Robert E. Howard’s famous barbarian, Conan celebrates 80 years. Join the celebration at www.conan.com.
New Pulp Author Ed Erdelac wrote a nice blog on appreciating Conan at http://emerdelac.wordpress.com/2012/12/02/happy-80th-birthday-conan-the-cimmerian/
All Pulp wishes Conan a happy 80th Birthday. Here’s looking at the next 80.
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IDW Publishing, along with comic production house Hazmat Studios and film production company Blind Spot Pictures, have announced an Iron Sky movie tie-in graphic novel in March.
Drawn and colored by the team of Gerry Kissell and Amin Amat, the artists behind IDW’s best selling graphic novel Code Word: Geronimo, and Xbox’s comic game tie-in Alan Wake. The book will also feature original pin-up art by Miguel Angel Abad and Darren Douglas, and chronicles the battle against the return of history’s most notoriously evil villains, the Nazis, who unbeknownst to us, escaped to the moon following their defeat in World War II.
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“The graphic novel is a prequel to the hit sci-fi action film Iron Sky produced by Blind Spot Pictures, and focuses on how the Nazis ended up on the moon, and how Udo Kier’s character, Wolfgang Kortzfleisch, became Der Uberfuhrer,” Kissell said. “Part steampunk and part comedy, the graphic novel was written masterfully by Alan Wake scribe, Mikko Rautalahti. who has a wicked sense of humor.”
The book will be 104 pages, with 67 pages of comic art with an additional 33 pages of production art, behind the scenes bonus material, and other exclusive material written by the film’s director, Timo Vuorensola.
Learn more about Iron Sky: the movie at www.ironsky.net.
Learn more about IDW and their books at www.idwpublishing.com.
Artist Jeff Doten chats with The Book Cave crew of Art Sippo and Ric Croxton about his art and the Strange Worlds Anthology.
Listen to The Book Cave Episode 208: Jeff Doten now at http://thebookcave.libsyn.com/the-book-cave-episode-208-jeff-doten.
Using the new Doctor Who Limited Edition Gift Set, your noble author will make his way through as much of the modern series as he can before the Christmas episode, The Snowmen. Travelers are advised against the use of weapons, teleportation, and religion.
In this episode, it looks like it’ll be a fabulous evening’s apocalypse, but The Doctor and Rose find out that there’s a chance they may be in danger during…
The End of the World
by Russell T Davies
directed by Euros Lyn“Moisturize me, moisturize me!”
Rose wants to visit the future – The Doctor takes her to the year 5.5/apple/26, five billion years on, the day the Earth will be destroyed by the sudden expansion of the sun as it dies. Humanity has long since moved on throughout the galaxy, and the death of their homeworld is seen as more of a celebratory experience. Platform One, a massive force-shielded spacestation is the floating ballroom for a huge party to watch the planet get the finger, and that’s where Rose and The Doctor have landed. Enjoying the opportunity to hobnob with extraterrestrials, Rose begins to notice that some…THING is wrong on Platform One. The force fields are brought down, and Lady Cassandra stands revealed as behind a plot to put everyone in danger solely to collect on a massive compensation suit. As The Doctor says, five billion years later, it all comes down to money.
We’ve seen in the first episode how well the new Who crew can do a story set on Earth, so they chose to impress us quickly and go big with a quick trip into the future. A wide assortment of wonderful makeup, mechanical effects and CGI provide a solid and believable experience, with no “wobbly sets” as they playfully reference in the commentary and on confidential the occasional cheesiness of the original series. Davies keeps a good balance of the dramatic and the silly here. Billie Piper gets some great scenes as she comes to grips with the fact that she hopped into the proverbial car with a total stranger, and stands a severe chance of getting burned over it. Literally.
There’s quite a few first appearances in this episode. In addition to recurring characters like the Face of Boe and Cassandra O’Brien, it’s the first appearance of the Psychic Paper. Another brilliant little idea to explain how easily the Doctor can get into any situation so smoothly, it’s a tool that’s rapidly become as commonplace and popular as the Sonic Screwdriver. It’s also the first time a running concept was used clearly – when the TARDIS travels into the future, the Time Vortex is red, when they travel into the past, it’s blue. When Tennant and Smith take over the role, that color theme carries through to their costumes – check the colors of Ten’s outfits, and Eleven’s bowtie. And assuming you already know how the season ends, you might notice this is the first mention of “Bad Wolf” – two aliens are chatting, and one mentions that this is “The bad wolf scenario”.
Davies starts another tradition going here as well – spectacular characters who appear once alone yet appear fully formed. Jabe of the Forest of Cheem is the first person to sacrifice herself to help The Doctor, She’s also the first to reveal a bit more about the Great Time War. It was mentioned in the previous episode; the war was the reason the Nestene food planets were lost, and The Doctor admits he couldn’t stop it. But here we learn that the rest of the Time Lords are gone, and his world is destroyed. The details are yet to come, but it’s a major departure from the previous series. The Time Lords were always seen as unassailable, undefeatable. For them to fall shows that no one in the universe is infallible. And that carries through to The Doctor. In the new series, he makes mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes put people in danger. It gives the Companions a chance to save the day, and generally increases the sense of drama: The Doctor will not always have the answer.
