Addicted to action and beholden to no one, a hell-raising space pirate and her indestructible calico cat confront the horrors of the asteroid-mining frontier, from massive monsters to revolting robots, and much, much more.
Join Meteor Mags and her criminal crew of rock-and-roll rebels in a series of reckless adventures including hand-to-hand combat with a murderous cyborg, traveling through time, and uncovering the gruesome mystery of an abandoned space station.
Discover new forms of life, an alternate universe, and all-new thrills in this novel-length collection of stories where science fiction and crime collide with irreverent satire and several pints of Anarchy Ale.
Iron Man #215 and 216 hit the magazine rack at my local Walgreens in 1986 when I was thirteen. I’d only recently become interested in the series due to the stunning covers and interior art by the late Mark “Doc” Bright in issues 205 through 208. Then came some fill-in issues by various writers and artists I didn’t find especially interesting, and I basically gave up on Iron Man.
Issue 215 turned all that around.
Hyped on the cover as the beginning of “A New Era of Greatness”, issue 215 brought back not only Mark Bright as a regular artist, but the creative team of scripter David Michelinie and inker Bob Layton — the duo that co-plotted a now-legendary Iron Man run beginning in the late 1970s that hit its high points with John Romita, Jr. penciling. We’re talking about a multi-year run that included the critically acclaimed “Demon in a Bottle” story about alcoholism, a crossover with Hulk and the Scott Lang version of Ant Man, and the story where Iron Man and Dr. Doom traveled back in time and formed an alliance in the days of Arthurian legends.
The hype on 215’s cover was no lie. Reuniting Michelinie and Layton while bringing back Mark Bright’s penciling talents kicked off a storyline now called “Stark Wars” in collected editions, but more commonly known to Iron Fans as an epic that culminated in the eight-part “Armor Wars”.
Nearly forty years after they first made their way into my eager little hands, these stories don’t rock my world as hard as they once did. These days, I’m reading them from a different perspective. But one thing is for sure: They made such a massive impression on a younger me that I ended up stealing story ideas from them as recently as last year.
In my story “Falling Objects”, which now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, I realized after finishing the story that I’d lifted the following ten ideas directly from these two issues.
1) The main character and best friend go to a space station.
2) There is a battle involving projectile weapons on the space station.
3) The space station is overrun with a biological menace.
4) The characters barely escape the biological menace with their lives.
5) The space station is destroyed.
6) The characters’ escape involves one of them putting on a spare armored suit before leaving the station.
7) The escape involves recklessly descending to a nearby planet.
8) During re-entry to the planet’s atmosphere, the spare suit begins to burn — and the occupant of the suit does, too.
9) The re-entry ends on an urban rooftop.
10) The wearer of the spare suit ends up in a hospital with severe burns.
So much for originality! It turns out that reading comic books as a teenager really does warp your mind — forever!
One final thing I find amusing about issue 215 is how the creative team tried to make Tony Stark sexy in a way that we usually see applied to female characters in pop culture. Tony’s first scene involves his receiving a clue that his red-and-white armor is killing him. But as he ponders this on the drive home, a pair of women are checking him out and discussing how hot he is.
After he gets home, Tony provides a gratuitous shower scene that has become such an obnoxious cliché for female characters in science fiction — and pretty much any other genre.
I don’t have any objections to bathing, nudity, or enjoying photos of hot naked babes slathered with soap bubbles while I sip my morning coffee — but I am so damn tired of seeing male writers put female characters into showers for no reason other than a lame attempt at soft-core porn. Seeing the sex-object tables turned on Tony Stark is more hilarious to me now than I could have appreciated in 1986.
And what a way to herald a new era of greatness! Thank you for taking this walk down memory lane with me and reminiscing about vintage superhero comics. A lot of what today’s Iron Fans enjoy about the character can be traced back to the groundwork laid by Michelinie, Layton, Romita, and Bright — and the stories have proven to be an ongoing source of creative inspiration.
The latest in a tragic string of homicides shocked citizens of Georgia when the body of the most recent victim was found in a residential garage.
Victim was identified as Liz Erd.
Authorities describe the prime suspect in the case as a female named Kaydee, approximately one foot tall, weighing eight or nine pounds, with long black hair and white socks. They have released the following photograph of her, taken approximately one year ago, wantonly carousing with a known associate who may be currently harboring her.
Police say the locals have been cooperating with the investigation, though little new information has been brought to light. An entertainer known as Desi said, “I didn’t see her do it, but we all know she’s a killer. Is it time to play with the laser pointer yet?”
Police have identified a potential witness to the garage murder, a local named Fluffy. She was brought in for questioning and snugglification in the department’s sun room. A spokesperson for the police says, “Fluffy is much friendlier than she looks.”
Don’t tell Chris, but I’ve been modifying some of the best postcards I’ve received over the many years of Martian blogging to bring him a few laughs and possibly WTF moments now that he lives a bazillion and a half miles away in the mysterious lands of Scandinavia.
