This week Host Tommy Hancock welcomes Publisher and Author Milton Davis, the man behind MVMedia. Leading the charge for Sword and Soul as well as Steamfunk, Davis is the vanguard for African American Genre and Pulp Fiction. Listen in as he talks about how he became a writer, why MVMedia exists, the myriad worlds that he and others have woven, future plans, and gives his own insights into the state of Black Speculative Fiction! Hang on to your hats as Milton Davis Gets PULPED!
The Shadow Fan returns for his 45th episode! This week Barry Reese takes a look at the three villains to bear the name The Light before jumping into reviews of Death’s Bright Finger (May 15, 1942) and The Shadow # 16 (Dynamite Comics). There’s also talk about Dynamite’s November offerings and their newest series — Noir, which will feature the return of The Black Sparrow.
If you love pulp’s greatest crimefighter, then this is the podcast for you!
On his blog, New Pulp Author Barry Reese announced that volume 5 of the popular Lazarus Gray series will feature a guest-appearance by one of New Pulp’s most popular heroes: Ron Fortier’s Brother Bones!
The Undead Avenger will be face off against Assistance Unlimited in a story that takes Reese’s heroes into the gloomy environs of Cape Noire. Said Reese of using Brother Bones, “I appreciate Ron’s willingness to share the character with me and I’m going to do my best to do it right. Ron’s a good friend and a major figure in the New Pulp movement, which makes it all the more important for me to not screw it up! Since Ron did such a bang-up job writing The Rook in Tales of The Rook, I want to at least make him smile as much he did me.”
Art: Rob Davis
Brother Bones starred in his own collection of stories and recently appeared in Red Bud Studio’s comic book, “Bullets of Jade” and issues of Pro Se Presents. A Brother Bones novel has also been teased.
In response to the team up, Ron Fortier said, “I’m really excited about our two characters meeting on the pulp stage and I personally can’t wait to see what happens when they do.”
Keep watching this space for more news as it develops.
Airship 27 Productions is delighted to announce the release of its latest pulp title, THE BAGMAN vs THE WORLD’S FAIR by B.C. Bell.
It is the summer of 1933 and the Windy City is hosting the fabulous World’s Fair. The famous Navy Pier along the shores of Lake Michigan is invaded by thousands of tourists from around the nation and the world; all there to marvel at the newest scientific advancements on display.
But within this glittering pleasure park of wonder lurks a devilish fiend set upon causing mass destruction and ruining the Fair; a scientist turned mad employing a bizarre sonic cannon to commit murder and chaos amongst the innocent throngs. Now it will be up to the unlikeliest hero of them all, the odd, notorious Bagman, to save the day.
Writer B.C. Bell sends his one time petty crook, Frank “Mac” McCullough back into action in this, the Bagman’s first full length adventure. Along with his loyal buddy, the ace mechanic, Crankshaft, Chicago’s most unusual mystery man must find the lunatic inventor and put an end to his heinous attacks before more people will die.
“The first time I read a Chris Bell Bagman story, I actually chuckled aloud,” says Airship 27 Productions Managing Editor Ron Fortier. “Bell’s ability to combine both fast paced, pure pulp action with slapstick humor is sheer genius. The Bagman is one of the most original of the new pulp heroes we have today. His fans will not be disappointed with this new, longer adventure.”
The book features nine interiors illustrations by Andy Fish and sports a truly colorful painting by Laura Givens with book designs by Rob Davis. As an added bonus, the story also features a very special cameo by Canadian writer Calvin Daniels’ own new pulp hero, the Black Wolf.
So slap another clip in your .45, straighten your tie and put that bag over your head, pulp fans; here comes the Bagman, delivering justice in his own peculiar way.
AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTIONS – Pulp Fiction for a New Generation!
