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LEADING NEW PULP PUBLISHER LICENSES PIONEERING INDEPENDENT COMIC PUBLISHER’S CHARACTERS!

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  • December 5, 2012

Two Companies known for independent creations and innovative storytelling in two different media combine their ideas and creators together for one fantastic series of books!  Pro Se Productions, a leader in New Pulp and Action/Adventure Fiction, and Heroic Publishing, a force in independent comics since the mid-1980s, have announced that beginning in 2013, new adventures as well as adaptations of past comic books featuring Heroic flagship characters Liberty Girl, Flare, and Eternity Smith will be written and published by Pro Se!
Tommy Hancock, Partner and Editor in Chief of Pro Se stated, “Pro Se is always interested in crafting new tales of concepts that deserve them and the universe that Heroic Publishing has created more than qualifies.   Eternity Smith is a character that has always occupied a space in my comic collection, and one of those that I’ve always wanted to take a crack at writing.   Thanks to the effort of Pro Se Submissions Editor Barry Reese and the man behind Heroic, Dennis Mallonee, that dream is coming true.   Not only with Eternity Smith, but with two stellar heroines from Heroic:-Flare and the Liberty Girl!”
Liberty Girl, a World War II heroine ripped from her glory days and rocketed forward in time to today, where she’s needed more than ever!   Flare, fashion model and brightly shining super heroine!  Eternity Smith, time-tossed scientific genius fighting against a future full of horror!  These legendary characters from Heroic will be featured in prose novels and anthologies, both adapting past comic work into prose as well as new stories, written by some of today’s newest and best talents in New Pulp!
“Some writers,” Hancock said, “have already been attached to specific projects.  Others have been approached.  There will also be opportunities for open calls as well, to bring in writers who have an interest in these characters.   And after the first year, there exists the possibility of bringing even more Heroic characters into HEROIC PROSE!, the Pro Se/Heroic line , such as the Champions and other popular characters.”
The first Heroic Prose book is scheduled for early 2013, an adaptation of the first Liberty Girl comic book by noted author Barry Reese.  Hancock will be helming an adaptation of as well as new tales of Eternity Smith.  Other titles will be announced as they become reality for 2013 and beyond.

Pro Se Productions-www.prosepulp.com

Heroic Publishing- www.heroicmultiverse.com

WHITE ROCKET PODCASTS TO THE MARVEL CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

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  • December 5, 2012

Marvel’s The Avengers

On this week’s episode of the White Rocket Podcast (part of the ESO Network!), host Van Allen Plexico is joined by writer/director/publisher Jim Yelton to talk about the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Van and Jim start with the really bad Marvel stuff from back in the day and explore how they came from those humble beginnings to dominate superhero movies today.

Episode 6 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.

LANSDALE’S DEAD AIM NOW AVAILABLE FOR PREORDER

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  • December 5, 2012
Cover Art: Glen Orbik

Subterranean Press has announced that Author Joe R. Lansdale’s Dead Aim is now available for preorder before its official release in January 2013.

Press Release:

Dead Aim (preorder) by Joe R. Lansdale
ISBN: 978-1-59606-524-6
Length: 104 pages
(preorder—to be published in January 2013)

Dust jacket by Glen Orbik

Dead Aim marks the always welcome return of Joe R. Lansdale’s most enduring fictional creations: Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. The result is a spare, beautifully crafted novella in which Lansdale’s unique voice and inimitable narrative gifts are on full—and generous—display.

The story begins simply enough when the two agree to provide protection for a woman harassed by her violent, soon-to-be-ex husband. But, as readers of this series will already know, events in the lives of Hap and Leonard rarely stay simple for long. When a protracted stakeout ends in a lethal shooting and a pair of moldering corpses turn up in an otherwise deserted trailer, the nature of this “routine” assignment changes dramatically. The ensuing investigation unearths a complex web of lies, duplicity, and hidden agendas that leads from an upscale Texas law firm to the world of organized crime, culminating in the kind of explosive, anything-can-happen confrontation that only Joe Lansdale could create. Violent, profane, and often raucously funny, Dead Aim is a tautly written, hugely entertaining thriller and a triumph of the storyteller’s art.

Trade: Fully cloth bound hardcover edition
Limited: 400 signed numbered copies, bound in leather, with a different cover design than the trade hardcover.

Learn more about Dead Aim here.

A Doctor A Day: “Rose”

  • News
  • December 5, 2012

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. Come along.

Shop girl Rose Tyler was not expecting much to change in her life.  In a very brief time, she faces down animated plastic shop dummies, teams up with a 900 year old time traveler, and helps save the world.  There’s no doubt why the episode was named after her…

ROSE
By Russell T. Davies
Directed by Keith Boak“Nice to meet you, Rose; run for your life!”

