Quite a few people apparently. The blog police mailed me a link yesterday to an excellent post over at the Forbidden Planet regarding the Jonathan Cape competition. There's links and images of a whole stack of entries that went into the comp - and I have to say that I wouldn't have minded losing to any of them at all (just in case any of my American viewers missed the sarcasm in the post). The quality is sky high and highlights two pretty important issues. The first is that the quality of unpublished comic book writers and artists is as good as it ever was in this country. There's a gold mine just waiting to happen out there - which begs the question, why isn't anybody doing anything with it? Is it up to us as lone gunslingers to set the ball rolling and do it ourselves until we've done all the hard work before a development deal comes along? "More than likely" is the answer to that. I'd love to hear from any of you guys out there who entered with your thoughts on where you're going next with your talents.

Secondly - shit, I can't remember what I was going to say now... oh yeah: I'm mightily impressed that somebody had the mettle to pay attention to the other entries. The fact that it's a blogger at Forbidden Planet makes it more worthwhile too. Surely it would have been sensible of Cape to have posted all the entries online? It would have meant a lot more traffic to their site and as a company, they would surely have reaped the benefit of knowing what the public might actually buy off the shelf.

I'm not taking anything away from the winners but it's like finding a wallet with fifty ten pound notes in it, taking two out and then throwing it away. Go figure.

Just for the hell of it, I've made The Fire Sermon available for free download here or if you're reluctant to download direct or just to damned lazy, you can grab it from the official Zodiac Lung store at LuLu, or check it out at my new favourite online e-book store: myebook