Quick Reflections of my Mother

Sharing a laugh: Mother, Carlene and Yours Sincerely

I have already made mention on my personal Facebook site that my Mother passed away on late Saturday night - early Sunday morning, after being diagnosed with bowel cancer about a year earlier. I am not seeking to elicit any sympathy on this site. Instead, I thought it might be more prudent to acknowledge her contribution in my formative comic-reading years.
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Even though I must credit my Father for bringing comics into our home in the years before I could even read, it was my Mother who nurtured the love of reading. She never thought comics childish, so there was no stigma attached to their reading in our home. While I was getting into the English weeklies from Fleetway, like Treasure, Look and Learn, Ranger and Valiant, (all of which I regularly read each week), my Mother 'discovered' Marvel comics a good five years before I did. Pow! and Smash! (from Odhams Press) were picked up by my Father on a less frequent basis. Yet I can still recall my Mother enjoying them more than I ever did, especially Ditko's Spider-Man. She was also an early convert to Frew's The Phantom in our home.

Of course, her reading was more diverse than that. She liked Science Fiction, detective (crime) stories, romance fiction, and she had a few volumes of Neville Shute laying around. I tried these out in my early High School days. (On The Beach still haunts me to this day.) There are many things (besides a love of reading) that she instilled in me. An ability to laugh at the absurd, at ones' self, and at life. I could go on. But I won't.

Suffice to say, my Mother's passing (and a long-planned visit to Bendigo to 'baby-sit two grandchildren) has put a temporary dent in my plans to promote "Bold Ben Hall" that commenced some days ago on Kickstarter. I did promise readers of this Blog that I would bring it to your attention on this page. I don't presently have the capacity to add a direct link from this page (I am working from a Tablet, rather than my usual computer), but if you place "Kickstarter + Bold Ben Hall" in Google, it'll be the first to come up on that search engine. I'll seek to add a manual link here: http://kck.st/2zIJdru Oh, there it is!

An earlier draft of the cover art. Art by Monty Wedd, Design by Ryan McDonald-Smith