As the end credits rolled, the first thought that occurred to me was that Win Win felt real. These were basically good people trying to do what is right but imperfections spoil any hope for total bliss. Heroes prove to have feet of clay and monsters don’t seem so monstrous once you get to know them.

The film, out on DVD from 20^th Century Home Entertainment, is another terrific showcase of the wonderful Paul Giamatti. He’s become the everyman of his generation, infusing his characters with traits and flaws’ that make them feel real enough you’d expect to find them living down the block. Here, he’s private lawyer Mike Flaherty, suffering from a decline in business thanks to the economy and he is presented with a short-cut so grabs it. He has a court appoint him as guardian to Leo (Burt Young) so he could collect the $1500 monthly fee but then dumps Leo in a nursing home to make the job easier. All Leo, suffering from dementia, wants to do is watch TV and live in his house.

Mike thinks he’s got thinks under control and won’t need to burden his stay at home wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) with their financial woes. Then, suddenly, Leo’s grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer) shows up from Ohio and things get complicated. Mike and Jackie suddenly become unofficial parents to a high school student who turns out to be an all-star wrestler.

Mike and his pal Stephen Vigman (Jeffrey Tambor) have been coaching the high school wrestling team and see Kyle as a chance to turn the losers into winners. But Kyle is damaged, having been neglected by his drug abusing mom Cindy (Melanie Lynskey) and abused by her latest boyfriend hence his sudden arrival in New Jersey. The way Kyle interacts with the Flaherty’s is the heart of the film as Mike is seen as the one good thing to happen to Kyle, until Cindy turns up and in short order, the ugly truth is revealed. (more…)

Ladies and gentlemen… We gather here today to mourn the loss of a cherished friend. DeeCee was many things to many people. Entertainer. Educator. Detective. Optimist. Friend. Let us take this time to recount those times that touched us, before DeeCee passed on into the ethereal void of blackness.

DeeCee, above all else, seemed impervious to the mortality we all must face. Since his birth in 1934 (back when we call just called him Nate Alypub) DeeCee has been one to cite the changing times as his own catalyst for reinvention. The world went to war, and with it, so did DeeCee. When our world became fixated on the cosmos above, did he not put on his space suit and power ring? Against his better judgment, DeeCee proudly sported a mighty and magnificent mullet in the late 80s. He was never afraid to put on a pair of cowboy boots. Let us never forget when we all thought he was dead, back in 1992. Even from those bleak times, he rose once again, stronger than ever. When the world grew grim and gritty, DeeCee broke his back in that tragic accident. But did he not pick himself up and reclaim his mantle without pause?

I want to take some time now too, to acknowledge DeeCee’s extended family. We were all crushed by the tragic end of his cousins Tan Gent and Elle Swirlds. DeeCee was always so proud of their accomplishments! I’m touched to see in attendance today DeeCee’s brothers, Vern Tigo and Wiley Storm. Vern, DeeCee was always quick to note how you were the sobering realist and macabre dreamer to his starry-eyed optimist. And Wiley… How could we ever forget when DeeCee adopted you, and kept you afloat during your more troublesome past?

DeeCee was rich in family, but even richer in friends. I see gathered here today a veritable pantheon of personalities, in support of the loss of our friend. Marv-El… we all know how you and DeeCee butted heads throughout your friendship. Before you moved out to Hollywood, you and DeeCee could always be seen sitting in the park, debating this and that. And who among us didn’t beam ear to ear when you two ended a years-long feud and amalgamated your friendship! Also among us are some of DeeCee’s friends from later in life… Val, Imogene, “Boom-Boom” Burt, Ava Tarr… so nice to see you all.

It may very well be the elephant in the room today, friends. DeeCee’s untimely demise was something so many of us saw coming. Who here didn’t scoff just a little this past spring, when he told us all about his trip to Flushing? “Everything will be different after this!” he told us. And we just let him go. He’s had these flights of fancy time and time again. Crisis after Crisis, did we not keep supporting him? He’s always bounced back stronger, we told ourselves. And sure, this trip didn’t sound like anything we hadn’t heard him rant about before. Time travel? Alternate futures? It’s all old-hat for DeeCee. Who would guess though that in a single splash, he would be forever lost to us all. Who among us today thought his last words were anything more than the usual hyperbole DeeCee was known for using?

But I digress. Today’s service isn’t meant to wallow in the demise of our cherished friend. DeeCee would want us to look to the future, as he always had. Most importantly, he would want us to acknowledge his biggest legacy, his son, DeeCee Jr.

Junior is just a week old, and it will be a challenge for him to live, thrive, and survive in these tough times. DeeCee’s legacy will live on in Junior. Though his first steps seem to have stumbled, let us all here in attendance support him here in his infancy. He has the world at his fingertips, and his potential is limitless. May he be inspired by the past, but now wallow in it. May he grow into his own man over time. Let the world adopt him with new eyes and old hearts. For within his gleaming eyes are infinite worlds of infinite possibilities.

