File 770 today kicks off a Titan-Comics blog tour for Life is Strange Vol. 4: Partners In Time: Tracks. Enjoy Cat Eldridge’s review and the art highlights that follow.
How far would you go, to get back to the person you love? As Max Caulfield embarks on a road trip across America after coming so close to returning to her own timeline, across the transect Tristan and Chloe follow the same path. But, both Max and Tristan struggle to control their powers and it looks like Max and Chloe may never get their happy ending – unless they can find something, or someone, to help them.
Review by Cat Eldridge: Life is Strange, Volume 4: Partners in Time Tracks
The fourth volume of the comic series based on the BAFTA-winning video game Life is Strange, follows the quite strange tales of multiverse hopping Max Caulfield. Though the premise is that they are time travelers, they actually are altering the multiverse itself and changing what happens to reality itself.
In this chapter of the series, time-twisting photographer Max has spent the past several years in a reality adjacent to her own. Lately, she realised she was running from her responsibilities… and from the Chloe she left in that reality. So she is determined to get home at all costs. So there must be a way for her to get home even with the multiverse firmly against her, so it’s time for the coast-to-coast road trip of multiple lifetimes to find it – when she follows the The High Seas band towards an uncertain destiny!
(I’m a sucker for a genre story involving a band and this one is damn good. Charles de Lint had one in his Medicine Road novel, and Terri Windling hand a scene with a band in The Wood Wife.)
So without going into the story in detail, let’s just say that both the characters and the story told here are plausible and well thought with characters that actually make sense. The LGBTQ characters are well-fleshed and make perfect sense here. I will say that it would definitely make more sense to start at the beginning of the story than here at volume four as there’s a lot of backstory doesn’t get detailed.
The artwork is awesome, simply awesome. It’s a soft palate brush effect that fits that setting in the Southwest and California perfectly. I also give points for whoever did the formatting for making work absolutely perfecting with the iPad, something that doesn’t happen all that often alas.
Life is Strange Vol. 4: Partners In Time: Tracks is published by Titan Comics and is available in bookstores, comic shops and online via Amazon, Forbidden Planet and digital download.
(1) LEND A HAND? Another Titan Comics blog tour will be rolling through on Monday. Would one of you volunteer to write a review of a comic by tomorrow night? I’d be thrilled, and so would Titan Comics. (Email me at mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com and I will send you a link to the PDF.)
(2) WISCON SAYS SUPPORT THEIR HOTEL. [Item by Jeffrey Smith.] This is different. The convention hotel saying: No convention this year? Come and hang out anyway! The SF3/WisCon Newsletter encourages readers to “Spend Memorial Day weekend at the Concourse Hotel”.
As you know, we’re not able to hold a WisCon in Madison this spring. However! The Concourse Hotel, the longtime home of WisCon, is running a special promotion for members and friends of the WisCon community over Memorial Day weekend, May 27-31, 2021
… The Concourse hosted its first WisCon in 1984 and has been our full-time hotel partner since 1995. They are an independently owned and operated hotel and as such have been hit especially hard by the loss of business during the pandemic. This is a fantastic chance to support them, get away from home for the weekend and see some friends in a clean, well-ventilated, socially distant environment….
(3) BOTH SIDES NOW. Lincoln Michel is writing an interesting series about the different genre and literary ecosystems for his Counter Craft newsletter. Here are links to the first three posts.
… I’m NOT going to try and delineate the (various and conflicting) definitions of “genre” and “literary” here. I do plan to get into that in some future newsletter but for now when I refer to the “literary world” I’m speaking of what you’d expect: MFA programs, magazines like The Paris Review or Ploughshares, imprints like Riverhead or FSG, agents who list “literary fiction” on their websites, etc.
When I say “genre world” I’m focusing mostly on science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction (plus the one hundred billion subgenres of those). Those are the genres I write in and am most familiar with. Obviously, there are other genre ecosystems: crime fiction, romance fiction, etc. Those tend to overlap a fair amount with SFF world, and also tend to function similarly in terms of how professional organizations operate, how awards are structured, and so on. But when I speak of something like “genre jargon” I’m pulling primarily from SFF. I don’t think I need to define SFF, beyond saying that acronym means “science fiction and fantasy.” You know it. Magazines like Lightspeed and Uncanny. Imprints like Orbit, Del Rey, and Tor.
Because genre vs. literary fiction is so often treated like a team sport where you pick a side and scream insults at the other one, I want to state up front that I root for both. Or perhaps play for both, in this metaphor. I’ve published in both “literary” magazines like The Paris Review and Granta as well as “genre” magazines like Lightspeed (forthcoming) and Strange Horizons. My story collection was published by the literary Coffee House Press and my science fiction novel is coming out this year from Orbit. I really love both “teams” here….
…Popular authors also tend to contend over and over. This can easily be seen by the list of multiple winners. Many SFF writers have won the Hugo for Best Novel multiple times. You have 6/12 (wins/nominations) for Heinlein and 4/10 for Bujold. Five different authors have won three times and nine have won twice. There is nothing like that in the Pulitzer. No author has won three, four, or six Pulitzers. Only four have won twice: Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, John Updike, and Colson Whitehead. This is despite the fact that the Pulitzers have been around since 1918 and the Hugos only since 1953. (This pattern is a little less prominent in other, newer awards, but still there.)
It’s fair to note that SFF perhaps has a smaller pool of books to choose from, since at least theoretically the literary awards are drawn from all of literature. But if the literary world is as narrow and parochial as many SFF fans contend then you’d expect to see that in the rewards.
As with almost everything I discuss here, there are arguments for both ways of doing things. In the genre side, the titans of the genre can be adequately reflected in the awards. A monumental work like N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy—truly one of the best fantasy series of modern times, which I’ve written about a bit here before—can even win three times in a row . That would simply never happen in the literary world, no matter how deserving. And one could certainly argue that the awards more accurately reflect the tastes of readership.
This can be a downside too, since biases and prejudices are also reflected. Before N.K. Jemisin won in 2016, no black author had ever won the Hugo for best novel. If you had died before 2015, when Cixin Liu won, you would have never witnessed a POC win the Hugo. It was hardly perfect in the lit world, but you did have Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ha Jin, Jesmyn Ward, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others winning NBAs and Pulitzers. It’s about the same for gender. Ursula K. Le Guin was the first woman to win a Hugo for Best Novel in 1970. (Ditto the Nebula, although that had only started in 1966.) By that time, dozens of women had won the Pulitzer and/or National Book Award.
All of that said, both the lit world and SFF world have been far better on the diversity front in the last five to ten years than they have been historically. Hopefully that will continue.
… Publishing runs on novels. At least when it comes to fiction, novels are what agents want to hear about, what editors want to look at, and—with a few exceptions—what readers want to buy. Perhaps because of this, short stories hold a special place in fiction writers’ hearts. The short story is our form. Our weird mysterious little monster that no one else can love.