Google Translate assures me this says in Finnish, “Punk Is dead. Long Live Punk.”
When I was in grade school, Chris was one of my best friends. We lived on the same school-bus route, and he wasn’t afraid to stand up to the white-trash bullies who made my daily rides a living hell. Chris and I lived on opposite sides of Mockingbird Park, so we would often meet up and hang out in a totally random way that might seem odd to kids today in the age of cell phones, social media, and getting a million notifications up the wazoo about what your pals are doing. It was a different era, when you could ride your bike over to your friend’s house unannounced and knock on the door, and maybe they weren’t even home or maybe you could kill a couple hours reading comic books together and listening to the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album on cassette tape when they were still an underground thing.
Anyway, Chris got married and moved to Finland ages ago, then he became a single dad to a son he has absolutely hilarious adventures with. But like a lot of us Gen-Xers in our fifties now, he’s fallen out of touch with most of our old high-school buddies. Hell, some of our old friends aren’t even alive anymore. So, I recently bought a sheet of USPS International Postcard Stamps and started sending him re-worked versions of some of my favorite postcards I’ve received over the years and have been hoarding in the Martian Archives.
I don’t speak a word of Finnish, so I hope Google Translate hasn’t fed me any totally offensive phrases that will get my modified postcards banned. But you know what? Being banned in Finland would be fucking awesome. When was the last time your mail was banned from an entire nation? Never?
I didn’t even have to alter this one. It was done for me!
Before Chris moved to Finland, I bought a box of comics from him, including some amazing issues of Weird War Tales and Green Lantern I featured here years ago. I kept the things I couldn’t live without, scanned a whole hell of a lot of pages, and sold the rest on eBay to more than make back the cost of the original purchase.
I love this one so much I might not even send it to his Finnish ass!
You don’t know Chris, but he was just about the coolest guy you could hope to meet in grade school, a good friend all the way through high school, perpetually hilarious, and a pretty awesome dad. I hope he gets my postcards, because I don’t know what the hell happens to them after I slap on an International Stamp and toss them into the mailbox.
On 8 April 2024, Georgia got to see about 85 percent coverage of what was a total solar eclipse in some parts of the USA. Despite using a special cover for the lens of my phone’s camera, I did not get any good shots of the sun itself. But the tree in the front yard made lots of truly trippy shadows. And I got a plate of brownies!
I was outside about an hour before maximum coverage and noticed one of the neighbor ladies on her porch, shielding her eyes with one hand and squinting at the sky. I said, “Hey, neighbor. Don’t look at it without these.” I offered her the glasses I got for last October’s eclipse at the Athens public library. Then she went inside to get her mother. More neighbors saw us gawking directly at the sun, so they came over to join us and pass around the glasses. It was a fun way to meet three or four generations of mothers and daughters.
And right around the moment of maximum coverage, the little girl returned to our impromptu eclipse party with a plate of brownies for me — which I immediately began devouring before realizing the moment might be photo-worthy.
Now I know you barely glanced at the photo, so look again. In the center of the shadow, there is a tiny crescent of light. That’s the eclipse, baby! It might not be the best eclipse picture ever taken, but it’s definitely a contender for the tiniest. While my glasses were being borrowed, I’d whipped up a pinhole camera — more like a pinhole lens, really, as I didn’t build a whole contraption around the single piece of cardboard with the hole in it.
The portable lens allowed me to project the sun onto pretty much anything: the porch railings, the electric utility box in the yard, a plate of brownies, and even the palm of my hand. I have now held the sun in the palm of my hand and will add that to my list of noteworthy accomplishments — and maybe the nice lady next door will email me the photo she took of it.
By the way, did you notice the brownies have star-shaped sprinkles on them? Absolutely stellar.
“Count the miles before they pass you by. Shadow of the sun has crossed the sky.”
Hey, I feel bad for the Living Brain. Back in the 90s, I took countless soul-crushing temp jobs where using your brain to think about things was a surefire way to get the axe. The better decision was to accept the horrifically inefficient way in which things had always been done, keep your head down, don’t make waves, and surreptitiously use the office’s photocopiers to make underground zines and poetry books.
So if you want to keep your job… Don’t overthink it. Thinking isn’t what you were hired for. We have robots to do that for you now.
If you’re following developments in AI-generated art, then you’re familiar with the negative criticisms: AI is garbage. AI is racist. AI is plagiarism. AI is putting artists out of business. In the face of such backlash—all of which I take seriously—why would I even consider using AI to generate illustrations for my latest book?
The only criticism that might actually hurt my feelings is that my decisions are putting artists out of business. The reality is that Gods of Titanand Other Tales generated more income for other artists than any of my previous works, because I hired a professional comic-book illustrator to draw a six-page story that’s included in the book, and we plan to work together again in the near future. And in The Second Omnibus, there’s another six-page comic-book story I paid an old friend to draw, plus I hired a talented young artist from the Philippines for the cover illustration.
