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| Cover Art:P Jeff Herndon |
Whack Job, the latest novel from author Mike Baron is now available for Kindle.
When world leaders burst into flame like a string of Lady Fingers, the President calls on a renegade former agent with a history of mental problems. Otto “Aardvark” White possesses a unique quality. He’s lucky.
Whack Job features a cover by Jeff Herndon.
Moonstone Books’ third anthology collection chronicling new tales of pulp hero, The Avenger is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Titled, THE AVENGER: ROARING HEART OF THE CRUCIBLE, the book is scheduled for release in April 2013 in both softcover trade paperback and limited edition hardcover.
The Avenger: Roaring Heart of the Crucible features stories by New Pulp Authors Matthew Baugh, James Chambers, Greg Cox, Win Scott Eckert, Joe Gentile, CJ Henderson, Nancy Holder, Michael May, Matthew Mayo, Will Murray, Bobby Nash, Barry Reese, Chris Sequeira, John Small, and David White. Edited by Nancy Holder and Joe Gentile. Cover art courtesy of E. M. Gist (softcover) and Jay Piscopo (hardcover).
The greatest crime-fighter of the 40’s returns in a third thrilling collection of original, action-packed tales of adventure, intrigue, and revenge. Life was bliss for millionaire adventurer Richard Henry Benson until that fateful day crime and greed took away his wife and young daughter… and turned him into something more than human. Driven by loss, compelled by grief, he becomes a chilled impersonal force of justice, more machine than man, dedicated to the destruction of evildoers everywhere. A figure of ice and steel, more pitiless than both, Benson has been forged into an avatar of vengeance, possessed of superhuman genius supernormal power. His frozen face and pale eyes, like a polar dawn, only hint at the terrible force the underworld heedlessly invoked upon itself the day they created… The Avenger!
Exclusive HC BONUS material: An Avenger timeline by Rick Lai, a story by John Small, plus solo tales of the Avenger’s aides by Howard Hopkins!
The Avenger: Roaring Heart of the Crucible will be in store April 2013 from Moonstone Books. You can order the softcover trade paperback and limited edition hardcover now.
There’s been a lot happening on the NBC comedy, PARKS AND RECREATION including an out-of-the-blue marriage proposal. Co-creator & star, Amy Poehler catches up on all of it plus odds are Jamie Foxx will be Electro and more speculation on Disney and Star Wars.
The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
During a recent in-house editorial discussion here, the notion was floated that we should be showing naked female breasts on this website, as part of an attempt to increase search engine rankings and site traffic.* To address this lack of undress, we’d like to present you with The Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society, whose slogan is “Making Reading Sexy”. Their raison d’etre:
We’re a group of friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, and complete strangers, who love good books and sunny days and enjoying both as nearly in the altogether as the law allows. Happily, in New York City, the law allows toplessness by both men and women. So that’s the way we do our al fresco reading. If you’re in New York and the weather’s good, won’t you join us sometime…?
And yes, you can go to their website, which features many photos of them in Bryant Park and other New York City locales fulfilling their organizational mission. (Of course, the site is probably Not Safe For Work.) They’ve been working their way through a recent contribution from Hard Case Crime who generously supplied them with free copies of some of their latest, including [[[Seduction of the Innocent]]] from our good friend Max Allan Collins. We hope he got a good back cover blurb out of it.
They don’t appear to have gotten around to comics and graphic novels yet, but we’re sure we can find something for them by the time the weather in New York gets nice again. And no, despite what you might think, we’re not going to send them a bunch of mini-comics. We just aren’t cynical enough for Cynicalman.
* Yes, this is what goes on in our workplace when we aren’t figuring out how many dimensions Cynosure intersects with. Arguing about whether Thor is stronger than the Hulk is for newbies.
The Nintendo Wii U Deluxe Set, listing at 349.99, is already sold out before its release on the 18th
Nintendo of America today announced a benefits incentive program for purchasers of its new [[[Nintendo Wii U Deluxe Set]]]. By signing up with their Club Nintendowebsite and registering their system purchase, users will receive a ten percent “points rebate” on purchases of WII U made through the Nintendo e-Shop. In addition, for each five hundred points earned in this fashion, users will receive a five dollar credit on future purchases in the eShop.
Club Nintendo allows users to earn points by registering their Nintendo purchases, and by taking brief surveys about the reasons for purchase and opinions on gameplay. The points can be redeemed for downloadable games or collectible accessories. High points earners are also eligible for rarer limited-edition items, made available for free.
This is the latest in a series of promotions intended to drive business to the Nintendo eShop. The release of [[[New Super Mario Bros 2]]] for the 3DS offered a 50 point Club Nintendo bonus for buying the downloadable version of the game. Another promotion running now allows users to receive a free downloadable game with the purchase of one of a select set of new releases for the 3DS. Nintendo does not offer their downloadable games at a discount over the store-bought versions, which makes them far more profitable to the company – while saving money on printing and shipping of physical media, they also receive the full price of the game, not just the wholesale price made if sold to a retail store. It also eliminates the resale market – the downloaded games cannot be sold back to a store, and can only be transferred from one system to another a limited number of times. Special offers like this are clearly intended to make the digital purchase more appealing to the user.