Strangely, the opposite was true 100 years ago. For the first few decades of the 20th-century, the short story was the popular form of literature. It was a magazine world back then. Short stories were what paid the bills. Authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald felt forced to write short stories that they could afford to write “decent books” (novels) on the side! In the genre world, the short story was so dominant that even the “novels” were often a bunch of existing short stories stitched quickly together in what was known as a “fix-up.” I’m not talking obscure books here, but some of the pillars of SFF from that era: Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, Asimov’s I, Robot, and Simak’s City. Also several of Raymond Chandler’s best hardboiled novels over in crime fiction. (Here’s a good post by Charlie Jane Anders arguing the fix-up is the ideal form for SFF.)…
…You may be asking, “So what? All the bids we knew about have already filed, so what difference does it make?”
I contend that there are two reasons for being concerned about this. The first is that frankly, there are groups that are unhappy about both the bids on the ballot, for various reasons. A “sprint” bid might enter the field. Now even though I have agreed to run Memphis’ WSFS division should they win, I’m trying to be as fair as I can about the known deficiencies of all currently filed bids. In 1990, I was a member of the San Francisco in ’93 Worldcon bid committee, facing filed bids from Phoenix and Zagreb. Due to unimpressive performances from all three filed bids at the 1989 SMOFCon (the filing deadline at that time was the close of the previous Worldcon, and sites were selected three years in advance at that time), a heretofore hoax bid for Hawaii was pressed into service by a large number of SMOFs and a write-in bid for Hawaii in ’93 filed. The write-in bid placed second ahead of the Zagreb and Phoenix bids, and I rather expect that had they been on the ballot, they might have beaten San Francisco. In 1991-92, I wrote and was a co-sponsor of a change to WSFS rules that changed the filing deadline to 180 days before the convention, a rule that, had it been in effect for the 1990 election for the 1993 Worldcon, would have allowed Hawaii to be on the ballot. So even though it would have been used against me back then, I recognize the value in keeping the door open for “sprint” bids. If there are groups that still want to take a shot at the 2023 Worldcon, I think they should have a chance to file until the T-180 deadline that is written into the Constitution.
The second reason I think DisCon III should reopen filing, even if nobody else files, is philosophical. WSFS rules are not self-enforcing. We trust Worldcon committees to follow WSFS rules as much as they can, subject to local laws and other contingencies. There is no higher authority that can force a Worldcon committee to obey WSFS rules. There’s no WSFS Inc. that can step in and give orders. There is no appeal from a Worldcon committee’s decisions. A Worldcon committee that refuses to follow a clearly-written and unambiguous rule that would not be difficult to follow is telling us that no rule is safe. WSFS governance is based on trust. If we can’t trust a committee to follow the rules, then the unwritten contract between the members of WSFS and the Worldcon committee that manages the members’ annual convention breaks down….
… I think DisCon III should change their initial decision and reopen site selection filing until June 18, even if no other bid surfaces, to confirm that insofar as they are able to do so, even under the difficulties of a worldwide pandemic, they will continue to obey the rules of the organization whose membership is the World Science Fiction Society. To do otherwise is to do a disservice to the members of WSFS….
… Now a special innovation team and a group of nearly 300 newsroom employees are pushing for drastic changes at the paper, which has been part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire since 2007….
… As the team was completing a report on its findings last summer, Mr. [Matt] Murray [WSJ Editor] found himself staring down a newsroom revolt. Soon after the killing of George Floyd, staff members created a private Slack channel called “Newsroomies,” where they discussed how The Journal, in their view, was behind on major stories of the day, including the social justice movement growing in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death. Participants also complained that The Journal’s digital presence was not robust enough, and that its conservative opinion department had published essays that did not meet standards applied to the reporting staff. The tensions and challenges are similar to what leaders of other news organizations, including The Times, have heard from their staffs.
In July, Mr. Murray received a draft from Ms. [Louise] Story’s team, a 209-page blueprint on how The Journal should remake itself called The Content Review. It noted that “in the past five years, we have had six quarters where we lost more subscribers than we gained,” and said addressing its slow-growing audience called for significant changes in everything from the paper’s social media strategy to the subjects it deemed newsworthy.
The report argued that the paper should attract new readers — specifically, women, people of color and younger professionals — by focusing more on topics such as climate change and income inequality. Among its suggestions: “We also strongly recommend putting muscle behind efforts to feature more women and people of color in all of our stories.”
The Content Review has not been formally shared with the newsroom and its recommendations have not been put into effect, but it is influencing how people work: An impasse over the report has led to a divided newsroom, according to interviews with 25 current and former staff members. The company, they say, has avoided making the proposed changes because a brewing power struggle between Mr. Murray and the newpublisher, Almar Latour, has contributed to a stalemate that threatens the future of The Journal.
…About a month after the report was submitted, Ms. Story’s strategy team was concerned that its work might never see the light of day, three people with knowledge of the matter said, and a draft was leaked to one of The Journal’s own media reporters, Jeffrey Trachtenberg. He filed a detailed article on it late last summer.
But the first glimpse that outside readers, and most of the staff, got of the document wasn’t in The Journal. In October, a pared-down version of The Content Review was leaked to BuzzFeed News, which included a link to the document as a sideways scan. (Staffers, eager to read the report, had to turn their heads 90 degrees.)…
(6) THE POWER OF ANTHOLOGIES. Featuring Linda D. Addison (Sycorax’s Daughters), Maurice Broaddus (POC Destroy Horror & Dark Faith), and Sheree Renée Thomas (Dark Matter), and moderated by author and editor Nisi Shawl (New Suns, Everfair, Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany), “Ancestors and Anthologies: New Worlds in Chorus” is a free livestream panel hosted by Clarion West and the Seattle Public Library on Monday, April 12 at 6:30 p.m. Register at the link. It’s part of the “Beyond Afrofuturism: Black Editors and Publishers in Speculative Fiction” Panel Series.
From the groundbreaking Dark Matter to Sycorax’s Daughters to POC Destroy!, anthologies are one way marginalized voices gather in chorus on a particular subject, subgenre, or genre. Our anthologies panel will delve into the world of bespoke collections with luminaries in the field.
… What took so long? 1) It is a daunting thing when a loved one dies to be responsible for the accumulations of a lifetime. 2) We’re book people! Letting go of books is painful. A bookcase is a record of time spent and history and books are harder to find good homes for than one might think. 3) Her particular status as beloved author made every decision weighted.
(8) STANISLAW LEM CENTENNIAL DEBATE. On April 18, Polish Society for Futures Studies (PSFS) will present a live online debate “The expansion of future consciousness through the practice of science fiction and futures studies,” celebrating the Stanis?aw Lem centenary. Lem was a celebrated science-fiction writer and futurologist from Poland. The Centennial Debate will feature international participants: Thomas Lombardo, professor emeritus of Rio Salado College and author of books on science-fiction and future consciousness; Karlheinz Steinmüller, PhD, science fiction author, publisher and eminent German futurist; Kacper Nosarzewski, futurist from Poland and a literary critic.