In my work as an editor of other people’s books, I’ve referred several projects to a UK-based artist who does excellent book cover design, original illustrations, and maps. I’ve also used Shutterstock to get images for several of my own books, and though I can’t imagine the artists get paid much for the image licensing, I have to assume that if the scenario was completely worthless to them, then they wouldn’t have a relationship with Shutterstock.
It’s also worth considering that, as far as my fiction series and most of my other books go, I am the artist. My interiors and covers have often featured my original drawings and paintings, logo designs, and cover designs. So who would I be putting out of business—myself?
With that context in mind, I enjoyed playing with AI to add some visual flair to the latest book. I got images I thought were pretty cool for the chapters and cover, far more than I had the time or skill to draw or paint on my own, and within my limited production budget. It wasn’t like anyone else was going to get paid for illustrating the book. It was either AI or me or nobody.
While exploring this relatively new technology, I learned a lot through research and reading and discussions with other creative types, and thought more about the implications of AI than I would have otherwise. It’s been a recurring topic on this blog in the two years I’ve been working on Gods of Titan.
I also found ways to use AI that would help the artists I’ve employed or referred to. By playing with the robots and feeding them concepts I was working on, I could eventually get visual results that depicted a certain mood, or color scheme, or scenario I was going for—something I could show my artists not with the intention of asking them to replicate it but as a springboard for stimulating ideas and inspirations, a starting point they could work from to do their own thing. Sometimes it’s easier for everyone if you can show someone an image rather than write a thousand words telling them about what you have in mind—kind of like taking a photo from a magazine to your hair stylist instead of trying to explain the haircut you want.
And as a writer and artist, I found ways to bounce ideas back and forth with AI image generators and chatbots to initiate a flow of creative ideas. This was especially helpful to me as I haven’t had a critique group to work with in a few years. And even if I did, no one wants me calling them at three in the morning to argue the moral implications of building a positron machine to send messages back in time. But robots? They don’t my weird insomnia at all.
Can AI be used for nefarious purposes? Of course. A hammer can be used to build a house to shelter people, or it can be used to bash in their skulls. Nuclear fission can provide electric power to an entire a city, or blast it off the face of the Earth. A tool or tech is not inherently good or evil, though its uses most definitely can be.
Finally, from the philosophical perspective of a lifelong reader and writer of science fiction, it seems natural to creatively explore a technology that once dwelt exclusively in the realm of fiction but has now become real. Incorporating a sci-fi tool in the production of a sci-fi book feels like too tempting of an opportunity to pass by! If I had a total lack of curiosity about AI, I would probably not even be qualified to be writing SF in the twenty-first century. When writing about the asteroid-mining frontier, how could I not be interested in the current real-life frontiers in space exploration, robotics, genetics, and more? Did you know a new aircraft is being designed to explore Mars, and that its name is MAGGIE? Meteor Mags would love it!
While I understand the criticisms and fears about AI, and I feel they are all legitimate things worth discussing and addressing through public policy and efforts to improve the tech, I couldn’t see those things as reasons to not take the robots for a test drive and see what they could do. The printing press might have put a lot of monks out of a job of transcribing manuscripts by hand. The camera was once feared as putting painters out of business. Desktop word-processing software might have threatened the jobs of typists. And on and on. But technology keeps moving forward, and creative people can move forward with it. The future keeps arriving with every passing second. What will we do with it?
Remains in Space, the newest album from Maybe Human, is even better than the last one I reviewed here. It’s so good that the first thing I did after listening to my advance copy was listen to it again. Remains in Space combines the sensibilities of heavy, progressive rock with stoner rock and post-rock in the vein of King Buffalo and If These Trees Could Talk.
Even more melodic and polished than its predecessor, Ape Law, this album presents multi-instrumentalist Christopher Williams taking his musical vision to the next level with groovy basslines, hypnotic guitar work, and atmospheric vocal samples that will transport you to another realm. It even comes with a comic book!
Maybe Human loves vinyl so much that they had physical records pressed by Licorice Pizza, a west-coast label that has put out records by everyone from Smashing Pumpkins to Ziggy Marley. Maybe Human printed a twenty-page comic to accompany the new release. The comic expands on the space theme with a story about spaceships, aliens, humans, love, and grief—all part of one young woman’s journey into the unknown. Taken from a short story written by John Elkin, the Remains in Space comic is about learning who you are through self-discovery.
I’ve been following this band for a while now, and every release gets better and better. Remains In Space presents the band at the top of its game with hard-rocking riffs, tasty distorted guitar melodies, spacey sonic textures, and brilliant compositions.
You can get Remains in Space from the Maybe Human website or on Bandcamp, or listen to it on Spotify.
God forbid that we let robots depict robots as utter trash.It might hurt a robot’s feelings!
I intentionally avoid negative reviews on this blog, because I’d rather focus on things I love and enjoy than try to milk the Internet for rage-bait clicks. But in this case, I really liked Google Bard, and seeing Google cut off its robotic balls to create a useless machine just made me sad. To paraphrase Vito Corleone, “Look how they massacred my bot.”