Let us now rise, as DeeCee’s charred, limp, decimated body is lowered into the ground. Amen.

SUNDAY: John Ostrander

COMING SOON FROM ALTUS PRESS-

One of the most beloved pulp characters, The Black Bat, is finally

celebrated with this 340 page deluxe retrospective. Author Tom Johnson
has indexed each issue, listing everything you need to know about the series, along with the following highlights:
• a complete reprint of the rejected Black Bat adventure, “The Lady’s
Out for Blood”
• a breakdown of the newly-discovered final Black Bat story, “The
Celebrity Murders”
• all 800 German Black Bat stories newly identified for the English audience
• Nine complete reprints of the Black Bat’s golden Age comic book stories
• An interview with series creator Norman Daniels as well as his
complete payment records… available here for the first time
Featuring additional articles by Will Murray, this is the ultimate
history of the series.

340 pages | $29.95 softcover | $39.95 hardcover

In response to requests since ALL PULP started as well as the posting of the great piece you’re about to read today, ALL PULP is kicking off a new column (logo to come soon) !  NUTS AND BULLETS will feature articles from creators and publishers of New Pulp and will focus on the process of putting out Pulp today.   It will err on the technical side of things, how to format, how to develop a character, how to establish pacing, how to write a back cover blurb…and as for the inaugural entry, How to Build a Pulp Cover.   New Pulp creator and Airship 27 Publisher Ron Fortier shares with ALL PULP a fantastic process for creating and designing modern Pulp covers.  Enjoy NUTS AND BULLETS and expect more helpful hints to come!

Greetings. This week we are going to do something we’ve done several times before on my Flight Log  that many of you have enjoyed a great deal; show how we put together one of our Airship 27 Productions pulp covers. Step by step you’ll see our planning and how we helped our artist execute the final image for a book now going into final production.

Earlier in the year one of our regular writers, Joshua Reynolds had submitted a full length Jim Anthony Super Detective novel entitled MARK OF TERROR. It’s a great read and somewhere in the middle of the book there is an action sequence wherein Jim chases an assassin wearing a gargoyle mask out of a theater and onto a busy nighttime New York street. The killer jumps into a sedan driven by another mask wearing colleague and they peel away, only to have the Super Detective come charging off the sidewalk and leaping onto the top of the vehicle. As it careens wildly through the streets of Manhattan, the killer leans out the passenger window and attempts to shoot Anthony off the car. Upon reading this sequence in the book, we knew immediately it was what we wanted for our cover. Then came a stroke of real good fortune. Earlier in the year, we had the opportunity to meet several local artists who live here in Fort Collins. One of them is a truly talented young fellow named Jeff Herndon. When Jeff learned about Airship 27, he offered to paint a cover for us and we immediately recalled the that Jim Anthony book waiting in the wings.

Actor -Body Building Champ Steve Reeves

The first thing we did was explain the character to Jeff and told him our ideal image of the Super Detective was none other than the late body-builder turned actor, Steve Reeves, who made some classic Hercules movies back in the 1960s. We then sent Jeff half a dozen shots of Reeves we found on the internet like the one above. This was how we wanted our Jim Anthony to appear on the cover.

Cora, Alex and dad, Alan Posing for Action.

Next we explained in great detail to Jeff what action scene we wanted him to bring to life with his paints. To help him better visualize that dramatic moment in the book, one Sunday afternoon our son Alan and grand kids, Cora and Alex, allowed their granddad to photograph them on one of our cars in a set-up pose mirroring the action in the book. We took several photos from different positions. The one above was the one that best suited our needs and would help Jeff better mentally envision what we were after.

Old 1930s Sedan in New York City.

But a neighborhood street in modern day Fort Collins, Colorado bears no resemblance to a busy Manhattan downtown scene. So once again we headed for the internet and found a photo of a New York city street and another of a proper mid-1930s automobile. We sent these off to our Art Director Rob Davis and he photo-shopped them together into the above picture. Now Jeff could use these elements as the basis for his drawings and eventual painting.

Jeff Herndon’s Final Drawing.

Using all the various elements we had provided him with, along with our description of the action, Jeff then proceeded to whip up this amazing drawing. Note the moon in the background sky, indicative of how this was about to become a night time image. Once we gave him the thumbs up to commit to paints, he really went to town.

Completed Painted Cover

For the next few weeks Jeff worked diligently at bringing his drawing to full color life and he succeeded far beyond our wildest imagination. The night he sent us a jpg. image of the finished painting, Rob and the Air Chief were delighted. Now here was a truly dynamic pulp cover. There remained only one final step, for Rob to design the text and logos etc. to finish the entire cover. So inspired by the art Jeff had accomplished, Rob wasted no time in bringing this dazzling project to a proper conclusion.