After a long dark silence, peppered only with books, audio adventures, comics, magazines and…well, ok, but no new TV adventures, Doctor Who returned to the air with a lot to prove, and not a lot of time to do it in.  Russell T. Davies had to grab the new audience, and at the same time, assure the old fans that the show was in good hands.  He achieved it all brilliantly.

Billie Piper as Rose Tyler is very much a new style of Companion for The Doctor – sure of herself, independent, and much more likely to fight than to scream.  We also see another change to the companions; we meet her family and friends.  The glorious Camille Coduri as her Mom, Jackie, and her boyfriend Mickey as played by Noel Clarke are different from other Companion’s family in they’re not dead, usually killed by the monster of the week, if we see them at all.  They give Rose more of a grounding; she’s happy to go off and explore the world, but there’s people waiting for her at home, and that naturally brings them back to Earth often, something that doesn’t hurt the budget.

And at the center, Christopher Eccleston as a very different and modern Doctor.  His clothing is nondescript, his manner gruff, his opinion of Humanity seemingly dismissive, but when he speaks in their defense, it’s clear he loves them.  His tongue is sharp; his first few lines to Rose are delightful, telling her to go off and eat her beans on toast, but congratulating her for coming up with a logical explanation for what she’s seeing. But shortly later, he gives a peek at the emotion he’s feeling every day, about he can actually feel the planet spinning under his feet.

Davies and co chose well for the series first villain; the Nestene Consciousness and its plastic commandos the Autons.  Only seen twice in the original series, they were obscure enough that it’d please the fans, but easy enough to explain to the newcomers.  From the dramatic scenes of gun-handed mannequins taking people out left and right in a mall to the ridiculous scene of Mickey getting kidnapped by a garbage bin, the show did what it always did well – take commonplace things and make them scary.

In this episode’s commentary, we hear about how they chose to keep the first appearance of The Doctor very underplayed, as opposed to giving him a big dramatic entrance. Also, the episode ran sort of short, and the scene with The Doctor talking about how he can feel the rotation of the Earth was added later, and then re-shot, as Chris decided he could do it better. One of the few times they had time to re-shoot something for quality.

The episodes of Confidential on this first series are the edited versions that appeared later on the website and other locations, not the full half-hour version that were run after the original broadcast.  They’re still quite interesting to get a look at how the show was put together.  It’s interesting to see the interviews with Chris Eccleston, both here and in additional extras on the disc.  Remember by this point he’d already decided to leave, they’d already filmed the whole series, and they already had his regeneration in the can.  But he’s happily giving these interviews, talking about what a joy it was, and gamefully smiling and nodding when asked how long he plans to stay with the series.

In one episode they do a perfect job of reintroducing the character to a new audience.  It was kept simple, but let everyone know the show was very much to be taker seriously. The special effects were very much up to modern standards, and the writing of Davies did not talk down to the show’s traditional primary audience of children.  Like it had been before, there was no guarantee the show would fly, but it got a damn fine running start.

HANCOCK TIPS HIS HAT TO ‘HUNT AT WORLD’S END’!

  • News
  • December 5, 2012

TIPPIN’ HANCOCK’S HAT-Reviews of All Things Pulp by Tommy Hancock
HUNT AT WORLD’S END
By Nicholas Kaufmann (writing as Gabriel Hunt)
Gabriel Hunt created by Charles Ardai
Published by Leisure Books, 2009
cover_big-8506553
There’s something to be said for archetypes.   We enjoy them, we return to them, many sociologists and psychologists say that they are essential to our survival as individuals and a race.  And being a fan of Heroic Fiction and particularly of Pulp, I am darn glad that writers today believe in archetypes as well and don’t shy away from writing a story around a character who is like some previous creation or reminds readers of that guy in that movie.  Many good tales are written because writers, too, enjoy playing with archetypes.
Enter Gabriel Hunt. 
Created by Charles Ardai, the genius behind the Hard Case Crime books, Gabriel Hunt is one of two brothers whose parents mysteriously disappeared and are believed dead.   The brothers are now entrusted with the operation of the Hunt Foundation, which Gabriel leaves largely to his brother Michael while he travels the globe rescuing lost artifacts from the wrong hands in efforts to give them to museums and, if necessary, saving the world in the process.
Sound a tad familiar?  Yes, there are definite shades of Indiana Jones and other such fortune and glory for museums types in Hunt.  But in this tale that opens with a bar fight in an Explorer’s type club and involves chasing down three jewels and an ancient Hittite device, Hunt definitely steps out as his own character.  This is both a blessing and a curse for the story.
The action is well paced throughout HUNT AT THE WORLD’S END, the third novel in the series, and leaps off the page at the reader.  The characters are engaging, colorful, and run the gamut of beautiful I-Can-Take-Care-of-Myself damsel, over the top villain, and even an ancient cult of scaries with worldwide membership thrown in for good measure.   The build up of and resolution of the adventure is nearly flawless.  And Hunt himself provides a heroic figure that the book revolves around easily.
Mostly.
It seems that many writers feel the need to write characters in Heroic Fiction today that will hopefully have a broader market appeal than typical concepts of Heroes as we see them.  There have to be flaws, there must be angst, there have to be internal complications that give breadth, depth and color to the hero, even in some cases making him seem less than heroic.  This is supposed to, I think, make him appear more heroic when he works his hero mojo.
In HUNT AT THE WORLD’S END, all this sort of characterization, most of it done as internal narration, accomplished was to make Hunt seem insecure, arrogant, and whiny.  The middle of the novel is bogged down with Hunt’s concern over a particular cast member being involved in their hunt, his love or interest or whatever he has in the aforementioned damsel, and there’s even a hint of regret for his chosen life thrown in.  All of this is fine if it’s handled correctly, but the way it’s presented in this book makes Hunt’s subsequent heroic actions seem hollow, false.
Another point about this book- and this is more the writer in me, not the reviewer, complaining- is the fact that it is written under a house name of the lead character.  Gabriel Hunt wrote the book and yet it’s in third person.  It would have been much more affective to have this tale told in first person and would have made some of the above mentioned issues with whininess a little easier for the writer- and the reader- to deal with.
THREE OUT OF FIVE TIPS OF THE HAT- HUNT AT WORLD’S END is a great actioner, wonderfully paced with plenty of derring do and baddies for the good guys to contend with.  I just wish I liked the hero more than I did and that maybe in this instance, the author would have stuck a tad more to the archetype than trying to broaden his reader base (that he was doing that is only my assumption, but still…this is my review).

