Category: News

Are The CBLDF and Bleeding Cool Promoting Censorship?

card-600x351-150x88-6859368The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is currently in the middle of a massive fundraising drive, set in the middle of Banned Books Week. They’ve been auctioning off a lot of neat items, including professional development reviews with Tom Brevoort and Chris Burnham (also available for lunch) and a meet-and-greet for Saturday Night Live.

But there’s one item that leaves us scratching our heads:

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is auctioning off a “Get Out Of Bleeding Cool Free” card which will allow the winner the chance to remove a story that Bleeding Cool has published, or prevent one specifically from being published.

Also, in a twist, we will allow the winner to use it as a Get Into Bleeding Cool Free card, guaranteeing positive and promotional coverage for the project of your choice.

Either way, it’s a one time use, but will come with a CBLDF membership. The bidding starts at $500.

The CBLDF, until now a staunch anti-censorship organization, is auctioning off the ability to selectively censor a website?

This can’t be right. I find it very hard to believe the CBLDF would doing something so contrary to their stated goals. Nor can I believe that a journalist of Rich’s caliber is promoting that, under the right circumstances, he can be bought.

I look forward to hearing more about this.

SURF PULP-As Told to Chuck Miller!


AS TOLD TO CHUCK MILLER-Pulp Interviews

Chuck’s Guest today- Craig Lockwood 

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CHUCK MILLER:  Surf Pulp is something that not too many of my colleagues who have loosely banded together under the “New Pulp” umbrella have been exposed to. And it’s a wonderful thing, since we are looking to broaden the definition of “pulp fiction,” and expand its visibility and appeal. Could you just give us a brief synopsis of how you got the idea and what steps you took to see it through all the way to Hard-Boiled Surf Pulp Fiction #1?

CRAIG LOCKWOOD:  I’ve often wondered if the term “New Pulp” or “neo-Pulp” isn’t misleading. While the great pulp publishing and fiction industry died out forty years ago, Ellery Queen and Analog are still published. So at least a tenuous thread to the pulp-past was maintained. And the pulps have been an enduring and arguably profound influence on America and Europe’s popular literary culture.


What’s telling is that when I started this project with Rick we had no idea that there was anything like a pulp revival.


I’d had the idea of publishing an all-surfing-related fiction magazine for years. And I loved the old pulp form. I’d done a pulp paper book The Whole Ocean in 1986.


Twenty-three years later I’d just finished writing a big book for a publisher, and decided to see if I couldn’t put an inexpensive magazine—a real pulp—together.


Rick’s a talented illustrator who had been an aficionado of the American pulp illustrative style of the 1930s and ‘40s and ‘50s. I’d read the sci-fi pulps like Galaxy and Analog, and the mystery mags like Back Mask and Ellery Queen, as a kid and been entranced the storytelling and action. My first published fiction – and the piece was wholly an adventure pulp sory — was in SURFER Magazine—despite SURFER being a “slick.”


Both of our mutual interests and our livelihoods center around surfing and the surfing sub-culture.

 That term may seem like an anomaly, but today there is an entire sub-culture—which is something like car-culture—but based around surfing, that had been growing in California since the 1930s. And I’m not talking “Gidget.”


There’s a multi-million dollar sustaining “surfing industry” that includes surfing apparel, surfboard manufacture, surf-related destination travel, surfing fine art with prestigious museum exhibitions, surfing cinema, TV shows, surfing music, surfing literature—including surfing journalism, with books and magazines—and even occasional surfing theater, and believe it or not, a nascent surfing academia.

And of course, there’s surfing crime. Which some older readers may recall getting both national notoriety and tabloid ink during the 1960s with a Florida criminal character nicknamed “Murph the Surf.”

Rick is academically trained, and a graduate of Art Center, here in Pasadena, California, which is one of he nation’s finest art schools. I studied creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rick’s work hangs in both private collections and at McKibben Gallery in Laguna Beach as well as in Rémi Bertoche, in France.


