100 years ago today, Mary Blair, an artist whose unique style was immortalized in classic Walt Disney films of the 1940s and 50s and theme parks, was born in McAlester, Oklahoma.
She was best known for the artwork she contributed to animations including Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Cinderella, and the look for It’s A Small World at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and later appeared in all Disney theme parks. Several of her illustrated children’s books from the 1950s remain in print, such as [[[I Can Fly]]].
To celebrate her birthday and influential art style, Google has given her a Google Doodle, which we show you here. If you want to know more about her, her nieces have put together a web site, or you can try and find the book [[[The Art and Flair of Mary Blair]]].
Now if only I can get the music from It’s A Small World out of my head…
Airship 27 Productions and Cornerstone Book Publishers are excited to announce the release of their third Jim Anthony Super Detective book, a full length novel, THE MARK OF TERROR.
From the early days of his crime fighting career, comes this brand new adventure of the man known as Jim Anthony; Super Detective. Half Irish, half Comanche and All American, Jim Anthony finds himself caught up in a world-wide conspiracy of murder and carnage as two ancient Greek cults square off against each other in modern times; each vying for world dominance over the other.
When several of New York’s leading business men suddenly go insane and begin committing suicide, the police are baffled and reluctantly look to the Super Detective for help. Soon, with the aid of a renowned archeological historian and a spunky, fearless female reporter, Jim Anthony is quickly caught up in a mystery like no other he has ever faced before. With danger from deadly masked assassins at every turn, the famous adventurer’s own life is soon hanging in the balance as he becomes the primary target of both warring cults.
Acclaimed New Pulp scribe, Joshua Reynolds delivers a fast paced, non-stop action thriller that is pure pulp gold. “This is Reynold’s second Jim Anthony story for us,” reported Airship 27 Productions’ Managing Editor Ron Fortier. “It’s very clear in how well he writes this classic hero that he has a genuine affection for the character and that comes across on every page.” Accompanied by nine illustrations from artist Isaac Nacilla and a stunning cover by painter Jeff Herndon, with designs by Rob Davis, JIM ANTHONY – SUPER DETECTIVE – THE MARK OF TERROR is the latest in an on-going series of brand new Jim Anthony adventures.
Cornerstone Book Publishers also publishes Masonic and esoteric books, selected pulp fiction, art literature, limited children’s books, and poetry collections. For more information about Cornerstone, go to www.cornerstonepublishers.com.
Airship 27 packages and publishes anthologies and novels in the pulp magazine tradition. In addition to Weird Horror Tales, Weird Horror Tales: The Feasting, and Weird Horror Tales: Light’s End, Airship 27 has released Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, a series of “Captain Hazzard” pulp thrillers, more pulp fiction in The Green Lam,a and Secret Agent X. For more information on Airship 27, go to www.airship27.com.
AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTIONS – Pulp Fiction for a New Generation!
Math. Ugh. Hate it. Too real world for me. Unyielding, unforgiving, no sense of humor, and numbers don’t talk to me the way words do. My brain isn’t wired for it. However, numbers are a part of comics and comic book writing.
Certainly there are the important numbers regarding sales, but they also figure into telling a story. Let’s go through some of them. First number: the number of pages. Right now, your monthly comic book is 22 pages long. Let’s say you’ve been asked to do a fill-in story or a complete in one story for a given book. There are certain space limitations you need to take into account.
How many panels are in a page? Well, your first page is usually the splash page which means one big panel. This page also usually has the title of the story and the credits box for the creators. Here’s some rules of thumb for the other pages: when there’s a lot of action, you use fewer panels per page. If it’s a talk scene, you can have more. I generally figure that it will average out to five panels a page. The splash page is one panel so you have 21 pages times five panels. We do the match and the whole thing totals 106 panels in which to tell your story.
There are also limits to how much you can put in a panel. This includes speech balloons, thought balloons, captions, and sound effects, if you have them. You don’t want to crowd the art. I generally figure the limit of all of the above is three per panel.
