For no reasons that are indefensible intellectually, I went to see Rock of Ages the other day. I like Alec Baldwin, okay?  It’s loud and it’s fun, and while hair metal was never my genre, I kind of like the power ballads that dominate the soundtrack.

The main plot is almost identical to Get Crazy,  one of the greatest movies ever made. A sincere rock club on the Sunset Strip (in this case, The Bourbon Room), run by Alec Baldwin and Russell Brand, is in the rapacious site of greedy real estate developers. Our heroes must put on a show that will sell enough tickets to raise money and thwart the evil plans. Meanwhile, a sweet young girl (Julianne Hough) from the heartland comes to Los Angeles with dreams of rock stardom, and falls in love with a boy with similar dreams (Diego Benota).

Mixed up in all this is Tom Cruise as Axl Rose, Malin Ackerman as a Rolling Stone reporter, Mary J. Blige in not enough scenes, and Paul Giamatti as Cruise’s manager.

Will the sincere and noble rockers triumph over the skeevy politicians and music executives who want to replace The Bourbon Room’s metal with malls and boy-bands? What do you think?

The acting is broad and fun. My only quibble with the casting is that Diego Benota looks a lot like Jonathan Groff, only he’s not, and that was distracting. I’m sure he’s a lovely human being in his own right.

And yet, as I watched it, I found myself getting irked. “That’s not historically accurate,” I would think, and then I’d remember that it’s a movie based on a Broadway jukebox musical. It’s like complaining that F Troop isn’t historically accurate.

I wasn’t in Los Angeles in 1987. I was in New York. Not only that, but I had a three-year-old child, so I didn’t spend a lot of time in rock clubs. Still, my memory of popular music of that time includes a lot that wasn’t metal. The biggest album for most people was Michael Jackson’s Bad. The biggest albums for me were Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love and Warren Zevon’s Sentimental Hygiene.

From this movie, you wouldn’t know there was any hip-hop. You wouldn’t even know there was any punk, even though the black leather and studs that denote authenticity among the rockers owe nearly as much to punk as they do to rockabilly. I don’t know what it’s like in L.A. these days, but you can see every one of those outfits today on St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan.

The other place you can see all these fashions is superhero comics. For some reason, the big hair, the fringe, even the shoulder pads live on at DC and Marvel. I guess once your creative vision of women is limited to bitch, naif, and slut, your visual imagination is similarly locked in the past.

The difference is that in Rock of Ages, they know they’re being camp. It’s funny, and they expect the audience to be in on it. For those of us who are superhero fans, the joke is on us.

SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman

New Pulp Author, Win Scott Eckert shared the following with All Pulp. Win spoke about this project on Earth Station One Episode 114, which you can listen to here.

PRESS RELEASE:

The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 3 – Now Available for Preorder! Includes my novelette “The Wild Huntsman,” the secret origin of the Wold Newton Family! The tale is a direct sequel to “Is He in Hell?” and takes place in Wold Newton on the momentous day the Wold Newton meteor fell, Dec. 13, 1795, spawning the sprawling family of pulp heroes, the Wold Newton Family!

The “Summer of Philip José Farmer” continues — preorder now at $5 off the cover price!

The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 3
Portraits of a Trickster

Preorder volume 3 now! Not only will you save $5 off the cover price, but if you are one of the first 100 people to preorder, you will get a custom laminated bookmark, just like the ones sent out with the first 100 copies of The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 2.
It is hard to describe the amount of awesome in this collection: the secrets revealed, the heartfelt tributes, the mysteries you can help solve, the tricks that may or may be played on you, the secrets revealed, the never before seen material by Farmer, the stories continued (with even more secrets revealed)… The most exciting volume of The Worlds of Philip José Farmer yet!

Publication will be in late summer, hopefully in time for FarmerCon VII, August 9 – 12. Here is the working table of contents (subject to change).

Foreword by Frederik Pohl

Peoria-Colored Worlds
Missing the Wit and Creativity by Michael Bailey
Down in Phil Farmer’s Basement by Steven Connelly
Over All, After All by Philip José Farmer

Of Friendships and Influences
The Holy Spirit of Science Fiction by Bruce Sterling
The Robert Traurig Letters by Philip José Farmer
A Box of Influence by Chris Garcia
Wild Weird Clime by Philip José Farmer
To Be, or Not to Be by Tom Wode Bellman

Worlds in Disguise
Trout Masque Rectifier by Jonathan Swift Somers III
Kilgore, Kurt, and Me by David M. Harris
The Many Dooms of Harold Hall by Charlotte Corday-Marat
Desires Denied by Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor

Classic Worlds
Osiris on Crutches by Philip José Farmer & Leo Queequeg Tincrowdor
The Genuine Imposter by Rick Lai
The Long Wet Dream of Rip van Winkle by Philip José Farmer
Up, Out, and Over, Roger by Philip José Farmer

Expanded Worlds
The Wild Huntsman by Win Scott Eckert
Dakota’s Gate by Heidi Ruby Miller
The Last of the Guaranys by Octavio Aragão & Carlos Orsi
Trickster of the Apes by S.M. Stirling

Of course, if you already own a copy of The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1 and 2 with matching numbers, we will send you the same number of volume 3.

Cover Art: Jeff Austin, Rusty Gilligan, Splash!

