. An upside has been my dailing boxing workouts, courtesy of the Mvmnt app. They’re doing great things for my body shape and my mental health. And maybe they feel, like selling copies of Nessie to strangers, that I’m doing something positive to deal with the world. Is it a coincidence that I’m regularly punching Nazis in the (astonishingly good) Indiana Jones and the Great Circle game? Let’s hope my exercises continue to be merely shadow boxing. As you read this I’ll be getting my first sports massage to deal with the constant tension on the right side of my neck. I think the game might make it worse and the boxing might sooth it. Gah.

Thomas’ birthday is approaching, and so this week I will take possession of a designer cake on a Lego City theme. And after that Caroline is away for a week, so it’ll just be me and him. I have a chart of daily trips out to keep us both from derangement, including his first ever train journey (of twelve minutes). He’s very nervous about it. I’ll keep you posted as to how it goes.

To Be Continued

Ooh, Thought Bubble approaching! Hope to see some of you there as always!

And I hope to see all of you here again next week!