Our pal Timothy Truman, perhaps best known for his work on such comics features as GrimJack, Conan, Hawkworld, Jonah Hex, Hawken, and Scout, has teamed up with writer Ian Rankin to present a 44 page comics story inspired by the work of rock-and-blues musician Rory Gallagher. From the press release:
“On October 29, 2013, Eagle Rock Entertainment will release Kickback City, a unique immersive album inspired by the crime noir passion and music of Rory Gallagher (MSRP $29.98). Featuring a specially compiled album of Rory Gallagher’s best crime novel-influenced music; the stunning package also includes an exclusive new novella by Ian Rankin, fully illustrated by graphic artist Timothy Truman. This unique immersive album also includes a special narration of the story by actor Aidan Quinn.
“Inspired by Rory Gallagher’s passion for crime novels, Kickback City is a creative collaboration combining the words of Ian Rankin, the illustrations of Timothy Truman and of course the music of Rory Gallagher. The result is a brand new kind of concept album – a must have for fans of Rory Gallagher, Ian Rankin, graphic novels and newcomers alike.”
In addition to being an accomplished writer and artist, Truman is also a journeyman guitar player and has jammed with musicians Carlos Santana, Bill Kirschen and members of the Grateful Dead. Timothy also provides the illustrations for a great many Grateful Dead album covers and posters.
“I was turned on to Rory’s work in 1973 when I was a junior in high school in West Virginia,” Truman noted. “One Friday night, I turned on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and that’s when I first saw Rory. He immediately blew me away. I thought he was the greatest guitarist and performer I’d ever seen and I’ve been a devoted follower of his music ever since.”
Music recorded by both Gallagher and Truman are frequently featured on Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind (I wonder who hosts that show), on ComicMix affiliate The Point Radio . For more information on Rory Gallagher, please visitwww.rorygallagher.com.
Please believe me, as I conclude last week’swell-reasoned and temperate dissertation on why comics fans should care – maybe – about the future of the US Postal Service, when I say I’m trying hard to wrap up this little opus before the USPS goes out of business.
But I’m not working as fast nor concentrating as well as I’d like because I’ve just been distracted by another “gotcha” courtesy of my BMK – Bad Mail Karma. It illustrates one of the more interesting by-products of the USPS’s ongoing effort to modernize, simplify and streamline its products and serviceseven as Congress calls for a postal austerity program:
When a customer confused by the ever-changing policies (that would be moi) makes a minor mistake, the USPS’s systems will helpfully turn it into an exhausting, nerve-wracking Major Hassle by preventing it from being corrected.
In my recent move back to Southern California, I managed to outsmart myself by sending ahead of me a USPS Priority Mail box of important items that I’d need before the moving van arrived with my everyday stuff. It has yet to arrive, some eight weeks later. It seems I used Priority Mail packaging that was not a flat rate box, but to which I incorrectly affixed flat rate postage generated online. OK, my bad.
That does not explain, however, why it took the P.O. four weeks to determine that that was the problem; why its online tracking system kept giving me information that contradicted the tracking data in the main USPS computer; nor why the package has now crossed the country four times, having been shipped back and forth between my old address and the new, each time being flagged in the system as undeliverable” or sent to “no such address.”
The helpful people I’ve dealt with at my local P.O. – six of them now, because the same people don’t seem to work there for more than five days in a row – can’t seem to figure it out, either. One “Letter Carrier Supervisor” told me, “I’ve been working here 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.” Of course, that may be because she apparently takes 147 coffee breaks a day.
This might also explain why she can’t get her direct reports to do what the three other supervisors have told me they will: When the package ricochets back here to Pasadena, they’ll call me so I can come pay the extra postage and pick it up. When last heard from, the package was at some “claims resolution” facility in Atlanta, but was supposed to be on its way back here. That was two weeks ago.
Now, imagine that this box had been, say, a shipment of comics from a private eBay seller for which you were waiting breathlessly. (Yes, small, private sellers often make honest mistakes. I hasten to add, though, that as someone who sells on eBay, I’ve been lucky – so far – not to make this kind of mistake with a customer’s package. And you can be sure I’m doubly careful now.)