The event will be streamed live on Zoom and YouTube, April 18th 12:00 am Pacific Standard Time, 3:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, 20:00 Central European Time, and the admittance is free. More information including links to the event will be posted at https://centennialdebate.ptsp.pl/.
The event is being supported by the World Futures Studies Federation, Association of Professional Futurists and Lem Estate, among many others.
Stanis?aw Lem wrote, in Solaris: “We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.” The Centennial Debate will explore the practice of science-fiction and futures studies as different ways of “using the future” and increasing our understanding of humanity’s hopes, fears, prospects and predicaments.
(9) MEMORY LANE.
On a day in 1986 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home premiered. It was directed by Leonard Nimoy who wrote it with Harve Bennett. It was produced by Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Nicholas Meyer and Harve Bennett. It starred the entire original original Trek cast. It would lose out to Aliens at Conspiracy ’87. The film’s less-than-serious attitude and rather unconventional story were well liked by critics and fans of the original series along with the general public. It was also a box office success. And it has an exemplary eighty-one percent rating among audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born April 10, 1936 – David Hardy, age 85. Astronomical and SF artist. European Vice President of the Int’l Ass’n of Astronomical Artists. Artbooks e.g. Visions of Space; Hardyware; 50 Years in Space: what we thought then, what we know now. Two hundred fifty covers, a hundred interiors. Here is the Jun 74 Amazing. Here is King David’s Spaceship. Here is Understanding Space and Time (note that the piano is a Bösendorfer). Here is the Apr 2010 Analog. [JH]
Born April 10, 1940 — Raul Julia. If we count Sesame Street as genre which it should, his appearance as Rafael there was his first genre role. Yeah, I’m stretching it somewhat. OK, how about as Aram Fingal In Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, a RSL production off the John Varley short story? That better? He later starred in Frankenstein Unbound as Victor Frankenstein as well. His last role released while he was still living was in the superb Addams Family Values as Gomez Addams reprising the role he’d had in The Addams Family. (Died 1994.) (CE)
Born April 10, 1948 – Jim Burns, age 73 (not James H. Burns 1962-2016). Four hundred twenty covers, two hundred interiors. Three Hugos. Twelve BSFA (British SF Ass’n) Awards. Artist Guest of Honour at Conspiracy ’87 the 45th Worldcon, several other more local cons in the U.K. and U.S., see here. Artbooks e.g. Lightship; Transluminal; The Art of Jim Burns. Each in The Durdane Trilogy used a segment of this, e.g. The Asutra. Here is Interzone 11. Here is the Jul 94 Asimov’s. Here is The Wanderer. Here is Dozois’ 34th Year’s Best Science Fiction. Here is Dark Angels Rising. [JH]
Born April 10, 1951 – Ross Pavlac. Co-chaired Marcon XIII-XIV, Windycon VIII, Chicon IV the 40th Worldcon. Fan Guest of Honor at Torque 2. Sometimes appeared in a blue aardvark costume; RP’s fanzine for the apaMyriad was The Avenging Aardvark’s Aerie; RP was one of the first fans to extrude a Website, also so called. Chaired Windycon XXIV from his deathbed. See these appreciations. (Died 1997) [JH]
Born April 10, 1953 — David Langford, 68. And how long have you been reading Ansible? If he’s not noted for that singular enterprise, he should be noted for assisting in producing the second edition of the EoSF, not to mention some 629,000 words as a principal editor of the third (online) edition of the Encyclopedia of SF, and contributed some eighty thousand words of articles to the most excellent EoF as well. And let’s not forget his genre writing as well that earned him a Short Story Hugo at the Millennium Philcon for “Different Kinds of Darkness”. And yes, he has won other Hugos, too numerous to recount here. (CE)
Born April 10, 1955 — Pat Murphy, 66. I think that her most brilliant work is The City, Not Long After which I’ve read myriad times. If you’ve not read this novel, do so now. The Max Merriwell series is excellent and Murphy’s ‘explanation’ of the authorial attributions is fascinating. And The Falling Woman by her is an amazing read as well. She’s reasonably well stocked at the usual suspects. (CE)
Born April 10, 1957 — John M. Ford. Popular at Minicon and other cons where he would be Dr. Mike and give silly answers to questions posed to him while wearing a lab coat before a whiteboard. His most interesting novel I think is The Last Hot Time, an urban fantasy set in Chicago that might have been part of Terri Windling’s Bordertown series but wasn’t. Possibly. The Dragon Waiting is also excellent and his Trek novels are among the best in that area of writing. I’d be lying to say he’s deeply stocked at the usual suspects. (Died 2006.) (CE)
Born April 10, 1959 – Ruth Lichtwardt, age 62. Hugo Adm’r for Anticipation the 67th Worldcon. Chaired MidAmeriCon II the 74th; her reflections as Chair here. Long active with the Gunn Center for the Study of SF; Adm’r for the 2021 Conference. Co-chaired ConQuest 49. Drinks Guinness. [JH]
Born April 10, 1975 – Merrie Haskell, age 46. Three novels, a score of shorter stories, recently in Beneath Ceaseless Skies 313. Interviewed in Lightspeed. Schneider Book Award. “I don’t think I’m unique in finding stories where female agency is non-existent, or is punished, as really troublesome…. I’m not even talking about the waiting-for-rescue parts; I don’t love that, mind you, but where are the choices?” [JH]
Born April 10, 1978 — Hannu Rajaniemi, 43. Author of the Jean le Flambeur series which consists of The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince and The Causal Angel. Damn if I can summarize them. They remind me a bit of Alastair Reynolds’ Prefect novels, somewhat of Ian Mcdonald’s Mars novels as well. Layers of weirdness upon weirdness. Quite fascinating. (CE)
Born April 10, 1984 – Rachel Carter, age 37. Three novels for us. Nonfiction in e.g. The New Republic. Teaches fiction-writing, also a freelance editor. [JH]
Born April 10, 1992 — Daisy Ridley, 29. Obviously she played the role of Rey in The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker. She was also in Scrawl, a horror film as well as voicing Cotton Rabbit in Peter Rabbit. Though stretching to even call it genre adjacent even, she was Mary Debenham in Murder on the Orient Express which was rather well done. (CE)
…I won’t lie, though: I sure do miss the time when a buck got you two comics and change. But I get how inflation works and how rising paper costs can’t be ignored. I’m also quite aware that the higher cover prices of today’s market have led to creators being able to make a decent living while entertaining us. That benefits the fans, who get to enjoy the great stories that spring from their imaginations.
However, there does come a point where comic books can simply become too expensive for many fans, forcing readers to drop titles not because they don’t like reading them, but because they simply can’t afford to anymore.
