Welcome to ACES WEEKLY Volume 41, Week Two!

When we tell stories about life through art it's a way of controlling it. We can rationalise its randomness, make points about it, and laugh at it. In reality, though, we're just stuck with the stories life writes for us, good or bad, and, almost all the time, the bad has to be taken the way it is whatever we'd like to do with it.  In reporting the loss of yet one more of the great Aces who've entertained you through Aces Weekly in the past, I've got to take the bad the way it is, again, and pay tribute to another of our great creators gone too early ; and there's no rationalisation of it to make it more palatable.  Our Ace, Nigel Dobbyn, is the casualty of Fate in this instance.  Nigel was the great letterer of our serial, Hadopelagic. He was also a great colourist, and a great artist who'd done much work for 2000 AD and other comics over the years.  He'd planned on doing something big for us way back - as artist and co-creator - but he'd wanted to have the whole 21 pages of it completed before he offered it for publication.  It was a big ambition for an in-demand comics pro to aim for.  We waited for some time without seeing more of it than some great initial pages, and I guessed he'd naturally become diverted to other commitments, so I accepted to wait longer and hope.  But Fate's taken its hand now, as it cruelly does, and the wait is over.  I look on that story as lost treasure, like Nigel himself.  For all of you reading this, everything else that Nigel did - of all kinds and many - is out there to find and enjoy if it's not in your library already.  He'll live on in that way if no better way, as all artists do.  That much of his life story we can keep control of - and reality won't stop us.  

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