This is a microcosmic example of the kind of thing comics fans will probably be saying good-bye to soon, mournfully or otherwise, having been left to the tender mercies of those even bigger screw-ups, UPS and DHL. The macrocosmic version is what I described last week: A stamp-related custom comic project that was extraordinarily successful for DC Comics (the aggregate print run for the nine CTC books I discussed added up to over 10 million) turned out to be a dismal failure for the USPS. This, only because the agency couldn’t secure the content approval from its licensors – the owners of several of the stamp subjects’ IT – in time to get the books out, to serve as collectors’ albums for the CTC series, at the same time as the stamps themselves.
And it’s too bad, really, this suicidal ineptitude, since comics fans once had a friend in the postal service. It was tangentially responsible for the creation of letters columns which, in the earliest days of comics fanzines and well before web sites and comment forums, became the principal means by which comics fans exchanged opinions about talent and continuity developments and, from the addresses printed, gained the means to interact and organize. These “LOC” pages came about because postal regulations required comics to have at least a page of text to qualify for their mailing rate. When the previous practice of hiring writers to create original prose fillers became prohibitively expensive, the “lettercols” were born.
Soon, those who self-identified as serious fans and collectors became the only readers who were so hell-bent on getting their monthly “fix” that they’d be willing to subscribe. But they were dissuaded from doing so because they didn’t want their mint-condition comics given a permanent vertical crease by being folded lengthwise to fit into a narrow wrapper, which was the only cost-effective way to send comics through the mail. So you can thank USPS, then, for killing this in favor of what took another decade to develop, with the growth of specialty retail shops: the pull-and-hold service.
Today, the Postal Service searches for new services it can providehttp://www.informationweek.com/government/security/postal-service-pilots-next-gen-authentic/240145559, to replace the ones it has screwed up so badly that they’ve become obsolete. One of its ideas is to get itself into the “identity management business.” The fact that the average citizen can’t figure out what, in fact, “identity management” is should in no way deter the USPS from this worthy goal. It might keep them occupied so that other companies will have to deliver all the packages, and our paychecks will all be issued by Direct Deposit and have no trouble finding their way into our bank accounts.
Of course, thereafter we’ll be unable to access our funds, because our identity will have “managed” to change – to that of someone we’ve never heard of in a zip code that hasn’t been invented yet. (Remind me not to tell you about how my previous address in Pennsylvania, a rural route which was given a normal house-number in “The Monroe County Readdressing Project” … with the result that my online change-of-address form couldn’t be processed properly because the old address wasn’t in the USPS database.)
Meanwhile, I’ve decided to stop oiling my old spinner-rack and instead donate it to a nursing home. I’m going to shop for comics via ComiXology exclusively, and work on figuring out how to get my new tech for promoting pacifism and conservation of labor, to make plastic staples. Once everyone on eBay is shipping via UPS, and we have the technology to totally recreate “floppies” in our own homes, the world’s Geeks – comic book division – won’t have anything to fear from the P.O. anymore, whatsoever.
(Reuters) Marvel Comics has agreed to settle a lawsuit by a comic book writer who sued the publisher over the copyright to the flaming-skulled character Ghost Rider.
The agreement, disclosed in a letter filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, if finalized would resolve five-years of litigation brought by former Marvel freelancer Gary Friedrich, who claimed he created the motorcycle-riding vigilante.
The Reuters story quoted above is pretty sketchy, but maybe we should celebrate anyway. We don’t know the terms of the deal and we may never know them; the only instance I’m aware of where a comics creator didn’t get creamed when he tried to get paid for the success of a character happened years ago when the late Steve Gerber tried to get a piece of the Howard the Duck action. Steve got some kind of settlement, but the terms of it were never made public, possibly because non-disclosure was a condition of the agreement. Whatever Steve’s reward was, it didn’t make him rich.