Nor can you do that every single panel. If you do that, you have a wall of words and the reader usually will just ignore it and go on to the next page that hopefully has less verbiage. The exception to this rule is Brian Michael Bendis and, trust me, unless you are in fact Brian Michael Bendis, you’re not Brian Michael Bendis.
There are also limits to how much you can put into each word balloon, thought balloon, or caption. Again, I use a rule of thumb and it’s based on my font type and size. I tend to use Geneva 14 point (my eyes aren’t great and that’s what I can most easily see). So I figure the maximum is three typed lines per balloon or caption. Again, you can’t do that with every panel or you’ll wind up with the Wall of Words that gets ignored. Again, the Bendis Exception applies.
So, being generous, let’s say you average about 1.5 balloons/captions per panel. Do the math. If you have 106 panels per issue, that comes out to 159 balloons/captions with which to tell your story. That’s it. 21 pages, 106 panels, 159 balloons/captions in all. That’s plot, plot twists, characterization, theme, and snappy banter. Ladies and germs, that’s not a lot of space.
There’s a bit more math with telling a story as well. Each panel should have one clear definable action per panel. Batman leaps but he does not leap, land, spin, and hit the Joker in one panel. Asking your artist to draw that is grounds for justifiable homicide. I’m kidding. Your artist won’t kill you; he/she will simply ignore your instructions and find a way to make it work. But they will hate you… with justification.
You can have a secondary character do something in the panel as well but you can’t do that a lot unless your artist is George Pérez who will add more action if you haven’t. The Pérez Exception is the artist corollary to the Bendis Exception.
And you have to do all this without making it seem crowded or rushed.
That’s the mathematical reality to writing a single issue comic book, kids. If you’re doing an arc, then you multiply by the number of issues. The number of issues you’re allowed will depend on the price point (again, a number) the company figures the public will pay. It’s usually four or five issues. So, for an arc, you can multiply the above totals by those numbers. Still not a lot of space. Finally, there are deadlines, which are another set of numbers, namely the date by which it’s all due. Violate that at your peril.
And that, as our friends in the newspaper trade were wont to say, is -30-.
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.
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!!
Dark Horse Comics has announced a Jan. 25 release for King Conan: The Phoenix on the Sword #1. The next installment is written by Tim Truman, with art by Tomas Giorello.
About King Conan: The Phoenix on the Sword #1: “First hailing Conan as a liberator after he annihilated Aquilonia’s foes on the battlefield, common folk and politicians alike now rally to unseat the Cimmerian from his stolen throne. Conspirators plot to kill King Conan and take the crown for themselves, but their schemes pale in comparison to a terror waiting quietly in the wings — an enemy who has haunted Conan his whole adult life and whose wicked aspirations dwarf those of maneuvering politicians! It’s the return of Thoth-Amon!”
Prolific artist Will Meugniot has worked in comic book, animation, picture books, and more. All Pulp recently sat down with Will to talk about his career, his artistic influences, the differences between working in animation and comics, plus his pulp interests.
Click on the art for a larger view. AP: Tell us a little about yourself and your pulp interests.
WM: I grew up in the 60s. It was a great time to be a kid interested in adventure fiction. Marvel and DC’s superhero revivals spurred many other publishers to enter the field, so you never knew what great comics you’d find when they finally opened the bales at the grocery store.
N.E.D.O.R. Agents
A similar thing happened in paperback books. Ace discovered that some editions of certain Edgar Rice Burroughs books had fallen out of copyright, published them, and triggered a pulp revival, which brought everything from Otis Adelbert Kline to Doc Savage back into print.
Doc was my favorite of the pulp heroes, though I bought as many reprints of The Shadow, The Spider, Phantom Detective and Dusty Ayres as I could find and afford. Related to this, I’m also a big fan of the sound serials and have a collection of most of the non-westerns on DVD.
AP: What does pulp mean to you?
