Happy Valentine’s Day!
Monthly Archive: February 2013
FIGHT CARD NEWS
New Pulp Author/Publisher Paul Bishop shared some Fight Card updates with All Pulp.
Lots of news to cover, so I’m going to get right down to it. Our January offering Fight Card: Rumble in the Jungle from David Foster got 2013 off to a great start for us. This is David’s second Fight Card novel (after Fight Card: King Of The Outback) and he really blows the pulp doors off in this tale …
Fight Card: Rumble in the Jungle
Hell’s Kitchen, 1953
Brendan O’Toole is on a downward slide. When his wife dies in a freak car accident, he quits his job and hits the bottle hard. Half tanked in the ring, he allows himself to be knocked out, ending his boxing career.
O’Toole, hits rock bottom. After a night of boozing, he is brutally mugged and left for dead. But O’Toole has friends, even if he can’t see it. One of them is Danny Reilly, a barman with a heart of gold. He arranges for O’Toole to join a construction crew set to work on a hotel being built in the Central African jungle nation of Sezanda. It’s O’Toole’s last shot at redemption.
Sezanda, Central Africa, 1954
As things begin to look up for O’Toole, the Sezandan government is overthrown in a military coup. All foreigners are taken prisoner and locked in concentration camps. O’Toole is sent to the worst, HELL CAMP XXI, under the control of a brutal ex-Nazi, Kommandant Krieger. Krieger has a special way of keeping his prisoners under control. In the camp, he has erected a boxing ring. And anyone who steps out of line is forced to face off against his man-mountain, wrecking machine, Crator – a man whose sole purpose is to inflict pain.
Fate has destined Brendan O’Toole to don the gloves one more time, in a fight not just for his life, but his very soul.
Attached you will find complimentary Word file of Fight Card: Rumble In The Jungle to send on to your Kindle or read on your computer, as well as a jpeg of the cover.
You can find Fight Card: Rumble In The Jungle on Amazon.
Next up is our February release, Fight Card: Against The Ropes from acclaimed New Pulp author Terrence P. McCauley. In December, Terrence saw his novel Prohibition – featuring Terry Quinn, ex-boxer turned mob enforcer in 1920’s New York – released from top pulp publisher Airship 27. Prior to the release of Prohibition, Terrence pitched the prequel – telling the tale of Terry Quinn’s boxing years – as a Fight Card novel. While the 1920’s was new ground for Fight Card, the character and writing was so strong, it was immediately a done deal. Fight Card: Against The Ropes is the result.
Fight Card: Against The Ropes
New York City – 1925
The boxing ring was the only world Terry Quinn had ever known. He’d entered the hallowed halls of St. Vincent’s Home for Boys in New York City as a fighter and left as a boxer. Years of training and honing his skills finally paid off as he fought his way to the top. Only one more fight stood between Quinn and shot at the heavyweight championship against Jack Dempsey. It was the glory he’d been waiting for all his life.
But things have never gone easy for Terry Quinn. As he starts training for the biggest fight of his career, a crew of Tammany thugs and fix-it men tell him to throw the fight or face dire consequences. Even before he has a chance to consider their offer, those dire consequences come home to roost when one of his long time corner men turns up dead.
The identity of the killer isn’t in question. The only question is what is Terry Quinn going to do about it.
Against The Ropes is a tough New York tale played out while the Roaring Twenties roared their loudest. Crooked cops, Tammany hacks, has-beens, and even the great Jack Johnson, all play a role in Quinn’s decision – is his quest for justice worth his future, and possibly … his life.
You will also find attached complimentary Word file of Fight Card: Against The Ropes to send on to your Kindle or read on your computer, as well as a jpeg of the cover.
You can find Fight Card: Against The Ropes on Amazon.
In other news, our March release will be Fight Card: The Last Round Of Archie Mannis from Joseph Grant. This will be a different style of Fight Card novel, echoing the biographical pieces done by the great Jack Kofed in many of the sports pulps.
April will see a Fight Card triple combination debut at the 2013 Pulp Ark convention where Fight Card co-creator Paul Bishop (yeah, me) will be the guest of honor. Pulp Ark will herald the unveiling of the first two novels under the Fight Card MMA banner – Fight Card MMA: Welcome To The Octagon from Gerard Brennan, and Fight Card MMA: The Kalamazoo Kid from Jeremy Brown. Both Gerard and Jeremy sport extensive critical acclaim for their prior works and have delivered dynamite stories that leap off the page.
The third punch of the combination will be Fight Card: Swamp Walloper –
the sequel to Fight Card: Felony Fists – from yours truly, Paul Bishop. Fight Card: Swamp Walloper will send LAPD cop Pat Flynn and his partner Cornel Tombstone Jones deep into the Louisiana swamps on a mission of two-fisted vengeance – and it won’t take long before they are in the fight of their lives against a sadistic prison warden and a chain gang of swamp rats.