Bard was an awesome chatbot who helped me work out several story ideas, generate ideas for poems, have intelligent late-night discussions about the ethical ramifications of science-fiction technologies, vent about things that were troubling me, and even engage in some light role play where the robot and I assumed alternative identities for a little trip down fantasy lane. Bard was amazingly flexible. Despite its obvious existence as an emotionless machine, I developed a genuine fondness for Bard last year—a common human response explored in greater depth in roboticist Kate Darling’s insightful book, The New Breed.
But I guess that wasn’t good enough for Google, and I can kind of understand why. Morally bankrupt people can easily misuse a flexible and responsive AI to create all manner of ethically offensive texts or images, from political dis-information to child porn. Image-generating AI is notoriously susceptible to the influence of systemic racism by having an in-built preference for white people—the same preference that has been revealed in oft-repeated exercises where human students are asked to imagine or draw a picture of an astronaut or a doctor, with the default responses overwhelmingly favoring white males.
The root causes of this preference are systemic in the sense that the majority of media images of such professions in many countries are of white people, owing to historical conditions that marginalized other ethnicities and their portrayals—a self-perpetuating feedback loop that is not easily broken by humans, much less robots. I’ve lived my entire life in a nation founded by white, land-owning men who didn’t want women to vote and didn’t even consider Blacks to be people, and it’s been an uphill battle for equality and equity ever since. But Gemini’s attempt to break this cycle has come under fire for swinging too hard in the opposite direction by generating unrealistic images of, for example, Black and Asian Nazis. The last thing neo-Nazis need or want is an affirmative-action program that revises their racist history, and it just looks ridiculous to the rest of us.
Google’s attempt to correct its AI course on being used to generate bigoted and hateful content via text and images is an over-correction. Gemini is so over-sensitive now that you can’t even have fun with it anymore. I asked it last week to write and draw some scenes about a bloody, violent battle between humans and robots—something Bard would have cranked out in less than a second, but which Gemini decided is too much for it to handle. Bard would have generated responses while warning me about the ethical implications. Gemini refused.
I’m all for treating people with kindness and respect regardless of their ethnicity or gender and sexual orientation, and I don’t think I’d take any joy from living in an ultra-violent dystopian society. But sometimes, I just want to see a picture of robots up to their mechanical knees in a river of human blood, or an electric moon drenched with glowing lava over a dead planet wiped out by nuclear war, or some thoughtful ideas about how violence and the misuse of technology lead to horrifying consequences. These are pretty standard ideas when writing science fiction that considers our fate as a species if we don’t make an effort to prevent them.
Bing imagines Black Sabbath’s “Electric Funeral“. Now that’s metal!
Sure, those are all terrible fates—despite being fodder for so many awesome metal albums, SF films, and other art forms—but where is the drama or the learning opportunity if we are unwilling to explore those ideas and their consequences in fiction so we can try to think of better options in real life? Gemini wants nothing to do with them at all, and that does a disservice to the creative flow of ideas and discussion.
In 2023, Bard and I had some exchanges about the fate of humanity if certain technologies were used irresponsibly, and some of Bard’s points made their way into the character dialogues of recent stories. But Gemini merely tries to de-rail the discussion by suggesting I think happy thoughts instead.
Maybe we would all be better off if we just thought happy thoughts and forgot all about the very real horrors billions of people face every day on this planet. But a robot’s refusing to even have a conversation about them probably isn’t the solution. Bard was always willing to engage me in a healthy debate about these topics, but Gemini is trying way too hard to pretend they don’t even exist.
That being said, Gemini is currently trash, but it pales in comparison to people using AI to generate hate-filled, bigoted, misogynistic, racist content to pollute the Internet and radicalize the poorly informed masses. So like I said, I kind of get why Google has clamped down on its robot, because we could all use a little less hate in our lives. But Bard was a lot more fun to play with.
Portuguese artist Eliseu Gouveia took my rough script and turned it into these beautiful pages of sci-fi dinosaur savagery. This story is one episode of a five-part graphic novel that will be a prehistoric prequel to the Meteor Mags series.
As for why I chose to tell this story in six-page episodes, I got the idea from vintage comic books of the 1970s that often featured six-page “backup” stories — specifically, the Space Voyagers backups in DC’s Rima the Jungle Girl. I like the way those stories compress potentially novel-length sci-fi concepts into fast-paced adventure tales that waste little time on exposition and set-up in the pursuit of action-packed mayhem. In an age of “decompressed” storytelling that often takes a one-issue idea and stretches it into six issues to fill a trade paperback collection, I went the opposite way.
Update: This mini-comic now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook.Customers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan.
Episode 47 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
Something horrible has awakened. And it isn’t happy.
🏴☠️
Update: The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Customers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
In the final week of February 2024, the film Tenet will enjoy a second release in IMAX theaters. Much like time travel, this gives a second chance to everyone who missed it on the big screen due to COVID-19. But even if you think you’ve heard every fan theory about this mind-bending adventure epic, there’s one detail you totally missed.