Spider-Man Unlimited Vulture
WM: It means stories which focus on fast paced action in exotic locales and feature larger than life heroes and villains. On a personal note, I grew up in a small farming town and yearned for a larger life full of adventure. The pulp heroes pointed the way, and while I’ve never taken down a globe conquering miscreant, I have had a few interesting overseas experiences in my travels as a producer/director. AP: When I think of Will Meugniot comics, I think of DNAgents (I’m proud to say I have the entire run) and FemForce. How did you get your start in comics and what is it that excites you about working in comics? WM: First, thanks for thinking of my comics! So much of my time has been tied up doing animation that I really haven’t done as many comics as I intended.
Tarzan. Dave Stevens inks
I first broke into the comics in the 1970s doing strips for undergrounds like The OK Comics tabloid and ‘ground level’ early direct sales books like Faeiry Star. My big break came when I sent Marvel a batch of sample pages featuring characters which didn’t have their own strips at the time: Guardians of the Galaxy, Ka-Zar, Nick Fury, and the one that paid off, Tigra. I did a couple of issues of that, then Marvel imploded and I was out, but fortunately, Tony Isabella showed Mark Evanier some of my uninked pencils. Based on them, Mark gave me work on the Tarzan and Korak comics he was editing for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. That lasted for almost a year, but Marvel took the Tarzan license and the ERB line was cancelled, which was what sent me into animation.
DNAgents
A few years later, my friend Dave Stevens came by the Marvel animation offices to score some free Xeroxes of his as yet unpublished Rocketeer. (Which was OK with the company, BTW – it was very ‘family’ oriented and Dave had worked for its previous incarnation, DePatie Freleng.) Dave told Rick Hoberg, Russ Heath and me about the new creator-owned comics movement, and got us excited by it. I phoned up Mark to see if he was interested, and that’s how DNAgents and the second phase of my comics career began. The things I love most about comics are the creative freedom, and the ability to do a piece of art which is identifiably your own. Animation requires you to blend into the style of the series, and by its nature results in work which is largely anonymous by design. I’m thankful and surprised that so many people recognize my work in that field.
Golden Girl
AP: I assume you get this question from time to time, but has there been any consideration of you and Mark Evanier doing more DNAgents stories?
WM: We’ve come close a few times, and I suspect we’ll do something with them in the next few years. Mark and I have stayed friends, but our careers have gone down different paths and it’s rare for us to have a big block of time free simultaneously.
I’m tightly booked for the next year or so with the N.E.D.O.R. Agents, a graphic novel of The Land That Time Forgot, Caspak (written by the great Martin Powell), and it looks like the pilot for an animated series I directed this summer clicked and the show will be in production as well.
The Land That Time Forgot: Caspak. The Step-By-Step Process
Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree
AP: The Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree book by you and J. J. Hart looks to be a pulpy fun ride. Tell us a bit about the book and what inspired it.
WM: My friends Shannon Denton and Patrick Coyle started a line of picture books under their Actionopolis imprint and invited me to do one. Zombie Monkey was already written, and I loved the subject matter of boy scouts versus zombified monkies, so of course I said yes! I’ve also illustrated a couple of other children’s books for Actionopolis, Pandora, and my favorite, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I think you can still get all of them on Amazon.
AP: Where do you, or would you like to, see the comic book industry in 5 or 10 years?
Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree
WM: I’d like to see it alive! This is a moment of incredible danger and opportunity for the industry. There is a clear shift in the way the medium will be distributed and that is going to ultimately affect its form. I don’t think print is going away, but I suspect we’re going to see a lot more print on demand and print to preorder books with the bulk of the distribution going electronic. Luddite that I am, I’m focusing on print at the moment, just because I love the feel of the physical product.
AP: With the advent of digital comics, the way many read comics has changed. What are your thoughts on digital comics and their impact on the industry and readers?
Pyro-Girl Animation Promo Art
WM: There is a need to adapt to the market, and it’s clear many younger readers prefer reading on a screen. The upside is that distribution costs should be less in the long run. The downside is that many publishers seem to be ignoring their responsibility and need to help the current and very important to the industry’s long term health distribution system with the shift.
