Art: Will Meugniot

Artist Will Meugniot shared his step-by-step process for creating the cover for Airship 27‘s upcoming All-Star Pulp Comics #2 featuring Derrick Ferguson’s Dillon and Helene from Ki-Gor. You can see it all here.

Keep watching all pulp for more on All-Star Pulp Comics #2.

All Pulp has learned that a new CALL OF CTHULHU adventure game, called THE DARKNESS WITHIN is currently in production in Spain. A sneak peek of the art has been released. Keep watching this space for more details as they become available.

H.E.R.O.

Kevin Rau visits The Book Cave to introduce his series H.E.R.O. Art Sippo, Bruce Rosenberger, and Ric Croxton discover quite a bit about the series and where it is headed. Be sure and listen for the special on the first book and the upcoming new book that Kevin is writing.

The H.E.R.O. button on the top right of www.kevinrau.com will bring up the list of main characters of the series, including the heroes and some of the villains.

You can listen to The Book Cave Episode 212: Kevin Rau H.E.R.O. here.

Okay, let’s agree that 2012 wasn’t a bad year. It wasn’t a good year, either. (Does that mean it wasn’t tired?) It just…wasn’t. It had no reality other than the one we slathered onto it, and either do minutes, seconds, hours – the whole temporal shebang. (All hands brace for Blather.)

Once upon a time…no, let’s just say once the ancestors who still live deep within us observed certain natural events and recurrences and used them to structure their lives and somewhere in the ancestral murk they gave the intervals between these events names and when a lot of intervals had passed and the universe committed us, we homo sapiens acted as though the names were real and – heck, we probably believe that they are. We place labels on the unknowable and believe the labels are the reality.

Anyone seen a unicorn lately?

There were obvious benefits to believing these illusions – this time stuff. For some of us, probably for most of us, these phantom seconds and hours and so forth help prevent our lives from being a tumble through chaos. If they weren’t useful, evolution would have dispensed with them before now. (Can you define now?)

Of course, not everything is part of an interval and maybe we should be glad. How boring would our lives be if they were ticked off by a metronome? If our happenings were utterly predictable? A little surprise occasionally brightens our…I was going to type “days,” but given the context, it might be better to use the word “existence” instead.

I’ve had some good happenings this past yea…ooops!…this past interval. Enjoyable books, movies, television. Enjoyable companions. A few laughs. New snow in the front yard and dazzling foliage in the fall…ooops again! Not “fall,” not another damn time word. (Maybe “state of existence after a warm interval”?) I’ve taken some interesting courses and finished writing a book and taught a comics writing class and traveled a bit and there is nothing much wrong with any of that. I should be grateful for all of it and I probably am.

But the interval had its negatives, too. My world is emptier without Jerry Robinson and Joe Kubert. Although it was kind of exciting too watch Hurricane Sandy shake the trees outside the window, the storm wasn’t really very friendly. And I could have done without the kinney stoones. It has been a dismal exercise in masochism to learn of the behavior of our politicians and to witness a presidential campaign that might have shamed Thomas Jefferson. Lies have been told and the telling of lies has gone unpunished and we wonder if it is now acceptable to lie. And if it is, what happens next?

That’s what we always want to know, isn’t it? What’s next? And this mystery, this next, is what none of our constructs can help us with. Not que sera sera, not “what will be will be” but rather, “what is, is.”

Have you defined now yet?

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

I was a little slow when it came to adopting television as a part of my lifestyle. I only cared about cartoons as a small child, and no wonder: teevee was mostly local and cheaply produced and all those public domain Fleischer and Warner Bros. cartoons were a delight. They still are. I didn’t get sucked into the mainstream until pre-adolescence.

When that happened, TV Guide was my bible. A digest-sized magazine that contained detailed descriptions of every local and network show to be aired in the following week, I, like my peers, pretty much planned our lives around the boob tube. The annual Fall Preview issue was a genuine event.

When it comes to broadcast entertainment today, TV Guide has become less than irrelevant – it’s useless. Cable has brought us so many channels if the magazine stuck to its original concept it would take a half hour to read the next 30 minutes of descriptions. The printed grid tells us nothing we can’t get from our cable grid. And the vaunted Fall Preview issue presumes the “new fall season” is unique. It is not. With the exponential growth of choice, “new seasons” come with each new season.

more important. I take the recommendations of my friends quite seriously – daughter Adriane is a constant source of advice, and I take heed at the recommendations of Martha Thomases and the other ComicMix crew (Martha makes one such nod this Friday; I’d link to it but it’s not Friday yet).

But if my jaded, tube-weary brainpan is capable of generating any excitement similar to that of the old new fall season, it happens right now, in January. Some of my favorites return this month: Justified, Community, Young Justice, Bill Maher. There are a number of promising-sounding shows such as Ripper Street, and before long we’ll have Louie, Hell On Wheels and Doctor Who back.

None of these (save Bill Maher) are what we used to think of as full-length series. We get maybe a dozen episodes of each annually. Even though each episode is played many times, teevee-watching isn’t quite the passive experience it once was.

All of this cable stuff already is being eclipsed by streaming media: Netflix and others have competitive original content, Apple has a box for sending stuff from a great many services (including, of course, its own) to the teevees in your house, and Intel is going to be rolling out an interesting new media box on a market-by-market basis starting soon. The larger cable companies have apps that allow you to pick up their service at home on your smartphones and tablets, and content suppliers such as HBO and the various networks allow you to steam their material to these same devices.

We’re probably just a heartbeat away from fulfilling the prediction made back in 1967 in the brilliant social satire, The President’s Analyst. Pretty soon we’ll just have a chip installed in our heads, and the fees will be debited to our bank accounts.

We don’t need drugs, alcohol or virtual reality. We have television.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

Knight watchman: Graveyard Shift (c) 2012 & TM by Big Bang Comics. Published by Pulp 2.0 Press.

New Pulp Publisher, Pulp 2.0 Press has announced and shared the cover to the upcoming 2013 release of the Knight Watchman: Graveyard Shift collecting the 4-issue 1998 mini-series originally published by Big Bang Comics. Pulp 2.0 Press’ resident Mad Pulp Bastard and publisher, Bill Cunningham calls Graveyard Shift “A love letter to the 90’s and a major reinvention of The Knight Watchman.

About Graveyard Shift:
In the wake of a tragedy, a masked hero forced out of retirement to save the city from itself. When a dead body turns up and all the evidence points to the Knight Watchman, Midway City’s former good guy becomes its most wanted criminal unless he can survive long enough to clear his name.

Knight Watchman: Graveyard Shift is by Chris Ecker, Gary Carlson, and Ben Torres and retails for $8.99 plus shipping and handling.

Coming soon from Pulp 2.0 Press.