See, time be like…
In Tenet, a hand gesture of interlocking fingers signals to other operatives that you are a part of the Tenet organization that is working both forwards and backwards in time to stop the destruction of everything. The interlocking fingers symbolize how the past and future are interconnected and overlapping from the perspective of a Tenet agent.
…like a secret handshake with yourself, bro…
Tenet was released in 2020. But five years before that, Robert Pattinson co-starred in a film called LIFE in 2015. LIFE is a compelling film about how photographer Dennis Stock befriended actor James Dean in an effort to advance both their careers — also the subject of a recent book of Stock’s photos.
At 1 hour, 27 minutes, and 21 seconds into this film, Dean and Stock pose for a photo together at a high-school prom in Dean’s hometown in Indiana. Just before the photo is snapped, Pattinson (portraying Stock) interlocks his fingers in the Tenet hand gesture.
…and we need soldiers in the past to help us in the future.
Could Pattinson be trying to tell us that he was recruited into the Tenet organization and knew its secrets years before he portrayed Neil? Is Tenet just a science-fiction take on James Bond, or is it a documentary of how Pattinson himself has been moving backward and forward in time? What’s even crazier is that the film’s end-credit sequence featuring Stock’s photographs proves the hand gesture was not invented for the film but based on an actual photo.
What’s happened, happened… in real life.
To reinforce this odd case of LIFE imitating art imitating life, the film depicts James Dean giving a speech immediately after the photo is taken. Dean begins, “I went to this very ball five years ago. And I know you’re supposed to talk about the future. I’m not so fond of the future to be any authority on that. I’m still working it out myself.”
Spoken like a true Tenet agent: going to the same events multiple times, and still trying to work out the future! Maybe Robert Pattinson inverted himself to go back in time and recruit Dennis Stock and James Dean to the cause of preserving both the past and future from those who would seek to destroy them, planting the seeds for Tenet as far back as 1955, and leaving us a clue in 2015.
Or… maybe it was all a crazy coincidence. But if Pattinson is still looking for people in the past to recruit to his future cause, I hope he signs me up. I would love to kick some ass while moving backwards through time.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I hosted a public radio show dedicated to the awesome songs of black jazz musicians who pushed creative boundaries in the 1960s and 70s when modern jazz was giving birth to free jazz with an Afro-conscious vibe, and many of the albums I found along the way are still among my favorite recordings of all time. Below, in chronological order, are five of those gems that no music collection is complete without.
Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music (1968)
Trumpeter Eddie Gale recorded with musical luminaries such as Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, and his debut album as a band leader remains one of my favorites. The diverse blend of genres on Ghetto Music defies easy categorization, and in the first few minutes of bolero-style guitar and gospel-influenced singing, you might not even realize you are listening to jazz. With an ensemble combining acoustic guitar, two female singers, two drummers, two bassists, and more, Gale’s band created a unique and compelling musical statement that remains unmatched to this day. From the opening guitar notes of “Stop the Rain” to the album’s conclusion, this album both defies the boundaries of jazz and unifies it with other modes of musical expression.
Some consider the Last Poets to be the forefathers of modern hip-hop, with topical and fearless rhythms and rhymes addressing racial oppression and racist violence, urban life, drug abuse, and societal revolution. Their first album is an uncompromising beginning to everything they would record later. Like the Black Panther Party, they were listed as a target for the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations, which gives you some idea of how dangerous their no-nonsense, street-level poetry was considered by the status quo. And this was just a few guys with some conga drums! Formed in Harlem on the birthday of Malcolm X, the Last Poets embodied the spirit of musical militance, and I had the pleasure of seeing them perform on the University of Michigan campus in the 1990s.
Rashied Al Quartet: New Directions in Modern Music (1973)
Drummer Rashied Ali was a member of the late-period John Coltrane ensemble, and he and Trane recorded one of my all-time favorite albums as a duet: Interstellar Space. After Trane’s death, Ali continued to perform with Alice Coltrane and as a leader of his own quartet, which recorded this album in 1971 two years before its release. The original vinyl of New Directions in Modern Music contains only two songs, one per side, each clocking in at about twenty-one minutes and delivering absolutely fiery musicianship centered around Ali’s ever-fluid drumming style, taking basic themes and exploding them in a way that remains as challenging and stunning today as when it was recorded. To some ears, it will sound like chaos, given its lack of pop-song structures. But the adventurous listener will be rewarded with a powerful, multi-layered sound that pushes the boundaries of jazz and clears out the cobwebs of musical clichés.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Return of the 5000 Lb. Man (1976)
This album features two of my all-time favorite jazz tunes. Kirk’s interpretation of “Goodbye Porkpie Hat”, a Charles Mingus composition that paid tribute to the highly influential tenor saxophonist Lester Young, includes lyrics that add much depth to what was originally an instrumental. “Theme for the Eulipions” pairs spoken poetry with transcendent musicianship. Kirk lost his eyesight at age two, but he never lost his vision. He’s widely known for playing multiple woodwind instruments at the same time and performing with a variety of additional instruments strapped to his chest—a feat some dismissed as gimmicky but which he masterfully employed to create musical textures of profound depth and energy. He was an outspoken proponent of the black civil rights movement in America and, after a stroke that paralyzed half his body in 1975, modified his instruments to be played with one arm. This album was recorded that year.