Ultimate Avengers 2
AP: You’ve produced and directed several animation projects from The Real Ghostbusters, G.I. Joe, X-Men, EXOsquad, Jem and the Holograms, Conan, Captain Planet, Spider-man, Stargate, and more. How did you make the transition from comics to animation and what are the similarities and differences between them?
WM: The shift was an economic necessity for me at the time, and was achieved by dumb luck. It started when Mark Evanier ran into Don Jurwich, producer of the Super-Friends cartoons. Don knew Mark had done comics and mentioned that Hanna Barbera was looking for artists with comics experience to help on the new action shows they’d sold for the 1978 TV season. Mark suggested I cold call HB and ask about it, so I did. The girl at the switchboard asked me whom I’d like to talk to and I said, “The producer doing the action shows.”
FemForce 158
She hooked me up with Doug Wildey (creator of Jonny Quest), which resulted in my being hired as a layout artist on his Godzilla series. Doug was a huge influence and a great teacher. I started drawing storyboards on the side for him, and we both realized that doing boards came naturally to me, so Doug brought me in house as his assistant, handing out and editing boards on Godzilla and Jana of the Jungle. He even let me do the retakes and meet with the clients on some episodes, which was a rare and generous thing. My next boss after Doug was Tex Avery who was the storyboard supervisor on The Thing, a comedy cartoon about Marvel’s Thing. I had great basic training.
Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree
While they are similar in some respects, film and comics are two different beasts. One of the things I’m really enjoying about my current strips is going back to form with them and using all of the classic devices which are unique to the comic book: varying panel sizes (the aspect ratio is constant in film, but it doesn’t have to be in comics), internalized dialogue via thought balloons (much more fluid that doing a voiceover to convey thought in a film), and even visualized sound effects via display lettering.
AP: Who are some of your artistic/creative influences?
WM: Kirby, Wood, Ditko, Williamson, Colan and Frazetta are the main ones. I particularly admire Wood as an artist/writer.
X-Men Storyboards
AP: What does Will Meugniot do when not making comic books?
WM: Professionally a lot of cartoons, either storyboarding or directing. Privately, I love old movies and non-fiction books about comics, movie serials and biographies. I also like just hanging out with my wife of 40 years, Jo.
AP: Where can readers find learn more about you and your work?
AP: Any upcoming projects you would like to mention?
Zombie Monkey Monster Jamboree
WM: N.E.D.O.R. Agents is the big one at the moment. It has a 3 page preview in FemForce 156, a 26 page story in FemForce 157, and its own cover and 20 pages of story in FemForce 158. PREVIEWSworld is doing a Facebook promotion with me for the strip. If you ‘like’ their page, you’ll be able to follow the strip there and enter some contests to win original art, too.
AP: Are there any upcoming convention appearances or signings coming up where fans can meet you?
WM: I’m sorting that out now as part of the PREVIEWSworld promotion. Follow them on Facebook for updates about my appearances.
AP: You have served as a writer, artist, producer, and director. Are there any creative areas you’ve not been worked in that you would like to try your hand at doing?
WM: At some point, I’m going to do some low budget live action work as a director. It’s been offered me in the past, but I’ve just been too busy to take it on.
Meet Vanity
AP: And finally, what advice would you give to anyone wanting to work in comics, animation, and/or art? WM: The main thing is to DO IT. You’re not a writer unless you write. You’re not an artist if you don’t create art. Don’t let your fear of rejection stand in your way of doing.
Of the art for the new Shell Scott graphic novel, New Pulp Writer, Mark Ellis says, “Here we go…David Enebral’s wonderfully atmospheric rendering of Shell Scott…who is apparently realizing anew that the sidewalks of 1960s Hollywood were just as likely to be paved with blood as stars.” I think you’ll agree our hero, Shell Scott is going to be up to his ears in trouble when our graphic novel, KILL THE CLOWN comes your way.
Shell Scott: Kill The Clown is adapted by Mark Ellis and illustrated by David Enebral for Sequential Pulp/Dark Horse Comics. Coming 2012.
