Jungle Week: Rulah vs. Goat

The Man Who Wouldn't Die!



Rulah has faced a lot of tough animals in her career as Jungle Goddess. She's even defeated a pack of wolves by hitting them with another wolf. But never - we are promised - has she had occasion to fight a goat. I guess they were running out of cool animals. You can get the whole story at the Comic Book Catacombs.

Jungle Titan



Burne Hogarth - on the other hand - knew what to do when Tarzan had fought enough lions. Have him fight giant lions! (Lots of other great Tarzan newspaper strips in that link too.)

Hobbit Movie Update: The Were-Bear Stays in the Picture

I missed this while my computer was down, but it's fantastic news. The second Hobbit movie by Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro won't be a fanfic gap-bridger between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as originally announced. Instead, they're splitting The Hobbit into two films so that they can do the whole story "including the White Council and the comings and goings of Gandalf to Dol Guldur." And - one can hope - Beorn?

My excitement for these films just increased by two-thousand percent.

Cownt Week: Gavin Spence, Part 1

What's happening to that poor cow? Who's that boney farmer? Stay tuned...

Jungle Week: Jungle Girls vs. Cephalopods

Another reason to love jungle girls: they're doing their part in the War Against the Giant Tentacled Things.



From The Best of Golden Age Sheena Vol. 2, which Caleb recommends and I absolutely have to buy.



From White Princess Of The Jungle #4. The Fortress Keeper has the whole story.

She's a Valkyrie (Valhalla is like SO bitchin)

My sincerest apologies for the title. Sincerely. As far as you know.



By Greg Jolly (from the book of mythic poetry he illustrated for Alex Ness).



By Victor Santos.

Cownt Week: Dave Bryant

Dave Bryant

Jungle Week: Jann and Friends

Lots of great jungle comics at Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

Terrors of the Jungle



By Jay Disbrow.

Jann of the Jungle

Six different Jann stories by Al Williamson and Ralph Mayo. Easily my favorites of this bunch.

Dorothy Lamour: Jungle Princess



By Wally Wood. The writing is horrible, but it's pretty to look at.

Walt Disney's Lord of the Rings

By Juan Manuel.

(I had to get my Robot 6 column done, so most of Tuesday's posts are sneaking into Wednesday.)

Colossa!

I've linked to the awesome Kitty Hawk webcomic before. Well now creator/illustrator Braden Lamb is using some down-time between chapters to share some older work about a giant monster on the rampage. The first chapter is up and it's pretty funny. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Cownt Week: Grant Gould, Part 1

Grant Gould

Jungle Week: Go, Tiki, Go!

Go, Tiki, Go!



Go, Tiki, Go!



Go, Craig Harris, Go!

Jungle Week: Dinosaur/English Dictionary

I bought this shirt for my boy. Trust me, it looks cuter on a seven-year-old than on the kid in the website picture.

Centurion

It's about time someone gave Olga Kurylenko a booty-kickin role instead of just the girlfriend-of-the-booty-kicker. In Centurion, she'll play "a savage-looking Pict warrior woman" who is "kind of revenge incarnate,” according to writer/director Neil (Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Doomsday) Marshall. “Her family were butchered by the Romans, she had her tongue cut out by the Romans, she’s had a hell of a time, and she’s out for Roman blood.” Battle on, Olga.

Umm, guys...?

...don't look now, but there's a giant robot behind you.

"Milk"roCon 2009

MicroCon was awesome. I always have a much better time when I'm not trying to sell stuff and this year was all about creating buzz for the Cownt. Mission accomplished, by the way. Jessica Hickman and I didn't give away all our stickers and postcards, but we gave away lots of them and we got some people very excited to see the Cownt comic when it comes out. The rest of the swag is going to WizardWorld Chicago with us to have at Jess' Artist Alley table.

The plan is to have the comic ready to debut at FallCon in early October. Art should be finished by mid-summer, which'll give me a couple of months to get it lettered and printed. I'm going to self-publish this one and try to create some buzz. If that's successful (and if the artists are all still talking to me by then) we'll try to get a publisher for the second issue.

Like I said, folks seem very excited about the comic. One gal - who'd picked up a Cownt print at FallCon last year - was literally jumping up and down as we talked about it. She told me she has her print hanging up at home and people ask her about it all the time. She was so sweet and thrilled and it made me even more excited too. There were several people like that.



I also got a new Cownt illustration that made me howl when I saw it. I'll share it later. In fact, in addition to this being Jungle Week on the Adventureblog, I think I'm going to make it Cownt Week too and share some of the fantastic Cownt art I've collected. There's some crazy brilliant stuff and I've been meaning to show it off anyway.

