This weekend the science fiction thriller, IN TIME, opened in theaters. Is is really LOGANS RUN redone? Star Justin Timberlake says NO and explains it why right here – plus remember WILD CARDS? It might be coming to a theater near you!
Amazing Stories Project Announces Editorial Advisory Board; Commissions Cover Art
Hillsboro, NH 10/21/11 – Steve Davidson (Crotchety Old Fan) who recently acquired the Trademarks for Amazing Stories, has announced the creation of an Editorial Advisory Board to assist in the re-launch of the world’s first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories.
Currently serving on the board in a voluntary capacity are four former editors of Amazing Stories – Barry Malzberg, Patrick L. Price, Ted White and Joseph Wrzos (who edited under the pen name Joseph Ross). Their tenures as editors of Amazing Stories spans nearly three decades and includes some of the most volatile, challenging and innovative periods in the magazine’s history.
Each of the board members has made important contributions to the genre, servingvariously as authors, agents, editors, collectors and historians. Their combined experience with the genre provides the Amazing Stories project with access to an unparalleled wealth of information.
Steve has also commissioned Frank Wu, multiple Hugo Award winning artist, to create a re-imagining of Frank R. Paul’s inaugural cover illustration for the magazine. The cover art will be made available on a variety of different media and will be used as a fund raising and promotional vehicle.
Additional details about the Amazing Stories project can be found in Steve Davidson’s monthly column on the review blog Grasping for the Wind (10/21/11)
Those interested in following the project can visit the magazine’s website atAmazing Stories Mag (sign up for a newsletter is available there) and on itsFacebook page.
Steve Davidson is a science fiction fan, blogger, curator of the Classic Science Fiction Channel website, author of several paintball books and currently edits the news and information website for paintball – 68Caliber. He made application for the Amazing Stories trademarks in 2008 and was granted the marks in September 2011.
About Lance Star: Sky Ranger “One Shot!” November, 1941. Ace Air Adventurer Lance Star accepts a dangerous mission into an enemy stronghold to stop the Nazi’s from uncovering plans for a weapon long believed destroyed. Lance flies a solo mission to Kiev where he is to plant explosives and destroy a weapons facility when he runs into an old enemy. Now, Lance is faced with a choice. Complete the mission? Or take down the Sky Ranger’s greatest adversary? He’s only going to get one shot at this. Will he choose the mission or revenge?
Featuring high-flying adventure, aerial dog fights, explosive action, and stunning artwork, Lance Star: Sky Ranger “One Shot!” is pure pulp fun from start to finish.
Lance Star: Sky Ranger “One Shot!” Written by Bobby Nash Art/Letters/Colors by James Burns 28 page DriveThru Comics Digital Edition $1.50
With e-books now making up about 20 percent of sales for many big publishers, it’s essential for bestseller lists to include them in order to give an accurate picture of what is selling. The Wall Street Journal will start running e-book bestseller lists starting this weekend, following a move by the New York Times earlier this year and USA Today in 2009. But there is something unique about the WSJ‘s e-book lists: They are powered by Nielsen BookScan, which has not publicly tracked e-book sales until now. Nielsen BookScan tracks print book sales, and is believed to cover about 75 percent of hardcover and paperback sales. The company had said earlier this year that it would begin tracking e-book sales at some point.
The WSJ is running four lists: “Combined e-book and physical sales for fiction and nonfiction, and e-sales only for fiction and nonfiction. Eligible releases will include self-published books, children’s books and ‘perennials,’ older works that continue to sell strongly.”
So in a very short time, BookScan will have data on electronic sales. The next question: will E-Comics sales be included in Bookscan numbers? If so, when? Will it include individual pamphlet sales, or will it only be for graphic novels? And will Comixology and Graphicly share their data with Bookscan? (Can they? Comixology has already said that various non-disclosure agreements are in place with publishers that have prevented them from releasing sales figures.)
This has been one of the biggest blind spots in the comics industry in the last year— with all of the digital initiatives that have been undertaken, we have no idea how they’ve been selling or changing the marketplace in general. If we’re going to have any idea where the comics medium is heading, we need this data.
HOLMES INC. is the brainchild of Toronto comic book impresario Ty Templeton, instructor at the Toronto Cartoonists Workshop, a training ground for up-and-coming writers and artists. Contributors to the comic are students and alumni of the TCW, many of whom are graduates of Ty’s famous Comic Book Bootcamp. With this project they’ve put to work what they’ve learned at the TCW to show off their skills, and created a great comic in the process.