Only the mines are not abandoned and we are soon treated to a fish (or should I say, fist?) out of water tale with O’Quinn and his partner searching for the lost gold while working for the current owners of the mine. It doesn’t take long for O’Quinn to fall in love with the mine boss’s daughter and it doesn’t take long for the trouble he left in San Francisco to catch up to him while he is left to battle for the hand of the woman he loves.
Fictional spies seem to come in two varieties, with numerous subsets: There are the glamorous and super-competent who bop around the globe, always traveling first class, driving lavishly sports cars, staying at palatial hotels, indulging in expensive cuisine and exotic liquor and comely members of the opposite sex and killing bad guys and saving civilization from slightly caricatured nut cases. (Bond – James Bond.)
If you can ignore the authoritarian subtext, mentioned in his space last week, and if you aren’t bothered by the veneration of conspicuous consumption, this almost-fantasy can be excellently entertaining, and often I have been excellently entertained by it.
This kind of secret agent is currently represented on television by Covert Affairs, a show in which the superspy is a woman incarnated by Piper Perabo. Her character isn’t quite as over-the-top as Bond, and thus far her opponents haven’t been any more caricatured than most televised antagonists, but she is one tough jet-setter who doesn’t stay in hostels when abroad and seems to have no qualms about her profession. She is part of a CIA unit that functions as a surrogate family, has a brotherly colleague with whom she has a platonic (so far) relationship, and even a biological sister. Oh, and she’s gorgeous. Did I mention that – the gorgeousness?
The other kind of fictional spy is a lot less fun. You find him/her in print in the novels of John LeCarre and Graham Greene and on the screen in movies made from those novels, and, I guess, some others. On the screen in your living room, this brand of spy is represented by another woman who is a far distance from Ms Perabo’s Annie Walker. Claire Danes’s Carrie Mathison, of Homeland fame, is deeply conflicted and in need of psychiatric help, which she got in the last episode of the previous season in the form of shock therapy. Ouch!
She has a love-hate relationship with her primary antagonist and doesn’t always mesh with her fellow CIAers. She usually looks unhappy and she’s been known to raise her voice. Her world is dark and the mortal climate is ambiguous: watching Homeland this week, I saw a beautifully written and played scene in which Carrie and a terrorist debated the righteousness of their respective causes and neither was in error. Grey is apparently the universe’s hue of choice and Homeland reflects that.
So what kind of spy story is better? Hey, no need for such a comparison. There is absolutely nothing wrong with pure entertainment and I would sashay along Annie Walker’s path any time. But – maybe drama should occasionally try for something more than entertainment. Maybe it should reflect the perplexities of the real world and maybe it should prompt us to question inherited wisdom and assumptions and so, if we were indulging in pointless comparisons (and we’re not! We’re not!) Carrie would be the more valuable she-spy.
But I’d still rather sashay with Annie.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING: The Science of Natural Healing, presented by Dr. Mimi Guarneri and available from The Teaching Company. The information Dr. Guarneri gives us could conceivably save lives. Stuff everyone should know.
FRIDAY: Martha Thomases – Where Are The New Nerds?
Here’s the Star Trek Into Darkness announcement teaser. So what do we know so far?
When the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise is called home, they find an unstoppable force of terror from within Starfleet has detonated the fleet and everything it stands for, leaving our world in a state of crisis. With a personal score to settle, Captain Kirk leads a manhunt to a war-zone world to capture a one man weapon of mass destruction. As our heroes are propelled into an epic chess game of life and death, love will be challenged, friendships will be torn apart, and sacrifices must be made for the only family Kirk has left: his crew.
Star Trek: Into Darkness brings back Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, Anton Yelchin, John Cho, and Bruce Greenwood, and adds Benedict Cumberbatch and Peter Weller to the cast. It’s written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Damon Lindelof, and directed by J.J. Abrams. The film is scheduled to hit theaters May 17, 2013.
So many sequels, so few of them have been good! Every once in a while comes one that lives up to the original. Mike Faber, Mike Gordon, Bobby Nash, and special guest Grundy chat reveal their favorites. And speaking of continuing missions, Star Trek/ Doctor Who comic book writer Scott Tipton takes a turn in The Geek Seat. As if that wasn’t enough, we take a look at AMC’s The Walking Dead as it heads into the fall finale. Plus the usual Rants, Raves, Shout Outs, and the ever-popular Khan Report!
Join us for yet another episode of The Earth Station One Podcast we like to call: Surprising Sequels at www.esopodcast.com.
Direct link: http://erthstationone.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/earth-station-one-episode-140-surprising-sequels/
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On his Facebook page, Pulp 2.0 publisher Bill Cunningham posted the following tease about an upcoming project.
“I am putting a book series together called JUNGLE GIRL ADVENTURES featuring photos, comic panels, posters and 3 short stories from Bobby Nash, Ian Watson, and Michael May. It’s a celebration of all things jungle girl. It also features a gallery of jungle girl pinup photos from the Donald F. Glut archives. What I have found is that the jungle girl subgenre has a long history in films, tv, comics and pulps — something that has been forgotten in mainstream media.”
Learn more about Pulp 2.0 Press at http://pulp2ohpress.com.
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
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