I also sold some copies of Tales from the Inner Sanctum #1, a horror anthology I contributed to a while back. I thought that I'd pretty much tapped the local market for it, but since it has the first appearance of the Cownt in it, folks were curious.

I stuck pretty close to my table for most of the show, but I did get up and move around a couple of times. The very cool Adam Hansen recognized me from Robot 6 and handed me a copy of his cool 3D comic (complete with glasses!) called The Sad State of Affairs of Rooster Jack. I'll talk more about that on Robot 6 one of these days.

I also got to catch up with some friends. Here's my occasional writing partner Alex Ness, for example:



Star Wars artist extraordinaire Grant Gould:



Charles Raymond who is not only one of the nicest people in the universe, but also draws some of the cutest, funniest sketch cards you've ever seen:



Sam (Tiempos Finales) Hiti giving me the ol' stink-eye:



Horrorwood's Brent Schoonover and Brandon Terrell. I promise that Brent's eating a chip and not cleaning his teeth.



Paul (Wapsi Square) Taylor, who's also illustrating one of the Cownt stories:



Martin (Pretty Much Every Pulp Character You've Ever Heard Of And Several You Haven't) Powell:



Check out my Flickr set for more, including Jess' getting inducted into the 501st Legion (and as part of the Dive Team, which is so appropriate if you know Jess and her love of sharks).

Thanks to everyone who came out and said "hi" - including at least one reader of this blog - and to all the great MCBA volunteers who coordinated the show. I had a blast. It's the first convention of the year for me and it's going to be a tough one to beat.

Music Meme: 1988

I'm at MicroCon all day tomorrow, so I'm posting this tonight.

Continuing my list of favorite albums from every year I've been alive.

1988

The Church: Starfish



If I'd been compiling this list in 1988, I would've picked Rattle and Hum. I went away to college in the fall of this year and my music allowance suddenly went down to almost zero, but I remember - still riding the high from Joshua Tree - walking six miles or so from campus to the movie theater to see Rattle and Hum on opening night. And I loved the movie, but mostly because it let me re-live seeing the band live the previous year.

I bought the album, but none of the songs grabbed me the way The Joshua Tree did. I thought they were pretty cool, but Rattle and Hum was never a "real" U2 album for me. I still don't even have it on CD. But, in 1988 U2 was more religion than entertainment for me and I would've faithfully told you that it was my favorite album from that year.

It certainly wouldn't have been a-ha's Stay on These Roads. With the exception of the title track and the theme from The Living Daylights, I was pretty disappointed in that album. I appreciate it a lot more now, but back then I figured that a-ha was almost done. Little did I know they'd keep putting out albums, but I wouldn't learn about them until 2003 or so.

The 1988 album I still listen to most is easily Starfish. New Wave was pretty much dead and "alternative" music (though I hate that name) was the next best thing. Especially if you put bagpipes in your song. It was like Big Country all over again! (Okay, I know now that they aren't really bagpipes, but I didn't know that then.)

The Church - Under the Milky Way



Runners up:
a-ha: Stay on These Roads
Enya: Watermark
Robert Plant: Now and Zen
She's Having a Baby Soundtrack
U2: Rattle and Hum

Singles:
Paula Abdul: "Straight Up"
DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince: "Parents Just Don't Understand"
Information Society: "What's on Your Mind (Pure Energy)"
Living Colour: "Cult of Personality"
Pet Shop Boys: "Always on My Mind"
The Primitives: "Crash"
Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians: "Balloon Man"
Roxette: "The Look"
Siouxsie and the Banshees: "Peek-a-Boo"
The Timelords: "Doctorin the Tardis"

Monster Week: Kill Them All!

Sym-Bionic Titan



Genndy (Samurai Jack, the original Clone Wars cartoon) Tartakovsky is working on a new animated series for Cartoon Network. This one's about "three extraterrestrials from the war-torn planet Galaluna" who crash-land on Earth and go to high school. And - if the promo art is to be believed - fight some giant monsters.

Resiklo



Earth's been invaded by aliens and humanity's only hope is robots built out of recycled junk. I'm so there.

Houdini versus the Giant Tall Robot



Snell knows me too well. Houdini was a magician, so that's kind of like a sorceror, which is sort of like a monster. I think that means I'm rooting for the robot.

And that wraps it up for Monster Week! Stay tuned next week as I continue trying to catch up in a massive, five-day event that can only be called... Jungle Week! Oooo...