We may be approaching that point.
One of the Big Two publishers, DC Comics, is bumping the price up on some of its monthly titles to $5.99 for a 40-page issue. In its solicitations for June releases, several ongoing series, The Joker #4, Superman Red & Blue #3, Wonder Woman: Black White and Gold #1, and one of the company’s flagship books, Batman #109, are all listed with $5.99 cover prices. Think about that for a moment. If someone wanted to read all four of those titles, it would cost about $24 (before tax) to do so. Four comics, $24. That’s a big financial hit….
(12) JONESING. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] “Phoebe Waller-Bridge to star in new Indiana Jones” reports CNN. Let’s hope the 35-year-old Waller-Bridge is not the love interest for the 78-year-old Harrison Ford. She wouldn’t pass the “half+7” rule for another 22 years.
(13) TRADECRAFT. Francis Hamit was a guest on the Spies Like Us podcast to discuss “Pine Gap (2018) Part One”. (The trailer for the Netflix series is at the link: Pine Gap: Season 1).
2018 Australian 6-episode series which we HIGHLY recommend both for spy geeks and people that don’t care much about tradecraft but enjoy a solid human drama. Watching these characters unwind and reveal their true characters under the duress of multiple intertwining espionage threats was a real treat for both of us. ALSO!!!! It is our first episode featuring a guest with actual expertise in the field, author and ex-intelligence officer Francis Hamit. Really excited about this one.
Hamit says: “This was a very positive experience for me. Tod and Dave are really nice guys and very ‘Otaku’ for any spy film or television show. Some of those (James Bond, etc) fall into the SF&F genre and they’ve done about fifty so far. Each is an hour long and they usually do two part, one hour each, in depth discussions. I was on as a topic expert on SIGINT.”
One of the puzzlements of “The Nevers,” the new alt-superhero show beginning Sunday on HBO, is the title. The peculiarly gifted late-Victorian Londoners, mostly women, who serve as the show’s heroes (and some of its villains) are never called “nevers”; they’re most often referred to as the Touched. In the first four of the series’s 12 episodes, nothing is called the Nevers. You can understand not calling a show “The Touched,” but it’s still a little confusing.
And the confusion doesn’t end there. “The Nevers,” while handsomely produced and, from moment to moment, reasonably diverting, doesn’t catch fire in those early episodes in part because we — along with the characters — are still trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
Before this goes any further, it’s time to mention that “The Nevers” — a rare case these days of a genre series not based on an existing property — was created for the screen by Joss Whedon. There are things to be explained about Whedon’s involvement with the show, but for now let’s stick to the synergism between the new series and his great creation, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”…
A trio of Russian and American space travelers launched successfully and reached the International Space Station on Friday [April 9].
NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov blasted off as scheduled at 12:42 p.m. (0742 GMT, 3:42 a.m. EDT) aboard the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch facility in Kazakhstan.
They docked at the station after a two-orbit journey that lasted just over three hours.
It is the second space mission for Vande Hei and the third for Novitskiy, while Dubrov is on his first mission.
By today’s standards, Pongdoesn’t appear to exactly offer the latest, greatest gaming experience around, but just try and tell that to Pager, a macaque monkey who works for Elon Musk at Neuralink, who is currently playing the game with just his mind…
The gameplay is all part of Musk’s master plan of creating a “fully-implanted, wireless, high-channel count brain-machine interface (BMI),” aka a Neuralink, according to the company’s latest blog post highlighting Pager’s gameplay. While the end goal of the implanted device is to give people dealing with paralysis a direct, neural connection to easily and seamlessly operate their computers and mobile devices, the technology is currently giving this monkey some solid entertainment (as well as some tasty banana smoothies)
In the best video you’ll see of a monkey playing video games all day, we get to hang out for a few minutes with Pager, a 9-year-old macaque who, about six weeks ago, had a Neuralink device implanted into each side of his brain. By appearance, he doesn’t seem to be ill-affected by the procedure, save for some missing head fur. Although, it’s hard to say we’re really having a good hang, as Pager is intently focused on playing mind games with a joystick, and on the sweet, sweet smoothies he gets for interacting with the computer. (Hey, at least he’s getting paid.)
(17) BEACH BLANKET BIG BROTHER. Mr. Sci-Fi – Marc Scott Zicree – is running a multi-part series about radio and on-screen adaptations of Orwell’s novel. The latest is “1984 Marathon Part 5 — 1984 Meets Dr. Phibes!” However, the cute title is deceptive — it’s really an audio copy of Vincent Price’s 1955 radio performance in the role of Winston Smith.
[Thanks to Danny Sichel, John King Tarpinian, Martin Morse Wooster, JJ, Cat Eldridge, Michael Toman, John Hertz, Jeffrey Smith, Michael J. Walsh, Andrew Porter, and Mike Kennedy for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day jayn.]
File 770 today hosts a Titan-Comics blog tour for Adler, written by Lavie Tidhar and with art by Paul McCaffrey. Here’s James Bacon’s review of the issue, plus a six-page excerpt from the comic:
Review by James Bacon
Adler by Lavie Tidhar and Paul McCaffrey
This is a light and fun romp into a strange steampunkesque world, where our protagonists are delightfully drawn from literature, Irene Adler, the cunning and brilliant equal of Sherlock Holmes, taking primary role, and calling on an interesting selection of characters, an orphan called Annie, Jane Eyre and Lady Haversham.
Tidhar, set out where this alternative history sits:
“1902:Queen Victoria still rules, sustained by some terrible science; the forces of colonial resistance gather to fight the British Empire; and Irene Adler and her friends must stop a deadly plot…”
I have to admit that I am well-impressed by the depth to which Tidhar has gone to, the various villains, from a handsome Jack based on David Warner’s portrayal and Le Fanu’s Carmilla, there is a cleverness to how he weaves in the various characters, and of course, the main villain is Ayesha, based I assume, on Henry Rider Haggard’s protagonist from She.
The blurb lets us know that it is time to “meet the League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen” and that is indeed fair.
I was a little underwhelmed by the actual story, I perhaps was not all that keen on seeing the Queen of a country that was crushed by the British Empire into being a colony being portrayed as the villain, instead of a righteous rebel fighting for her nationhood. I suspect that a lot of the fun aspects, from the clothing to the lighter style of art, was not what I was looking for, at this time. I had hoped for a darker and grittier story, and the look and artistic style of this comic which flows well, is prettily drawn and tells a fun story, was not what I was hoping for, and part of that is down to me, a shelf of Lavie Tidhar and even his bibliography on Michael Marshall Smith sits proudly on my bookcase, so I maybe brought to much expectation to this easier going, fun comic.
It isn’t exactly like there is too much whimsy, it just felt slightly out of kilter for me. It might be aimed and presented for a younger market, other readers perhaps, and I am certain that it will be enjoyed, which is great. I love that there are comics that are just not for me, as it now means they are for someone else, and that is a good thing.
I wanted something that was a little more nuanced, perhaps a heavier twist with these same well thought of characters, and heavier, darker, much more reflective of our now, where societal structures and imperialism is more the enemy than to be defended.
(1) SHOULD GEORGIA BILL HAVE IMPLICATIONS FOR DRAGON CON? Georgia has passed a controversial voting bill reports CNN. Some think Dragon Con should take a stance, a few say they won’t attend while the law is in effect.
The new law imposes new voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, empowers state officials to take over local elections boards, limits the use of ballot drop boxes and makes it a crime to approach voters in line to give them food and water.
“It’s like the Christmas tree of goodies for voter suppression,” Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan said on the Senate floor as lawmakers prepared to vote on the nearly 100-page bill Thursday.
Republicans cast the measure, dubbed The Election Integrity Act of 2021, as necessary to boost confidence in elections after the 2020 election saw Trump make repeated, unsubstantiated claims of fraud.
By Thursday evening, a lawsuit challenging the new law had already been filed by a trio of voting rights groups: the New Georgia Project, the Black Voters Matter Fund and Rise Inc.
Editor Walt Boyes raised some possible implications for Dragon Con, held annually in Atlanta, in the following statement sent for publication. (Boyes adds: “I am speaking for myself, not for Ring of Fire Press, and I haven’t talked to anybody at Dragon Con.”)
In the last 24 hours, the Republicans of the state of Georgia passed a draconian set of voter restrictions, the like of which has not been seen since the Jim Crow laws. It is clear why they have restricted voting, even to the point of making giving water to people on line to vote illegal. They know that the Republican Party cannot win in a standup fair contest and they are trying one more thing to stack the deck against black and brown voters and progressives of all stripes.
If Dragon Con has any respect for democracy, I would hope they would use their huge footprint and buying power to suggest that the State Legislature rethink their voter restrictions, and if the Legislature doesn’t, Dragon Con should leave Georgia. This is a major, essential moral choice.
Several people have tweeted comparable thoughts:
I was going to go to Dragoncon, but not now that he cheated his way into the governor's office. https://t.co/IXCumydHhx
— Wayne Wilson (Springsteen fanatic ) (@bbud1959) March 26, 2021
Dragon Con should cancel or move.
— Kate Woods Walker (same name at Spoutible) (@KateWoodsWalker) March 26, 2021
I thought world would become a kinder & more just place when #OrangeCheato was removed, Georgia has enacted a law that is a blatant attack on humanity & decency.
When travel becomes a thing again, I will still not attend @DragonCon or anything in Georgia until justice prevails.
— Walt aka ???????????? RedFlagsInFandom.com????? (@neoengel) March 26, 2021
If @DragonCon & @MomoCon decide to move forward w/their conventions and line the pockets of a state that so repulsively restricts the voice of its citizens then I’m not gonna support it. Use your voice and power #DragonCon to do good in the world. #WithGreatPower#DoTheRightThing
— @jeffsmall.comicgeek.social (@jeffrsmall) March 27, 2021
It would be interesting to learn whether Dragon Con leadership has influence beyond the purely economic that could be brought to bear on the situation. As to their economic leverage, looking at the communications Dragon Con has been putting out, they’re still in suspense whether they can do an in-person con in 2021. If social media pressures the committee to pre-emptively threaten not told hold an event that’s already in jeopardy, then what happens next?
(2) ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED. N.K. Jemisin shared a joyful milestone with Twitter followers:
While I'm here, might as well mention I got the news that THE FIFTH SEASON has passed half a million copies sold (515,500). When I started out as a writer, I prayed my 1st novel would hit 10k, even 15. Mind perpetually blown. Every day I'm grateful to my readers. Thanks, y'all.
(3) CORY DOCTOROW ON AUDIO RIGHTS. [Item by Daniel Dern.] From the current issue of Locus, the premier trade journal/news magazine/site for the sf, fantasy & horror etc. book-etc. industry, this interesting article on why Cory eschewed Amazon for his audiobooking: “Cory Doctorow: Free Markets”. He “buries the news lede” ~12 paragraphs down:
…2020 was a hard year, but for me, it had a bright spot: In September, I launched and executed the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in history. I made $267,613. In the space of a month, I went from worried about my family’s finances to completely secure about our ability to pay our mortgage and taxes and add a good chunk to our retirement accounts. It was an extraordinary month.
Even though 16 years have come and gone since Eccleston regenerated into David Tennant, he doesn’t sound like he’s aged a day. Good for a Time Lord, to be honest. There’s still the excitement, the swagger, the kind of dopey optimism hiding deep trauma that was present in 2005. We only had an all-too brief 13 episodes with the Ninth Doctor, but with Big Finish’s Ninth Doctor Adventures line, he’s basically going to double that….
During China’s first two sci-fi booms, in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively, writers tended to focus on technological utopias and issues such as international politics, scientific ethics, and extraterrestrial encounters. Currently, however, we can see a general movement in the arts, whether conscious or not, to reestablish a link with China’s cultural heritage. …
After decades of looking primarily to Western writers for inspiration, whether Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, or William Gibson, Chinese authors’ fascination with the interaction between old customs and new technology reflects a society-wide revival of interest in Chinese traditional culture and cultural pride.
… But when kehuan authors connect their work to these traditions, they’re not simply reveling in the past — China’s bookshelves are already groaning under the weight of all the works dedicated to that particular pastime. Rather they’re acknowledging that China and its people are still intrinsically linked to its traditions and its history, and that collective experience and belief will remain important in the future. Whether this heritage is a net positive or negative depends on how it is used: Some writers see in it the potential for exploitation, while others choose to portray the past as the key to saving our shared humanity.
(6) BREAKTHROUGH IN HUNGARIAN WEIRD. [Item by Bence Pintér.] Horror small press Valancourt Books is going to publish a short story collection by the best Hungarian horror/weird author and screenwriter Attila Veres. Veres first published his dark, grotesque, and darkly humorous short stories at Lovecraftian fanzine The Black Aether. After this he debuted at professional publisher Agave Books in 2017 with the weird apocalyptic novel Odakint sötétebb, which became an overnight sensation. In 2018 he followed this up a short story collection, Éjféli iskolák, which is widely read outside usual genre circles also. His short story ‘The Time Remaining’ was included in The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories anthology in 2020.
Horror and weird is a novelty in Hungary, especially books which are dealing with Hungarian realities. Veres started the trend with his deeply imaginative, frightening and personal stories, in which political questions are often there in the background. In these short stories Hungary is reflected in a distorted, often shattered mirror, portrayed with a touch of black humor.
The collection will be published by Valancourt in 2022, and it will include ten stories: seven will be translated from Éjféli iskolák, and there will be three new ones from his next collection. This is also huge news for Hungarian speculative fiction generally, since this will be the first Hungarian speculative book (I know about) to be published in translation in the US since…ever? (I say this with a nod to Hugo winner Bogi Takács – who writes mostly in English.) I hope this will start a trend!
