Fifteen years after MAD ABOUT YOU, Paul Reiser returns to the NBC comedy line-up with a different twist on reality – his reality. Paul explains it all plus we get news in Bradley Cooper as The Crow and Batman on stage!

Have you seen Paul’s new show?   Drop us a comment below!

 THE FAMILY MYSTERY-PART TWO

First, I shared the story of the world of THE FAMILY MYSTERY….If you missed that, go back a post or two and read the ILB before this.   Now, let’s meet the family, shall we?

DOCTOR DILLON ‘DOC’ DENTSON-A shy retiring research scientist who works in his home laboratory for an up and coming scientific facility, Doc Dentson enjoys watering his lawn and barbecuing steaks on the weekends and has enjoyed that since the end of World War Two, a war that he participated in in some mysterious capacity.  Anyone who knows Doc would say that he’s quiet, cheerful, and is happier nowhere than in his own home.

Those people don’t know Doc very well. 

Over at Making Light, former Valiant Comics editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden started a thread on trying to explain marketing categories in publishing, and how they’re not solely determined by the content:

Say your book features a strange and powerful device, the Transnistrian Infundibulator:

If the storyline is about the inception, interim difficulties, and eventual happy resolution of the relationship between the inventor of the Transnistrian Infundibulator and some nice young woman, it’s a romance.

If he’s a scholar studying the Transnistrian Infundibulator, she’s a governess, and his best fossil specimen of T. infundibulator falls out of his pocket during a reception at Almack’s, it’s a regency.

If one or both of them is not 100% human, they meet cute while fighting off spooky badguys, and the Transnistrian Infundibulator is an ancient magical artifact they use to defeat said badguys, it’s a paranormal romance.

If she’s his lab assistant, he thinks she looks hot in goggles and a tool belt, and the Transnistrian Infundibulator is a huge rivet-intensive steam-driven mechanical wombat, it’s steampunk.

If the Transnistrian Infundibulator is magic, but instead of working like a handheld appliance, it generates profound and numinous changes that affect the world as a whole, it’s probably fantasy.

And the discussion took off from there.

Farther down the list of comments, I added:

If you actually see what the Transnistrian Infundibulator looks like in the book twice, it’s comics.

If it also has a spine, it’s a graphic novel.

But it occurs to me that we should be much more precise in trying to decide comics categories. For starters:

If the Transnistrian Infundibulator awakens a long sleeping creature the size of an elementary school that speaks perfect if grandiose English, it’s a Marvel monster comic from the late 50s.

And so I throw the floor open to you. Have at it.

This is going to be one of those rapid fire Tommygun columns for ILB today.   Got a lot going on, but had this idea that I know I’m not likely to get to anytime soon and that just won’t leave me alone.   Now, of course, all the usual copyright stuff applies..this is my idea and all that as of today, so if you want to write it, then holler at me and we’ll discuss details.  This idea has enough legs that once the deluge I’m currently suffering under passes, I will probably pick up and do something with unless someone’s already gotten me to agree to let them have it:)

THE FAMILY MYSTERY
Although the time frame for this idea could be changed, my thought right now is that this is set in the late 1940s-early to mid 1950s.  It centers around a family, the Dentsons.  The five members of the Dentson family are your stereotypical Father Knows Best TV Family on the surface, but they share something other than DNA and a last name.

They share a secret identity.

In the metropolitan city the Dentsons live in, there is a problem.  A major problem.  And that is crime. Crime runs rampant, everything from street level muggings to maniacal super geniuses hellbent on world domination.  Although others in the past have stood against the rising tide, those myths and legends, the handful there were, hung up their masks or faded away following the Second World War.  But another stepped up to fill the void.  One who seemed to be everywhere at once, to know everything, to even master a variety of skills no one person could master, including changing physical size and appearance tor almost any situation.  This hero, this bastion of justice and truth, wraps himself in the shadows of the city he swears to protect.  Cloaked, masked, hidden from view, THE MYSTERY does all one man can do to protect the decent denizens of his city.

Of course, it’s easier when THE MYSTERY is really five people…Meet the Dentsons!

OK, looks like this will be a two part column!  For character descriptions of the Dentsons and some of the other principals, tune back to ALL PULP this weekend as I’ll be finishing this up from WINDY CITY!