24 Hour Comics Day is here! Check with your local store for events, or stay at home and try it yourself! The rules are simple, as defined by Scott McCloud:
Create a complete 24 page comic book in 24 continuous hours.
That means everything: Story, finished art, lettering, color (if applicable), paste-up, everything. Once pen hits paper, the clock starts ticking. 24 hours later, the pen lifts off the paper, never to descend again. Even proofreading has to occur in the 24 hour period. (Computer-generated comics are fine of course, same principles apply).
No sketches, designs, plot summaries or any other kind of direct preparation can precede the 24 hour period. Indirect preparation such as assembling tools, reference materials, food, music etc. is fine.
Your pages can be any size, any material. Carve them in stone, print them with rubber stamps, draw them on your kitchen walls with a magic marker. Whatever you makes you happy.
The 24 hours are continuous. You can take a nap, but the clock keeps ticking. If you get to 24 hours and you’re not done, either end it there (“the Gaiman Variation”) or keep going until you’re done (“the Eastman Variation”). I consider both of these “Noble Failure” Variants and true 24 hour comics in spirit; but you must sincerely intend to do the 24 pages in 24 hours at the outset.
THE ONLINE VARIATION: The above applies to printed comics or online comics with “pages” but if you’d like to try a 24-hour Online Comic that doesn’t break down into pages (like the expanded canvas approach I use in most of my own webcomics) then try this: At least 100 panels AND it has to be done, formatted and ONLINE within the 24-hour period!
If you’re ready to go for it, good luck! And if you want a topic to start fresh, you can always try the Evil Overlord Plot Generator!
CHUCK MILLER: Surf Pulp is something that not too many of my colleagues who have loosely banded together under the “New Pulp” umbrella have been exposed to. And it’s a wonderful thing, since we are looking to broaden the definition of “pulp fiction,” and expand its visibility and appeal. Could you just give us a brief synopsis of how you got the idea and what steps you took to see it through all the way to Hard-Boiled Surf Pulp Fiction #1?
CRAIG LOCKWOOD:I’ve often wondered if the term “New Pulp” or “neo-Pulp” isn’t misleading. While the great pulp publishing and fiction industry died out forty years ago, Ellery Queen and Analog are still published. So at least a tenuous thread to the pulp-past was maintained. And the pulps have been an enduring and arguably profound influence on America and Europe’s popular literary culture.
What’s telling is that when I started this project with Rick we had no idea that there was anything like a pulp revival.
I’d had the idea of publishing an all-surfing-related fiction magazine for years. And I loved the old pulp form. I’d done a pulp paper book The Whole Ocean in 1986.
Twenty-three years later I’d just finished writing a big book for a publisher, and decided to see if I couldn’t put an inexpensive magazine—a real pulp—together.
Rick’s a talented illustrator who had been an aficionado of the American pulp illustrative style of the 1930s and ‘40s and ‘50s. I’d read the sci-fi pulps like Galaxy and Analog, and the mystery mags like Back Mask and Ellery Queen, as a kid and been entranced the storytelling and action. My first published fiction – and the piece was wholly an adventure pulp sory — was in SURFER Magazine—despite SURFER being a “slick.”
Both of our mutual interests and our livelihoods center around surfing and the surfing sub-culture.
That term may seem like an anomaly, but today there is an entire sub-culture—which is something like car-culture—but based around surfing, that had been growing in California since the 1930s. And I’m not talking “Gidget.”
There’s a multi-million dollar sustaining “surfing industry” that includes surfing apparel, surfboard manufacture, surf-related destination travel, surfing fine art with prestigious museum exhibitions, surfing cinema, TV shows, surfing music, surfing literature—including surfing journalism, with books and magazines—and even occasional surfing theater, and believe it or not, a nascent surfing academia.
And of course, there’s surfing crime. Which some older readers may recall getting both national notoriety and tabloid ink during the 1960s with a Florida criminal character nicknamed “Murph the Surf.”