Beyond April, we will see books from John Kenyon (Fight Card: Get Hit, Hit Back), Derrick Ferguson (Fight Card: Brooklyn Beatdown), Tony Hancock (Fight Card: Fight River), Anthony Venutolo (Fight Card: Union Of Snakes), Rory Costello (Fight Card: Flyweight Fury), Bobby Nash (Fight Card: Barefoot Bones), Nick Ahlhelm (Fight Card: MMA: Rosie The Ripper), and an as yet untitled tale from returning Fight Card author Kevin Michaels … Whew! There is a lot of hard punching Fight Card action on the horizon … There is also a lot to juggle, so if I’ve forgotten anybody, please, please let me know …
As always, artist Keith Birdsong has been doing yeoman work on the covers for our e-books, and David Foster has been very generous in helping to get out our top-notch paperback covers.
Thanks to Terrence P. McCauley for taking over the Fight Card Twitter feed @FightCardPulps, to Robert Evans for keeping up the Fight Card Linked-In Group, and to Jeremy Brown for helping out with the Fight Card website.
With the able assistance of David Foster, a new issue of Fight Fictioneers Magazine will also be making an appearance in April and will be promoting all of the Fight Card novels to be published since our last issue. We are continuing to work on audio versions of our Fight Card titles and hope to have more solid information soon.
A GIRL AND HER CAT!
 |
| (Promotional art – not actual cover) |
New Pulp Author Win Scott Eckert announced on his blog that he is writing a new novel for Moonstone Books, Honey West and T.H.E Cat: A GIRL AND HER CAT!
It’s Honey West and T.H.E Cat, in the first new Honey West novel in over 40 years, A Girl and Her Cat!
Following on the heels of the first ever Honey West & T.H.E Cat crossover comic, Moonstone’s “Death in the Desert,” comes the Honey West & T.H.E Cat novel, A Girl and Her Cat…..
When an exotic green-eyed Asian doctor hires Honey to recover a stolen sample of a new influenza vaccine from a rival scientist, the blonde bombshell private eye—suspicious but bored—takes the case. But after she’s attacked not once, but twice, on her way from Long Beach to San Francisco to track down her quarry, she knows there’s more—much more—to her femme fatale client than meets the eye.
Along the way, Honey’s one-time paramour Johnny Doom—ex-bounty hunter and current Company agent—reenters the picture, and the gorgeous doctor’s insidious—and deadly—grandfather deals himself in. But when Honey questions whether Johnny’s playing her game, or just playing her for a patsy, she joins forces—as only Honey can—with the one man in Frisco who can help her recover the stolen vaccine-cum-bioweapon and prevent a worldwide epidemic—former cat burglar-turned-bodyguard Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat: T.H.E Cat!
Join writers Win Scott Eckert and Matthew Baugh, and cover artist Douglas Klauba, for A Girl and Her Cat, a groovy, racy 1960s romp coming in 2013 from Moonstone!
Mike Gold: The Nerddom Intelligentsia
There’s a new sun rising up angry in the sky
And there’s a new voice saying we’re not afraid to die
Let the old world make believe it’s blind and deaf and dumb
But nothing can change the shape of things to come
We all know how our mass media portrays nerds: people who are brainy, obsessive, with a penchant for wearing merchandising-related merchandise. We come in two sizes: gangly or Christie-clone. We couldn’t get laid at an orgy on the dark side of the moon. We have a life-long lust for our popular culture and cannot distinguish between low-brow and high-brow.
Actually, I’m rather proud of that last bit. Cultural elitism really pisses me off. But this is America, where the bottom line justifies everything. The day nerds became bankable was the day we became legitimate.
We helped. Picking up a lesson from my fellow hippie freaks of 1967, we have redefined the term “nerd” simply by accepting it as a reference to ourselves. My fellow ComicMix columnist Emily S. Whitten embraces this wonderfully, in nearly everything she writes for this site.
The Simpsons helped quite a bit. Comic Book Guy exposed a previously hidden reality: a goodly percentage of those who hang our at the comic book shop are members of Mensa, and more would be if we had even the most rudimentary social skills. Mind you, I’d only been to a handful of Mensa meetings and I found them pathetically tedious, but they were at the University of Chicago so I was probably asking to be bored.
The fact is, comic book reading among those older than nine used to be associated with stupidity, arrested development, and the complete lack of a social life. Now many understand that it’s the upper end of the brain rack that finds this stuff appealing.
Nerds might not be cool, but then again, why is it that nerds invent all the cool stuff? We might have very short attention spans and we’re easily attracted to that which is bright and shiny, but we’ve taken over the popular culture and we’ve taken over technological innovation and, quite literally, our toys have become the tools of revolution all across the world.
Remember Doctor Doom’s little flying teevee cameras that would allow him to view his mayhem all over the world? He borrowed them from Ming the Merciless… but that’s not my point. Today, for good or for bad or for both, we’ve got our flying cameras. They’re called drones. Some of them are capable of bombing people back to the Flintstones. We’ve got GPS in our pockets, transponders in our cars, cameras at most of the traffic lights and highways and stores and office buildings and not only do “we” know where you are, but we know where you have been.