Cover: Leonard Kirk
The stories in Holmes Inc. feature the descendants of the Holmes and Watson families, in the present day. Throughout the many decades since the Master Detective died in 1935, the descendants of Sherlock, Mycroft, and Watson have managed to keep their family together for generations, serving King, Queen, and country for nearly a century, as the agents of HOLMES INC.
Digital Copies of Holmes Incorporated are available for FREE DOWNLOAD at the following sites: Drive Thru Comics, The Illustrated Section, My Digital Comics, and Graphic.ly. You can find links to each at http://holmesinccomic.wordpress.com/buy.
Print copies of the 52-page Holmes Incorporated #1 are currently $5.95 per copy. Print copies of the 80-page Holmes Incorporated #2 are $6.95 per copy and can be ordered through PayPal. For single issue sales please send $5.95 (#1) or $6.95 (#2) plus appropriate postage (see below) to info@cartoonistsworkshop.com. Postal rates are $2.00 within Canada, $3.50 to the U.S. and $7.00 to Europe. Please contact Sean Menard at info@cartoonistsworkshop.com for postage quotes on multiple copies.
The patron comic book of Monday Mix-Up has always been The Brave And The Bold, a comic book that delighted in mashing up weird combinations of characters, usually Batman with characters that made almost no sense to combine with, like Deadman, Kamandi, Jonah Hex, Sgt. Rock, Adam Strange, Lois Lane, Scalphunter, the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Unknown Soldier, the Guardians of the Universe, the Joker, R’as al Ghul, and the House of Mystery. This tradition has been carried on in the TV series [[[Batman: The Brave And The Bold]]], which has included many of those combinations and added Space Ghost to boot.
But for some, those combinations just aren’t going far enough. For those, we present The Brave And The Bold: The Lost Issues. Now you can find the missing team-ups with Batman and Jack Bauer, Iron Man 2020, Spider-Man 2099, Harvey Birdman, Groo, Galactus, Dirty Harry, Darth Vader, and Adam West.
Not to be outdone, if you delve into the archives you can also find all the missing Marvel Two-In-One issues where the Thing meets Young Justice, Vampirella, Wallace & Gromit, Tintin, the Warlord, Snoopy, the Spirit, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Walking Dead, and Thing #2 and Thing #1.
Outside my window it’s January in October; the snow is falling in thick full flakes, the wind is howling, and the steam radiator is hissing and spitting heat while I write this. I just finished watching Captain America: The First Avenger. The perfect movie for a day like a day like this, when I’m all warm and cozy inside while a little Ice Age is raging on the other side of my window.
It’s a really great movie, totally true to its comic book roots, and yet with just enough of an underpinning of truth that enables – for me, at least – a total suspension of disbelief. I haven’t felt this way about a super-hero movie since I first saw Superman. Yeah, I dug Batman Begins and Dark Knight and I’m looking forward to The Dark Knight Rises. And I liked the X-Men movies, even though they were all about Wolverine – hell, the guy even makes a quick cameo (brilliantly done and totally in character) in X-Men: First Class; but Superman and Captain America are movies that leave me walking on air and just full of joi de vivre.
So much of the credit, like 99% of it, goes to Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of Superman, and I think, in the same way, 99% of the credit for the success of Captain America goes to Chris Evans. They both really get it. They get that these characters are representations of, characterizations of – no, the embodiment of the American dream, the American ideal, the “gee whiz, this is the best country in the whole world, and I am one damn lucky fellow to be living in it” experience.
When suits at Marvel made the decision a few years ago to kill Captain America, I was so upset. Honestly – and I mean this in the best possible way – it was for me as if Christopher Reeve had just died all over again. Reeves had proved himself a true Superman, a true American hero, in so many ways; and his death was, for me, an end of an era. And then, a few years later, and all for the sake of $$$, for publicity, Cap is dead. And I felt like – well, let me put it as succinctly as I can:
This country is fucked.
In 1957, Elia Kazan directed A Face In The Crowd. Starring Andy Griffith in his film debut, it’s the story of Lonesome Rhodes, a hard-drinking country-western singer pulled out of obscurity and given his own radio show by talent scout Patricia Neal. His “down-home” philosophical spiels soon lead to his own television show, leading to worshipful fans, drooling sponsors with money, and political influence. Now drunk on power instead of alcohol, Rhodes is a manipulator of Machiavellian proportion. And although A Face In The Crowd was not considered a success during its theatre run, it has proven to be, as so many of Kazan’s movies were – prescient in its depiction of the overtaking by pop culture and big business of the American political system.