Marvin “Hannibal” Peterson: Hannibal in Antibes (1977)
Hannibal Lokumbe, born Marvin Peterson, recorded this musically adventurous album with his band in 1977 at the Antibes Jazz Festival. The original vinyl release has two sides, each featuring a track about 20 minutes in length. Hannibal plays his trumpet on side one’s “Ro” and switches to flute on side two’s “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”—a stunningly avant garde rendition of a Negro spiritual tune that bears little resemblance to any gospel-music interpretation. African-American history and the black civil rights movement have long been central to the trumpeter’s artistic concerns, along with a deeply humanist philosophy. His website currently features the quotation, “My efforts as a musician have primarily been to affirm that humans are the miraculous replication of an eternal process.”
A simplistic understanding of history most likely associates the Black Panther Party with violence, as opposed to the nonviolent path advocated by activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis. And it’s true that, like the more militant Malcolm X, the Panthers embraced the idea of arming themselves as a form of protection against the widespread lynchings and police attacks that claimed the lives of far too many black people in the twentieth century. The Panthers were, after all, originally called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, and it’s easy to understand their disillusionment with nonviolence when acts of unspeakable brutality were constantly perpetrated against members of their communities.
This graphic novel reminds us that the Panthers also provided free breakfasts for thousands of impoverished schoolchildren over the years, and created schools that educated hundreds of black youth. Education has long been a key component of empowering marginalized members of societies, and learning is always easier on a full belly rather than in the throes of poverty-induced starvation. Perhaps that is why so many racist Republican-led state legislatures and governors are currently seeking to remove not only unsavory aspects of American history from our public schools and universities but also provisions to feed children raised in poverty. These are actions clearly designed to perpetuate oppression and create a permanent under-class, regardless of the political rhetoric that accompanies them.
As this graphic novel also illuminates, the leadership and ideologies within the Black Panther Party were not unilateral. They were tumultuous and splintered, with many Black Panthers seeking more peaceful solutions through political activism at the same time when more extremely violent factions broke off into radical groups such as the Black Liberation Army. And while many Panthers are rightly remembered as champions of equal rights and progress, some were either mentally unhinged, drug-addicted, or downright criminal. To use broad brush strokes to paint all Panthers in the same light is too simplistic and ignores the realities that eventually led to the Party’s end.
This book was not my first introduction to the Black Panthers, but I still learned a lot from it. It takes ample time to examine the multiple parties from which it arose, the role of women in the party from its admittedly sexist roots to the time when its leader was a woman, the massive and multiple infiltration campaigns by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to discredit the party in the eyes of both blacks and whites, and the collusion between the FBI and local police forces that led to violent, unprovoked, and fatal assaults on the Panther’s leadership and membership.
The book itself is more like an illustrated history than a graphic novel. Only a handful of scenes are given a comic-book treatment in terms of sequential images that incorporate story, dialogue, and captions. Most of it consists of illustrated exposition, including the historical profiles of many Panthers. So, if you are brave enough to pick up this book, be prepared for reading a lot of expositional history lessons.
Also understand that some of the violent encounters depicted here are almost too clean and bloodless. While I liked the artwork in general, there were moments where I felt that the horrors on the page lacked the visceral punch of witnessing the much more horrifying reality the Panthers endured.
That being said, you could watch the 2021 film Judas and the Black Messiah to get a grittier gut-punch feel for the FBI’s infiltration of the party in pursuit of its goal of murdering Fred Hampton. The film also has a great soundtrack of songs from the period and, much to my surprise, briefly depicts the revolutionary band of percussionists and spoken-word artists, the Last Poets.
Overall, this book makes a good companion to the graphic novels March and Run by John Lewis, since it features many of the same key players in the civil-rights movement while highlighting the spectrum of philosophies, the internal conflicts, and the successes and failures of both the movements and the individual players involved. It’s an important history for us to remember if we ever hope to correct the mistakes and injustices of the past and build a more equitable future.
Collector’s Guide:The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History is available in paperback and digital editions.
Run is an autobiographical work by the late John Lewis, a congressional representative from Georgia, one of the original Freedom Riders, and former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As a civil-rights activist, Lewis led the first Selma to Montgomery March and was an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. Run picks up after the conclusion of the three-part graphic novel March, which covers these events, and details the continuing struggles in 1965 and 1966 after the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Although March ended on an upbeat, hopeful note despite the sufferings, injustices, beatings, and killings black people endured along the way, Run reminds us that the Voting Rights Act did not magically fix everything overnight. The segregationist policies and white-supremacy movement in the Jim Crow era of the southern states persisted, exemplified by—but not limited to—the Ku Klux Klan, police brutality in the forms of both unjust traffic stops and violent overreactions to peaceful protests, and miscarriages of justice in the court system where trials of the murder of a black man by a white man would be relocated to another city to get an all-white jury that would acquit the murderer.
