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| Dillon |
Derrick Ferguson released Chapter Two of “Vril-Ya!” as a Thanksgiving treat.
“Vril-Ya!” is Derrick Ferguson’s half of the epic Jim Anthony/Dillon team up. “The Coming Race” by Joshua Reynolds makes up the other half of the story. Further information about THE VRIL AGENDA can be found here and Chapter One of “Vril-Ya!” can be found here.
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| Jim Anthony |
Prime Books’ New Cthulhu: Recent Weird anthology selected by Library Journal as one of the best science fiction/fantasy titles of 2012.
On the Prime Books site, they posted about the honor. “We are pleased and rather gobsmacked—if delightedly so—that New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird has been selected by Library Journal as one of the best sf/f titles of the year. Congrats to all the authors whose outstanding work made it such.” Plus, they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share some news. “We suppose this gives us a fine opportunity to announce we will be publishing Spawn of Cthulhu: New Stories Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft—an all-original anthology—edited by Paula Guran in 2014. (And no, I have not started soliciting yet.)”
About New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird-
For more than eighty years H.P. Lovecraft has inspired writers of supernatural fiction, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and gaming. His themes of cosmic indifference, the utter insignificance of humankind, minds invaded by the alien, and the horrors of history — written with a pervasive atmosphere of unexplainable dread — today remain not only viable motifs, but are more relevant than ever as we explore the mysteries of a universe in which our planet is infinitesimal and climatic change is overwhelming it.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century the best supernatural writers no longer imitate Lovecraft, but they are profoundly influenced by the genre and the mythos he created. New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird presents some of the best of this new Lovecraftian fiction — bizarre, subtle, atmospheric, metaphysical, psychological, filled with strange creatures and stranger characters — eldritch, unsettling, evocative, and darkly appealing . . .
Contributors in Alphabetical Order:
The Crevasse, Dale Bailey & Nathan Ballingrud
Old Virginia, Laird Barron
Shoggoths in Bloom, Elizabeth Bear
Mongoose, Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette
The Oram County Whoosit, Steve Duffy
Study in Emerald, Neil Gaiman
Grinding Rock, Cody Goodfellow
Pickman’s Other Model (1929), Caitlin Kiernan
The Disciple, David Barr Kirtley
The Vicar of R’lyeh, Marc Laidlaw
Mr Gaunt, John Langan
Take Me to the River, Paul McAuley
The Dude Who Collected Lovecraft, Nick Mamatas & Tim Pratt
Details, China Mieville
Bringing Helena Back, Sarah Monette
Another Fish Story, Kim Newman
Lesser Demons, Norm Partridge
Cold Water Survival, Holly Phillips
Head Music, Lon Prater
Bad Sushi, Cherie Priest
The Fungal Stain, W.H. Pugmire
Tsathoggua, Michael Shea
Buried in the Sky, John Shirley
Fair Exchange, Michael Marshall Smith
The Essayist in the Wilderness, William Browning Spencer
A Colder War, Charles Stross
The Great White Bed, Don Webb
New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird
Edited by Paula Guran
Type: Trade Paperback
Pages: 528
Size: 6″ X 9″
ISBN: 9781607012894
Publication Date: November 23, 2011
Price: $15.95
Learn more about Prime Books at www.prime-books.com.
Fight Card Books has released the cover to the upcoming paperback edition of Irish Dukes by Mike Faricy. Currently available as an ebook, Irish Dukes will have a paperback release in the near future.
ABOUT FIGHT CARD: IRISH DUKES–
Dublin, Ireland, 1951
After winning his latest bout in Berlin, US Army boxing champ Sergeant Kevin Crowley is on military leave in Ireland. Raised in St. Vincent’s Asylum For Boys in Chicago, he has finally returned to his place of birth, where he is sure he will find the family he never knew and lay claim to his dream of a royal fortune.
What Crowley actually finds is the fight of his life … A near destitute grandmother, crippling debt left by a father he never knew, a feisty redhead with hatred in her heart, a villainous landlord and his gang who’ll stop at nothing to settle a score going back a generation …
Kevin Crowley has never backed down in the ring or out … The treasures and truth awaiting him in Dublin are not what he first imagined. But with his past, his family, and his future at stake, Crowley will put up his Irish dukes and fight like never before …
Learn more about the Fight Card series at www.fightcardbooks.com.
Listen to Paul Bishop’s Fight Card interview on the Earth Station One podcast here.
The [[[Wii U]]] was released on November 18 to a gleefully waiting public with midnight release events and the requisite pomp and circumstance. The system offers a big jump in power and screen resolution, the first system from Nintendo that’s HDMI-compatible. Add to that a good raft of first and third-party games available, a new layer of social media interaction and a strong (albeit coming-soon) set of media streaming functions, and you get a solid system designed for the family and the hardcore player in mind.