And now we have Herman Cain. Everybody knows him as “The Pizza King,” and who hasn’t seen his “Imagine There’s No Pizza” performance? (John Lennon must be rolling over in his grave. Yoko, can’t you sue him or something?) But did you know that he’s also a gospel singer, and performed on the 13-track album Sunday Morning released by Selah Sound Production & Melodic Praise Records in 1996? Did you know that he writes an op-ed column that is syndicated by the North Star Writers Group to over 50 newspapers? Did you know that he has written numerous books – Leadershipis Common Sense; Speak as a Leader; CEO of SELF; They Think You’re Stupid – and that the latest, This is Herman Cain: My Journey to the White House, is on the bookshelves now, and that he is not only campaigning, but on a national book tour as we speak? And did you know that, until he formally announced his candidacy, he hosted The Herman Cain Show on WSB-AM in Atlanta? Lonesome Rhodes, you’ve met your match!
So is he just a huckster peddling his wares? Well, let’s see. Did you know that Cain was on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve in Kansas City? And that he was the chairman of the Omaha branch? (It’s not surprising that Fox News never reports on that, since the Fed is one of the big bad bogeymen under attack by the Repugnanticans.) And that he sat on the boards of some of America’s biggest corporations, including Nabisco and Whirlpool?
So he ain’t just a huckster, he’s a corporate toady and a bankster too! (Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Together, are you listening?)
And since 2005, and ending when he announced his candidacy, Herman Cain worked for Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a right-wing political action committee (PAC). You know who funds AFP? The Koch brothers!!!! You know who’s Cain’s campaign manager? Mark Block, his co-worker at AFP. You know Cain’s senior economic adviser, Richard Lowrie, he of the totally huckster 9-9-9 tax plan? Guess where he met Cain? Yep. Lowrie sat on the AFP board of directors until Cain announced his candidacy.
Yeah, good ol’ Herman Cain. He’s just a regular old joe. A face in the crowd.
Watching Shane now.
Come back, Cap. Cap. Cap, come back. Come back, Cap! Caaaaaaap!!!!!!!
Treacherous mermaids in the Sargasso Sea, mysterious death in Accra, an alien race beneath Mombasa and Voudou sorcery in Haiti? All this and more inside…. Jungle Jim is a bimonthly African pulp fiction magazine featuring genre-based writing from all over Africa. This inaugural issue contains three stories and the first part (in a series) of The White Darkness – a real-life account of cult film-maker Richard Stanley’s extraordinary experiences in Haiti as recorded in his private diaries while filming a documentary on Voudou for the BBC. Issues 1 – 5 are now available on Kindle through Amazon UK. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jungle-African-Pulp-Fiction-ebook/dp/B0055SW5NW/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1309464363&sr=8-10
Win Scott Eckert announced on his blog [http://woldnewton.blogspot.com] that a German translation of Philip Jose Farmer’s classic Sherlock Holmes-Lord Greystoke pastiche The Peerless Peer will appear in 2012 from publisher Atlantis Verlag.
For whatever reason, my kids didn’t want to see Cars and we even missed it on cable and home video. When word spread that it was good but not Pixar’s best feature, there wasn’t a lot of desire among the family to check it out. The same feeling arrived this June when the inevitable sequel, spurred by enough box office revenues and massive merchandise success, arrived. We empty-nesters just couldn’t muster the desire to go see the film, despite an engaging trailer and a love for all things Pixar.
The home video release of the movie this coming week remedied this void in my Pixar knowledge. The movie is entertaining enough, moving at, appropriately enough, a racing clip; it reintroduces the established characters, moves them to a new setting and gives audiences (and merchandisers) some new players. Hilarity ensues for 106 minutes and the film itself is entertaining but it felt cookie cutter in its approach with little in the way of either heart or surprise. Where I found Up too implausible to make me suspend my disbelief, this felt far more like pure kiddie fare than the usual family friendly feature that offers something for everyone.
I suppose the espionage angle was for the adults in the crowd and yes, Michael Caine was a perfect choice for the automotive version of James Bond. Still, it felt unnecessarily tacked on, although his contrast with Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) was a nice idea. Mater is a supporting character uncomfortably thrust into the spotlight and much like a television sitcom spinoff written around a supporting character (Joey anyone?), Mater just isn’t a strong enough personality to handle the lead.