Rick is academically trained, and a graduate of Art Center, here in Pasadena, California, which is one of he nation’s finest art schools. I studied creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rick’s work hangs in both private collections and at McKibben Gallery in Laguna Beach as well as in Rémi Bertoche, in France.
I’ve been a journalist and editor since college, mainly surfing but in the beginning the pickings were slim so I also worked as a lifeguard and deputy sheriff. Later I served as a war correspondent in Southeast Asia, Balkans, the Middle East and Afghanistan, a crime reporter, and a surfing historian whose last book “Peanuts” An Oral Biography Exploring Legend, Myth and Archetype In California’s Surfing Subculture” was reviewed last year by surfing’s most prestigious magazine, The Surfer’s Journal, as “This year’s Best book on Surfing, 2010.” Currently I serve as co-chair of the Oral History Committee of the Surfing Heritage Foundation, which is an endowed institution and museum. But I also shape surfboards and racing paddleboards – it’s all handwork – as a hobby/business.
We were well into the project when we started discovering you guys.
We looked at each other and went “Wow! Here’s real talent, good writing, and great storytelling.”
And you—the pioneers—were all out there taking great waves and cranking these stylish pulpy bottom turns and looking good.
It was like wandering through the desert thirsty and alone and discovering this well-supplied big wagon train with the Bonanza cast at the reins.
CHUCK:What would you say to potential readers who might be leery of your work because of their unfamiliarity with surf culture and the perception that this is a very specialized area that they just wouldn’t “get?” I think this could be really significant in terms of opening up new connections and exposing people to familiar concepts in a new context. That can be a difficult barrier to break through, which is sad because I think there are far more things in common than not.
Chuck, you nailed it. There are definitely more things in common in pulp fiction than not. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the milieu.
I suspect we both see pulp fiction as a wonderful dimensional door through which readers are transported by writers into other realities. The vehicle of transmission is the combination of the author’s words and the reader’s imagination.
Surfing, and surfing fiction does reflect aspects of surfing’s specialization, just as espionage fiction is specialized. But specialization need not be exclusionary, and it’s never a reason to neglect the opportunity of an exciting read.
The English mystery writer Dick Francis, himself a jockey, set all his stories against a background of horse racing—which is like surfing, a kind of sub-culture. I’ve only been to one horse track in my life, and know nothing about horse-racing, betting on horses, or horse-racing as an occupation. But I’ve read and enjoyed at least a dozen Dick Francis mysteries, full of racetrack jargon, and enjoyed them.
Reading masters of a specific genera—such as spy fiction’s John Le Carre´, or Alan Furst—means being immersed in that specific fictional world. This is a world the author has created. And when the author is good, and when the narrative’s coherent and the drama compelling we’re exposed and become both intellectually and emotionally involved in a very specialized environment—say Carré’s Cold War London in 1965, or Furst’s Eleventh Arrondissement in 1940 Paris, during the Nazi Occupation.
And in that fictional environment the magic of a reader’s imagination, a skilled author’s description, narrative and dialog—all provide enough information for the reader to understand and personally assimilate thepolitical climate, the geography, the tradecraft and techniques, the idiom and argot of espionage.
Compared to this kind of complex arcana, surfing’s lexicon is relatively easy. Especially when the format’s a short-story or novella. Here the author is going to be focusing less on some incidental technical aspect—such as a specific surfboard’s design limitations in a given wave—than say, on the protagonist’s efforts to get to the exotic location where a previously un-ridden but fabled wave exists. And—as in all adventure fiction—that requires an author’s commitment to narrative and a reader’s exercise of imagination.
And, if the author is skillful, he or she provides the reader sufficient expository detail so their imagination takes over. This, after all, is how we are able to read and immerse ourselves in—and find credible and enjoyable enough, and thus continue reading—our pulp fiction superheros.
Surfing is an activity rooted in American culture. Surfing comes out of that culture, and so much of what surfing authors are writing about is at least familiar. Most of us have either been to a beach, or seen film or stills of the ocean, and waves, and surfers. We have a sense of the beauty, power and grandeur of the sea.
