Cover: Danny Kelly

The sleepy rural community of Woodland is caught up in a nightmare from which they cannot escape.

Suddenly, mysteriously, a small group of extraordinary visitors arrives to save them, coming from a place where orange, gold, and crimson leaves follow you in the autumn breeze. A place of eternal October, where imagination is magic, monsters are real, and pumpkins are more than they seem.

They know what scares you, and only they can stop it.

Evil—beware, the World’s Weirdest Heroes!

The Halloween Legion © Martin Powell.

The Halloween Legion prose novella, featuring cover art and interior illustrations by Danny Kelly, is currently being designed by William Carney for Wild Cat Books. It’s hopefully that the print version will be available on Amazon.com by Halloween!

And Stay Tuned to ALL PULP for Halloween Legion Interviews and other goodness with Creator Martin Powell!!

The KINDLE version is now available at http://www.amazon.com/THE-HALLOWEEN-LEGION-ebook/dp/B005U8345K/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1318256315&sr=1-2

via Disney Princesses – Poorly Dressed People of the World – Fashion Fails.

I’ve been in a grumpy mood all weekend. I don’t know why exactly… and I made it worse today because, being in a grumpy mood yesterday, I didn’t work on my paper for school – the topic being An Ethical Analysis of a Current Domestic or Global Issue, and normally I love to talk ethics and issues with a capital “I,” but I just was so grumpy, I couldn’t get my interest going – which of course I should have, but I blew it off.

Which meant that I had to do it all today, which led to me missing the Giants game against the Seahawks. Which they lost 36 – 25. And yesterday was Yom Kippur, but I was grumpy, so I blew off going to temple, too, which made me feel terribly guilty, but I grumpily chose to feel guilty rather than do the right thing and go to temple with my parents. Who are really getting up there in age and who knows if we’ll all be here next year, and would it really have been so horrible to go to temple for a few hours and make them happy?

Although I did fast. Sort of. Meaning I drank a lot of Diet Pepsi and smoked a pack of cigarettes while being grumpy and watching The Dick Van Dyke Show on TV Land. So I’m feeling guilty and grumpy about not going to temple yesterday, even though my parents were totally cool with it, and anyway, I haven’t gone to temple since 9/11, when I just decided that all organized religions totally suck.

And I’m grumpy because I’m not all that happy with my paper, which is called “There’s Something Happening Here” and is about the Occupy Wall Street Protests and the unethical practices of Wall Street (which of course is enough to make anyone grumpy) and the bullshit crap about Occupy Wall Street that’s coming out of the mouths of people like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and John Boehner (which should make everybody grumpy, but it doesn’t, which makes me even more grumpy), and there’s so much to say, but I had a word limit, which I went over, which makes me grumpy, and with my luck my professor is a member of the Tea Party, which will really make me grumpy if it’s true.

But this column’s supposed to be about comics.

So what did I read this weekend? Well, I wanted to critique Catwoman #1 of DC’s New 52, because I have a special interest in Selena, having written the first Catwoman mini-series, and it’s been making me grumpy that in that series I wanted Selena to deliberately throw the bad guy who had raped her sister off the catwalk, but the powers-that-be at DC at the time wouldn’t let me ‘cause “Selena a cold-blooded killer? Nonononono, bad, Mindy, bad,” but apparently now it’s okay to show Selena and Bruce doing the dirty on a roof in total Photoshopped glorious color. But my comic book shop guy screwed up the order for the second week in a row now, which has also made me grumpy.

But I did pick up Batgirl #1 by my gal friend Gail Simone and artists Ardian Syaf and Vicente Cifuentes along with Wonder Woman #1 by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, and Action Comics #2 by Grant Morrison, Rags Morales, Brent Anderson and Rick Bryant. Plus Green Lantern, Batwoman and Voodoo. But it’s making me grumpy that I’m behind the eight ball and it feels like everybody else has already put their two cents in.

Gail does her usually superb job writing Barbara Gordon, and I’m trusting her to answer why Barbara remembers being shot by the Joker and being in a wheelchair for three years if none of the characters are supposed to remember their previous incarnations. Or is it that she just doesn’t remember her time as Oracle? But I really like that the emotional and psychological reverberations of the Joker’s attack are still there. It would make no sense if Barbara was just “la-di-di-dah.” I’m trusting Gail to follow through with this for quite a while. No instant fixes, please, girlfriend! The artwork made me a little grumpy though.

