My very good friend, William J. Norris, is an excellent actor, a wonderful director, an inspiring playwright (I wrote my first play because I really admired a play that he wrote and that led, in turn, to my writing career), and one helluva teacher. I should know. I’ve stolen cribbed borrowed applied so many ideas and concepts from his teaching into my own attempts.

I met him one night for drinks after he taught an acting class and he told me that a student came up to him after a session and asked Bill if he thought the student could act. Bill said, “No.” William J. says that every time a student asks him that question, he gives the same answer. That seemed a little brutal to me in this nurturing, everyone-wins-an-award-for-showing-up era we live in. Bill said he was being kind; the life of an actor – of any artist, actually – is hard enough and if someone can be talked out of it, they should be.

He was, and is, right.

In my own theater days one of sidelines I pursued, on occasion, was that of a freelance actor coach, focused on helping someone with their auditions. It was surprising how many actors (and I include myself overall in this) let their sense of self-worth hinge on whether or not they got a call-back or were cast in the part. The whole artistic process is too narrow a reed on which to hang so weighty an existential question – do I have worth?

I encounter a variation of this at the lectures on writing.

I do. At the onset, I ask who is interested in writing. Some hands go up. I ask the hands, “Are you a writer?” You’d be surprised at how many people equivocate. “Well, I’m trying to be. . .I don’t know. . .Maybe. . .” All those answers are wrong.

If someone says that yes, they are a writer, I then ask, “Are you a good one?” Again, I often get equivocation – they want to be a good writer, they hope someday to be a good writer, and on and on. I slap the buzzer. Errnk! Again, wrong answer.

There’s a right answer but it’s also a trick answer: “Yes, I’m a writer. I’m a good writer. Not as good as I want/going to be yet.” That’s the right answer.

Here’s the trick part: you have to mean it. You have to believe it. If you don’t, why should anyone else? You have to have conviction.

I’ve sometimes compared writing – or any creative, artistic endeavor – to a circus. Sometimes you are on the high-wire, working without a net. You put one foot in front of the other and you don’t look down.

Sometimes it’s like being on the trapeze, and then the spotlight goes out. You let go of one trapeze and reach out into the darkness, believing that there is another trapeze bar and that there is another set of hands that will grab yours. You have to believe.

Sometimes it’s like being the clown car; you putter into the central ring and then all of these strange, absurd, maybe wonderful beings come out of you. If they don’t then you’re just a stupid little car in the spotlight. You have to trust in your inner clowns.

You don’t ask whether or not you can write. If you have to ask, then you can’t and won’t. It doesn’t matter if it’s the best thing anyone has ever written or even if it’s the best you have ever written. You put the words down and you decide later if you like them. You have to believe in your talent. You’ll figure out later if the writing is good, bad, or indifferent. For now, you’re writing and that’s what a writer does. A writer writes.

In the belief – not the hope, not the wish – in the belief that they can.

MONDAY MORNING: Mindy Newell

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

Forgive me folks. Today’s column is going to be a sappy, crappy, and sweeter than caramel drenched hot fudge balls dipped in rock candy. Consider this my spoiler alert: there’s absolutely no snark in today’s column. There’s only the happy tale of how a pair of acquaintances became so much more to me and to my Unshaven brethren.

The only thing truly standing in my way of bringing the noise and the funk to my half of every Samurnaut book were real life models. I make no bones about my abilities: I draw from life. A blank paper to me is less an invitation to showcase a spindly Spider-Man or healthy Hulk. I was trained to draw what I see, and sadly my mind is far too left brained to maintain an image well enough to reproduce from grey-matter to hand. But I digress.

When it came time to shoot The Samurnauts, I opted to reach out to those whose faces I wasn’t so acclimated to. That, and I honestly didn’t want my immediate family and friends traipsing around as superheroes. My call-to-action was met (largely) by members of a local(ish) comedy troupe I had opened for on a handful of occasions. Oh yeah. I should totally mention: for a hot minute I considered pursuing stand-up comedy. Don’t look it up on YouTube. Seriously. Don’t type “Marc Fishman Stand-Up.” Don’t say I didn’t warn you. OK? OK. Where was I?

Oh yes. Six members of “Big Dog Eat Child” were kind enough to lend their faces to The Samurnauts. With said Big Dogs I was granted a set of models built for emotion and staging. Putting a nerf gun into their capable hands and shouting “be heroic” showed their natural talent to contort and twist into brand new people. Amongst them, Erik Anderson and his wife Cherise (not of the troupe, but equally interested in helping out when our initial model had to cancel) stood out as being very much into becoming superheroes. After a fun afternoon of digital photography, Nerf wars, and prancing about… I made a last-minute offer to my new models. “If you are ever curious as to how this will turn out, feel free to look me up on Skype.”

It could not have been maybe a week or two later that my computer buzzed at me. Erik and Cherise, in the heart of the weekend (when most everyone is enjoying not having to make comic books), wanted to check in. And there they stayed glued to their screen watching me build a comic book from roughs to inks to colors to lettering. Over the course of the weeks that it took, they stayed up on Skype night after night watching the construction. Suddenly I was no longer making a comic alone in my basement… I was drawing for an audience. An audience willing to literally stay up with me until they couldn’t stay awake. As they would later tell me… I was better than HBO.

When the first issue of Samurnauts came hot off the press, Erik and Cherise were at the convention with bells on. Not happy enough to simply see a final copy of their issue, they were determined instead to see Unshaven Comics succeed. They grabbed a handful of business cards and took to the show floor to spread the word. A husband-wife guerrilla marketing team… doing the job we figured would not be gifted to us for many many years of convention-trenching. Oh how wrong we were.

Over the years (which I can’t even believe is how long we’ve been doing this…), Erik and Cherise have become less friends of Unshaven Comics, more family. Every convention, literally every convention we have attended since The Samurnauts was a thing, they have been in tow. We launched a Kickstarter to turn Erik into a cosplayer. And when it succeeded, soon our Blue Samurnaut was showing up in every costume-round up album across the mid-west. And this past weekend in Charlotte, North Carolina, both Erik and Cherise stood behind tables pitching our wares at Heroes Con in lieu of our own Kyle Gnepper (who was deservedly enjoying a vacation gifted to him by his non-comic-book-making day job). They did it without being asked. They did it because they love our book. They did it because they want to see us succeed.

There’s that gem of a lyric… “I get by with a little help from my friends…” And never before would I have found it to be so profound. Unshaven Comics is substantially lucky to have a plethora of amazing friends out there in the industry. We’d be remiss not to thank Mike Gold, Glenn Hauman, Adriane Nash, and the whole lot of ComicMix‘ers for the continuing success we’ve achieved in the five years we’ve seriously pursued our dream. Erik and Cherise engrained themselves into our studio and company without asking for anything more than the promise of continued hero-dom. A price we still feel guilty for today.

I know those of us who make comic books have many reasons to be cranky, snarky, angry, or bitter. But here I sit in awe of two people who Skype’d in with me once because they loved the idea of being heroes to the world… and ended up instead being mine.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

MONDAY: Mindy Newell

It’s a TV series about a woman who dies and is brought back into a totally new life, so how ironic that DROP DEAD DIVA was cancelled after four seasons, then revived for a fifth on Lifetime. We talk to the shell shocked cast and creator about where they are going from here. Plus GHOST RIDER back in court, Roger Corman decides to share and SONS OF ANARCHY gets a comic,

Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio  – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other  mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

New Pulp Authors Kane Gilmour and Doc Vaughn visit the Book Cave to introduce the listeners to their fantastic novel and web comic, Warbirds of Mars.

Listen to The Book Cave Episode 234: Warbirds of Mars now at http://thebookcave.libsyn.com/the-book-cave-episode-234-warbirds-of-mars

In my entire life, there were two times I didn’t hate it.

The first time, in the early 1970s, I was walking out of Central Park with my then-boyfriend. I was wearing a green halter-dress, as was the fashion of the times. There was a group of construction workers having lunch near the park entrance, and when I rounded the corner, one of them, seeing me, fell to his knees.

About a decade later, my husband and I were going to a Halloween party with a movie theme in the Village. He was some version of the Phantom of the Opera, and I was Marilyn Monroe. I had a white luminous plastic halter dress, white shoes (leftover from my wedding – see, you can use them again!) and a blonde wig. As we crossed Houston Street, a man got out of his car and proposed.

Being hassled on the street is part of being a woman. In these two instances, I thought there was a certain amount of spontaneity, some wit. But I still didn’t like it. I didn’t like feeling judged every time I ventured out of my apartment. It didn’t matter what I wore. I could be in sweats, in running clothes, in a down coat, in a suit for work or wearing my baby in a Snugli, and still men would feel entitled to tell me what they wanted to do to me.

“You’ll miss it when they stop,” people said to me. No, I didn’t.

Men don’t do that because they are overcome by love or lust at the sight of a woman. They do it to put us in our place, to let us know that the sidewalks belong to them, not us, and we are allowed to walk about because it amuses them to permit it.

Which brings me to comics.

It was my pleasure to be at Heroes Con over the weekend. A fabulous show, full of talented young people making comics, sharing comics, and selling comics. At least half the floor space is dedicated to Artists’ Alley, my favorite part of any show, and the presence of the Savannah College of Art and Design means there is a lot of talent on display.

I noticed that a large percentage of the artists (Half? I’m not sure) were women, certainly more than I ever saw when I first started to go to shows in the 1990s. Coincidentally or not, there is way less art devoted to T & A on display.

Utopia, right? We’re here, we have ovaries, get used to it.

And then …

At breakfast on Sunday morning, I was sitting next to a lovely group from Orlando. One of the two women took me about a dinner she had been to the night before. She had to get up and leave in the middle because a colleague had made a series of crude remarks to her.

“I’m married,” she said. “He knows I’m married.”

Of course, even if she wasn’t married, he had no right to continue once she made her displeasure known to him. As humans, we occasionally misread cues and make the unwelcome pass. As humans, we can forgive one time. The fact that this guy continued indicates that he’s either really, really clueless, or, more likely, he was telling her that she was there solely for his amusement.

“I could write about this guy,” I said. “Tell me his name.”

“No, I can’t do that,” she replied. “I see him at all the shows.”

There has been a lot of discussion about gender issues in comics lately, by me and by my esteemed colleague, Mindy Newell. And it’s not just here, but at other sites as well.

And it’s not just comics. Female gaming fans are complaining more, noticing that the sexism they see around them is supported by the very corporations trying to sell them games, as if they can’t be demeaned anytime they want, and for free.

If you aren’t a woman, maybe you think this is a tempest in a teapot. Maybe you think, as a commenter on one of the links above, that the battle for Equal Rights is over, and that women are just looking for things to complain about so we can continue to be victims (because being a victim is so much fun). If you think that, you’d be wrong.

You can re-write this article and substitute “queer” or “African-American” or “Hispanic” or “Asian” for “female.” It’s all the same problem. You can try to change it because it’s the right thing to do, or you can try to change it because more kinds of comics mean better kinds of comics, which we all want.

But, please, for the love of all that is fun in life, let’s change it.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

Cover Art: Mike Manley

Art: Mike Manley

New Pulp Publisher, Airship 27 Productions shared artist Mike Manley’s newly completed cover painting for the upcoming Robin Hood novel by I.A. Watson. This new Robin Hood novel is the third in the trilogy series. Volumes 1 and 2 are still available from Airship 27 Productions.

Look for more news on the upcoming Robin Hood book 3 as soon as they are available.

Stay tuned pulp fans.

Van Allen Plexico

Author Lisa M. Collins interviewed noted New Pulp Author and White Rocket Books publisher, Van Allen Plexico.

Plexico is also the host of The White Rocket Podcast, which you can listen to here.

You can read the full author interview here.