I’m not a skier, have never skied, hate snow, don’t know the precise meaning of terms like “mogul” or “screamin’ starfish” or “slow-dog noodle turn” and have never experienced the thrill of flying down a mountainside in deep powder. Yet I’ve read and enjoyed skiing-related fiction. So it wasn’t what I knew that entertained me, it was the author’s skill in creating a literary door through which I could venture in imagination.
I didn’t have to be an anthropologist like Colin Trumbull, living with the m’Buti, in the Congo and having to learn an entire non-cognate language to figure out the sub-culture. If I didn’t know the terminology, the story carried me along.
In one of our Vol. 1 No. 1 issue’s stories, “Sorcerer of Siargao” by Susan Chaplin, her surfer-protagonist is described this way:
“Marla was tall, with big shoulders and clear blue eyes. At forty-seven and recently divorced she was living out some pre-divorce impulse to surf her way around the world.”
There is nothing very exclusionary here for a non-surfing reader. You get her logline. Restless middle aged woman seeks adventure. The rest is storytelling—through a surfer’s eyes.
In “The Big Deep” hard-luck hard-boiled surfing private eye Sam Sand tellssurf syndicate enforcer Gang Lopez who’s bringing him an impossible-to-solve case: “Gang, you been laminating without a mask?”
Now a non-surfer may not have a clue that this wisecrack refers to the manufacturing process of saturating the “laminate,” the two fiberglass layers of a hand-shaped surfboard blank’s skin with catalyzed polyurethane resin, but you know he’s skeptical—and is obviously saying it in a colorful way.
One thing those of us who are attracted to the pulp milieu share is that we love imaginative storytelling. So if Hard-boiled Surf Pulp which is aimed at a primarily surfing audience has any chance of attracting non-surfing readers we think it will be because our writers can tell stories well.
CHUCK:Name two or three of the biggest influences on your writing. Not necessarily limited to authors, but including ANYTHING that you think has shaped your style and the worldview that your fiction is built on.
My biggest initial influences in desire to be a writer were genetic, i.e., my mother and father.
My dad was a hard-boiled, hard-core, hard-bitten, hard-case WW I combat veteran—a newspaperman/journalist, war correspondent, and occasional pulp writer during the 1920s and ‘30s. He became a wire-service bureau chief, in Lisbon. My parents had lived in the same Paris neighborhood as Ernest and Hadley Hemingway and were part of the same literary and artistic circles.
My mother was an artist, a sculptor of some renown, and the daughter of three generations of newspaper men. And she had the storyteller’s gift. She’d been a fashion illustrator for Vogue Magazine, so her artist’s eye missed nothing. Decades after an event she could recall the most precise details, inflect the tone of voice of someone who’d been speaking, mimic accents, and connect everything to the weather, the political climate, how the women and men were dressed, how the food was prepared, was served and tasted.
Just before World War Twice they returned to California and Hollywood where he became a screenwriter for Fox. I came along soon after. Then the war came along and my father was killed, soon after Pearl Harbor.
As a child without a father—growing up in Hollywood during the war—my mother would tell stories about her early life. I was fascinated with her accounts of her famous family’s history, of my father’s life, their travels—including some exciting adventures with narrow escapes—and the now all-but-forgotten literary figures they’d known such as John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, Raoul Whitfield, and Dashiell Hammett.
When I was very young my mother would tell me serial stories of characters she’d invent. Then, taking a big drawing pad and using charcoal pencils, she’d quickly illustrate them while she was telling the story, drawing the characters—horses, boats, cars, guns—and the most outrageous and weirdly costumed arch-villains. We had a house full of books, and a beach house in Laguna Beach and so I grew up reading and surfing.
Pulp magazines were still on the newsstands when I was a kid and I became interested in reading and collecting science fiction magazines. Without question, much of my interest in writing fiction came from that early pulp exposure.
Going to the local newsstand with my weekly allowance was a ritual. What a visual feast! There were dozens of lurid covers, adventures, detective mysteries, westerns, romances, creepy shudders, and the ones in the back at the top—beyond kid’s reach—the spicy pulps.