… The funny thing is, she loves history, even more than science fiction. As a result, she’s read shelves of books. That’s why, in “Doomsday Book,” you have an assistant in modern times who worries about the college running out of orange juice as people come down with a mysterious and deadly infection, and an old woman in the 1300s who believes the plague is a punishment from God, and a group of bell ringers from America who are more worried about their rights to perform being taken away under a quarantine than keeping others safe.
Does all this sound familiar?
People, in other words, worry about dumb things as the world collapses around them, Willis said. There are many examples of that in “Doomsday Book,” even though she wrote the book in 1992, when people would think “pandemic” was the name of yet another grunge band inspired by Nirvana….
My guest this time around is Zig Zag Claybourne, the author of The Brothers Jetstream: Leviathan and its sequel Afro Puffs Are the Antennae of the Universe. His other works include By All Our Violent Guides, Neon Lights, In the Quiet Spaces, and the short story collection Historical Inaccuracies. His fiction and essays have appeared in in Apex, Galaxy’s Edge, GigaNotosaurus, Strange Horizons, and other venues.
We discussed how creators can self-define their success to avoid jealousy and despair, why he’s always preferred Marvel to DC, how he’d annoy his family with his love of the original Star Trek, the two professors who showed him he could be a writer, why the title is the soul of a story, the most important pointer he received after reaching out to romance writer Beverley Jenkins for advice, why he does some of his best writing in the bathtub, how dialogue reveals character, whether his wild duology will ever become a trilogy, how to survive toxic fandoms, and much more.
(10) BEVERLY CLEARY OBIT. The great children’s book author Beverly Cleary died March 25 at the age of 104 reports HarperCollins.
… By the third grade she had conquered reading and spent much of her childhood with books from the public library. A teacher suggested that she should write for boys and girls when she grew up, and the idea appealed to her. But after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley (where a dormitory is named in her honor) she specialized in librarianship at the University of Washington, Seattle (which today honors her contribution to Northwest literature with the Beverly Cleary Endowed Chair for Children and Youth Services).
Her early dream of writing for children was rekindled when “a little boy faced me rather ferociously across the circulation desk and said: ‘Where are the books about kids like us?’” Henry Huggins, his dog, Ribsy, and the gang on Klickitat Street, including Beezus and her younger sister, Ramona, were an instant success with young readers. The awards came later, beginning with a Newbery Honor in 1978 for Ramona and Her Father and one in 1982 for Ramona Quimby, Age 8. She received the 1984 John Newbery Medal for Dear Mr. Henshaw, which was inspired by letters she’d received from children.
Mrs. Cleary has also been honored with the American Library Association’s 1975 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, the Catholic Library Association’s 1980 Regina Medal, and the University of Southern Mississippi’s 1982 Silver Medallion, all presented in recognition of her lasting contribution to children’s literature. In addition, Mrs. Cleary was the 1984 United States author nominee for the prestigious international Hans Christian Andersen Award.
In 2000, to honor her invaluable contributions to children’s literature, Beverly Cleary was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress; in addition, she was awarded the 2003 National Medal of Art from the National Endowment for the Arts….
(11) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
March 26, 1989 — On this day in 1989, Quantum Leap premiered. Created by Donald P. Bellisario (Tales of The Golden Monkey, AirWolf), it starred Scott Bakula as the time-travelling Sam Beckett and Dean Stockwell as his holographic contact from the future, Admiral Al Calavicci. The series would air on NBC for five seasons gaining a large following after a mediocre start. It has a stellar 97% rating by the audience reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes.
(12) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
Born March 26, 1850 — Edward Bellamy. Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is really the only work that he’s remembered for today. It’s interesting if more than a bit stilted in its language style. He wrote two other largely forgotten works, Dr. Heidenhoff’s Process and Miss Ludington’s Sister: A Romance of Immortality. (Died 1898.) (CE)
Born March 26, 1907 – Betty MacDonald. So well known for The Egg and I that e.g. Los Angeles had an omelette-restaurant-and-art-gallery called “The Egg and the Eye”. For us, two dozen stories about a magical Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle; as a boy I thought them jolly fun, re-reading later I saw they were about bad children who through magic got their comeuppance. (Died 1958) [JH]
Born March 26, 1928 – G. Harry Stine. Two dozen novels, a score of shorter stories; two dozen “Science Fact” columns in Analog, ten dozen of “The Alternate View”; essays, letters, reviews there and in Destinies, Far Frontiers, Omni. Nonfiction e.g. Rocket Power and Space Flight, Handbook of Model Rocketry, The Third Industrial Revolution, Halfway to Anywhere. Founded Nat’l Ass’n of Rocketry. Chaired Nat’l Fire Protection Ass’n Technical Committee on Pyrotechnics. (Died 1997)
Born March 26, 1929 – David Lake. Ten novels, eight shorter stories. Ditmar Award. Guest of Honour at Quasarcon. Introduction to Oxford Univ. Press ed’n of Wells’ First Men in the Moon. Often seen in Foundation, SF Commentary. (Died 2016) [JH]
Born March 26, 1931 — Leonard Nimoy. I really don’t need to say who he played on Trek, do I? Did you know his first role was as a zombie in Zombies of the Stratosphere? Or that he did a a lot of Westerns ranging from Broken Arrow in which he played various Indians to The Tall Man in which at least his character had a name, Deputy Sheriff Johnny Swift. His other great genre role was on Mission: Impossible as The Great Paris, a character whose real name was never revealed, who was a retired magician. It was his first post-Trek series. He of course showed up on the usual other genre outings such as The Twilight Zone, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Outer Limits, Night Gallery and Get Smart. And then there’s the matter of “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” which due to a copyright claim I can’t show you him performing. (Died 2015.) (CE)
Born March 26, 1945 – Rachel Holmen, age 76. Editor at Locus; at Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine. “Quilter, knitter, folk musician/singer … bad gardener … girl geek … used to be part of TeamB.” [JH]
Born March 26, 1950 — K. W. Jeter, 71. Farewell Horizontal may or may not be punk of any manner but it’s a great read. Though I generally loathe such things, Morlock Night, his sequel to The Time Machine , is well-worth reading. I’ve heard good things about his Blade Runner sequels but haven’t read them. Opinions please. (CE)
Born March 26, 1952 – Gary Mattingly, age 69. Co-founded Kansas City SF Society. First President of Metro Detroit SF Society, Inc., sponsor of AutoClave; co-chaired AutoClave 1. Co-chaired Ditto 2 (Ditto, a brand of spirit duplicator). Special Guest at Corflu 4 (corflu = mimeograph correction fluid). AutoClave, so far as I know, the first fanziners’ con; Ditto, Corflu followed. [JH]
Born March 26, 1953 — Christopher Fowler, 68. I started reading him when I encountered his Bryant & May series which though explicitly not genre does feature a couple of protagonists who are suspiciously old. Possibly a century or more now. The mysteries may or may not have genre aspects (some such as Seventy Seven Clocksare definitely genre) but all are wonderfully weird. Other novels by him which I’d recommend are Roofworld and Rune which really are genre, and Hell Train which is quite delicious horror. (CE)
Born March 26, 1979 – A. Igoni Barrett, age 42. One novel for us. Outside our field, two collections of shorter stories. Won BBC World Service short-story competition. Charles Dickens Award. “My best ideas come from south of my head. So whatever a reader asserts I was doing in my stories is probably right. Or possibly wrong. Each day I keep discovering myself in others’ reading of my work…. The only thing I set out to do was to show my head that I could write from my gut.” [JH]
Born March 26, 1985 — Keira Knightley, 36. To my surprise and this definitely shows I’m not a Star Wars geek, she was Sabé, The Decoy Queen., in The Phantom Menace. Next up for her is Princess of Thieves, a loose adaptation of the Robin Hood legend. Now I didn’t see that but I did see her in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl as Elizabeth Swann. I saw her as Guinevere, an odd Guinevere indeed, in King Arthur. Her last role I must note was as The Nutcracker and the Four Realms in which she was the Sugar Plum Fairy! (CE)
(13) ADLER. File 770 will be the penultimate stop on Titan Comics’ Adler blog tour next week. Adler is written by Lavie Tidhar.
