It’s happening as I sit here typing, on a Thursday, about 30 miles due south of the village where I happily abide, and, barring as always the unforeseen, I’ll be in the midst of it sometime tomorrow, mingling with armies of strangers, gazing at exhibits both exotic and banal, almost certainly meeting folks I have known for decades but seldom see whelmed by noise and flashing lights and color and celebrities and hucksters and the breath of chaos…

I refer, of course, to the New York Comic Con. (You thought I meant Armageddon? Naw… but maybe next week…) This is the younger, but extremely vigorous sibling of the monstrous (in at least two meanings of the word) San Diego Comic Con, but it is no wimpy little brother. Like Athena, springing from the head of Zeus, the NYCC arrived burly and mature, though a bit disorganized, three years ago and has been growing ever since. I’ve heard that 75,000 attendees are expected at the con site over the next four days. (At the San Diego shindig I attended last year, there were 130,000 or 140,000 con goers, depending on who provided the information.) That this event, and its west coast equivalent, could not only exist, but prosper, is yet another sign of how much comic books, that lowly, despised publishing stepchild, have changed and gentrified since I shuffled into the office of Marvel Comics about 45 years ago.

There were conventions then, sure, but they were miniscule compared to the current iterations – a few hundred or later, and at most, a few thousand avid fans who were there, not to ogle celebs or buy cool t-shirts, but to share a love of a certain kind of storytelling. You may have heard me describe (at a convention?) accompanying Flo Steinberg to my first con at the McBurney YMCA in Manhattan: maybe a hundred citizens of various genders and ages wandering around the Y’s gym, a few tables bearing stacks of old comics for sale, and the afternoon’s big deal, a group of comic book professionals on the stage discussing…well, discussing something. I was among them, and that, of course, was to laugh – me, in the business a month or two, sharing an audience with men who had given joy to me on many a summer afternoon and Sunday morning, who shaped the medium in which I labored. I wonder what I said. Probably something. Ah, the arrogance of youth…

The biggest attraction, at the Y that day, was the presence of a genuine movie star: Buster Crabbe, the screen’s Tarzan, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers, in the flesh. If I hadn’t been a blasé college graduate and Navy veteran who’d actually been to a foreign country, yessir, or if I’d had any sense of what popular culture is, I’d have been impressed.

But hey! I’m no greystache lamenting the good old days when, dang it, things was the way they oughta be, decent and proper. Things now are different, but they’re as decent and proper as the universe allows them to be.

Somebody say amen.

Recommended Reading: Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. Hey, have you ever actually read it? Or read it since you had to do so as schoolwork?

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases

News Release

Airship 27 Productions and Cornerstone Book Publishers are excited to announce the release of their third Jim Anthony Super Detective book, a full length novel, THE MARK OF TERROR.

From the early days of his crime fighting career, comes this brand new adventure of the man known as Jim Anthony; Super Detective. Half Irish, half Comanche and All American, Jim Anthony finds himself caught up in a world-wide conspiracy of murder and carnage as two ancient Greek cults square off against each other in modern times; each vying for world dominance over the other.

When several of New York’s leading business men suddenly go insane and begin committing suicide, the police are baffled and reluctantly look to the Super Detective for help. Soon, with the aid of a renowned archeological historian and a spunky, fearless female reporter, Jim Anthony is quickly caught up in a mystery like no other he has ever faced before. With danger from deadly masked assassins at every turn, the famous adventurer’s own life is soon hanging in the balance as he becomes the primary target of both warring cults.

Acclaimed New Pulp scribe, Joshua Reynolds delivers a fast paced, non-stop action thriller that is pure pulp gold. “This is Reynold’s second Jim Anthony story for us,” reported Airship 27 Productions’ Managing Editor Ron Fortier. “It’s very clear in how well he writes this classic hero that he has a genuine affection for the character and that comes across on every page.” Accompanied by nine illustrations from artist Isaac Nacilla and a stunning cover by painter Jeff Herndon, with designs by Rob Davis, JIM ANTHONY – SUPER DETECTIVE – THE MARK OF TERROR is the latest in an on-going series of brand new Jim Anthony adventures.

Cornerstone Book Publishers also publishes Masonic and esoteric books, selected pulp fiction, art literature, limited children’s books, and poetry collections. For more information about Cornerstone, go to www.cornerstonepublishers.com.