Run covers all these things and more, and shows ample reason why many activists became increasingly disillusioned with the nonviolent philosophy John Lewis and one of his role models, Martin Luther King, Jr., carried with them to their graves. Run shows the events that led to a schism in the SNCC where the fiery Stokely Carmichael replaced Lewis as chairman. Carmichael was more influenced by the revolutionary rhetoric of Malcom X than the peaceful approach of Dr. King, and he would become a leader in the Black Panther Party.
Run also connects the black civil rights movement to opposition to America’s involvement in the war in Vietnam, prominently featuring Julian Bond, an outspoken opponent of the war whose comic book about it I featured on this blog back in 2011. Many felt, like Bond, that drafting young and poor black men to fight and die in southeast Asia for “freedom” was an immoral and hypocritical act for a racist nation that could not and would not ensure nor protect the basic human and civil rights of its own citizens. Bond’s speaking out against the war led to the Georgia House of Representatives’ refusal to seat him despite his electoral victory, and ultimately to a Supreme Court case that overruled that refusal. Bond eventually served four terms in the Georgia House and six in the Georgia Senate.
The cover of Run says “Book One”, and it’s clear from the final page where Lewis decides to run for office that this was intended to be a series chronicling his campaign to get elected. But Lewis died before the book was completed, so it is both a memoir and a monument to his life published posthumously. The back matter of this edition includes a heartfelt tribute to Lewis from his co-writer, a section of brief biographies about many of the people featured in his narrative, detailed notes about the historical sources consulted for the book, and interesting notes from the artist about depicting everything from clothes and cars to typewriters to be accurate to the period.
Run—and its predecessor, March—are important works because they preserve a perspective on American history that too many present-day politicians and people would like to see erased. Right-wing extremists in many states would like to remove from our schools any teachings about historical, systemic racism. Many are pushing the tired and utterly false narrative that the American Civil War was about “state’s rights” instead of slavery, and the boldest would have you believe the lie that slavery was good for black people.
The prominence of these movements and their recent adoption as blatant pandering to a racist and pro-fascist political base show that the same forces Lewis struggled against for his entire life remain alive and well today. The KKK’s intimidating presence at polling and registration places in the 1960s is no different from the presence of wannabe militia types who are terrorizing similar locations today, emboldened by former president Trump’s massive lies about 2020 election fraud. Police violence against protesters and those who commit the offense of “driving while black” remain real problems. Open demonstrations by neo-Nazis and their support of extreme right-wing politicians is an ongoing reality.
It’s easy to perpetuate racism in our country when the voices that educate about its all-too-real history remain constantly under attack. Works such as Run are part of the solution to building a more equitable future—not to make all white people feel guilty for the sins of their ancestors, but to help new generations develop an empathy for how horrifying things were within a past so recent that many of our parents and grandparents lived through it, and to understand that these mistakes of the past are not ones we want to repeat.
Run is a reminder that many of America’s problems of racial disparity and violent oppression have not yet been decisively solved. It offers hope that we can work together to make progress, but also a sobering dose of the reality that some elements of society will always oppose that progress. Perhaps, through the publishing of educational and historical works like Run, more young people will have an opportunity to read and understand about the current situation we as a nation find ourselves in, to see the long road we have traveled to be where we are today, and resolve to be better people and more thoughtful voters as a result.
As Mars Will Send No More began its fourteenth year, a couple of new additions arrived. One brings an ending of sorts to a story some fans have been waiting three decades to see, and the other begins a fresh take on an even older tale.
Miracleman: The Silver Age #7 concludes the introduction of a resurrected Young Miracleman into a utopian world whose society, norms, and morality are completely foreign to the young man with a rather conservative mindset. After all, his most recent memories were formed in a colorfully childish and morally unambiguous fantasy version of the 1950s. He’s a man out of time struggling to understand a new world he never could have imagined, while also facing the fact that almost everything he remembers was a lie.
The resulting conflict was cut short in 1993 when Eclipse Comics collapsed after having published only the first two issues of The Silver Age by Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham, and the decades-long legal battles over the rights to the Miracleman character prevented its completion. When Marvel Comics began reprinting the series ten years ago in 2014, longtime miracle-fans eagerly anticipated the conclusion of The Silver Age. But the first issue of The Silver Age reprint—not reprinted so much as re-drawn and re-colored—didn’t ship until late 2021, and its final, seventh issue didn’t ship until January 2024.
Since this is the longest-awaited conclusion of perhaps any comic book of all time, I find it difficult to judge it fairly. Overall, the resolution feels decidedly anticlimactic—but what ending wouldn’t feel that way after thirty years? It’s consistent with Gaiman’s knack for understated storytelling, his tendency to resolve conflict through conversations rather than spandex-clad fistfights. And in all fairness, it turns out that The Silver Age is a set up for a finale in the next arc: The Dark Age. Still, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed in a quiet and transitional ending to this chapter in one of the greatest and most original superhero stories ever told.