The system is not without faults, tho. It’s slow. Painfully slow. It required a system update before any games could be played (taking almost 90 minutes to download, exacerbated by the demand on Nintendo’s systems from EVERYONE needing it), as well as a separate update for each and every game before they started up, averaging five minutes each to download and install.
Once the games load, however, they are gorgeous. The new addition to the Mario Bros franchise draws from a number of chapters of the series, including many from the latest 3DS edition, and adds on many more. The showpiece game, [[[Nintendo Land]]], (included with the Deluxe Set, available separately for Basic Set purchasers) is a series of “mini-games”, but in name only. Each is an engrossing and deep game featuring franchise titles like Metroid and Pikmin, games not yet featured in stand-alone games on the system, but do a good job of keeping them in the public’s mind. The new GamePad works well with the new games, as well as being able to function as a TV remote, allowing you to power up everything at once to use the system. Many games can be played entirely on the GamePad, allowing the TV to be used by the rest of the family. It lacks any local storage to allow you to play games independent of the main unit, but that’s more wishful thinking than a real issue.
The system is backwards-compatible with the Wii, but this too is very slow. It runs through a software-based emulator that provides a bare-bones Wii menu and interface. Gone is the ability to send email to other Wii systems, as well as the ability to import Miis, the system’s personal avatars. You have the option to transfer your Wii’s system data to the new Wii U, but it’s an all-or-nothing option; there’s no way to pick and choose what game saves, Miis or other system data, and once it’s transferred, your old Wii is returned to Factory specs. Fine if you’re planning on tossing it in the closet, or on ebay, but if you were hoping to keep it as a second system, you’re somewhat out of luck.
Each game has its own bulletin board in the MiiVerse, part of the social media platform the Nintendo Network, where you can both write and draw notes about the games, share game tips and if possible, get a few laughs. At the moment, there’s no way to choose what game boards to see, or to sort the so the games you own and play, making accessing your preferred boards a bit cumbersome. And of course, getting to the MiiVerse is…slow.
Coming in the next month are the various streaming media channels like Amazon Video and Hulu Plus, joining Netflix which is already up and running. The Gamepad will also be the center of a service known as TVii, the details on which are a bit sketchy; details will be forthcoming as the service is unveiled in December.
There’s clearly room for improvement in the system, but what’s available now is well worth the expense, and if you’ve not already gotten a Wii U, the wait.
Terovolas, the latest novel from New Pulp Author Edward M. Erdelac is now available from JournalStone Publishing. Erdelac describes Terovolas as being an excerpt from The Van Helsing Papers. The novel covers Abraham Van Helsing’s incredible 1891 sojourn in Texas following the events portrayed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Read an excerpt here.
Pick it up on Amazon here or from the publisher here.
Want to win a free copy? Leave a comment at the author’s blog today. At midnight on Black Friday, November 23rd, a random winner will be chosen to receive a free signed copy of Terovolas.
Good luck!
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| Stephen Amell as Arrow |
Art Sippo wasn’t able to join The Book Cave this week due to work obligations. Rumor has it that his experiment escaped and the villagers were approaching with torches and pitchforks. Joining the podcast this week as a new member of the Book Cave crew is Bruce Rosenberger. Bruce is the host of his own podcast, KomicsKast, the show where Ric first learned what a podcast was and became hooked. In this episode, Bruce and Book Cave host Ric Croxton talk about the popular new TV series, Arrow. They cover the character of Oliver Queen from his beginning to the present. Plus, hear who Ric and many others think Queen is representing as a character on TV.
The Book Cave Episode 206: Arrow is live. Listen now at http://thebookcave.libsyn.com.
What else should we play at noon on Thanksgiving but Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant”?
Well! They are certainly biting the dust, aren’t they, these “heroes”? A few weeks ago, I lamented the steroid-fueled fall from grace of that bicycling phenom, Lance Armstrong. And for quite a while we’ve been learning about perverse clergymen who can’t keep their cassocks buttoned and their hands to themselves. Now, we have the sorry spectacle of two of our nation’s high-profile warriors behaving like eighth graders enthralled by their female classmates’ sudden bumpiness. Could they be taking their cues from a rather impressive list of horny congressmen? Don’t know. Is this a matter of national security? Shrug. Are they dumb asses? Well, I have no rocks to throw when it comes to asinine concupiscence, so let us hurry past this and ask the big question: Are they heroes, these horn dogs?
