Paul Cornell's Friday Newsletter

The Lychford Collection is Out 9th September!

The Lychford Collection, which contains my first three Lychford novellas from Tordotcom Publishing, will be out on the same day as the new Gnomes of Lychford, 9th September, from all good bookstores, online and physical!

Bristol Signing This Month!

I’ll be signing, alongside so many other great creators (12 of us in all!), at Excelsior Comics, 51-53 Merchant Street, Broadmead, Bristol, BS1 3EE, on Sunday 16th March, from 2pm. If you’re in the area, do come along and say hello!

The Mighty Avengers Vs. the 1970s

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. (Release date, etc., TBA.) 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 as you can see below, I’m in very good company with the other launch titles in the Marvel Age of Comics range!

L.A. Strong! (Now With Preview Pages and Launch Event!)

I have a strip, with art from the great Dennis Calero, in L.A. Strong, a charity comics anthology in support of the victims of the L.A. fires, out from Mad Cave on March 19th. The line up of comicker talent is extraordinary, as you can see below. You can order a copy, and read all about it, here and you can see an exclusive preview, including many finished pages, at The Beat, here.

And if you’re in the UK, you can order a copy from Forbidden Planet mail order here. 

There will be a launch event for the book on Saturday, March 22nd, from 7pm, at the Revenge Of comic store in Los Angeles. You can find all the details here.

Ace Jacket

I’ve contributed a short story to this anthology in aid of autism charities, edited by Sophie Aldred and Shawn J. Levy. It’s out on June 17th. You can read all about it and pre-order a copy here.

Award Longlisting for ‘The English Astronaut’!

My three-part comics serial for 2000AD with artist Laura Helsby, ‘The English Astronaut’ has been longlisted for in the category of Best Shorter Fiction in the British Science Fiction Association Awards! You can see the full listings here, and, if you’re a BSFA member, vote!

Gnomes of Lychford

On 9th September, Tor.com Publishing is releasing the sixth book in my Lychford series of rural fantasy novellas, Gnomes of Lychford. It’s a re-editing of the serial I ran on this newsletter, and I’ve taken the opportunity to sort out a couple of little plot problems. I think it’s my best Lychford book, and, weirdly, it’s a great jumping-on point, because everything about the series is explained at the start. You can read all about it here.

“An unlikely group of supernatural creatures terrorizes the sleepy village of Lychford. Okay, they're gnomes. That's not a spoiler: you worked it out it from the title. When an ancient prophecy clashes with an unfortunate modern design aesthetic, the people of Lychford must band together to put out fires (both literal and metaphorical) to save their town before the king of the Gnomes (King Greg, and it's dangerous to laugh at a gnome) calls in the terms of an old promise. Trouble is: no one knows what the promise is, nor how to fulfil it. It's going to be a long night.”

Telefantasy Time Jump (Shows for March Announced)

The new podcast from me and Lizbeth Myles is now up and running. We’re covering 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 March (covering 1955) will be Quatermass 2 and Science Fiction Theatre. 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.

For Your Awards Consideration (Hugo Awards Now Open!)

The project I’ve had out in 2024 that I’d like to put forward for any award nominations you might be considering this year is The Complete(d) Saucer Country by myself and artist Ryan Kelly, published by Image. Thanks very much for considering it. And for Best Fancast in the Hugos, I’d like to mention Hammer House of Podcast! Thanks!

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 Linktree

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!

The Work of Friends

My friend the radio dramatist Julian Simpson, the creator of The Lovecraft Investigations, has a new chapter in that saga approaching, and this time he’s crowdfunding it. Check out an ‘express your interest’ page (it doesn’t commit you to anything) for the forthcoming Crowley, a five-part documentary about the great occultist that’s nonetheless hosted by Lovecraft regular characters Kennedy Fisher and Matthew Heawood, with special guests including Dr Eleanor Peck!

My friends at Stars and Sabers Press have announced their new forthcoming anthology, Of Enchantment, Enigma and the Infinite, which features fantasy stories with magical themes. You can find their crowdfunding campaign for this gorgeous new book here.

My friend the writer and poet Chrissy Williams (with artist Lauren Knight, Sofie Dodgson and Becca Carey) has the final order cutoff deadline (for when you can order in comic shops) approaching for her new Golden Rage comic (described as ‘Battle Royale meets The Golden Girls’), ‘Mother Knows Best’. I’ve read the first issue and it’s in your face awesome and absolutely liberating. Take a look at an intro and some sample pages here, and you should order at your local shop by 17th March.

And my friend the comic writer Si Spurrier has also let me see the first issue of his new series. A Mischief of Magpies, with artist Matias Bergara, Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou and Emma Price, from DSTLRY, is an extraordinary fantasy journey told in a variety of visual approaches. ‘This astonishing project revolves around Mar, a teenager who finds himself inexplicably transported to an extraordinary city, endlessly sailing a shoreless ocean. The city is built around a vast machine of two distinct halves: the bright, bustling spires above the waves, and the beast-haunted twilight halls below. Between them, playing on the beach, a troupe of anarchic magpies seems to have all the answers... but none of the questions.’ You can read all about it here.

My Week

Urgh. So until Wednesday I was doing fine. You know, Thomas had moved on to ‘Seven Nation Army’ in his drum lessons, I delivered a twelve page TV pitch to an old friend in the business who’d asked if I was interested in diving back in, I was exercising every day and feeling pretty good in mind and body. Then I woke up on Thursday, and everything was wrong from that moment on. (Maybe I shouldn’t read the news in bed.) I started on the fantasy novel again, and realised I needed to rewrite this whole section, because I’d taken a wrong turn. (Actually, doing that is often enough to make my unconscious turn on me like an angry dog, so maybe that was behind my funk.) Toward the end of the day, though, I rallied, and dived in to something rather good in terms of setting up a new comics project. (The U.S. waking up in my late afternoon either adds energy to my day or is a bit tiresome if one is knackered.)

So I’ve decided that I’m basically taking today off, and will re-engage with the novel, and some other projects, on Monday. I’m off to have lunch with the novelist Geoff Ryman, which should be lovely. And this evening there’s another pub quiz - very much the in thing in my little town - this one at the Cricket Club. This evening in general poses both an opportunity and a little bit of a hurdle. Last Friday’s pub quiz, in my local, ended with me as the last one left at the table, everyone else having headed off to something else. (We still came third.) They were people I didn’t know very well, who former barmaid Maisie had brought together, with me as a bit of a ringer, but I felt rather alienated, as sometimes happen in this town where I’m the only one who does what I do. (Another team invited me to sit with them for the answers, bless them.) There’s also the small matter of who settled up. Martin, my friend who’d also been conscripted onto Maisie’s team, brought out his credit card toward the end, and I have a feeling he might have paid for the whole table. I can’t be having that. Hence both emotional and financial knots to untie when I pop in before the quiz.

Tomorrow, I’m intending to go on a long car journey in search of a comic shop, something which has these days become my favourite escape. I hope to find whatever it is I lost track of on Thursday. And I really must get back to those exercises.

To Be Continued

Plans are now solidly in place for one of those big announcements I mentioned! Until then, I hope to see you all here again next week.