Wonder Woman is always her best, imho, when her Hellenic background plays a strong part in her book. Which is why I loved Wonder Woman! I especially liked the cape worn by unidentified bad guy who pulls a “Godfather” on the horse in the stable. (The bad guy is only unidentified if you’ve never read any Greek mythology and so don’t get the significance of that particular cape.) Brian Azzarello does his usual brilliant job at dialogue, dropping hints and making the characters come alive. The artwork definitely did not make me feel grumpy.

Action Comics #2 is sucking me in but good! Special highlight for me was the “exclusive peek behind the scenes” at the development of the characters and artwork. Especially the artwork. As a writer who can’t draw beyond a stick figure, I love seeing (or reading) how an artist makes the magic.

I wasn’t feeling grumpy there for a few minutes, but now I’m grumpy again because I didn’t have time to read the rest of my haul, which puts me even further into the backfield. But I’ve run out of room anyway, so I guess I shouldn’t be grumpy.

Except that I’m running really, really late on this column (again!) and that’s making me grumpy.

TUESDAY: Michael Davis

As you all know, Steve Jobs died this last week. You also know, or should from everything that has been said about him since he died, that he co-founded Apple and was the visionary that brought us the iPhone, the iPad, the iPod and the computer on which I’m writing all this. Some have compared him to Einstein or Edison and, considering the influence he’s had or will continue to have, I think the comparison is apt.

Here’s some of what Steve Jobs said about death from his commencement address to Stamford University in 2005. He’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, had surgery, and hoped he had escaped it. Jobs was a reflective person, however, and talked about what the experience had taught him.

“Death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new… Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

“And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

That’s profound advice for anyone who wants to be a writer, who wants to be any kind of artist. Jobs was an artist, in my opinion, and his medium was Apple.

This has had a special reverberation for me as well. I’ve been spending the week dealing with an irregular heartbeat. My heart sometimes goes ba-dump, ba-dump, ba-dump. . . .ba-DUMP. We’ve all heard the phrase of how something or someone made your heart skip a beat. Well, mine has and I can tell you it’s not romantic; it’s a little scary.

Yes, I’ve been to the doctor(s) and there’s been a bunch of tests and there will be more to come. I’m told it’s not a heart attack. The initial diagnosis is palpitations. I’m one attack of the vapors from becoming a Southern Belle.

While this is something to pay attention to (and I am), it doesn’t appear to be dangerous at the moment. At the same time, it’s made me reflective of the fact that I am mortal and I will die. I’ve had a relationship with death all my life and I think it’s shaped me for the better. As a boy, any number of my relatives died by the time I was ten. I spent a lot of time at wakes and funerals. I saw dead people – ones I had known as living folks.

I lived across the street from our church and one bright summer morning I was on my bike in front of my house when a funeral cortege passed by heading to the front of the church. As I watched the hearse go by, I got the sense that someday the positions would be different. I would be in a hearse and some ten-year old kid would watch me pass by. As Jobs said, the old replaced by the new and that everything new eventually becomes old.

All those deaths – ones close to me like my father or my late wife, Kim, or of heroes like the Kennedys or John Lennon – have become part of me. It’s like the way artists use negative space to define objects. Death helps define life. Death has helped me define life for myself, it has entered into my writing and given it resonance.

Too often in comics we treat death as a plot device; the hero dies, the hero comes back. The grave has a revolving door. It’s a stunt to sell more books. I’ve done it myself. Some times it’s valid but it happens too often so that the death of a character really doesn’t mean anything anymore. Does that keep comics juvenile? Does it keep them from having any real resonance?

The medium itself is having death pangs in so many ways. Comic books shops are dying; print as a medium may be dying. Denny O’Neil once remarked to me that comics as a medium doesn’t have to exist; it can also be mortal. It can die.

Or it can change. The old parts die out and then get reborn. As Steve Jobs noted, death clears out the old to make way for the new. Maybe comics can benefit from a little death. It’s good to remember: nothing and no one lasts forever. That what gives life its poignancy and its value. Enjoy what you have while you have it. Love those you love while they’re here. Celebrate life; value death.

Life’s too short to read bad comics.

MONDAY: Mindy Newell