Night of the Living Holidays

Like many bloggers, I’m going to take off a few days from blogging to celebrate the holidays. It’s also possible that I’ll head up to Arkansas to see my mom. She was put in the hospital for just a day, but they then took her to the nursing facility for a bit to get her physical therapy so she can come home. I’d like to be there to help out once she gets out of the nursing facility. But I also have to go back to work on January 7 so I need to go up before then. I’m still playing it by ear, to see when it would be best for me to be there. I’m not leaving until after Christmas for sure because I want to be here for that to be with Lana and to see my son, Josh.

I will post here if I decide to go, or when I decide to go, but I may not be visiting blogs for a few days anyway because of the holidays. In the meantime, I leave you with a review of Kolchak: Night Stalker of the Living Dead.

I was lucky again in winning a contest held by Christopher Mills over at Atomic Pulp, and he sent me the three volume comic book series that he wrote about Carl Kolchak warring with zombies in the corn fields of Nebraska. Chris wrote the books, and the art was done by Tim Hamilton. Dave Ulanski is the editor.

I’ve been a fan of Kolchak for a long time. I really enjoyed the original TV series, with Darren McGavin in the lead role. It’s one of the very few TV series I’ve ever caught all the episodes of. Chris perfectly captures the McGavin take on Kolchak, rumpled, cynical, a little brave and a little cowardly at the same time. If you like Kolchak and comics you should definitely like this three volume series. It’s available at Moonstone Books.

By the way, Chris’s Femme Noir series is also very good. In fact, I thought it was better than the Kolchak, and that’s saying something.

Until later, Merry Christmas to all. And to all a good night!

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Comic Books

I was in the comic book store the other day, my first time in probably twelve years, to order Femme Noir by Christopher Mills. While there I checked out some of the other offerings and bought a few. I was never a big comic book fan. As a teenager I read some, but probably never had more than 100 or so, and these were mostly Fantastic Four, Spiderman, and one or two war comics like Sgt. Rock and Ghost Tank. I also had a horror western one called Jonah Hex.

Later, when I first joined the Robert E. Howard group, REHupa, I bought a number of the Howard related comics like Conan and Kull. That was in the early 90s but that phase didn’t last long. Having been weaned on books, I always found reading comics rather irritating, frankly. You’d settle down for a read, and be done almost instantly. Five minutes tops for most comics. I quickly found the only way to enjoy them was to collect 5 to 10 issues and then read them all at one sitting.

This time I bought a few of the new Dark Horse Conan comics, and read them back to back, and a couple of “graphic novels,” which are essentially longer comics that give you a bit more of a satisfying read. For one of the very few times in my life I bought something primarily for its cover. It seems that there are a variety of Frank Frazetta comics coming out and I’ve always enjoyed Frazetta’s art work, particularly the stuff he did for the Karl Edward Wagner Kane paperbacks and the Death Dealer paperbacks. I picked up a comic with one of his “Kane” covers called Dark Kingdom, part 1. The story did not involve Kane, however, but a character named Red Morden. The tale itself was very typical but the art was nice.

I did, however, find a nice surprise in the store, a Jonah Hex: Origins graphic novel. This really took me back and I enjoyed it quite a bit since there was a meaty story to the work. How about you? Any comic book dinks out there? Have comics been at all an influence on your writing? I would generally say that they haven’t influenced my own work at all, most likely because of my limited exposure to them during my formative years.

Sword and Planet Link

As a supporter of all things “Sword and Planet,” or “Interplanetary Romance,” if you prefer, I must refer you to the The Perils on Planet X Blog. This is a sort of production diary set up by Christopher Mills, who is writing the story for a three issue comic book series of this name. The series features an earthman named Donovan Hawke who ends up stranded in the past, on a planet named Xylos, which also happens to be the planet that once inhabited our solar system at the spot now known as the Asteroid Belt. Swashbuckling ensues, as I’ve seen from getting a glimpse of chapter 1 of the series.

There are certainly elements of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon in the series, and a bit of Burroughs as well, but there are a lot of nice new touches that keep the story line fresh. As you could guess from the Talera series, I believe there is still tremendous potential in the general Sword and Planet genre, with plenty of room to respect what has gone before while still telling wonderful fantasy adventures that have never been told.

By the way, Christopher and I have different preferences for how to name this genre. He thinks Sword and Planet is clunky and prefers Interplanetary Romance, which is one of the earlier names for the genre. I stopped using “romance” myself because I found that if I tried to describe the Taleran books as Interplanetary Romance almost all non-fans of the genre were confused by what I meant. A term that I use sometimes is “Interplanetary Adventure,” although Christopher has suggested “Interplanetary Swashbuckler.” I like that, but for the moment may continue to use Sword and Planet as a parallel construction for Sword and Sorcery, which I also like to read and write.