I first heard of the Friedrich suit from Gary himself, when we were guests at a small Missouri convention. He couldn’t say much at the time, just that the litigation was happening. I had immediate doubts. As noted above, comics guys had a habit of losing in courthouses. And Gary did lose the first round; a judge smiled upon the corporation. That seemed to end the matter.
Next, Marvel countersued to regain the money Gary had gotten selling Ghost Rider souvenirs at cons. You could argue that Marvel’s legal cadre had to do what they did in order to protect the company’s copyright/trademark – that’s their job, after all, and this is not the place to debate the merits of their livelihood. But I couldn’t help feeling that Gary, a man who lives modestly, was being bullied by a New York behemoth. The money involved could be important to Gary, and wouldn’t make a blip on the corporate accounts.
Then, today, the good news. Gary won an appeal and, barring further legal shenanigans, his retirement became a bit easier.
Anyone familiar with the history of our peculiar medium knows that its dominant narrative is that business guys get fat from the efforts of creative guys, who don’t get fat. (This is pretty well documented: see Larry Tye’s recent history of Superman, Gerry Jones’s Men of Tomorrow, and a lot of journalism in Roy Thomas’s magazine, Alter Ego.) But their are indications of change – glacially slow change, to be sure, but change nonetheless. When I cashed my first comic book check, we pale scriveners got a flat, one-time-only payment, for which we relinquished all rights. No royalties, no foreign income, nothing for use in other media, on t shirts, lunchboxes, promotions…None of that’s true anymore. We still don’t own copyrights on work done for the big publishers, but we are guaranteed back-end money. Some might claim that we should get more, but we get something, and that counts as progress. .
Meanwhile, in legal land, Mr. Friedrich won his appeal and, as far as I know, the efforts of the estates of Superman’s creators are still in litigation, and maybe they’ll prevail. It’ll be much too late to do Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster any good, but it might benefit their descendants.
Having spent the past four days in Baltimore attending my favorite comics convention – the one that’s actually about comics – I had the opportunity to spend some serious conversation time with a lot of my friends. However, because the show is a four-hour-plus drive from La Casa Del Oro, the best conversation is with my daughter and ComicMix cohort Adriane Nash. Whereas much of her work is behind the scenes, Adriane is the one who kills here each year on April Fool’s Day and at least one of her hoaxes has graduated to the level of Urban Myth.
As her dad, this makes me very proud. But (sing along, folks), I digress.
After returning from Baltimore Monday night, while cuing TiVo for Ricky Gervais’ appearance on David Letterman, we had one of those “let’s tie-up everything we’ve been talking about” conversations. This one was about how, given time, them younger generations eventually discover the really great stuff that was done before they were born. Adriane started with Jack Kirby, which, of course, made me feel even older than my present dotage. Younger readers have to discover Kirby, the most influential creator in the history of American comics. And they do… with a little help from their friends.
There’s nothing wrong with that. When I was about half Adriane’s age, I interviewed disc jockey Bob Hale (WLS, NBC, and the guy who emceed the Iowa concert the day the music died). Bob said he didn’t despair for those kids who like crappy rock’n’roll because they eventually grow up and discover the Good Stuff. That was an important lesson (thanks, Bob!), one I’ve remembered for the past, ummm, well, 45 years. And so it is with comic books.
As it stands today, no less than three major comics publishers are reprinting various aspects of the canonical EC Comics. Will Eisner’s The Spirit stays out there on the racks, as well it should. Carl Barks – same thing. Because Jack Kirby’s output was so astonishingly massive, it seems there’s a new reprint of his stuff about every six weeks.
This is true with the classic newspaper strips (I define The Spirit as a comic book that was published in newspapers), these days largely through the efforts of the gifted and knowledgeable Dean Mullaney and our friends at IDW. Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, Chester Gould, Al Capp… you can bust your back dragging out all those massive hardcover tomes of Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, and Li’l Abner, and that’s a small price to pay for the thrill of such discovery. And then you go over to Fantagraphics for Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Roy Crane’s Captain Easy, Charles Shultz’s Peanuts and Elzie Segar’s Popeye.
So… as you age you’ve got a responsibility to pass along the good stuff, to educate the young’uns to the great stuff that provided not only the foundation for our great medium, but the first half-dozen floors as well. I guarantee you that just about every talented artist and writer impressing the hell out of you today has devoured these folks and many others possessing equal gift: Alex Toth, Joe Kubert, Mort Meskin… the Internet doesn’t have enough bandwidth for me to list them all.
It is our responsibility, our duty to pass along the good self.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of The Dresden Files, so it was awesome to get to sit down and chat with author Jim Butcher about the series while at Dragon Con last weekend!
The Dresden Files, as you may know, is a series about the wizard Harry Dresden, and follows his adventures and investigations into supernatural disturbances in modern-day Chicago, which he recounts through a first person narrative. It’s also, oh-by-the-way, a ton of fun, and weaves a lot of lore, myth, and legend from all cultures into modern adventure stories with a wizard who’s more gunfighter than Gandalf (even if he fights with a staff much of the time). As the series has progressed, it’s also gotten more complex and nuanced, with some great plot twists and character developments along the way. I definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet read it.
The series is pretty far along and we’re currently waiting on book fifteen, so if you have no idea what I’m talking about, I recommend you check out the series or at least the Wikipedia page before reading this interview; unless you’re the kind of person who doesn’t mind possibly being confused or definitely encountering spoilers. Because, fair warning, there are spoilers ahead!
Have we all been sufficiently warned? Yes? Then onward to the interview!
I’m a big fan of The Dresden Files, and I’ve read all of the books, so let’s just begin by talking about the series. There are fourteen novels to date. Book fourteen is Cold Days, which sets up the upcoming book. In Cold Days, Harry is the Winter Knight, and Sarissa ends up as the new Summer Lady, and Molly, in an unexpected turn of events, is the new Winter Lady. And Harry’s lost all of his stuff – even his mini model of Chicago!
Yeah, it all burned up in his apartment.
So he’s got no place to go, he’s living on Demonreach, he’s upset about what’s happened with Molly, who he’s tried to protect; he and Murphy have this interesting dynamic changing from what they’ve had, and something deeper is going on…so that’s where we leave it. Tell me when we will be seeing book fifteen, and what we should expect from it?
Book fifteen is called Skin Game. It will be out either late this year or early next year, depending on how quickly the publisher wants to rush it through production. The basic premise of the book is that Harry Dresden is still stuck working for Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, and there are people she owes debts to…
In Skin Game, Harry’s been out on Spooky Island, on Demonreach, and has been staying there for about a year, because he’s got this thing in his head that’s going tick-tick-tick, and it’s going to kill him eventually. And Demonreach is able to keep it from completely crippling him. So he’s been staying there, and he thinks that his friends have kind of abandoned him, and he finds out that Mab has been intercepting all his communications and making sure they think he’s fine and needs to be left alone.
And then Mab shows up and says, “Okay, well – here’s the thing, is, I’ve got this job for you to do. I’ve got a debt to pay off, and you’re going to have to go do it. And if you don’t do it, well, you know, I can’t make you do anything, because that was kind of part of the deal, that I can’t compel you to do this; but if you don’t, then the thing in your head is going to kill you in the next three days. So I’ll let you make up your own mind.”
Hah, wow! Faeries always do that, in The Dresden Files; they follow the rules but trick you anyway.
Exactly. She’s playing by the rules, technically, which is the only way to do it, if you’re a faerie. So she’s informed him, “Well, you can either do this or not.” And Harry’s like, “Fine, I’ll do the job, whatever it is.” And he finds out that the job is, Mab is going to loan him out to Nicodemus Archleone, the head of the Denarians.
Ahh, and he’s shown up several times, and he’s really awful, to make an understatement.
