“How long did you know?” Cassie asks as Elsie carries her while flying over Los Angeles, seeking where Debra is being hidden. We find out why these two women don’t get along well, but must work together to save Flying Glory. Find out what they have to say to one another in this page of Reverberations, our 10th Anniversary issue of FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY: http://www.flying-glory.com
“What will make her come to my office?”… Dr. Molly Payne wonders as more revelations are revealed. Is it a dark future for Flying Glory? Get a glimpse in the latest page of FLYING GLORY AND THE HOUNDS OF GLORY.
Looking forward to seeing you all again on January 8th, 2012.
Over the weekend, we told you that Australian born street artist Anthony Lister had arrived in Los Angeles, working throughout the nights to create a gigantic street mural that was inspired by Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Today marks the film’s debut on Blu-ray and DVD, coming from Twentieth Century Home Entertainment.
Here’s a look at the production using time lapse photography:
GLAMOUR JOB By Doug Farrell BookSurge Publishing 484 pages ISBN – 10: 141967496X ISBN – 13: 9781419674969 Release date – Sept 21, 2007 (fantasy – adventure – pulp) No Contact Data
About the Author – Doug Farrell has been a professional actor most of his adult life and spent several years performing comedy a Los Angeles improve troupe. He’s married to his best friend Ellen and raising three remarkable children with her. He taught college classes, was a vegetarian chef and installed home theaters. Recently at night he’s been a guide for ghost tours, telling Savannahs’ paranormal stories to people from around the world. This is his first novel.
Every now and then, I trip over a book that’s really hard to describe genre-wise and this is such a case. It’s a madcap adventure that falls somewhere between fantasy, slapstick comedy and social satire. That all these elements mix effectively and in the end produce a heady concoction of genuine adult delight is a testament to Farrell’s own imagination in brewing what he aptly describes as “A Fairy-tale for Grown-ups.”
The set up deals with a fairy war that occurred in another dimension wherein the goblin race lost and was forced to flee to our world, arriving in 1947, two years after the end of World War II. Convincing certain human scientist to help them, the goblins invented special disguises that allowed them to go undetected in our world and for decades walked among humans, some even interbreeding with them. Ultimately the same scientists who developed these sophisticated camouflages saw the potential for monetary wealth by using the same formulas to create beauty aids for human women. They create Glamorine, a Chicago based million dollar cosmetic empire built on the results of these techniques and certain globin magics.
The book’s theme plays with duel definitions of the word glamour. The first being a quality of fascinating, alluring, or attracting, especially by a combination of charm and good looks. It also means magic or enchantment; spell; witchery.
The protagonist is super model and the face of Glamorine, Laurie Morgan, whose grandfather was one of the scientist who created the company. As the story opens Laurie has become disillusioned by her near perfect life and is in the process of divorcing her loving husband, Nick. Laurie is suffering from ennui unable to explain her own dissatisfaction and believes she’s become trapped in a dull, boring routine of existence. No sooner is the divorce granted then she is contacted by a blue gnome name Hawley disguised as a little girl. He warns Laurie that her life is in danger. As if confronting an actual blue dwarf weren’t enough, Laurie begins to running into women throughout Chicago who looked exactly like her.
As paranoia begins to set in, Hawley explains that there is a goblin revolution in the works. After decades of living in secrecy amongst mankind, a group of goblin leaders have concocted a scheme to take control of Glamorine and replace its board of directors, including Laurie and her grandfather, with phony disguised goblins. Once they’ve achieved this end, they plan on poisoning the cosmetics produced to Glamorine to eliminate all of mankind and take over the Earth.
Needless to say having an army of vicious goblins out to do her in is more than enough motivation to snap Laurie out of her malaise and back into living at full tilt if only to stay alive. Before the book’s conclusion arrives, she will have been held prisoner in an underwater complex below Lake Michigan, met and been devoured by a fire breathing dragon and allied herself with tiny pig-fairies only she can see. “Glamour Job” is a rollicking tale that never lets up and is filled with satirical jabs at how we treasure a make-believe beauty that is simply an illusion devised by Fifth Avenue to milk millions from starry eyed little girls all wanting to grow up and become runway princesses. But do be warned, this is only the first chapter in a trilogy and the ending does come somewhat abruptly.
