New Pulp creators, Martin Powell (writer) and Nik Poliwko (artist) bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The War Chief to the internet. The first strip is now live.
Tune in now for the start of a new weekly comic strip based upon Edgar Rice Burroughs’ historical novel of life and death during the final days of the Apache Wars. It is the fascinating adventure of Shoz-Dijiji, born as Andy MacDuff, and raised as a proud Apache. An honest and sympathetic portrait of Native Americans, ERB drew from his real experience living among them during his early years before becoming the world’s best-selling author. Burroughs himself considered THE WAR CHIEF his best and personally favorite novel among his nearly one hundred books.
Art: Nik Poliwko
Also Featuring the All New Weekly Comic Strips: TARZAN OF THE APES™ by Roy Thomas and Tom Grindberg CARSON OF VENUS™ by Martin Powell, Thomas Floyd, and Diana Leto THE ETERNAL SAVAGE™ by Martin Powell and Steven E Gordon THE CAVE GIRL™ by Martin Powell and Diana Leto — Starting in July!
The Silver Six By AJ Lieberman & Darren Rawlings Scholastic Graphix, 188 pages, $10.99
There’s a refreshing breathlessness to the action in The Silver Six, a brand new graphic novel being released on Tuesday. Set in a bleak future, humanity has apparently paved over the planet and has to survive in domed cities to breathe. Classes take field trips to the nearby corner where a tiny square of parkland, complete with a single tree, is an object of fascination. It’s a harsh and brutal form of survival given that the planet’s energy needs are seemingly handled solely by Craven Industries. They supply something called Hydro-2 and as long as they control this supply, they seemingly work above the law.
So does Phoebe Hemingway, a 12 year old whose parents died on a shuttle accident a year previously. She and her robot Max have been dodging revealing her true existence until social services finally catch up with her. Placed in an orphanage, Phoebe encounters five others and forms a fast friendship with them as if fate brought them together. As the story unfolds, that’s exactly the case as we learn each holds an identical document signed the day before their parents all died on the shuttle. Embedded in each document is a piece of a tiny electronic memory that needs to be pieced together so the kids can learn what really happened to their parents.
Meantime, old man Craven has dispatched Sam to retrieve Phoebe’s document, beginning a game of cat and mouse that drives most of the action. Once the running starts, they make it from the orphanage to a spacecraft to a moon and back again. Along the way, there’s some entertaining banter, some heroic acts, and an awfully lot of rushing around. Lieberman, best remembered for a run on Batman comics a decade or so back, keeps things moving so quickly that his target readers, 8-12 year olds, will turn the pages never stopping to question how 12 year olds know how to pilot spaceships and build robots.
Teachers will love this for its themes of friendship and family, heroic sacrifice and so on. There’s a large dollop of technical know-how tossed in yet we never see the kids actually taught any of this. Instead, the orphanage facility’s teacher is unintentionally misinforming the kids thanks to a Craven-supplied text.
Lieberman doesn’t do enough to make the six characters distinct and Darren Rawlings’ art style makes them appear 8 years old, not 12. Still his drawing is clear and imaginative with good color, which makes sense given his experience at Big Studios.
As an introduction to young adult science fiction or comics, this works just fine. It’s not the most original story and the plotting gets muddled halfway through, but the readers won’t notice, captivated by relatable, plucky characters.
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News Roundup – including an uncomfortably large number of articles dealing with bias, racism, harassment and BS that just has got to stop!, Time Machine roundup of the week’s most popular posts, and Mark A. Garlick’s artwork featured in this week’s IAAA Gallery.
This is what a deadline looks like on writer’s block.
Nothin’. I got nothin’. Lots of stuff has happened this week, lots of stuff happened in the pop arts, there are sure to be lots of topics from which to choose, something must interest me enough to blather about for the length of a column aaaaaaand
. . .nope. Brain’s not interested in any of them.
I finally went to see Man of Steel. There’s sure to be a column in that. What I thought of it, good bad or indifferent. Except that everyone has commented on it. Martha Thomases has commented twice and done it well both times. I’ve been lapped in Superman commentary by Martha Thomases. The film dropped 60% in attendees between the first and second weekends. Everyone who wants to see it already has and have their own opinions. A review on Man of Steel at this point is lame. Superman is dead. Even my brain doesn’t want to go there.
I got nothin’.
Hey, I’m a professional writer. I’ve encountered brain freeze and deadlines before. I know tricks and ways around writer’s block. One is to stop staring at the blank screen and go do something else.
Okay. Did something else. Aaaaaand. . .more nothing.
Distract yourself, John. Go on Facebook. Read what other people are saying, doing with their lives. Share funny things on your wall. Go do that.
Did that. FB bores me. It’s fifteen minutes later and I still have plenty of nothin’. And I’m slipping past deadline now.
I’m tired. That’s what it is. Go take a nap. That’ll do it.
No, it didn’t. A half hour shot and . . .
AAAAARGH! I can’t write I never could write why did I decide to be a writer?! The screen is still blank. Hungry. Demanding. Intimidating. Whatever made me think I could be a writer?
Oh, that’s right. Mike Gold offered me money. Curse you, money, you evil temptress! Why couldn’t I have remained as I was – an unemployed professional actor working part-time straight jobs to cover the rent? I was happier then.
No, I wasn’t. I’ve obviously gone around the bend. I’m hallucinating about the “good ol’ days” that were never really that good.
I’ll distract myself. Go play with the cats. Here, kitty kitty kitty.
Two minutes later. They’re bored and abandon me to my deadlines. Wretched felines. Can cats smell loser on you?
Play a game online. I often do that to cleanse my mental palate, get my concentration up and the brain cells energized. At least, that’s always been my justification. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Go play a game.
Did that, just came back, and. . .I got nothin’. It’s just later in the day.
I went and washed dishes. That’s how desperate I am. It might work. Put my mind in zen mode and something will come out.
It didn’t work.
Stupid Computer! You know how I write! Why can’t I bring up an app or something and you write my column?!
Wait. There’s an idea. When musicians reach a certain age and don’t have anything new to do, they put out a Greatest Hits collection. Maybe I could do that. Just go back over some of my past columns and pull out random lines and string them together and see what happens.
Godfather II deepened and expanded on the first film; Godfather III – not so much. Any list of faves, yours, mine, or the guy down the street, says something about us. What I want is something new. As I said, Pamela Lee Anderson starred in the movie and I lingered, waiting to see if she would take off her clothes which is the main reason for any guy to watch a Pamela Lee Anderson movie. Mitt Romney wants to deep fry Big Bird.
Okay, that’s not going to work, either. Maybe interesting as a paragraph but a whole column of that? I don’t think so.
Maaaaybe I could write a column on what it’s like having to write a column when you have writer’s block and the deadline is upon you.
I freely admit a bias. DC’s animated efforts have always trumped Marvel’s. Always. Super Friends smacked Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends two ways from Sunday. And for every great episode of the 90’s X-Men or Spider-Man there were two Batman or Superman: The Animated Adventures. And sure, Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and the Sensational Spider-Man were brilliant, but they don’t belong in the same breath as Justice League Unlimited and Batman Beyond.
At present moment the only animated war (and it’s a weak one at that…) that may be around is Ultimate Spider-Man against Teen Titans Go! Both are meant to skew young. But only one of them is doing it right. I’ll give you half a guess – it’s Teen Titans Go!
In the simplest of terms, Ultimate Spider-Man ultimately sucks. And that hurts to say, because my personal lord and savior Paul Dini, is a creative consultant. The show is a schizophrenic attempt at making Spider-Man for a new generation. This is after the way-better-written Sensational Spider-Man, mind you. Every single trope a cartoon can use to wave the white flag of “love me!” is plastered throughout the show. A misfit team of B and C listers meant to accompany the star? Check. Family Guy style cutaway gags every few minutes? Check. Frequent guest stars to make you forget there’s no character development? Ch-ch-check. In all the episodes I’ve sat through, the only thread that connects them all is the desperation that oozes from the pores. Here is a series that reeks of plot by committee that does anything short of shuckin’ and jivin’ in order to grab the kiddies’ attention.
On the other hand, Teen Titans Go! seems to suffer from none of this. An oddly post-modern retread of its former self, TTG takes the titular titans of 2003, and re-imagines them in kawaii form. This super deformed (more cartoony, if such a term could ever be applied to a cartoon) Titans show plays towards the micro-sized popular companion toons like Regular Show or Adventure Time. With no serious episodes to be had, TTG is a show hellbent on solely being entertaining. No secret machinations present. Where USM seeks to birth a brand new Marvel Animated Universe™, TTG seeks only to get some laughs. I should note in the wake of the cancelation of Green Lantern: the Animated Series and Young Justice I was apt to be cranky with whatever replaced them. It took literally two minutes of TTG to crack my grimace.
Normally I’m a bit more verbose, but the proof is in the pudding. As it stands, Marvel continues down a terrible path, choosing to aim at any market that will have them. DC continues to allow their creative teams to explore, experiment, and ultimately (heh) aim their cartoons with laser focus. Combine that with their continued brilliant voice casting, and smart writing? You get, more often than not, a superior product.
The studio mogul-turned-producer, blocked from working on the set, nonetheless scored a Kryptonite-proof check thanks to Hollywood’s early adopter system.
New Pulp publisher Planetary Stories released their 28th free on-line issue. You can find it here.
This issue features new Planetary Stories authors, including “Incident on Titus Thirteen,” a great mix of Space Opera, action and humor, by J Eckert Lytle and “Krax Delivered“, action-packed Space Opera by Joel Zartman. Plus tons more!
Starting June 29th, writer Martin Powell and artist Nik Poliwko bring Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The War Chief to life in a new webstrip from Edgar Rice Burroughs Comics.
For only $1.99 per month you can subscribe to Edgar Rice Burroughs comics, featuring these All New Weekly Comic Strips: TARZAN OF THE APES™ by Roy Thomas and Tom Grindberg CARSON OF VENUS™ by Martin Powell, Thomas Floyd, and Diana Leto THE ETERNAL SAVAGE™ by Martin Powell and Steven E Gordon THE CAVE GIRL™ by Martin Powell and Diana Leto — COMING IN JULY!
New Pulp Publisher Airship 27 Productions shared the above image on their Facebook page. Ravenwood – Stepson of Mystery, faces off against an eight foot robot in his newest adventure by Janet Harriett appearing soon in his second anthology collection now in production.