I’ve been a journalist and editor since college, mainly surfing but in the beginning the pickings were slim so I also worked as a lifeguard and deputy sheriff. Later I served as a war correspondent in Southeast Asia, Balkans, the Middle East and Afghanistan, a crime reporter, and a surfing historian whose last book “Peanuts” An Oral Biography Exploring Legend, Myth and Archetype In California’s Surfing Subculture” was reviewed last year by surfing’s most prestigious magazine, The Surfer’s Journal, as “This year’s Best book on Surfing, 2010.” Currently I serve as co-chair of the Oral History Committee of the Surfing Heritage Foundation, which is an endowed institution and museum. But I also shape surfboards and racing paddleboards – it’s all handwork – as a hobby/business.


We were well into the project when we started discovering you guys.


We looked at each other and went “Wow! Here’s real talent, good writing, and great storytelling.”

And you—the pioneers—were all out there taking great waves and cranking these stylish pulpy bottom turns and looking good. 


It was like wandering through the desert thirsty and alone and discovering this well-supplied big wagon train with the Bonanza cast at the reins.

CHUCK:  What would you say to potential readers who might be leery of your work because of their unfamiliarity with surf culture and the perception that this is a very specialized area that they just wouldn’t “get?” I think this could be really significant in terms of opening up new connections and exposing people to familiar concepts in a new context. That can be a difficult barrier to break through, which is sad because I think there are far more things in common than not.


Chuck, you nailed it. There are definitely more things in common in pulp fiction than not. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the milieu.


I suspect we both see pulp fiction as a wonderful dimensional door through which readers are transported by writers into other realities. The vehicle of transmission is the combination of the author’s words and the reader’s imagination.


Surfing, and surfing fiction does reflect aspects of surfing’s specialization, just as espionage fiction is specialized. But specialization need not be exclusionary, and it’s never a reason to neglect the opportunity of an exciting read.


The English mystery writer Dick Francis, himself a jockey, set all his stories against a background of horse racing—which is like surfing, a kind of sub-culture. I’ve only been to one horse track in my life, and know nothing about horse-racing, betting on horses, or horse-racing as an occupation. But I’ve read and enjoyed at least a dozen Dick Francis mysteries, full of racetrack jargon, and enjoyed them.  


Reading masters of a specific genera—such as spy fiction’s John Le Carre´, or Alan Furst—means being immersed in that specific fictional world. This is a world the author has created. And when the author is good, and when the narrative’s coherent and the drama compelling we’re exposed and become both intellectually and emotionally involved in a very specialized environment—say Carré’s Cold War London in 1965, or Furst’s Eleventh Arrondissement in 1940 Paris, during the Nazi Occupation.


And in that fictional environment the magic of a reader’s imagination, a skilled author’s description, narrative and dialog—all provide enough information for the reader to understand and personally assimilate the  political climate, the geography, the tradecraft and techniques, the idiom and argot of espionage.


Compared to this kind of complex arcana, surfing’s lexicon is relatively easy. Especially when the format’s a short-story or novella. Here the author is going to be focusing less on some incidental technical aspect—such as a specific surfboard’s design limitations in a given wave—than say, on the protagonist’s efforts to get to the exotic location where a previously un-ridden but fabled wave exists. And—as in all adventure fiction—that requires an author’s commitment to narrative and a reader’s exercise of imagination.

And, if the author is skillful, he or she provides the reader sufficient expository detail so their imagination takes over. This, after all, is how we are able to read and immerse ourselves in—and find credible and enjoyable enough, and thus continue reading—our pulp fiction superheros.

Surfing is an activity rooted in American culture. Surfing comes out of that culture, and so much of what surfing authors are writing about is at least familiar. Most of us have either been to a beach, or seen film or stills of the ocean, and waves, and surfers. We have a sense of the beauty, power and grandeur of the sea. 

I’m not a skier, have never skied, hate snow, don’t know the precise meaning of terms like “mogul” or “screamin’ starfish” or “slow-dog noodle turn” and have never experienced the thrill of flying down a mountainside in deep powder. Yet I’ve read and enjoyed skiing-related fiction. So it wasn’t what I knew that entertained me, it was the author’s skill in creating a literary door through which I could venture in imagination.


I didn’t have to be an anthropologist like Colin Trumbull, living with the m’Buti, in the Congo and having to learn an entire non-cognate language to figure out the sub-culture. If I didn’t know the terminology, the story carried me along.