We also note by the print date that “Glamour Job” is four years old. All the more reason to seek it out as it might have flown under your radar. Urban fantasy isn’t one of this reviewer’s most favorite genres, but “Glamour Job” has enough action muscle to sustain it for even the most jaded pulp reader. If you are looking for something truly different and fun, you would be hard press to do much better than this book.
Meantime, yesterday, Australian street artist and painter Anthony Lister began working on creating a fabulous piece of street art inspired by the Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Lister arrived in Southern California straight from Art Basel Miami Beach, the most prestigious art show in the Americas, where he painted several murals across the city. The mural is being painted at 7769 Melrose Ave in Los Angeles across the street from Fairfax High School, and Lister will be there until Monday afternoon.
We hope to share a timelapse video of the work from start to finish some time next week, after Lister’s work is complete.
New York, NY (December 2, 2011) Top Cow Productions and Image Comics announced today a premiere launch event at Meltdown in Los Angeles for the Pilot Season 2011 voting period. The Pilot Season “Take Control” party invites Los Angeles fans to meet the various creative teams involved in 2011’s Pilot Season competition, get their books signed, and get the details on how they can determine the winning series this year. The event is co-sponsored by Chipotle Mexican Grill, through arrangement with marketing firm Bonfire Agency.
Since 2007, Pilot Season has become the leading fan-driven comic event, allowing creators to compete with brand-new original properties for fan votes. This year, Top Cow released eight unique pilot issues by eight creative teams ranging from established industry pros to up-and-coming talent to screenwriters and even one NFL All Star. With all eight books in stores, voting will begin on Monday, December 5th at topcow.com, where fans can also find additional information on each title.
To kick off the highly contested month of voting, Top Cow and Image Comics have partnered with Meltdown Comics to host a “Take Control” launch party on Wednesday, December 7th from 7:00-9:00pm. Fans will have the opportunity to mingle with the creative teams, get their Pilot Season issues signed, receive free comics from Top Cow, and enjoy free food and drinks furnished by Chipotle Mexican Grill. Confirmed guests include Joshua Hale Fialkov, Rahsan Ekedal, Morgan Davis Foehl, Dennis Calero, Brad Keene, Matt Hawkins, Filip Sablik, Nick Nantell,Dan Casey, and Troy Peteri. All fans in attendance will also receive “Buy One, Get One Free” certificates for future visits to Meltdown’s neighborhood Chipotle at 7660 Sunset Blvd. Meltdown Comics, one of Los Angeles’ premiere comic shops, is located at 7522 Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90046 and can be reached at (323) 851-7223.
This year’s voting process has evolved from previous years. From December 5th to December 18th, fans will be able to vote as often as they would like for their favorite series. On December 19th, the four highest vote-getters will continue to the second round. Until December 25th, fans will be able to vote once per day for their favorite series, with the highest two vote-getters continuing to the final round of competition on December 26th. The final winning series will be determined when voting closes on December 31st and will be announced in early January 2012.
“Pilot Season is one of the highlights of the year for all of us at Top Cow and we’re thrilled to kick off the voting in style at Meltdown,” commented Top Cow Publisher, Filip Sablik, “Rather than just do a standard signing event, we thought it’d be fun to have a party and celebrate all these great new books! I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a couple impromptu campaign speeches on December 7th.”
“We’re thrilled to have Chipotle on board for this leg of the Pilot Season program,” added Steve Rotterdam, Bonfire Co-Founder and Partner. “It makes the event all the more celebratory.”
For more information on Pilot Season, go to topcow.com. For additional information on the event and Meltdown, head to meltcomics.com.
Related Categories: Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Short Stories
The hard-boiled private eye genre is one I dearly love.The trench-coated shamus with a cigarette dangling from his lip, .45 automatic or .38 revolver in a well-worn shoulder holster, fedora pulled down low over his forehead, the faithful gum-chewing secretary and even more faithful fifth of scotch in the desk drawer…it’s a genre I never get enough of.And since television and movies have apparently abandoned the P.I. it’s up to writers like Lee Houston, Jr. and books like HUGH MONN, PRIVATE DETECTIVE to give me my fix.