Yes, he has, and yes – he’s one of the worst villains in the series. And he’s off to pull a heist. And he’s putting a crew together to pull a heist with, and he needs Harry to be on the crew. So Harry basically gets signed up with the Evil League of Evil, with all these different villains from around the world, some of whom have appeared before. So now he’s off to rob the treasure vault of Hades, Lord of the Underworld. So that’s the plotline. Harry’s got to be working with these people…and he immediately arranges to bring somebody along to watch his back while he’s there, because he doesn’t really feel like turning on these guys, and so he rounds up Murphy to come cover his back for him.
Oh, so Murphy’s going even deeper into the supernatural, right from the start of this story.
Yeah – but Harry’s point is, “I need somebody who can see things. I don’t need somebody who can fight supernatural things; I can do that. I need somebody who can notice things.” And Murphy’s the sharp one; so he grabs her.
Yeah, Harry is a little bit dim sometimes.
He can be.
You’ve written him that way.
But he turns to Mab at one point and he says, “You’ve got to understand, Nicodemus is going to betray me. He is gonna stab me in the back and try and kill me; that’s who he is.” And Mab says, “Of course he is.” She says, “I expect superior and more creative treachery from you. Oh, and by the way, make sure you do what I said you would do. You have to fulfill that first. But as soon as that’s fulfilled, do whatever you want.” And Harry’s like, “I can’t believe you’re going to have me do this.” And Mab’s like, “I would have loved a game like this when I was your age, come on!”
And Harry’s like, “I just want to take a nap, and a hot shower.”
Yeah, exactly. Really, that’s kind of where he’s at, yeah.
Okay, so now where does Molly fit into this book? Are we going to see her? Molly’s a favorite of mine, and obviously what happened to her in the last book was a big detour from what we thought was going on, and has a lot of impact.
Right; well Harry gets to find out that Molly hasn’t told her parents anything. She’s just carried on, and kept showing up to Sunday dinner and so on. So her parents don’t know about the whole Winter Lady thing, and they’ve got no idea anything’s wrong. So that’s a lot of fun.
So we get to see more of Michael and all of the family?
Yeah, we’ll get the Carpenters in it for some stage time there. But yeah, she’s been off doing Winter Lady stuff, and catching up on about 150 years of Maeve’s backlog; because not only was Maeve crazy, but she wasn’t doing the job; and that was really the problem as far as Mab was concerned. Crazy, psychotic, murdering people? Okay, that’s fine – but is she getting the work done? So Molly’s been doing that; and Molly’s the only one who can take care of the thing in Harry’s head – Demonreach told him that Molly could help (in Cold Days). Which is why Mab has made sure that Harry couldn’t communicate with Molly. So she’ll have to show up to help him with that.
So that’s where we’re going in the next book – tell me, what’s the plan for the rest of the series?
We’re going to have twenty-ish of the books like we’ve had so far; these casebooks that happen as one-by-one stories; and then I’m going to cap the whole thing off with a big ol’ apocalyptic trilogy at the end.
So there’ll be a great trilogy at the end.
Well, big. I don’t know if it will be great!
Well, I think the books have kept getting better as you’ve gone along; and I always admire someone who can write a big series and keep it all straight.
I have help with that!
That’s to be expected! So we’ve got Harry and Murphy off on this adventure; Mab is kind of pulling some strings; Molly is dealing with her family, and possibly going to come in. What about the Outsiders, and the Nemesis and all that?
We’ll get back to them in the future. At the moment they’re not as huge an issue. Harry needs to survive the next three days, and then he can start dealing with some of the other things. At the moment he’s got enough on his plate with Nicodemus being in his face.
It’s kind of like on The X-Files, where we got some monster of the week episodes, and then some about the overarching conspiracy. It’s kind of nice to break it up like that.
Yeah, you can’t do huge-huge-huge all the time, because that’s no fun.