Mike Gold: In Honor Of Talent

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  • December 5, 2012

gold-art-121205-2474266Too many people in the comics racket get the tribute they deserve long after they leave the medium – if, indeed, at all. So I’m going to try to write one while the subject is still in her editorial seat; possibly before she even decides if she wants to actually leave the medium.

As you probably read – presumably right here at ComicMix – Karen Berger will be leaving her position as Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of DC Entertainment’s Vertigo line this coming spring. As Glenn noted in his news story, Karen will have been at the company for a third of a century (no, that photo on Glenn’s story is recent) and will have run Vertigo for 20 years. Vertigo, which she fostered, molded, and kept alive in the face of challenge and competition, all without adequate support from the guy who ran their marketing department at the time

Most certainly, Karen did not do this alone. She had a very talented staff, a staff she acquired and in many cases taught. She gathered an exceptionally gifted list of talent, and some of them would take a bullet for her. A couple people who otherwise spit on the ground every time DC Comics was mentioned would climb an active volcano for her.

In the process, Karen added greatly to the landscape of American comics and boldly took DC Comics into new directions. Unless you’ve been there, you cannot truly understand what a courageous and complicated undertaking that is. At the time DC was a corporation that was part of a larger corporation that was part of a Fortune 500 company. More recently DC has been part of a major motion picture studio that was part of a much larger Fortune 500 company. It’s the same company, only a lot bigger.

Like most astonishingly huge corporations, Time Warner’s omnipresent product is bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the enemy of innovation. Oh, sure, from time to time they’ll hire a few outside-the-box thinkers, particularly when they need a creative kick in the ass. But those of us who earn our livings outside of that box know all too well there’s a point when the corporation grows weary of being kicked in the ass. It flies in the face of their corporate culture. Or, as Mel Brooks famously said in Blazing Saddles, a Warner Bros movie, “Gentlemen! We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs here!”

Karen survived all that. Not just because she was great at her job, although that probably helped at times. She survived it because of her force of will, by doing what’s right by the talent she employed both creatively and in business to the best of her ability, and tilting at that windmill of bureaucracy with an energy that would drain Miguel de Cervantes.

Loyalty doesn’t come out of a box. You have to earn it.

In the process, Karen moved a huge chunk of DC Comics into areas the stodgy company had never considered. For decades there was a DC look that was impregnable. It worked, but like all creative endeavors eventually it showed its age. Karen planted the seeds of Vertigo years before the Vertigo imprint itself was established and now, in some of the more worthy New 52 titles, you can see the impact of her labors on the DC Universe. I don’t know if she realized her work was an act of subterfuge at the time, but some of us certainly did.

For this, Karen Berger deserves to go down in American comics history as one of the medium’s most innovative forces. Karen, as a co-worker you were amazing to be around. I can hardly wait to see what you do next.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

 

Review: Little Inferno

The Wii U, released on 11/18, has a good assortment of games available, both in stores and through the Nintendo E-Store.  A happy surprise is the large  number of smaller indie games available on the system, and of them all, the most blissfully wacky is Little Inferno, from the Tomorrow Corporation, makes of World of Goo.  Little Inferno combines the infuriating “What do I DO?” feeling of the open form game, the dark whimsy of a Tim Burton movie, and the purifying warmth of fire, and creates a deceptively simple game that unfolds like an onion in a deep fryer, and is just as delicious.