Airship 27 packages and publishes anthologies and novels in the pulp magazine tradition.
In addition to Weird Horror Tales, Weird Horror Tales: The Feasting, and Weird Horror Tales: Light’s End, Airship 27 has released Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, a series of “Captain Hazzard” pulp thrillers, more pulp fiction in The Green Lam,a and Secret Agent X. For more information on Airship 27, go to www.airship27.com.

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTIONS – Pulp Fiction for a New Generation!

ISBN 1-613420-16-1
ISBN-13 978-1-613420-16-4

For those of you who experience my weekly hysterical polemics over at Michael Davis World (yep, that Michael Davis), it will come as no surprise that I was looking forward to Dark Horse’s new series Orchid. Sure, new comics come about as often as simians poop, but this one was written by Tom Morello.

Who, you may ask, is Tom Morello? I’ll try not to indulge in musical and political elitism here; there’s always enough of that to go around. Suffice it to say that Morello is one of those activist musicians, and his work shines brighter than most. Best known as the guitarist for Rage Against The Machine, Tom was also in the bands Lock Up and Audioslave. For much of the past decade he’s been a solo act, a.k.a. The Nightwatchman. This latter work is acoustic; the former more punk/new wave/hip-hop. Or, as we in the Whole World Is Watching racket like to say, loud. I play his stuff on Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind, I listen to his work lovingly, I watch him on Bill Maher, and evidently we are or have been members of the same union. Indeed, if he was at last week’s New York Comic Con, he and I were probably the only two people among 100,000 to be wearing IWW garb.

What I find really cool about this guy, outside of his work and his politics, is that his mom co-founded the anti-censorship organization Parents for Rock and Rap (say “anti-censorship” and I’m there) and, oh yeah, he’s the nephew of Jomo Kenyatta, the anti-colonialist anti-Communist activist who became Kenya’s first president.

Ahem. So, to get down to the nitty-gritty, is Orchid worth reading?

The simple review is, yes it is. I wish I had worked on it. There’s some rough edges in both the story and in Scott Hepburn’s art, but compared to most of what haunts the racks these days it’s Alex Raymond. Hepburn seems to have been influenced by British guys like Mik McMahon and Ian Gibson; that’s high praise. He’s done a lot of Star Wars stuff for Dark Horse and some Marvel gigs, and his storytelling is as strong as the story he’s telling. In fact, I might track down some of Hepburn’s Star Wars work – as John Ostrander can tell you, it takes a lot to get me to read Star Wars.

The story is post-apocalyptic, an overworked genre that generally lacks the strong emotional point of view needed to make it work. Not so with Orchid. The lead character is a teenage prostitute who protects her family in their struggle to survive in swampland shanties while the rich live above the morass in their fortresses, harvesting the poor (I’d say the 99%, but this number has not yet been established) as slaves, organ providers and sex toys. Morello and Hepburn make it work by sheer dint of their craft and their applied appreciation of allegory.

Morello supplements each issue with a new downloadable song. I’d give you the link, but I’d rather you check out Orchid #1, available at more-intelligently run comic shops and online.

I can’t help wonder if the current Occupier demonstrations all across the nation – now, all across the world – weren’t orchestrated by Morello as a promotion stunt. Given my own background, I’d say that was really cool. Highly doubtful, but really cool. If only that same intensity were to morph into greater exposure for Orchid.

THURSDAY: Dennis O’Neil

iPulpfiction.com, the internet’s leading provider of pulp fiction, new and old, has just released the third DEATH ANGEL story, authored by Mike Bullock.

In My Dominion II is the second part of serialized short prose tales starring the New Pulp heroine Death Angel as she unravels a mystery of violence and ancient gods. The story logline is as follows:

Ellen Fromme hopes to come to grips with the macabre events that led to her hus­band’s death and put her past be­hind her. But, she soon finds that her safe pent­house apart­ment and in­su­lat­ed lifestyle are no pro­tec­tion from… Do­min­ion.


Future Death Angel stories are scheduled to appear monthly on iPulp, a cloud-based reading service that publishes classic and contemporary short stories accessible from any device with an up-to-date browser and Internet connection.

The first two Death Angel tales to appear on iPulp can be found here:

Death Angel: Hung Jury
Death Angel: In My Dominion