New Pulp Author Frank Dirscherl, creator of The Wraith has announced the release of his latest novel, THE WRAITH: CRY OF THE WEREWOLF

Cry of The Werewolf is now available to buy across the spectrum. Available as a paperback (RRP $US13.99) and an eBook (RRP $US3.99), this stunning adventure, the fourth in THE WRAITH ADVENTURES series, will leave you breathless.

About The Wraith: Cry of The Werewolf:

Having gone through ordeal after ordeal, Paul Sanderson (aka The Wraith Dread Avenger of the Underworld ®) and his love Leena Patterson, decide to take a long overdue vacation. Choosing the mountain village of Bidbury as their destination, the two happily leave the crime and filth of Metro City far behind them, at least for a time. Once they reach the picturesque surrounds of the Little England area, their idyll is shattered by an attack by a creature nobody thought could possibly exist—a werewolf. Soon, Paul discovers a village wracked by fear and deceit, and an evil so pronounced, so monstrous, that only The Wraith could possibly defeat it.

Cry of the Werewolf is the fourth in this enthralling series of pulp novels featuring the Dread Avenger of the Underworld, and has all the thrills and emotion that one has come to expect from Dirscherl, surely the pre-eminent superhero pulp author of our time.

The Wraith: Cry of The Werewolf is available from Trinity Comics bookstore, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble in both paperback and eBook. Learn more about and where to purchase The Wraith: Cry of The Werewolf at www.the-wraith.com/crynovel.html

To learn more about Frank Dirscherl and The Wraith, visit http://www.trinitycomics.com and http://www.frankdirscherl.com

* The fourth Wraith novel, CRY OF THE WEREWOLF, is NOW AVAILABLE! Featuring cover art by cover by Jeff Austin, Rusty Gilligan, and colors by Splash!*

* The next Wraith novel, CROSSFIRE (by Stephen J. Semones) will be out in
July! *

* Join the NEW Trinity Comics message forum at http://trinitycomics.proboards.com *

We left off our previous post of having just found a hidden file folder inside the leather satchel of Dr. Richard Parker. We’ve since scanned in all the pages in the folder and leave them to you to find all the hidden clues.

Here’s one hint: the double grid pattern you see on many of the pages have been replicated in different drops around the country, but each one has different information in each. A compilation of all the code info can be found here.

Other notes: 00 is on many documents, and is also labeled on the side of the spiders encased in lucite.

And there’s one minor continuity flub. The newspaper clipping of Dr. Curt Connors and Dr. Richard Parker is theoretically from when Richard Parker disappeared. But if that’s the case, why does the sports story on the back of the clipping reference Flash Thompson playing for the high school team? Surely Flash wouldn’t have been left behind for over a decade…

The Amazing Spider-Man opens in theaters in America on July 3rd, and stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Martin Sheen, Sally Field, and Cameron Scott.

I’m tired of being an outsider! No more rebel for me! From now on, I run with the pack.

But where to begin? Why, by emulating our leaders, those wonderful ladies and gents who prowl the halls of power in our nation’s capitol. Yessir, I’m talking about Washington D.C. and I’m talking about our own Congress and we’re not playing favorites, the House or the Senate, either one will do. So, to imitate our solons…I guess I should get pissed off about something. I guess I have to! Isn’t that what the current crop of lawmakers do?

But what? The economy? Nah – everybody’s riding that hobby horse.  The wars? Old news, and besides, everyone seems to be taking them for granted. Wait…I’ve got it.

The Journal News. My local newspaper.

A little context. I’m just back from the St. Louis area where I spent some coin on a couple of editions of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, which Joseph Pulitzer owned before he went to east and, at the New York World, commissioned the first color comics. Now, I never worked for the PD – I reported for a much smaller sheet upstate – but it was an early part of my daily life from toddlerhood on. I guess my parents must have been subscribers.

Almost certainly, it was in the PD’s “funny pages” that I got my first exposure to panel art. Not only were there comics in the PD, at a certain time in, I guess, the 40s, those comics were in color. Not just Sundays – heck, every paper’s Sunday comics were in color – but every blessed day. I think I was on the floor of my grandmother’s living room when I opened the paper and…wow! Color comics! On a weekday! Some occasions, a kid doesn’t forget. And somewhere, Joseph Pulitzer was exalting.

So, flash forward: Last Monday, I picked up the PD, turned to the funny pages looking for my favorites and, yes, there it was, the strip that I think is tied with Doonesbury for being the best and wisest feature in all of syndication: Non Sequitur, by Wiley Post. But it was a strip! And in the Journal News, it’s a box! The editor in me wanted to know if the feature was sent in two formats or certain papers reformatted it themselves, and what effect that might have on Wiley Post’s working habits and if he has to reformat himself, why that doesn’t drive him crazy.

But, while all that gives one pause, it’s not bad. What is bad is what I saw the day before, in the PD’s Sunday funny pages: Non Sequitur. In color. On Sunday! On Sunday, dammit. Because the Journal News, though it has a Sunday comics section, which I read every week, doesn’t carry the Sunday Non Sequitur. I didn’t even know that there was a Sunday Non Sequitur before this week

Well, Journal News? I’ve been a loyal reader for 14 years and I live in Upper Nyack and I can’t help wondering what you have against doing us the service of publishing Non Sequitur seven days a week. Not six – seven. Do I hear an excuse?

I’m waiting, Journal News. And I am pissed!

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases and Big Hair