COMING SOON!!

And above is the finished cover to what will be our 39th title – JIM ANTHONY – SUPER DETECTIVE – MARK OF TERROR by Joshua Reynolds, cover painting by Jeff Herndon, with nine terrific black and white interior illustrations by Isaac “Bobit” Nacilla and designs by Rob Davis. Currently the book is in the final stages of proofing and we hope to have it out within the next two weeks. Rest assured we will reprint that cover shot here when it is finally on sale. This is our third book in our Jim Anthony series and we are all damn proud of it.

Finally, the icing on the cake arrived only last week when we learned a local art gallery here in the Fort is launching a brand new show featuring ten local artist, one of which is Jeff. And most likely this painting will be on display there in Jeff’s collection. The show runs between 3 Sept and 5 Oct. and is located at the Rendition Gallery, 251 Jefferson St., Fort Collins, Co. Valerie and the Air Chief plan on attending opening night, we’ll bring our camera along to snap some shots of Jeff and his amazing work.

Someone does love fans of good Pulpy books.

Throughout the month of September, The University of Chicago Press is giving away the digital edition of The Score, the fifth book in Richard Stark’s ‘Parker’ series.

Stark’s ‘Parker’ has become an icon of action, violence, and crime fiction and has gained prominence in the last several months, due in part to graphic novel adaptations of the Stark works by Darwyn Cooke as well as renewed interest in the character as a film property.

Also currently available for an unknown length of time is the Edgar award winning comic crime novel ‘God Save the Mark.’ This book, hailed as one of the best blends of humor and crime to date, was written by Donald Westlake, the man who also wrote as Richard Stark.

Both books are available in Kindle format from Amazon. The epub edition of The Score can be had through Barnes & Noble, the PDF of The Score can be obtained from  U of C, and the epub edition of God Save the Mark is available via Copia.

This is the week when everything is supposed to change. The first of the New 52 comics is on the stands. Since better  folks than me are weighing in on the new stuff, I want to talk about what went right before.

Specifically, Flashpoint.

While I like team-up stories, I’m not a big fan of “After today, nothing will ever be the same again” hype. Not because I’m against change, but rather because change is constant. After every day, nothing is ever the same. In reality, this hype usually means a bunch of characters will be killed. Death is the substitute for drama in modern comics.

I didn’t like Supergirl’s death in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Kara has always been one of my favorite characters, even though she was rarely written well.  Her love interest was named Dick Malvern, for crying out loud, which I always understood to mean Bad Green Penis. I thought her death was a symbolic admission that the men who wrote comics at the time didn’t understand girls.

Ever since, there have been company-wide, month long crossovers where nothing will ever be the same. This year, the promise was backed up by 52 Number One issues that will be published the month after the crossover ends.

So what happened in Flashpoint? Damned if I know. As near as I can tell, it was a five-issue Bill & Ted adventure, except that instead of Bill and Ted remembering to travel back in time to leave themselves a note telling themselves what to do in the past, there was Flash, a Cosmic Treadmill, and no George Carlin. And a lot more carnage.

Why is this necessary? I mean, I actually enjoyed the Flashpoint mini-series, but they would have been just as satisfying as Elseworlds, and that would have allowed the creators to let loose even more. Is it really this complicated to jump through these hoops to wipe a slate clean?

Why can’t we just agree that the old continuity is gone, and get on with telling stories? And if, for whatever reason, some of these stories aren’t successful, why can’t we let a new creative team come in and start from scratch again?

When I first started writing comics, an editor (sorry, I forget who) told me that no one wanted to read comics written by someone’s mom. In this case, though, I think comics could certainly use someone who simply said, “Because I said so.”

Dominoed Dare-Doll Martha Thomases thinks there should be more George Carlin in comics, and everywhere else. Read her political stuff at michaeldavisworld.com every Saturday.

[[[Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land]]]
edited by Harvey Pekar & Paul Buhle with Hershl Hartman
Abrams Comicarts, 240 pages

It always seemed to me like mine was the last secular “Jewish generation” in America. Born in the mid-1950s, in the depths of Brooklyn in a neighborhood adjacent to the heavily Orthodox neighborhood of Crown Heights, surrounded on all sides by three generations of family, including grandparents and great-grandparents born in the old country, the entire world seemed Jewish. Even when my family moved (briefly) to West Virginia (population 5,000, only seven of which were Jews), then back to Brooklyn, to Canarsie and East Flatbush, the feeling of Jewishness never went away. The neighborhoods were now a mix of Irish, Italian, and Jewish, even a sprinkling of Afro-Americans, but when the family gathered, Yiddish was still spoken among the adults when the topic wasn’t fit for kinder, children. As a result, der kinder learned to understand, if not speak, just enough of the mamaloshen (the mother tongue) to get the gist of what we weren’t supposed to hear.