So I pictured myself being able to write for these kinds of exciting magazines. I was just learning to type and submitted a few science fiction shorts in my early teens—which were promptly rejected.
Unfortunately, by the time I had begun to write well enough to perhaps be accepted, the pulps were approaching extinction, and everyone in my college writing classes was trying to write like Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller.
Ray Bradbury’s fiction was a strong early influence, and he spoke frequently at Robert Kirsch’s Art of Fiction course and workshops at UCLA where I was a student. I’ve never forgotten his closing words at one of his lectures:
“Always quit while you’re hot. And don’t forget to put the cover on your typewriter.”
Michael Vance’s novel, Weird Horror Tales:Light’s End, is “an amazing, page turning suspense thriller”. Artist Eric York turns some ghoulish pages as well.
York is the interior illustrator of Vance’s latest novel. Vance was first attracted by York’s outré, very design oriented, and weirdly beautiful interpretations of the work of world-famous horror writer, H. P. Lovecraft.
“Eric is that rarest of gems,” said Vance, “an original. Since we share a love for Lovecraft’s prose, York’s style seemed a perfect choice for the last novel in my Weird Horror Tales trilogy that was also influenced by Lovecraft’s genius. I was overjoyed by his “deviant” art for my novel!”
York’s distinctive art has also appeared in books, fanzines, and comics including The Fantastical Worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, The Shadow Over Santa Susana, Malafact, Besmirched, Terminal Brain Rot and many others.
“I drew the cover for another of Michael’s books a few years ago [that was published in England],” wrote the artist. “I enjoy his subdued style of horror as well as his creepy locale of Light’s End. I’ve always been into stories using the common setting of sinister old, small towns, and thought this would be a nice change to collaborate with Michael again. Plus I wanted to draw his morbid old degenerate, Jake Horne.”
York also self-publishes under his Maggot Global Publishing imprint and has published Hungry Maggot, Vermis Rex, Tillinghasts’ Moribund Fairy-Tales, Eldritch Pulp Adventure, the Erebus Tarot, as well as the upcoming Zygote’s Fables, and his 100 plus page graphic novel adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s collection of poems, Fungi From Yuggoth. More than 500 examples of his artwork are available at http://www.tillinghast23.deviantart.com/.
Art: Eric York
With the help of several additional artists, Vance unleashes his dark imagination in each of the three books of his Weird Horror Tales trilogy. Often compared to the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury, Vance’s work is not for the faint of heart. Weird Horror Tales: Light’s End features a cover by famed painter, Keith Birdsong.
The publisher of the Weird Horror Tales trilogy, Cornerstone Book Publishers also publishes Masonic and esoteric books, selected pulp fiction, art literature, limited children’s books, and poetry collections. All three Weird Horror novels are available on-line, at book stores, from Cornerstone, and as E-books. For more information about Cornerstone, go to http://www.cornerstonepublishers.com/.
Airship 27 packages and publishes anthologies and novels in the pulp magazine tradition.
In addition to Vance’s Weird Horror Tales, Weird Horror Tales: The Feasting, and Weird Horror Tales: Light’s End, Airship 27 has released Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, a series of “Captain Hazzard” pulp thrillers, more pulp fiction in The Green Lama and Secret Agent X. For more information on Airship 27, go to http://www.airship27.com/.
ISBN: 1-613420-14-5 ISBN-13 978-1-613420-14-0 Digital copy available
Weird Horror Tales, Weird Horror Tales: The Feasting, and Weird Horror Tales: Light’s End are now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other bookstores. Best price for traditional book is from Cornerstone Book Publishers at (http://www.gopulp.info/). For electronic version, go to: http://homepage.mac.com/robmdavis/Airship27Hangar/index.htm
100 years ago today, Mary Blair, an artist whose unique style was immortalized in classic Walt Disney films of the 1940s and 50s and theme parks, was born in McAlester, Oklahoma.
24 Hour Comics Day