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The game consists of a fireplace, more specifically, the Little Inferno Entertainment Fireplace.  Your job – burn things.  Buy things from a series of catalogs of flammable objects, place them in the furnace, set them aflame, find money contained within, use the money to buy more things to burn.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  As you buy objects, more become available.  As you burn more and more, you begin receiving mail from  the manufacturer, congratulating you on your proficiency.  Letters also begin arriving from another Little Inferno owner who seems to have learned a bit more about the company, and the purpose of the fireplace.

The game is dark, disturbing, and tantalizing.  Exactly WHY does the magnet make the gears in the Fireplace spin faster?  Where did Someone Else’s Credit Card come from, and why can you buy then in almost infinite quantity?  Why is the world getting colder?

For a company as family-friendly as Nintendo to select such a bent little masterpiece for not only a game for its new console, let alone a day-of-release game, is a bold move indeed.  This is a game CLEARLY not for everybody (It’s rated T-for-Teen), but for those who like dark humor, not to mention burning things, it’s a perfect little brain-bender.

THE SHADOW FAN TAKES ON HITLER’S ASTROLOGER

The Shadow Fan Podcast returns with another action-packed episode! Barry Reese outlines the history of Harry Vincent, reviews Malmordo (1946), Dynamite’s The Shadow # 8, and Marvel’s The Shadow: Hitler’s Astrologer. Listener feedback inspires Barry to go on another rant about the Kent Allard/Shadow identity controversy!

Join the conversation about pulp’s greatest hero today at http://theshadowfan.libsyn.com/hitler-s-astrologer.

THEPULP.NET UPDATES SITE

On their Facebook Page, ThePulp.net announced some changes to their website.

Something looks different! That’s right. ThePulp.Net introduced a new format today. Based on suggestions from the survey we conducted last spring, we’ve added a bit more color and pizzazz to the site to better reflect the vivid pulps of the past. Let us know what you think!

Visit the new www.thepulp.net today.

COMING SOON FROM MECHANOID PRESS

  • Uncategorized
  • December 4, 2012

PRESS RELEASE:

Coming Soon
Contact: James Palmer
palmerwriter@yahoo.com
www.mechanoidpress.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Monster Earth
Coming Soon!

Atlanta, GA—James Palmer, editor and publisher of Mechanoid Press, an independent publishing imprint specializing in New Pulp, science fiction, and more, is proud to announce the upcoming release of its first anthology MONSTER EARTH.

MONSTER EARTH harkens back to the classic giant monsters of yesteryear like Godzilla, Mothra, Gamera, and King Kong, while focusing on the human element and what it would be like to live in such a world where giant monsters terrorize the Earth.

“There have been a few other giant monster anthologies over the years,” says Palmer.
“But our book is going to be a bit different. It has a unifying concept, as well as a solid pulp style of storytelling.”

Developed by MONSTER EARTH co-editor Jim Beard (writer, Captain Action and the Riddle of the Glowing Men), each story in the book takes place in a different decade of the 20th century, which leads to a Cold War fought with giant monsters rather than the threat of nuclear weapons.

“I really wanted all the stories to have an underlying thread that weaves between them all the stories, and Jim really came up with a winner.”

The stories in MONSTER EARTH have a strong human angle as well.

“Focusing in on the human beings living in this world is important to me,” says Palmer.
“The monsters are like forces of nature, with the humans trying to control them. But don’t worry, these aren’t just regular human interest stories with a monster thrown in for window dressing. There are plenty of great monster battles and more than enough citywide destruction to please the most discerning kaiju fan – and anyone who loves a good tale.

Palmer and Beard have assembled a great line-up of New Pulp all-stars to give us their visions of a world ruled by giant monsters. MONSTER EARTH will include stories by I.A. Watson (Sherlock Holmes, Blackthorn: Dynasty of Mars), Ed Erdelac (The Merkabah Rider), Nancy Hansen, and newcomer Jeff McGinnis. Beard and Palmer will also provide stories, and there will be a free online bonus tale by Jeff McGinnis coming out shortly before the book’s release.

MONSTER EARTH is slated for a Christmas release, and will be available in print and ebook formats.

For more information and updates, including a preview of the cover and table of contents when they are finalized, go to www.mechanoidpress.com and sign up for our FREE newsletter.

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About Mechanoid Press
Mechanoid Press is a new imprint specializing in science fiction, New Pulp, and steampunk ebooks and anthologies. For more, visit www.mechanoidpress.com or follow the robot revolution on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mechanoidpress. You can also like Mechanoid Press on Facebook.

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