Okay, what’s a “hero,” anyway? The answer, if you don’t mind regressing past a lot of centuries, is that a hero is something pretty close to a god. Heroes first presented themselves in mythology, and often, maybe most of the time, they were half-deity themselves: Gilgamesh and Hercules and that crowd. We worship gods; we venerate heroes. And the need to perform these acts of worship and veneration seems to be pretty deep within us. Our genes seem to like them; every culture seems to have its pantheon of über-beings. Might have some survival value – uniting folks unrelated by blood into a social unit, the better to grow crops and defend against enemies and invent video games.
And here’s where it gets vexing for those of us in the hero business: maybe the time for heroes is almost past. Not just any one hero, or group of heroes, or class of heroes – the very concept of hero. Going, going, gone. Because it’s hard to venerate something you know, in your synapses, does not exist – not just on Olympus, or heaven, but nowhere at all. Which is what contemporary experience is telling us: no Santa Claus, no Easter bunny, no heroes. Now move along…
Oh, there are still plenty of extraordinary feats to admire. Physicists and mathematicians and delving into realities that their forebears didn’t know existed and if you doubt that athletes are amazing, just check out any random season of a major sport or watch the next Olympics. But the “hero” idea has accumulated a lot of baggage over the millennia: our heroes should be noble and honest and honorable and self-sacrificing and, as the Greeks had it, should “serve and protect.” They aren’t any of that – not the ones that exist outside make-believe.
Still, we go to the movies and watch the television and get entertained by heroic figures, so, bottom line, whatever prompts us to hero worship is still with us. And if our heroes are a bit more smudged than those our fathers and grandfathers favored…hey, our air isn’t as clean as theirs, either, and we’re still breathing, at least for a while.
Before I go…did I tell you that I’ve finally seen the new Arrow TV series and…
RECOMMENDED READING: Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases
At this time of Thanksgiving, we’re thankful to each and every one of you who keeps coming back to the site because you like the people, or the comics, or the occasional snark. We all know how tough it is out there, not acknowledging that fact doesn’t make it any less tight in the wallet. There is a pestilence upon this land, nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress in this period in history. But we’re glad that you’re here, reading and occasionally commenting.
We’d also like to ask you, if you’re doing any shopping at Amazon this holiday season, do it through us and help us keep the lights on. If you want to support ComicMix every time you shop at Amazon, bookmark this link and use it whenever you do your online shopping.
We are NOT asking you to forgo shopping at your local comic store, far from it. Please support your local shops. If you don’t know if you have one near you, go to our Comic Shop Locator. And if you’re running a store that’s not listed, please add your comic store to our database.
Things may be a bit light over the next few days with holidays and tech stuff, so enjoy yourself and watch out for crazy drivers and rogue TSA agents.
As part of the upcoming November 29th sale of Pop Culture merchandise at Christie’s Auctions are two pieces of original artwork for the syndicated Tarzan comic strip from the series Tarzan Against Dagga Ramba and Tarzan And The Barbarians by legendary Tarzan artist Burne Hogarth.
PRESS RELEASE:
POP CULTURE
London, South Kensington
Nov 29, 2012
Sale 7401
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| Art: Burne Hogarth |
Lot 27
Tarzan, 1942
Burne Hogarth (1911-1996)
Original art work for the syndicated Tarzan comic strip from the series Tarzan Against Dagga Ramba, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, the story titled Beseiged, published 15 March, 1942, the artwork signed and dated 575 3-15-42, Hogarth, additionally signed and inscribed For Danton Burroughs – warm regards, Burne Hogarth, July, 4, 94, the reverse of the frame also signed and inscribed For Dan Burroughs, A nice turn of story on this page with modern military accents putting TARZAN into a different focus, All best! July 4, 1994, HOGARTH
28½x21¾in. (72.5×55.5cm.)
Estimate 10,000 – 12,000 British pounds
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| Art: Burne Hogarth |
Lot 28
Tarzan, 1943
Burne Hogarth (1911-1996)
Original art work for the syndicated Tarzan comic strip from the series Tarzan And The Barbarians, watercolour, pen and ink on paper, the story titled The Foe Aroused, published 10 January, 1943, the artwork signed and dated 618 1-10-43, Hogarth, additionally signed and inscribed For Danton Burroughs – best thoughts, Burne Hogarth, July 1, 94, the reverse of the frame also signed and inscribed Dan, Compositionally, an interesting page – The ‘design flow’ moves in angular verticals and horizontals thrusting through the panel grid. The setting is mostly rocks and stone and makes a wonderful consistency of concatenating forms. Do you like it? all best, Burne Hogarth, July 1-94, HOGARTH
28×21½in. (71×54.5cm.)
Estimate 10,000 – 12,000 British pounds
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Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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