New Year’s Resolutions aren’t for me. When I was a kid, my parents would sit my sister and me down with paper and have us write some. I suppose it helped their hangovers. Since I had to do it, I hated it.

For most of the last decade, my only resolution has been to drink more water. If that.

Still, there is a new year ahead, and that means twelve months of possibilities. It would be foolish not to have a plan to take advantage of them. So here, for better or worse, is what I want to do. We’ll see if I have the resolve to follow through.

• Try new things. When I go to the comic book store on Wednesday morning (hi, gang!), it’s easy to just pick up my usual. But just as that’s a boring way to go to a restaurant when there are so many other choices, it’s no way to approach the rack. Last year, for one example, I took great joy in Resident Alien. If you didn’t see it, I highly recommend the trade. As for me, I’m going to look for more than a DC bullet in the corner.

• Don’t support what I don’t like. As I said above, I have a tendency to just look for the DC bullet. And while I’ve expanded my repertoire over the decades I’ve read comics, I tend to add titles more than subtract them. Why do I do this? Am I afraid I’ll miss something? The Internet means I can always catch up. In the meantime, I’ll save myself time, money, and indicate my displeasure to publishers.

• Proselytize. When something is good, I’ll say so, especially if that thing isn’t getting enough attention. For example, American Horror Story: Asylum  is the best television show I never hear anybody talking about. It has everything you could want in an entertainment – Nazi doctors, serial killers, demon-possessed nuns, crusading lesbian reporters, aliens from outer space – and it’s from the guys who bring you Glee, so you know everybody looks good.

• Shut up, occasionally. It’s easy for us Baby Boomers to talk incessantly about how much better we had it, back when rent was cheap, there was no HIV, and there were no rating systems. We had great movies, great comics and music that still moves us. But most of us forgot our ideals, and sold out our legacy. Patti Smith is doing Levi ads. We are in no position to tell younger people what to do.

It’s my fondest hope that I can stick to these, at least through Groundhog Day. And to keep my water bottle handy.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

The White Rocket Podcast has released episode 10: The Movies of 2012, Part 2! Bobby Politte and Van Allen Plexico pick up where they left off last time, starting with ARGO and ending with an in-depth look at THE HOBBIT. Find it on iTunes or at http://whiterocket.podbean.com.

Episode 10 of The White Rocket Podcast is now available on Podbean, iTunes, via the Podcast app on iPhone/iPad, or you can use the mini-player at the White Rocket site.

Listen to Part 1 of this conversation here.

The White Rocket Podcast is part of the Earth Station One Network.

Go Hero and Executive Replicas has released a photo of the first ever GOLDEN AGE Doc Savage 1:6 Scale figure. This is a work in progress and the final product is subject to change, but we wanted to share with all of all Pulp’s Doc Savage fans.

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