Hey, I didn’t say nerddom was a force for good. It’s a human force. And it’s mainstream.
And we’ve got these massively overpopulated conventions all over the world. We can organize.
We can take over.
Maybe… we already have.
THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil
Scholastic Unveils New Cover for Harry Potter’s 15th Anniversary
Hard to believe that it’s been 15 years since J.K. Rowling’s boy wizard first came to America. To celebrate, Scholastic announced this morning that a new covers will grace anniversary editions of the seven-book mega-best-selling series. In an interesting move, Kazu Kibuishi, the creator behind the over-hyped Amulet series, will be providing the new covers, replacing Mary GrandPré’s now classic images. Here’s the first cover for your viewing and personally, I think it’s an improvement. It’d be nice, as part of the celebration, they used the original title, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but that’s not going to happen.
Here’s the formal release with all the anniversary details.
New York, NY (February 13, 2013) – Harry Potter fans and young readers just starting their journey through the world of Harry Potter will have something new and exciting to add to their bookshelves this September. Scholastic (NASDAQ: SCHL), the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today unveiled an all new cover for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – the first of seven new covers to appear on U.S. trade paperback editions coming in September 2013 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the U.S. publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the original book in J.K. Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter series.
The stunning art for the new editions is by critically acclaimed artist Kazu Kibuishi, best known for his #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel series, Amulet. Kibuishi is a longtime Harry Potter fan who called this opportunity, “more than a little surreal.” Each of the seven new covers will depict a distinctive and memorable moment from the respective book. The collection, which will also be released in September as a boxed set, will offer new readers just reaching the age to begin the series a glimpse of J.K. Rowling’s magical world and the epic story they are about to enter.
“The Harry Potter covers by Mary GrandPré are so fantastic and iconic,” said Kibuishi. “When I was asked to submit samples, I initially hesitated because I didn’t want to see them reinterpreted! However, I felt that if I were to handle the project, I could bring something to it that many other designers and illustrators probably couldn’t, and that was that I was also a writer of my own series of middle grade fiction. As an author myself, I tried to answer the question, ‘If I were the author of the books – and they were like my own children – how would I want them to be seen years from now?’ When illustrating the covers, I tried to think of classic perennial paperback editions of famous novels and how those illustrations tend to feel. In a way, the project became a tribute to both Harry Potter and the literary classics.”
The inspired original art for the series, created by the talented Mary GrandPré will continue to be featured on the U.S. hardcover and digest paperback editions.
According to Ellie Berger, President, Scholastic Trade Publishing, “The brilliant artist Kazu Kibuishi offers his unique vision of the world of Harry Potter, making each cover an incredible adventure that will transport new readers just discovering Harry Potter for the first time directly into the rich world of J.K. Rowling’s imagination.”
Scholastic also announced that in November 2013, the company will release the first boxed set of the complete Hogwarts Library in the U.S., including Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and The Tales of Beedle the Bard. Sales of the Hogwarts Library will support two charities selected by the author, J.K. Rowling: Lumos, a charity founded by J.K. Rowling which works to end the institutionalization of children, and Comic Relief, a UK-based charity that strives to create a just world free from poverty.
Fifteen years after the first U.S. publication of J.K. Rowling’s first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in September 1998, there are more than 150 million Harry Potter books in print in the United States alone and the series still hits bestseller lists regularly. The seven Harry Potter books are published in over 200 territories in 73 languages and have sold more than 450 million copies worldwide.
This Week’s New Comics: February 13, 2013
This week’s list of new comics in stores is sponsored by Manhattan Comics and Comixology. Buy new comics now!
(more…)
THE SHADOW FAN– CALLING BURBANK!
With their 18th episode, The Shadow Fan Podcast debuts a brand-new feature: Calling Burbank! New Pulp publisher and writer Tommy Hancock reviews “Crime, Insured” from the perspective of a relative newcomer to The Shadow mythos! We also have commentary from Shadow expert Anthony Tollin, plus reviews of “The Thunder King,” Masks # 3 and The Shadow: The History of the Radio Program.
Join us in celebrating the greatest pulp hero of all time at http://theshadowfan.libsyn.com/calling-burbank
RETURN TO MONSTER EARTH
Mechanoid Press unveiled a new MONSTER EARTH bonus story by New Pulp author Ian Watson, a follow-up to his Monster Earth tale The Monsters of World War II, or, Happy Birthday, Bobby Fetch.
You can read it now at http://www.mechanoidpress.com/2013/02/12/chuck-ronson-reporting-a-monster-earth-bonus-story-by-i-a-watson/
THE WHITE ROCKET PODCAST REVIEWS THE TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!
John Ringer and Van Plexico count down (and debate) their TEN FAVORITE MOVIES OF ALL TIME on this week’s episode. What’s included? Is Van right? Is John nuts? YOU DECIDE!!
Find White Rocket Podcast: TEN BEST MOVIES EVER on iTunes or at http://whiterocket.podbean.com and http://www.whiterocketbooks.com
Part of the ESO Network of shows!