With this offer, a fifty dollar or higher game would effectively earn an immediate five dollar rebate towards further eShop purchases. However, the final list of Wii U games available through the eShop has not yet been revealed; only four retail games have been announced so far, including NintendoLand, which already comes with the Deluxe Set. Nintendo customer service reps have stated it will include their both “full-size” retail releases like New Mario Bros Wii U, as well as many smaller games at lower price points. Their retail games are delivered on a DVD, which holds up to 4.2 GB of data. It’s almost certain most of their releases do not fill those discs to bursting; if they did, only about 8 retail games could be stored on the system’s 32GB internal storage. The system does support additional storage via SDHC cards, and while external hard drive support has been reported, no details are available. So at the moment, the viability of downloading a high number of their retail games is questionable, rendering the ability to truly take advantage of the promotion somewhat limited.
While the promotion begins officially in December, all Wii U purchases made starting on the day of release (Nov. 18th) will qualify. Details on the promotion are being made available at the Nintendo site at http://ddp.nintendo.com/
Carrie Vaughn is best-known for her “Kitty Norville” urban fantasy series — about a radio talk-show host turned reluctant werewolf — but she’s also written other things. Just last year, for instance, she came out with [[[After the Golden Age]]]
So, the first question is: what comes after the Golden Age? Whether you’re Hesiod or Jack Kirby, the obvious answer is “The Silver Age.” And After the Golden Age is a quite Silver Age-y book, full of gangsters (organized into teams, with spiffy nicknames, and I would not be at all surprised if many of their gangs had dress codes) who politely kidnap Celia repeatedly in the vain hope of using her as a shield against her parents. (This is seen to never work, but — in best Silver Age fashion — the gangsters keep doing it, because they need to follow the essential Weisinger plots or else they are nothing.)
This is lucky for Celia; if this were an Iron Age story, she’d be in pieces in the fridge before page ten, and we wouldn’t have much of a novel. But she does live in a more genteel age, with defined standards of behavior for both heroes and villains, and so her kidnappings tend to just disrupt her schedule and horribly frustrate her.
(Vaughn lampshades the inevitable question: Celia doesn’t leave Commerce City because she doesn’t want to — sure, she has no relationship with her parents, and has a career that usually takes young public accountants through extensive travel around the country for the first few years of their careers, but, by gum! she’s going to stay right there in Commerce City because the plot requires it no villains will drive her out!)
The rest of the book is agreeably muddle-headedly Silver-Agean like that: Celia starts dating a young police detective, Mark Paulson, whose father is the city’s Mayor, with the usual obvious parallels between their parents. Celia’s ur-kidnapping was by the Olympiad’s (her parents’ superteam) greatest foe, the Destructor, as a young teen, and she ran away to join the Destructor’s gang not long afterward, in a fit of teenage pique at sixteen. (And this is endlessly brought back up throughout the novel, as though this was a superhero world in which no one had ever made a heel or face turn even once — let alone dozens of times a year, as in the modern era.) Celia is given primary responsibility to build a forensic accounting case against the Destructor (even though he’s old, possibly senile, and has been locked up in not-Arkham for a while now) as part of a major criminal case against him, for no obvious or specific crimes, and even though her multiple conflicts of interest would make any opposing counsel salivate at the thought. The whole plot, in fact, is entirely second-hand: it’s all standard superhero furniture that seems to be in this novel because it belongs somewhere in a superhero story, and not because Vaughn had specific reasons for wanting any of it.
Vaughn keeps it all going with her narrative voice, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you spend any time thinking about it. But, remember: in the Silver Age, stories aren’t supposed to make sense. Celia has more than the recommended level of angst, and is batted around by events — she’s supposedly driven and responsible, but her accountancy work isn’t dramatic, so Vaughn just mentions it now and then, and it really doesn’t add up to much.
Celia bounces off the supers of her hometown — her parents, Captain Olympus and Spark; Arthur Mentis, the telepath who was a late addition to their team; Annalise, aka Typhoon, a water-powered hero her age — as she slowly learns about the requisite sinister plot. And, of course, she gets kidnapped in the furtherance of that plot, but it all turns out all right in the end — city saved, true love found, the whole nine yards.
After the Golden Age is a pleasant if slightly musty-feeling superhero story; it’s based on several-decade-old tropes and doesn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to what superhero stories look like these days. (Of course, superhero stories have looked horrible for much of the last two decades, so not looking like that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) Vaughn makes it entirely an enjoyable read, but this isn’t a book to think too deeply about motivation or realism as you’re running through the pages.
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| “The Obsolete Man” |
New Pulp creators Martin Powell, Mark Maddox, Anthony Taylor, and Diana Leto join Bobby Nash and the Earth Station One podcast crew for a look at The Twilight Zone.
On the final episode of our Countdown to Halloween, the ESO crew travels to another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. Mike Faber, Mike Gordon, and Bobby Nash, along with special guests Anthony Taylor, Martin Powell, Diana Leto, and the award-winning Mark Maddox journey to a wondrous land whose boundaries are only that of imagination. Our next stop: The Twilight Zone! Plus, artist Bret Herholz spends some time in The Geek Seat! All this and the usual Rants, Raves, Khan Report, and Shout Outs!
Join us for yet another episode of The Earth Station One Podcast we like to call: The Signpost Up Ahead Says You Are Now Entering.. The ESO Zone at www.esopodcast.com
Direct link: http://erthstationone.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/earth-station-one-episode-135/
If you want to see how they did these, take a look:
Sculpting Two-Face
http://www.dccomics.com/videos/sculpting-two-face
Sculpting The Joker
http://www.dccomics.com/videos/sculpting-the-joker
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
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The Law Is A Ass #460: Those “For Life” Sentences Are Nonsense
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