Somewhat surprisingly, London’s venerable British Library has emerged as a major player in the reissuing of early-20th-century popular fiction. After immense success with a line of Golden Age mysteries, it recently added imprints devoted to classic weird tales, women’s novels from before World War II and early science fiction. The BL’s trade paperbacks are uniformly handsome, well printed, augmented with illuminating introductions and priced around $12.50. Some titles are issued in the United States by Poisoned Pen Press, while the others can be ordered online or through your favorite bookstore. Nearly all are worth seeking out.
Consider, for example, “The Question Mark” and “The Man With Six Senses,” both by Muriel Jaeger. Originally published in 1926 and 1927 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, the two novels are H.G. Wellsian works of technological, political and social extrapolation. The first depicts a socialist utopia of the 22nd century, and the second tracks the life of a flawed “superman” and the effect of his powers on himself and those closest to him. In both, action is subordinated to argument, as the characters converse about society, class, sex and marriage, religious belief and human evolution….
(16) IT BUGS HIM. Leonard Maltin covers a nonfiction film with fannish appeal: “Curiosity Is The Key”.
… Attack of the Murder Hornets sounds like the title of a cheesy 1950s science-fiction film. It is, instead, a droll documentary about a very real threat to the Pacific Northwest that could have spelled disaster for the already depleted bee population of North America. Michael Paul Stephenson, whose resume includes Girlfriend’s Day and Best Worst Movie keeps a straight face, so to speak, as he documents the discovery of these winged invaders by a working-class beekeeper and his family, who count on the revenue they derive from home-made honey to supplement their monthly budget. They join a motley band of government scientists, researchers, and do-gooders to form a posse that is determined to locate and eradicate these murderous insects from Japan. All the participants are earnest, some a bit quirky, but Stephenson allows us to judge them for ourselves as this amusing, low-key suspense yarn unfolds….
(17) JENNINGS WINS KAYMAR AWARD. The National Fantasy Fan Federation announced that Bob Jennings was unanimously voted as winner of the Kaymar Award.
Three cheers for Bob! The Kaymar Award is traditionally given in April every year, supposedly because the N3F was organized in the month of April. We’re a bit early for once. The selection is made by a committee, consisting of previous winners who are still in the club, from nominations submitted by members. The award, unlike other awards in fandom, can be awarded only once. It is not given for talent or for popularity, but for work — work for the benefit of the club and its members. The award is a memorial to K. Martin Carlson [1904-1986], who originated, maintained, and financed it for 25 years. Carlson was a long-time N3F member who held many positions in the club, including club historian. He went by the fan name of Kaymar.
… The experience of stepping through the pipe and into Super Nintendo World is honestly amazing. The architecture is so complete, and your view of it so well-directed, that it really does feel like you stepped into another world. I love that the designers went for a blocky, 2D-esque style for much of the environment — it would have been easy to go with something more conventional given that there are now a lot of 3D Mario games, but this approach is much more evocative. Rather than attempt to replicate a particular Mario game, the mashed-up style just screams “Nintendo.”
… The Mario Kart ride is the most ambitious attraction I’ve ever seen at a theme park. It’s essentially an AR action game set on a go-kart track, where you’re drifting through the virtual course and firing virtual shells at virtual opponents — as the kart moves through the track in real life.
The ride is located inside a re-creation of Bowser’s castle, with lots of well-crafted Mario Kart paraphernalia to look at as you line up. (The queue was fast-moving on my visit and took about half an hour in total, though I imagine wait times will be a lot longer when the park is at full capacity.) Inside you’re given a plastic Mario hat that fits onto your head with an adjustable disc, a little like a PlayStation VR headset….
(19) DRAGON A TRAILER. In “Honest Trailers: Raya & The Last Dragon” on YouTube, the Screen Junkies say the film has nothing to do with the 1985 kung-fu cheesefest The Last Dragon, and that the film has an evil baby “who feels like an exchange student from the Boss Baby franchise” and a waterfall that seems so real “it looks like a water deepfake. If I were real water, I’d be worried!”
Here’s an amazing short film titled “The Old New World” by photographer and animator Alexey Zakharov of Moscow, Russia. Zakharov found old photos of US cities from the early 1900s and brought them to life.
The photos show New York, Boston, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore between 1900 and 1940, and were obtained from the website Shorpy.
It’s a “photo-based animation project” that offers a “travel back in time with a little steampunk time machine,” Zakharov says. “The main part of this video was made with camera projection based on photos.”
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, John Hertz, JJ, rcade, Bence Pintér, Walt Boyes, Mike Kennedy, Cat Eldridge, Rob Thornton, Michael Toman, Martin Morse Wooster, PJ Evans, Daniel Dern, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Paul Weimer.]
Bilal: Legends of Today, released by Titan Comics on February 16, brings together The Cruise of Forgotten (1975), The Stone Vessel (1976) and The City That Did Not Exist (1977) in a 128-page hardcover.
Antagonised by an enigmatic character with supernatural powers, which serves as a theme for the trilogy, the three stories delve into the lives of various traditional communities (a village of the Landes, a Breton fishing port, a small working-class town in the North) as they fight against the police, the army, and all those in power, whose action, at the time, was very controversial.