Okay, so let’s talk about Harry’s love life for a minute…
Oh, gosh. Yeah. Harry’s love life was something that I never really planned when I was writing out the whole series.
Well, going back to the very beginning; there was a whole lot of…almost uncomfortable…male gaze in the first few books. As a female reader, I love the books, I love the adventure, I would keep reading for the adventure; but the scenes where we stopped and spent five minutes talking in extreme detail about the women Harry meets, and learning that every one of them is model-beautiful… I was a little put off by that at first; and I think one of the reasons I wasn’t entirely put off is because when Murphy is introduced she’s treated differently, which was refreshing, and also made me think maybe she was going to stick around for awhile. You’ve gone away from that some…
Well, to a degree.
So has your perspective on that changed?
Well, I think the main thing is, I’m not a 25-year-old guy anymore. Which was how old I was when I wrote Storm Front. I don’t want to sound weird or anything, but you haven’t had the experience of being a guy in his twenties, where basically you don’t really know what’s going on, from the time you’re fourteen or fifteen until about the time you hit twenty-five, and then you sort of emerge from the testosterone haze, and it’s like, “Maybe there’s something in life other than boobs.” And that’s the – car insurance rates go down when you’re twenty-five for a reason. You know, I don’t think these two things are unrelated. But yeah, I mean it’s just one of those things that has been a change of perspective on my part. I just have to write the story that I write, and I don’t worry too much about basically anything except writing the story.
Well that’s fair. In the beginning, when you had Susan and some of the other female characters, and Murphy – did you realize that you were approaching Murphy differently, and introducing her without as much of the sexual component? Was that a purposeful thing?
Nope; I was just doing what I was doing.
Okay; so let’s jump over to the current relationships; now that we’ve talked about Susan and the other earlier women…
Yes, and poor Susan; she died horribly. Although there were so many people who were like, “Oh, I just can’t stand Susan.”
Well, maybe because of the way she was introduced – but several people have died horribly in your books!
True, and perfectly wonderful people have died horribly, too, so, you know, that…kind of happens.
True! So now…we’ve got Harry, and we’ve got Murphy, and we’ve got Molly…and we’ve got some relationship issues. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Right – Harry and Murphy have at least kind of admitted that there might be something there; which is way better than Harry would ever consider doing with Molly. Because he still remembers Molly when she was little, so, even though their age difference is not entirely huge, it’s huge enough that he’s weirded, anyway. She is no longer weirded by the concept at all, but he is. So Harry and Murphy have finally admitted there might be something there; but both of them are just very avoidant, and so they’ve had trouble actually expressing that, except in moments of adrenaline.
Yes. Now with Molly being the Winter Lady, and Harry being the Winter Knight – I root for Harry and Murphy because it just seems so right; you’ve written it in such a way that it makes sense – but I did wonder towards the end of the last book, now that they’re both in the Winter Court, and there’s this magical connection beyond the connections they already have; how is that going to play out?
Yeah, awkwardly. It will continue to be awkward; because it’s Harry Dresden, how could his life not be awkward?
True! Now, there’s a character that I absolutely adore, and I don’t know if we’re going to see again – Ivy. Will we be seeing her?
She won’t be in this book; she’s not gone from the series permanently, but not in this one.
Great; and anything else you want to share with the fans?
Well…here comes the next one! And I’ve still got plenty more after that. The stories are already planned out.
Well I look forward to reading them, and thank you so much.
• • • • •
Thank you, Jim, for your time and a delightful interview; and Dragon Con, for setting that up for us! Hope you all enjoyed it, ComicMixers!
The popular series, HAVEN, is back on SyFy blasting into a fourth season that picks up where they left off just a few months back. Actor Lucas Bryant talks about thew changes in his role and what we can expect for the series in this run. Plus SAGA wins big in Baltimore and is Katee being coy? Will she be Captain Marvel? Don’t forget – we are back with twice-a-week-updates – right here on ComicMix!