In one of our Vol. 1 No. 1 issue’s stories, “Sorcerer of Siargao” by Susan Chaplin, her surfer-protagonist is described this way:


“Marla was tall, with big shoulders and clear blue eyes. At forty-seven and recently divorced she was living out some pre-divorce impulse to surf her way around the world.”


There is nothing very exclusionary here for a non-surfing reader. You get her logline. Restless middle aged woman seeks adventure. The rest is storytelling—through a surfer’s eyes.


In “The Big Deep” hard-luck hard-boiled surfing private eye Sam Sand tells  surf syndicate enforcer Gang Lopez who’s bringing him an impossible-to-solve case: “Gang, you been laminating without a mask?”


Now a non-surfer may not have a clue that this wisecrack refers to the manufacturing process of saturating the “laminate,” the two fiberglass layers of a hand-shaped surfboard blank’s skin with catalyzed polyurethane resin, but you know he’s skeptical—and is obviously saying it in a colorful way.


One thing those of us who are attracted to the pulp milieu share is that we love imaginative storytelling. So if Hard-boiled Surf Pulp which is aimed at a primarily surfing audience has any chance of attracting non-surfing readers we think it will be because our writers can tell stories well.


CHUCK:  Name two or three of the biggest influences on your writing. Not necessarily limited to authors, but including ANYTHING that you think has shaped your style and the worldview that your fiction is built on.


My biggest initial influences in desire to be a writer were genetic, i.e., my mother and father.


My dad was a hard-boiled, hard-core, hard-bitten, hard-case WW I combat veteran—a newspaperman/journalist, war correspondent, and occasional pulp writer during the 1920s and ‘30s. He became a wire-service bureau chief, in Lisbon. My parents had lived in the same Paris neighborhood as Ernest and Hadley Hemingway and were part of the same literary and artistic circles.


My mother was an artist, a sculptor of some renown, and the daughter of three generations of newspaper men. And she had the storyteller’s gift. She’d been a fashion illustrator for Vogue Magazine, so her artist’s eye missed nothing. Decades after an event she could recall the most precise details, inflect the tone of voice of someone who’d been speaking, mimic accents, and connect everything to the weather, the political climate, how the women and men were dressed, how the food was prepared, was served and tasted.


Just before World War Twice they returned to California and Hollywood where he became a screenwriter for Fox. I came along soon after. Then the war came along and my father was killed, soon after Pearl Harbor.


As a child without a father—growing up in Hollywood during the war—my mother would tell stories about her early life. I was fascinated with her accounts of her famous family’s history, of my father’s life, their travels—including some exciting adventures with narrow escapes—and the now all-but-forgotten literary figures they’d known such as John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, Raoul Whitfield, and Dashiell Hammett.


When I was very young my mother would tell me serial stories of characters she’d invent. Then, taking a big drawing pad and using charcoal pencils, she’d quickly illustrate them while she was telling the story, drawing the characters—horses, boats, cars, guns—and the most outrageous and weirdly costumed arch-villains. We had a house full of books, and a beach house in Laguna Beach and so I grew up reading and surfing.


Pulp magazines were still on the newsstands when I was a kid and I became interested in reading and collecting science fiction magazines. Without question, much of my interest in writing fiction came from that early pulp exposure.


Going to the local newsstand with my weekly allowance was a ritual. What a visual feast! There were dozens of lurid covers, adventures, detective mysteries, westerns, romances, creepy shudders, and the ones in the back at the top—beyond kid’s reach—the spicy pulps.


So I pictured myself being able to write for these kinds of exciting magazines. I was just learning to type and submitted a few science fiction shorts in my early teens—which were promptly rejected. 

Unfortunately, by the time I had begun to write well enough to perhaps be accepted, the pulps were approaching extinction, and everyone in my college writing classes was trying to write like Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller.


Ray Bradbury’s fiction was a strong early influence, and he spoke frequently at Robert Kirsch’s Art of Fiction course and workshops at UCLA where I was a student. I’ve never forgotten his closing words at one of his lectures:

“Always quit while you’re hot. And don’t forget to put the cover on your typewriter.”

