Author Geoffrey Thorne has released Better Angels, a Gray Harbor Novel as an ebook. Better Angels is currently available on mashwords in mulitple ebook formats and on Amazon in both ebook and paperback formats. iTunes and other retail locations are coming soon.

About Better Angels:
A fugitive comes home to settle old scores and gets caught in the schemes of some grifters out to rip off the local mob boss.

It was supposed to be so simple: just scam the local Russian mobster out of some money and drugs, then skip out of town before he knows he’s been fleeced. It looked good on paper. It sounded good when he talked it out but, as usual with Nicky, the minute he brought his dream grift into the real world things went straight to hell. His partner seems to have pulled a double cross, his girlfriend is totally useless, the Russians are coming for their property and all Nicky’s got to get himself out of this are his wits and his mouth. And that’s before Max showed up with his hard guy attitude and quick fists. Yeah, things are going to Hell, all right. Seems like Nicky forgot the first rule of survival on the mean streets of GRAY HARBOR: Always make sure the guy holding the gun is you.

Geoffrey Thorne is currently a writer-producer on the hit TV series, LEVERAGE as well as having written for LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT, BEN 10: ULTIMATE ALIEN and the upcoming BEN 10; OMNIVERSE. His work has been nominated for GLYPH and GENESIS awards and he was a multiple silver medalist in the STRANGE NEW WORLDS short story contests as well as a finalist in the prestigious WRITERS OF THE FUTURE AWARD. Thorne is the co-founder and writing partner of GENRE 19, a studio he formed with visual artist Todd Harris in 2008 and the founder and EIC of THE WINTERMAN PROJECT. Learn more about him at www.geoffreythorne.com.

I met Karen Berger in 1983.

Thirty years ago.

Thirty years is a long time. A lot can happen. And a funny thing happens as the years pass. You look back and you can see how you ended up where you are today. How the chalk drawings of your life have made a graphic novel starring you. It’s a story made up of page-turners and cliffhangers, of happy endings and endings that leave you nauseous with Vertigo.

Like so many others, I was, frankly, shocked when the news broke that Karen is leaving DC this March. (I believe my words were “Holy shit!”) Is this her decision? Is she being pushed out? I’ll leave that issue to others.

This column is, simply put, a love letter to Karen Berger.

Last week Mike Gold wrote, im-not-so-ho, a brilliant column about Karen and her lasting imprint on the comics field, in which he stated – I’m paraphrasing – that “Karen fostered and molded and taught her staff.” I can attest to that. Though I was never part of her staff per se, if it was not for Karen Berger and her nurturing of whatever talent I may possess as a writer…well, my life would have been very, very different, and I’m sure I would not be here at ComicMix now.

If you want to know the “ins-and-outs” of how Karen taught me the craft of writing comics and nurtured me and helped me expand my professional credits, look up my column dated August 8, 2011, How I Became A Comics Professional, Or, How The Fuck Did That Happen, Part Two. This is about how she helped me find myself.

In 1983 I was a single mom, and apart from the joy Alix gave me, I was a very, very unhappy and lost woman. I was lonely. I was, if not in darkness, in a fog as thick as pea soup. I could not put a finger on what was wrong, I only knew that something was lacking. There was an emptiness in my life. It was as if I was standing in the center of a compass, and I didn’t know in what direction I should walk.

Whatever possessed me to sit down that day and write a brief synopsis of what would become Jenesis, the story that got me into DC’s New Talent Showcase? Was it hope? Was it, as my therapist likes to say, a core of steel somewhere buried deep within me that enables me to always pick myself up no matter what, and to and continue to put one foot in front of the other? Was it the hand of God, or the Goddess, or Fate, or Karma, or whatever higher power is out there? Or was it pure chutzpah, born out of a need to do something to change my life? For me, and for Alix? (I tend to think that it was God giving me that hope and core of steel and the chutzpah, but that’s just me. You can decide for yourselves.)

But nobody, despite what they may boast, does it all alone.