Bilal: Legends Of Today is illustrated by Enki Bilal (The Nikopol Trilogy, Exterminator 17, Monster), in collaboration with Pierre Christin, the multiple award-winning comics writer. Bilal is regarded as one of the leading European comics creators working today, and his most famous work, The Nikopol Trilogy, has been released as both a videogame and a film (directed by Bilal) called Immortal, starring Charlotte Rampling.
Titan Comics adds another volume to The Moorcock Library with its Elric The Eternal Champion Collection.
Iconic sword-and-sorcery author Michael Moorcock weaves magic, heroism, and wonder as his legendary Eternal Champion Elric features in two rarely seen adventures illustrated by French artist Phillippe Druillet and veteran Moorcock interpreter James Cawthorn.
In Druillet’s “Return to Melniboné,” Elric, armed with his sentient runeblade Stormbringer, returns to the Dragon isle of Melniboné and to his cousin and lover Cymoril. Unbeknown to Elric, dark forces are gathering and there is a sinister conspiracy to steal Stormbringer and bring chaos to Melniboné.
James Cawthorn’s “Stormbringer” sees Elric’s wife, Zarozinia, kidnapped by servants of Chaos and ransomed for the runeblades, Mournblade and Stormbringer. Elric must enter the World of Chaos and confront Chardros the Reaper, Mabelode the Faceless, and Slortar the Old – the three most powerful Lords in the Realm of Chaos – and fight not just for the life of Zarozinia, but for all of mankind.
Hardcover, 56pp, $19.99, £17.99; On sale January 2021; ISBN: 9781785869556
About the Creators:
Michael Moorcock is a prolific and award-winning writer with more than eighty works of fiction and non-fiction to his name. He is the creator of Elric, Jerry Cornelius and Colonel Pyat, amongst many other memorable characters. In 2008, The Times named Moorcock in their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.
Philippe Druillet is known for his innovative approach to visual design. Since the start of his career in 1966, Druillet has won multiple awards, including the European Sci-Fi award for comics in 1972, The Grand Prize for a Science Fiction Franchise in 1976, in 1990 he was inducted into the European Science Fiction Society Hall of Fame for his artistry, and in 1996 he won the National Art and Graphics Grand Prize.
James Cawthorn has had a long working relationship with Michael Moorcock, illustrating his prose serials, and the comic strip Planet Peril, and writing the three-part serial Handar the Red in Tarzan Adventures, and illustrating for the Sexton Blake Library. He drew graphic novels adaptations of Moorcock stories, including Stormbringer, The Jewel in the Skull, and The Crystal and the Amulet.
Titan Comics announced that this April they will launch a brand-new series in the Doctor Who comics line featuring one of the Doctor’s darkest nemeses in Missy #1.
Following on from the huge success of the Doctor Who Comic crossover adventures, starring the Tenth and Thirteenth Doctors as they battled iconic villains like the Weeping Angels, Skithra, Sea Devils and Autons, this new story sees the series expand its horizons even further with the first appearance of the Twelfth Doctor’s arch-rival Missy (as played on TV by Michelle Gomez).
MISSY wages war on the Doctor, but this time she’s not alone! Can the combined brilliance of the Third and Twelfth Doctor avert her deadly scheme, or will she get her hands on a secret weapon capable of wreaking havoc on the universe? This special story, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Master’s first appearance, will feature more Doctors and Masters than ever before.
This new series will also see the return of the critically acclaimed creative team behind the Doctor Who comics with Eisner-nominated writer Jody Houser (Stranger Things, Spider-Man), illustrator Roberta Ingranata (Witchblade), and colorist Enrica Angiolini(Warhammer 40,000).
For writer Jody Houser, this upcoming arc has been a long time coming: “I wrote a few pages of Missy way back in The Road to Thirteen, and I’ve been dying to write more of her ever since. Her ineffable cunning and sense of fun make her the most delightful sort of monster.”
Missy #1 will debut with a selection of amazing variant covers, including the first of a stunning four-part Masters connected cover set by Claudia Caranfa featuring Michelle Gomez, John Simm, Roger Delgado and Sacha Dhawan as well as a cover by the fan-favorite artist David Busian(Star Wars Adventures).
Doctor Who: Missy #1 hits stores and digital devices April 2021. Pre-order the comic ahead of its release in April 2021 (February Diamond Previews) from your local comic shop, from Forbidden Planet (UK & Europe), or digitally at Comixology.
Doctor Who returns in Issue #2 with the comic debut of iconic Seventies TV villain.
After narrowly escaping the Weeping Angels and the Autons in 1960s London, the Tenth and Thirteenth Doctor must team-up once again to save present-day Earth from being overrun by the classic aquatic villain, the Sea Devils!
Who else can they turn to for help but Rose Tyler: leader of the human resistance!
File 770 today is celebrating one of the Twelve Days of Spider-Man on Titan Comics’ blog tour, featuring art highlights from The Philosophy of Spider-Man, including a page exclusively unveiled here.
Swing into the marvelous mayhem of Spider-Man’s thoughts, wise-cracks, and web-fueled wisdom! A lavish collection of everything that makes Spidey tick.
Is your spider-sense tingling? This wonderful little book reveals all the quirks and quick-wittedness that the scarlet spider revels in and dispels it for your pleasure
How funny is Peter Parker really? How does he cope with J. Jonah Jameson’s incessant barking? Is an upside-down kiss as easy as it looks? All this and more as the mind of the most popular superhero of recent history is unwebbed!
With great power comes a great number of jokes, jibes and jovial wordplay as you delve into some of Spider-Man’s most comedic comic book moments, laudable cover art, and pure Spidey-(non)sense.
The volume follows the success of last year’s The Philosophy Of Deadpool.
Horizon Zero Dawn Vol 1: The Sunhawk, released November 24, is a fully authorized expansion of the world of the epic, game. It explores a new adventure with fan favorite characters Talanah and Aloy, and collects issues 1-4 of the single comics.
Horizon: a far-future Earth full of epic natural beauty and forgotten ruins, where awe-inspiring, animal-like machines are the dominant species and humans struggle to survive in pre-industrial tribes. In the aftermath of a titanic battle that almost laid waste to the capital city of Meridian, Talanah, one of the greatest machine-hunters in the land, struggles to find her place in the rebuilding effort. Making matters worse, Aloy, her trusted friend and confidant, has disappeared. When a new threat emerges in the hinterlands, she must decide how best to serve her tribe, her friends, and herself.
File 770 is hosting the second day of Titan Comics blog tour, featuring some of the art highlights in the collection.
HORIZON ZERO DAWN
Writer:Anne Toole, winner of Writers Guild Award, was one of the writers on the Horizon Zero Dawn video game. The game earned critical acclaim for its writing and won the Golden Joystick Award for Best Storytelling. She also created the hundred-episode series Alles Liebe, Annette and wrote for the Emmy-winning webseries The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. She also contributed writing to the videogame The Witcher.
Artist: Ann Maulina is an up and coming artist based in Indonesia. She is the author and artist for her own webcomic Raruurien.