      

Vanguard Publishing announces Strange Worlds of Science Fiction – The Science Fiction Comics of Wally Wood

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The Science Fiction Comics of Wally Wood

PRESS RELEASE:

Vanguard Publishing announces
Title: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction
Subtitle: The Science Fiction Comics of Wally Wood
Series: Vanguard Wally Wood Classics

Tales from the Crypt and Weird Science publisher Bill Gaines
called Daredevil, THUNDER Agents, and Mars Attacks co-creator,
Wally Wood “the greatest Science Fiction artist of all time.”
Strange Worlds collects rare 1950s Wood sci-fi comics Strange Worlds,
Space Detective, Capt. Science, Space Ace, and more. If you like Vanguard’s Frazetta Classics, try Vanguard’s Wood Classics.

Partial list of Contents:
The Flying Saucers,
An Earthman On Venus,
Spawn of Terror,
Winged Death On Venus,
The Monster God of Rogor,
The Martian Slayers,
The Insidious Doctor Khartoum,
Time Door of Throm,
Death in Deep Space,
Bandits of the Starways,
The Opium Smugglers of Venus,
Trail to the Asteroid Hideout,
The Weapon Out of Time,
Kenton of the Star Patrol,
Sirens of Space,
Rocky X: Operation Unknown

Author-Illustrator: Wallace Wood
Editor: J. David Spurlock
Cover: Steranko & Wood
Hardcover: 200 color 8.5 x 11 pages
HC Retail: $39.95
Publisher: Vanguard
Release: October 31, 2011
Language: English
HC ISBN-10: 1934331406
HC ISBN-13: 978-1934331408
Printed in: China
http://www.vanguardpublishing.com

FORTIER TAKES ON STRANGE GODS!

ALL PULP REVIEWS- by Ron Fortier
STRANGE GODS OF THE DIRE PLANET
By Joel Jenkins
Pulp Work Press
263 pages
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Writer Joel Jenkins is one of the most prolific, exciting and talented members of the New Pulp movement today.  Through his association with Pulp Work Press, an outfit he started with fellow writers Joshua Reynolds and Derrick Ferguson, Jenkins has produced some of the most amazing, fast-paced pulp adventures ever to hit print.  The originator of several series in various traditional genres, STRANGE GODS OF THE DIRE PLANET, is the fifth book in this homage to Edgar Rice Burrough’s classic Martian books.
Having not read the previous four, I really appreciated Jenkins’ understanding that new readers would need a little extra background exposition to bring them up to speed on where the action was taking place and who all these characters were; while at the same time moving the story along at a breakneck pace to satisfy those fans who had been along for the ride from the beginning.  That he accomplishes this wonderfully is no small achievement and a big reason I enjoyed the book so much.
Here’s what any new reader will learn upon entering Garvey Dire’s world.  Dire is a modern NASA astronaut who, by some cosmic snafu, had his space craft hurled through an anomaly that sent him back in time millions of years to a Mars inhabited by humans like himself and all manner of beasts and fauna.  Realizing this is a one way trip; Dire accepts his fate and sets about making a new life for himself amongst the female dominated tribes of the giant red planet.  Jenkins has created a truly exotic social background that is fascinating with paying scrupulous attention to what each of these customs means to the entire culture he has created.
On Dire’s Mars, men are in short supply so they are protected and treasured and it is the abundant female sex that handles the affairs of state, commerce and warfare.  Obviously this is a different world than Dire is comfortable with, especially when adapting he realizes he must accept polygamy and marry several women to assume an active role in this society.  Like Burrough’s books, Jenkins’ Martian civilization is crumpling and the population struggling daily against both the forces of nature and time to survive.
The crux of this fifth volume centers about a long kept secret of an occult group of fanatics known as the Technopriests and Dire and his allies attempt to uncover it.  There is bloodshed galore, non-stop action and great heroic characters battling against truly beautifully crafted background.  It also ends on one of the most dramatic cliffhangers this reader has ever encountered.  Over the many years since Burroughs created his interplanetary pulp classics there have been dozens of imitators who have attempted to recapture the magic he wielded but none has ever come as close as Jenkins with the Dire Planet books.  These books rock!