Writing is Hard: Marketing Should Be Fun

Jessica Faust from BookEnds literary agency talks about marketing for authors. Her most practical advice is around building your website and what you should make sure to include. I've been thinking about doing something with my old michaelmay.us site, which I pretty much abandoned once I started using this blog regularly. I'll be taking Faust's suggestions into heavy consideration as I do that. (Feel free to check it out now if you're curious, but I've just gotten started on it and there's not much to see. I don't even like the format as it is now.)

Other than that, Faust's perspective is that trinkets and whatnot are useless clutter unless you really enjoy using them and passing them out. For her, they're a delivery system for getting out and meeting potential customers. It's the meeting that really sells you and the book. That makes a lot of sense to me, so as I'm considering future marketing ideas, I'll try to avoid doing something just because everyone else is and concentrate on stuff that I personally think is cool.

The Warlord of MicroCon

If you live near the Twin Cities and are on the fence about attending MicroCon, here's a recently added guest who might help make up your mind.



I met Mike Grell at a FallCon a few years ago, but it was just briefly and only to ask him to sign some Green Arrow comics. We've got a mutual friend in Alex Ness now, so I'm looking forward to meeting him again in that context.

Monster Week: Giant Ones

Lost & Found



By Otis Frampton. Dinosaurs are sort of giant monsters, right?

The Savage Swarm



By Ed Valigursky.

Le Kong!



I think I prefer the French version.* Thanks to Brother Calvin and his Canadian Cave of Cool for finding this. I have to exercise a lot of willpower in picking what to link to on his site. There's just so much cool stuff. If you like what I'm doing here, you have to be reading Calvin's blog too.

Not only do you get awesome stuff like "Who's Having the Worst Day?"...



...but Calvin also provides an invaluable public service with his constant watchdogging of the evil cephalopodic forces that threaten us all. I'll definitely be linking to some of that in the future. It's too important to ignore.

Speaking of Evil Cephalopodic Forces...



By Das Chupa.

Monster Attack Network movie



Marc Bernardin and Adam Freeman’s giant-monster graphic novel Monster Attack Network is being produced at Disney. If anyone else wants to make a giant monster movie - maybe one where the giant monsters fight giant robots - I've got just the story for you.

*Edited to Add: Christopher Mills has more info on the "French" Kong film in the comments: "That poster is for the Korean-made Kong knock-off A*P*E, which Dino DeLaurentis successfully manged to keep out of U.S. distribution back in 1976, though it played elsewhere around the world. It's horrible."

Catch that Robot!

I'm trying not to horde links any more. It's going to take a while to get there, but eventually I hope to be able to post about things within a day or so after seeing them.

That includes updates on my Robot 6 posting, so to that end here's what I've done so far in April:

What Looks Good for June



Review: SLG's Captain Blood #1



Review: Anna Mercury

Monster Week: Harker

Got an email today from writer Tony Lee about his upcoming Dracula sequel from AAM/Markosia. According to the press release Harker covers:

...the lives of the main characters from the novel, six months on from the Count’s grisly death as they continue to try to piece their lives back together again.

But a ghostly visit from the past informs Jonathan Harker that the legacy of Count Dracula isn’t over, for there was one last bride, the Countess Von Gratz, otherwise known as the Countess Dracule, a Vampire never seen in the classic novel – and she intends to travel to London to reap revenge on the people who killed her late husband, as well as take for her own nefarious means the unborn child of Mina and Jonathan Harker.

And so a new chapter begins, as the surviving heroes from Dracula, Mina and Jonathan Harker, John Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Abraham Van Helsing band together to stop the Countess Dracule, her Gypsy servants, her recently arisen, un-dead assistant Renfield and her three ‘Grooms of Dracule’, Vampire lords who follow her every command. During this battle Abraham Van Helsing will face his own nightmares including the death of his son to Vampires, and John Seward will gain new ones in the bottom of a pharmaceutical bottle – but none will be as terrible as Mina’s nightmare – for Count Dracula still lives, an ethereal spirit, bound to her by blood and only seen by her as he waits for her son to be born – a son who’s blood is tainted with his own, a host body for his spirit…

Can Jonathan Harker truly kill the spectre of Dracula forever? And where will he be led in a story that visits a variety of locations from the original novel, including London, Exeter, Whitby, Munich and the Borgo Pass?

Lee also sent along some preview pages.

Jonathan Harker meets Quincey Morris's Ghost:




The resurrection of Renfield:




It's 112 pages long and coming out this October. Like Frankenstein's Monster, I'm always curious about new Dracula stuff and it's encouraging that this project has the support of the Stoker family and Leslie S. Klinger (whose Annotated Dracula I love). Plus, the more I read that summary, the more curious I am to see Lee's plot play out. Looking forward to this one.