Let me explain; even though Hugh Monn lives and works on the far distant planet of Frontera interacting with many different species and using advanced technology, the tone and feel of the character and the eight stories in the book are pure 1950’s.Lee drops in a mention here and there of some bit of sci-fi such as a character having green or purple skin or Hugh’s weapon of choice being a Nuke 653 Rechargeable but that’s just throwaways Lee lobs at us once in a while to remind us that we’re not on Earth.But he doesn’t go into any real detail as to how this future civilization operates or how the technology works.When the subject of detective stories crossed with science fiction comes up, I usually mention Larry Niven’s stories and novels about Gil The Arm or Roger Zelazny’s “My Name Is Legion” since in those stories, the science fiction is integral to the story.Take out the science fiction and you wouldn’t have a story.Not so with Lee’s Hugh Monn stories.They could easily have been set in 1950’s Los Angeles or New York with a little rewriting.But I digress…let’s take HUGH MONN, PRIVATE DETECTIVE for what it is, not for what it isn’t.
Hugh Monn is a Human and yes, he freely admits to his clients that his name is a gag.But one he prefers to use as he’s got some pretty big secrets in his past he’d prefer to keep to himself.As a detective, Hugh is capable, sharp, principled and dogged in his determination to solve his cases and get to the truth. Hugh isn’t a pain-in-the-ass who rebels against authority and isn’t a lone wolf who doesn’t play by the rules.Matter of fact, Hugh conducts himself as a total professional.He doesn’t shoot when he doesn’t have to, he’s polite to everybody he meets and he co-operates with the authorities.In particular, Lawbot 714 who he runs into in a couple of stories and who I wouldn’t mind seeing become a regular if Lee gives us more Hugh Monn cases.He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, he likes kids; he holds open the doors for old ladies.I think you can tell where I’m going with this.Hugh’s a fine detective but as a character I found myself wishing that once in a while he’d haul off and slug a suspect for no good reason other than he doesn’t like the fact the guy has eight eyes.Hugh could stand to be a little rougher and not so polite.
The story “Shortages” is a good example of how Hugh Monn solves a case using his understanding of both humans and aliens and his powers of observation.It also introduces the character of Big Louie, a Primoid.Big Louie is the main suspect in a series of thefts being committed at a high security pier.It’s a pretty good locked room mystery and the relationship between Hugh and Big Louie is the primary attraction in this story, as in “At What Price Gloria?”Hugh and Big Louie have to rescue Big Louie’s wife Gloria and stop an assassination attempt.I only wish more of the stories had been as suspenseful as this one.In some of them, the mystery really isn’t that hard to figure out as there’s a lack of suspects so the solution comes down to either being this one or that one.And I never got a sense of Hugh being in any real danger in any of these stories.But Lee should be commended for trying different types of stories such as “For The Benefit of Master Tyke” which hinges more on the healing of a family than the solving of any real crime.I picked up halfway through “Where Can I Get A Witness?” is intended as a homage to the 1944 film noir “Laura” and I enjoyed it until the very last paragraph where it felt to me as if the writer had stepped in to give his opinion of his own story and didn’t allow his character to do so.
So should you read HUGH MONN, PRIVATE DETECTIVE?As a first book from a new writer, I’m inclined to give Lee a pat on the back.There’s a lot to like in his writing style.He does know how to keep a story moving but he shouldn’t shy away from rolling in the dirt and giving his characters some sharp edges.I wouldn’t mind seeing Hugh Monn tackle some more cases but I also wouldn’t mind seeing Lee Houston, Jr. strip away the political correctness and explore the real darkness of Frontera.
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.”