Will The Rest Of DC Comics Move?

dcspin-std-bl-jpg-4DC Comics has already had a large job exodus from New York to Los Angeles, and now there are signs that what’s left may have to pack up soon, as well as the rest of Time Warner. Deadline Hollywood has the story:

CEO Jeff Bewkes told staffers in an email that the company’s preparing to evaluate “our office footprint in the New York metropolitan area and develop a long-range plan to meet our future needs.” The team leading that process — to be run by Chief Financial and Administrative Officer John Martin and Global Real Estate SVP Tom Santiago — probably won’t make a decision until the end of 2012. Then it could take years to implement. The corporate ranks and cable channels including CNN probably will stay in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle; the company owns about 1 million square feet in the building. But Time Warner leases an additional 3 million or so additional square feet of office space in the New York area. The agreement for the publishing unit’s operations at the Time & Life building expires at the end of 2017, while the one for HBO’s home on 6th Ave runs out in 2018. There are plenty of options in Manhattan, including the new World Trade Center. But neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut probably will try to persuade Time Warner to move some of its operations, and jobs.

via Time Warner Launches Review Of NYC Office Options.

A Second DEADLY GAMES! Teaser.

Check out this all new teaser ad for Deadly Games! the upcoming new novel by Bobby Nash.

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Would You Like To Play A Deadly Game?

That’s exactly the question asked of Atlanta Police Detective John Bartlett and photojournalist Benjamin West after finding out that their longtime nemesis, Darrin Morehouse, has died, apparently at his own hand.

His death triggers the deadliest game of all!

To win this game, all John Bartlett and Benjamin West have to do is survive it.

Easier said than done.

DEADLY GAMES!
Coming soon from BEN Books.

Keep watching http://www.bobbynash.com/ for more information.

PRO SE PRESENTS FOR OCTOBER-AN EPIC NOVELLA BY AN AUTHOR OF EPICS!

Pro Se Productions, Publisher of New Pulp books, anthologies, and magazines, announces today that the October issue of its magazine, PRO SE PRESENTS, will be a special issue featuring the novella, THE HUNTER ISLAND ADVENTURE by well known New Pulp author Wayne Reinagel.

Never before in print, THE HUNTER ISLAND ADVENTURE features characters from Reinagel’s INFINITE HORIZONS Universe and his PULP HEROES trilogy.  “Infinite Horizons,” according to Reinagel, “explores the secret lives and revealing the unrecorded adventures of the greatest heroes and villains to ever walk the Earth.


“In the worlds of Infinite Horizons, the question is explored, what if the Victorian and Pulp era adventures actually occurred in our universe. And taking into account all of the events that have happened since that time, how would this have altered the pulp heroes from the 30’s and 40’s? The answers to these questions are presented in the first trilogy of Infinite Horizons novels entitled Pulp Heroes.



Pulp Heroes is an epic adventure, spanning two centuries in time and linking the incredible lives of history’s most popular Victorian Age adventurers of the 1800’s with the greatest action heroes of the Pulp Era and an assortment of well-known, real-life figures.”

THE HUNTER ISLAND ADVENTURE is a story about Pam Titan, Doc Titan’s cousin and an adventurer in her own right, and three associates who end up on a wild adventure all their own.  Although available in ebook form, this will be the first time that the story has appeared in print.

“We are more than honored,” Tommy Hancock, Editor in Chief of Pro Se Productions says, “to be the home for Wayne’s novella.  Known for his epic storytelling and adventures that span decades, even centuries, full of his own creations as well as reinterpretations of real historical figures and literary characters, Wayne also proves he’s extremely capable in telling gripping tales in a short form.  And you an find out how capable in PRO SE PRESENTS #3 in October.”

More information will follow as the release date nears for PRO SE PRESENTS #3 in October!

Nathan Fillion & Tim Daly join heroic cast of Justice League: Doom

Primetime television stars Nathan Fillion and Tim Daly, the reigning voices of Green Lantern and Superman, respectively, join an exciting group of actors reprising their famed cartoon roles in Justice League: Doom, an all-new entry in the popular series of DC Universe Animated Original Movies due in early 2012 from Warner Home Video.