The day I came home from my first meeting with Karen was the beginning of the end for me: the end of feeling chained down, the end of feeling mislaid and misplaced, the end of feeling alone. I had met a woman who saw something in me that I had lost the ability to see – my ability to dream. My ability to accomplish.

Karen was not only my editor. She became my friend. I was there as she and Richard fell in love, broke up, got back together, and got married in an absolutely beautiful wedding in brick townhouse in Greenwich Village. She was the first person that I ever told about my agoraphobia – we were sitting in a restaurant on Columbus Avenue.

“I’m having a panic attack,” I said.

“You are?”

“Yeah, I know it’s stupid, but I’m freaking out.”

“About what?”

“That something is going to happen to me and I’ll end up lying on the floor,” I answered.

“And what, do you think I would ignore you, that people would just walk over you getting to their tables?” she asked?

And we laughed.

And though the anxiety attacks continued – I still get them sometimes – I’ve never again let them hold me back.

Comics…and an editor and friend named Karen Berger helped me to learn to believe in myself again.

May the road always rise up to meet you, Karen.

And thank you.

From the bottom of my heart.

TUESDAY MORNING: Emily S. Whitten

TUESDAY AFTERNOON: Michael Davis

Art: Jamie Chase

Cover Art: Jamie Chase

New Pulp Author Martin Powell shared Jamie Chase’s rendition of Dian The Beautiful from their upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ At The Earth’s Core for Sequential Pulp Comics/ Dark Horse Comics.

“She was quite the most superior person I had ever met–with the most convincing way of letting you know she was superior.“
— Author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ description of Dian the Beautiful in AT THE EARTH’S CORE.

Cover Art: Frederick Blakeslee

Black Dog Books has announced that Dusty Ayres– Invasion of the Black Lightning by Robert Sidney Bowen is now available in paperback and ebook formats. Invasion of the Black Lightning contains three exciting novels of America’s Battle Ace!

PRESS RELEASE:

A steel fist pounded against the gates of Paris, battering to ruin the last stronghold of freedom on the continent. For three long years all Asia and Europe has been a seething inferno of war.

The great wave of destruction makes its sweep westward. Rising up from Central Asia, the Black Lightning invaders, under the command of the mysterious Fire-Eyes, seek to annihilate the civilized world.

Now the path across the Atlantic is open. The United States will be the next to fall unless its troops can rally behind Dusty Ayres, America’s Battle Ace, and stop—the Invasion of the Black Lightning!

For the first time, the initial three novel-length adventures of Dusty Ayres are brought together in one unparalleled volume. Packed with thrills and excitement, this is sure to be the “don’t miss” item of the season!

Included are:
• Black Lightning
• Crimson Doom
• Purple Tornado
With an introduction by Tom Roberts.
Cover art by Frederick Blakeslee.

Dusty Ayres– Invasion of the Black Lightning is now available in paperback and ebook formats.
E-Book / 266 pages / Price: $4.99 US
Trade paperback / 266 pages / Price: $24.95 US

“Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds” is a trademark
and is the property of Argosy Communications, Inc. Used with permission.

Art: Neil T. Foster

Art: Robert Brown

Airship 27 Productions has shared a sneak peek at an interior illustration from their upcoming Dan Fowler G-Man pulp anthology.

From the Airship 27 Facebook page:
Super artist Neil T.Foster is busy at work doing spot illustrations for our second DAN FOWLER G-MAN book due out early next year. Here’s a sneak peek at one of his illos.

Airship 27’s Dan Fowler G-Man Volume 1 is also available here and here.

Look for more news on this new project at All Pulp as it becomes available.

On the ballot here in Michigan in the last election, there were several proposed amendments to the state constitution. One was concerning the use of Emergency Financial Managers (EFMs). It’s no big news that Michigan is having a hard time of it financially and several municipalities and other local organizations such as school districts have been tottering on their own fiscal cliffs as a result of ineptitude, mismanagement and plain old corruption on the part of the sundry boards, councils, and mayors involved.