Popular entertainment was Jewish, too. The producers and writers behind many of the sitcoms were Jews and even if the characters weren’t Jewish (with the exception of The Goldbergs), the comedic sensibilities sure were. Ditto for the variety shows, where in addition to everything else, many of the hosts were Jewish as well. Milton Berle, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis (although not Dean Martin), Sid Caesar. Allan Sherman sold millions of comedy albums in the early-1960s with song parodies that were flavored by schmaltz (chicken fat). Today, when he’s remembered, he’s remembered for his (mostly) WASPy “Hello Mudder, Hello Faddah.” Song-writing in the mid-20^th century was so Jewish that according to ASCAP’s list of the top twenty-five most popular Christmas songs, twelve were written by Jews.

Even the Italians were Jewish in Hollywood. In The Detective, a 1968 mystery starring Frank Sinatra, Jack Klugman co-stars as one of Frank’s police colleagues who has a brief exchange with his wife in the sing-song cadence of Yiddish about whether or not he wants her to make him a “nice glass tea.” My great-grandmother drank hot tea out of a glass (never a mug), sweetening it with a cube of sugar between her teeth as she sipped.

Jewishness, if not Judaism, was everywhere. Hollywood is still a Jewish town, but the entertainment it now produces is far less so. Even the language of the Jews, Yiddish, has become somewhat catholic in appeal; every schmuck on the street thinks he’s a big macher because he knows a bissel Yiddish. And as the Jews have long known, there’s really nothing like Yiddish to make a point. As Neal Gabler (author of the excellent An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood) says in his introduction to Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular & The New Land, “Yiddish is the most onomatopoeic language ever created. Everything sounds exactly the way it should: macher for a self-appointed big shot, shlmiel for the fellow who spills the soup and shlmazel for the hapless one (as in “poor shmuck”), shnorrer for a freeloader, nudnick for a pest. The expressiveness is bound into the language, and so is a kind of ruthless honesty….Yiddish has dozens of words for imbecile, a tribute to Jewish lucklessness…. There is no decorousness in Yiddish, nor much romance. It is raw, egalitarian, vernacular.”

Yiddish is an “amalgamated language, borrowing freely from German and Polish and Hebrew with its own unique constructions and confabulations,” and the people who speak it are the Yiddishkeit, or the Yiddish culture…although as Gabler points out, what the word encompasses is “so large, expansive, and woolly a concept that culture may be too narrow to do it full justice. ‘Jewish sensibility’ comes closer,” but, in the end, “You can’t define Yiddishkeit neatly in words and pictures. You sort of have to feel it by wading into it.” (more…)

(Editor’s note: Obviously, this column was written before Hurricane Irene hit the Atlantic Northeast. This was very smart on the author’s part, as nobody knew if he’d have power to write and send it until it could have been too late. Thanks for the foresight, Denny!)

If superheroes existed, they’d be near Cape Hatteras, where Hurricane Irene is expected tomorrow, or maybe here, where big wind is expected Saturday or Sunday. Or they’d be monsters.

I lived through a hurricane in 1963, aboard the USS Lake Champlain – petite as aircraft carriers go, about the size of a small village, but huge among ordinary watercraft. We were in the Caribbean, reasonably safe because something as massive as a carrier probably won’t capsize, but making our way along decks that were constantly swaying. Once, I stuck my head outside a port and looked at the huge waves breaking over the flat bow of the ship and thought, well if I wasn’t a believer before…

Our pilots spent the next few days flying rescue missions to and from Haiti and I got a story or two to tell.

And last May, in Missouri, we were close to a tornado that passed within a mile of our hotel. The next morning we drove through the area, where Marifran grew up, past the spot on the curb where we sat in my father’s station wagon after a movie and pizza, good Catholic kids doing nothing more than lingering. Mari’s childhood home was intact, but the garage in the back yard was flattened. That’s how it was in Ferguson, Missouri that May morning: normal plots of suburbia punctuated with devastation.

And what will happen to Nyack, New York tomorrow or the day after?

Superheroes, I think, come from the same place as deities and good luck charms, They represent something greater than our frail and frightened selves, something bigger and stronger and vastly benevolent that will shield us from the cruelties we thrust upon us by ill fate, cruelties that may be edging toward Nyack from the south and may soon ravage us. They don’t exist, these superheroes, but evolution has gifted and cursed us with imagination, and maybe we can be comforted by pretending that they do.

We’ve done some preparing, and may do more. But I remember those waves crashing onto the carrier deck and I doubt that our paltry efforts will be able to affect the results of the storm.

What I want is a superman to protect me, or at least a father’s hand to hold. But supermen aren’t real and my father has been dead for years.

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases