I guess the angels were scratching their heads real hard, and so when I awoke yesterday there was three feet of white stuff all over everything. It’s still there, mostly, except for the streets, where our tax dollars have been at work, and the driveway where a nice man who didn’t ask for a king’s ransom shoveled it off.

I like it when the angels scratch their heads, except if I have to go someplace or the electricity kerfutzes, which it did during the recent hurricane – angels blowing out birthday candles? – and then the angelic behavior is plenty vexing and old folks have to seek shelter in hotels and if you think that’s easy to find, you’ve never sought shelter after a big wind!

I guess this is why some folks who have reached or exceeded their three score and ten choose to reside in places like Florida. You know – beaches on both sides of the state and plenty of sunshine headin’ their way, zippety-doo-dah.

Florida has the reputation of being paved with greyheads, but the last time I was there I saw more young than old. Maybe it helped that I was attending a comics convention. But I remember a movie in which the main characters were twenty-somethings who ended up in Florida. (Okay, one of them didn’t quite reach his destination due to dying en route.) I have to thank my man in another sunny locale, Ken Pisani, currently residing in Southern California with the lovely Amanda, for informing me that I have a small participation in the flick. Very, very, very small.

In the brief clip Ken sent me, Jon Voight is riding in a bus next to a little girl who’s reading a comic book – that I wrote. It’s one of my early Wonder Woman issues (though, come to think of it, arguably there were no later Wonder Womans by me because I didn’t last long on the title.) Well, golly!

I saw the movie, Midnight Cowboy, during an early run, probably the first and probably at a Times Square theater – one of the classy ones on Broadway, not one of the stick-floored grind houses on 42^nd Street. But I don’t remember the bit with the comic book and that’s curious because I was still close enough to my Catholic boyhood to be aware that the film was considered to be…you know, smutty. Near occasion-of-sinny. And I sure as hell(?) wasn’t used to seeing my work anywhere except on newsstands and in editorial offices. I would have reacted and having reacted, I would have remembered.

But I didn’t and I’ll worry about that as soon as I deal with global warming and the legal implications of drone warfare.

I’m forgetting something…

Oh, yeah. Later today, Marifran will be reading this blather off the computer and when she gets this far, I’ll be wishing her a happy birthday.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

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.

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

What, you thought we’d go with Bruce Campbell?

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