The draconian solution devised by the Michigan legislature, itself a meeting place of miscreants and ideologues who are currently ramming through a “right to work” bit of legislation without any public hearings or other forms of democracy, was a pair of Emergency Financial Manages bills. This allowed the governor to appoint a Financial Manager for an undisclosed amount of time who would take over the troubled entity’s finances. The more extreme of these allowed the EFM to break or change contracts without negotiation and many other dictatorial acts. This one was struck down by the Michigan Supreme Court as unconstitutional. The governor’s office responded by trying to reinsert the law as a state constitutional amendment, outside of the Court’s reach, and thus it was on the ballot last November.

It got voted down and I was one of the ones voting against it. I understood the reasoning behind the law and the proposed amendment. The reason that the various local entities were in the financial mess that they were in was an inability and/or unwillingness to come to grips, get past their own petty personal attempts to hold on to power and do what was necessary to solve the problem. At the same time it was so inherently undemocratic that I couldn’t support it. Good, bad, or indifferent, these local officials were voted in by the populations they supposedly served. I could understand the impetus and reasoning behind the EFM but I couldn’t accept installing what was essentially was a dictator however worthy the reason. It just went against the grain.

And what has all this to do with pop culture, about which I am supposed to be writing?

I and My Mary recently went to see Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s astounding film about the President and focusing on his attempts to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, abolishing slavery, through the House of Representatives. It’s going to win a lot of Oscars at the next Academy Awards and deservedly so. Daniel Day Lewis inhabits the part of Lincoln, making you think that this how the man must have been. He wears the sadness and melancholy of Lincoln the way that Lincoln often wore a shawl. It drapes over him.

The cast of the movie is stellar. Sally Fields plays Mary Todd Lincoln and is every bit the equal to Daniel Day Lewis. One scene features an emotionally intense fight between Lincoln and his wife and Mary Todd gives as good as she gets. If you think of Mrs. Lincoln only as Lincoln’s widow who winds up in an insane asylum, this will make you re-think that notion.

There is some very canny casting in the film, playing to our perceptions of the actor and infusing them into the part. Tommy Lee Jones as Representative Thaddeus Stevens, an ardent abolitionist who was a key to getting the 13^th Amendment passed, not only looks like photos we have of Stevens but Jones’ rat-a-tat way with an insult meshed perfectly with the character. These days we are accustomed to James Spader playing slightly sleazy and underhanded characters and his part in the film, W.N. Bilbo, who helps court or bribe representatives to vote for the Amendment, plays to that perception.

There are other fine performances and actors throughout the film – David Straitharn, Jospeh Gordon-Levitt, Hal Holbrook among many, many others. The script is by Tony Kushner (who wrote the award winning pair of plays, Angels in America} based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s superb biography of Lincoln and his cabinet, Team of Rivals. This script will be up for an Oscar as well and deserves to win it.

The film also had me asking questions of myself. Abraham Lincoln was arguably the greatest president this country has known. As I’ve learned about him, he has become and remained one the heroes to me of our country’s history. I wonder, however, if I had lived in his time, knowing only what people then knew, would I have been for or against him?

Lincoln, early in the Civil War, suspended the writ of habeas corpus, a central tenet of our government, by which an unlawfully detained prisoner can demand his or her release. When the Supreme Court of the time overruled his suspension, Lincoln ignored them. Civil law could be suspended in the areas of the South that the Union controlled and martial law, with military tribunals, were imposed. Newspaper and journalists could be censored and some were, inhibiting freedom of speech.

Given my unease with Michigan’s EFM law, how would I have responded back in Lincoln’s day to the suspension of habeas corpus? Yes, there were good reasons for him to act as he did but how much of that is plain in hindsight from where we are now and how much would that have been apparent then? Would the erosions of civil liberties, however worthy the apparent reason, grated on me? Could I, would I, have supported Lincoln back then?

Honestly, I don’t know. Those of us in the moment may not always be able to see things as clearly as the hindsight of history may show. In this time, in any time, perhaps the best we can do is try to do the best as we see it and hope that, as Lincoln said, we side with “the better angels of our nature.”

MONDAY: Mindy Newell