CEO Jeff Bewkes told staffers in an email that the company’s preparing to evaluate “our office footprint in the New York metropolitan area and develop a long-range plan to meet our future needs.” The team leading that process — to be run by Chief Financial and Administrative Officer John Martin and Global Real Estate SVP Tom Santiago — probably won’t make a decision until the end of 2012. Then it could take years to implement. The corporate ranks and cable channels including CNN probably will stay in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle; the company owns about 1 million square feet in the building. But Time Warner leases an additional 3 million or so additional square feet of office space in the New York area. The agreement for the publishing unit’s operations at the Time & Life building expires at the end of 2017, while the one for HBO’s home on 6th Ave runs out in 2018. There are plenty of options in Manhattan, including the new World Trade Center. But neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut probably will try to persuade Time Warner to move some of its operations, and jobs.
Moonstone Entertainment and THE AudioComics COMPANY Announce CollaboratiON
The AudioComics Company to produce adaptations of Moonstone titles beginning with Honey West and The Battle for Los Angeles
For immediate release:
The AudioComics Company is pleased to announce that it will act as the official audio theatre production arm for Moonstone Entertainment, Inc., producing full-cast adaptations of its licensed and original comic books and graphic novels, as well as selections from their line of short story anthologies. These pieces will be available on compact disc and pay-per-Mp3 digital download through a variety of outlets, including Moonstone’s online store, at comic book conventions, the iTunes store, and community audio drama showcases.
Their first collaboration will be Honey West, adapted by Elaine (Starstruck) Lee from her mini-series “Murder on Mars.” Hollywood’s toughest and sexiest private eye has gone undercover as an extra on a low-budget science fiction flick to find the murderer of sex symbol Zu Zu Varga, only to find that (shock and surprise) everyone’s got a motive. And then there’s that killer robot… Also slated for production is the team-up special The Battle for Los Angeles, which is a part of Moonstone’s “Return of the Originals” line. Starring The Black Bat, Domino Lady, G-8, Secret Agent X, and The Phantom Detective, these avengers pit their wits (and guns) against a menace from another world in 1945 Los Angeles in a story actually inspired by true events.
Moonstone EIC Joe Gentile: “Moonstone is super excited to hear our stories done in this dramatic fashion! AudioComics brings a very professional quality sound, as well as great voice actors to the table, and the final result is the best we have heard! It’s not a plain ol’ audio book, it’s an audio play, like a private performance in your living room!” AudioComics co-founder Lance Roger Axt echoes Joe’s sentiments: “Audio theatre is simply one of the most exciting and accessible forms of entertainment available. This is not lost on Joe and the good folks at Moonstone Entertainment, and we’re very excited to be working with them and their roster of properties. Actually, ‘very excited’ may be an understatement! I mean have you seen their roster of properties lately?”
Honey West records this fall for a winter, 2012 release, directed by William Dufris. This first production will also mark the beginning of an ongoing series of HW projects with Moonstone. The Battle for Los Angeles will record in winter of 2012, adapted by CJ Henderson and Lance Roger Axt (from Henderson’s script), and directed by Mr. Axt, with a planned spring of 2012 release.
Moonstone Entertainment Inc. publishes comics and illustrated fiction designed to “awaken your sense of adventure”, featuring classic and new heroes including Kolchak the Night Stalker, Buckaroo Banzai, The Green Hornet, The Avenger, Captain Midnight, The Domino Lady, Zorro, Honey West, and Airboy in thrilling tales of adventure, mystery, and horror. For more than a decade, Moonstone Entertainment Inc. has created fine and distinct comic books, graphic novels and prose…books that are meant to be read. Awaken your sense of adventure at www.moonstonebooks.com
The AudioComics Company, under the guidance of producers Lance Roger Axt, William Dufris, and Elaine Lee, provides superior audio entertainment with its professional full-cast audio theatre productions of both licensed properties and original works from the world of comic books, graphic novels, and related media, accessible in today’s market with today’s sound. Their debut production of the original play script of Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta’s Starstruck has received critical acclaim from comics and audio professionals alike; forthcoming productions include Titanium Rain and The Batsons. www.audiocomicscompany.com
Contact: Joe Gentile, EIC (contact_us@moonstonebooks.com)
Lance Roger Axt, Co-Producer/Director (info@audiocomicscompany.com)
[[[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, derkinder 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-20th 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…)