Justice League: Doom finds Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, Cyborg and Batman on their heels when a team of super villains discover and implement the Dark Knight’s “contingency plans” for stopping any rogue Justice League member. The story is inspired by Mark Waid’s much-heralded JLA: Tower of Babel.

Fillion, the star of ABC’s hit TV drama Castle, made his debut as Green Lantern/Hal Jordan in the recent Green Lantern: Emerald Knights. Fillion made his initial DCU bow as the voice of Steve Trevor in the 2008 hit Wonder Woman.

Currently headlining the cast of ABC’s popular Private Practice, Daly originated the title character’s voice in the landmark cartoon, Superman: The Animated Series. He has reprised the role in two DCU films: the 2009 extravaganza Superman/Batman: Public Enemies and the 2010 thriller Superman/Batman: Apocalypse.

In addition to current primetime stars Fillion and Daly, the cast is a grand reunion of the original group of actors who provided the voices of the Justice League for the cartoon of the same name and its follow-up, Justice League Unlimited. Reprising their roles are Kevin Conroy (Batman: The Animated Series) as Batman, Michael Rosenbaum (Smallville, Breaking In) as Flash, Susan Eisenberg (Superman/Batman: Apocalypse) as Wonder Woman and Carl Lumbly (Alias) as J’onn J’onzz/Martian Manhunter. Bumper Robinson (A Different World, Transformers: Animated) joins the cast as Cyborg.

The Justice League faces two sets of villainous teams in the film – The Royal Flush Gang and a sextet of notable evildoers. The latter group includes three voice acting alumni of the Justice League animated series: Phil Morris (Smallville, Seinfeld) as Vandal Savage, Olivia d’Abo (The Wonder Years) as Star Sapphire, and Alexis Denisof (Angel) as Mirror Master. Also opposing our heroes are Carlos Alazraqui (Reno 911) as Bane, Paul Blackthorne (The Dresden Files) as Metallo, and Claudia Black (Farscape, Stargate SG-1) as Cheetah.

David Kaufman (Danny Phantom) also reprises his Justice League role of Jimmy Olsen.

The film is executive produced by Bruce Timm (Batman: Year One), and directed by Lauren Montgomery (Batman: Year One), who is also credited as producer alongside Alan Burnett (Batman: The Animated Series). Justice League: Doom is the final script from the late Dwayne McDuffie (All-Star Superman, Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths). Casting and dialogue direction is once again in the capable hands of Andrea Romano (Batman: Year One, SpongeBob SquarePants).

Warner Home Video will premiere the Justice League: Doom trailer during its presentation at New York Comic Con on Friday, October 14 from 3:00-4:00 p.m. in the IGN Theater. Also premiering during that session will be the Catwoman animated short that is attached to Batman: Year One, the next DC Universe Animated Movie (streeting October 18).

The Point Radio: Joel McHale Grows Up


We talk more with Joel McHale about the new season of COMMUNITY, how he’s taking himself a little more seriously and what’s up with Jeff & Annie. Then we showcase another new NBC comedy –  FREE AGENTS with Hank Azaria and Kathryn Hahn, plus FRINGE fans can relax. We found Peter Bishop – and he’s at DC Comics.

The Point Radio is on the air right now – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or mobile device– and please check us out on Facebook right here & toss us a “like” or follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

FOUR BULLETS FOR DILLON Is Live!

A lost city in the Cambodian jungles run by a pint-sized tyrant wearing a gem-encrusted belt buckle. Beautiful women who lure Dillon and his rival, rock musician Sly Gantlet, into a clash of alpha males and a deadly set-up.  A beautiful queen and a backstabbing friend.  A quest for an evil artifact linked to the betrayer of Christ. FOUR BULLETS FOR DILLON includes four hard to find and never before seen stories ripped from the life of global adventurer Dillon!  Ordering information can be found at Amazon.com or Pulpwork Press.

And remember that with proof of purchase of FOUR BULLETS FOR DILLON you’ll also get the 10 page illustrated “Dillon And The Escape From Tosegio”  Details can be found HERE