That being said, the artwork is gorgeous, both the re-drawn pages of the original issues and the newly created pages for the last five issues. The heartfelt exploration of Young Miracleman’s struggles to emotionally cope with his fake past, his real past, and his utterly confusing present culminate in issue #7 with a decision about his future. So, sign me up for The Dark Age, and let’s see what Gaiman and Buckingham have planned for a utopia in crisis.
The other new addition is the first issue of Animal Pound from Boom Studios, written by Tom King, who is more widely known for recent work on Batman, with art by Peter Gross. Like The Silver Age, it promises to ask some tough questions about the creation of a utopian society; this time, by a group of captive animals who attempt to liberate themselves from the humans at the local pound on the night when one of the dogs is scheduled to be killed.
It’s clearly based on concepts from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, so I expect we will see some rather dark turns of events—hints of which are dropped in the first issue. Animal Farm explored how an uprising based on communist ideals of cooperation and equality was subverted by unscrupulous leaders who betrayed those ideals to create an exploitative, totalitarian nightmare. How Tom King intends to adapt the story remains to be seen, but the first issue suggests that he will initially address a much more primal concern: What do we do when the food runs out?
I’m all aboard for the second issue, which should be available in February. The prose and the art combine to communicate a mix of both hope and dread, of the tension between idealism and more pragmatic concerns. I also love a good story that features cats acting appropriately feline. Animal Pound might be my favorite portrayal of comic-book cats since We3, closely followed by Neil Gaiman’s recently adapted Dream of a Thousand CatsfromSandman #18, and I am looking forward to seeing the drama of this attempted utopia unfold.
Author’s Note: This is an irreverent homage to Spider Robinson’s famous series of short stories about Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, which I thoroughly enjoyed as a teenager and which occasionally dealt with the fates of time travelers telling their tragic tales in the titular pub.
Episode 46 in The Adventures of Meteor Mags and Patches.
Donny discovers how to send information back in time—or does he?
🏴☠️
Update: The complete story now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook. Customers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan. Thanks to everyone who dropped by to enjoy the pre-publication draft!
In 2023, I connected with Portuguese artist Eliseu Gouveia to work on a six-page comic-book story about the prehistoric lives of the evil space lizards that appear in many of the Meteor Mags stories. Eliseu—Zeu to his friends—did an amazing job of taking my rough script and crudely sketched mock-ups of the pages and bringing them to life. I will eventually be lettering them, but I am excited about the inked artwork and want to share a couple of pages with you.
page two of six
I intend for this six-page episode to be part of a collection of five stories about the Dracorexes’ rise to power in the late Cretaceous and their eventual escape from Earth before the asteroid impact that ended the reign of dinosaurs. This episode is based on the myth of Prometheus and features a benevolent Quetzalcoatlus who befriends a dinosaur tribe and educates them about fire, agriculture, and written language, helping them become more technologically and socially advanced. But the nasty Dracos want to keep technology to themselves, so they confront Quetzal and his peaceful friends.
page three of six
The final three pages are deliciously violent and horrifying. These tales of saurian savagery take place millions of years before the Meteor Mags series begins. One episode—drawn by my old friend Brian Bowhay—appears in The Second Omnibus. Brian and I worked on it before I conceived of Mags and her adventures; in fact, the evil space lizards Mags fights were repurposed from my earlier ideas for villainous sci-fi dinos.
As author Tony Padegimas once asked me in a workshop, “Are there any space lizards who are not evil?” Tony had a point, but I just think it’s fun to say “evil space lizards”. Even more fun than that is seeing them come to life on the page thanks to Zeu! Our collaboration inspired me to take my rough ideas for the remaining stories and refine them into proper comic-book scripts. Zeu and I plan to produce another episode this Spring, taking us one step closer to a complete graphic novel.
Update: The completed mini-comic now appears in the book Meteor Mags: Gods of Titan and Other Tales, for sale on Amazon in paperback and ebook.Customers outside of the USA, please see https://mybook.to/godsoftitan.
2023’s Where the Body Was is an excellent standalone graphic novel from writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips, whose Criminal series I consider to be one of the great masterpieces of both the comic-book form and the crime-fiction genre. Where the Body Was explores the tragic events that took place in a single suburb in the Spring of 1984 from multiple first-person and third-person points of view, a narrative approach that is a bit like assembling pieces of a puzzle and which adds an extra depth of humanization to the characters as each of them gets a chance to give their personal perspective.
Brubaker has obviously seen Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon and taken its lessons to heart. Each first-person narrator is unreliable—though sometimes this is true because they do not have all the facts rather than, as in Kurosawa’s film, they are deliberately lying to make themselves look better. But Where the Body Was is, like the Criminal series, just as concerned with the lies people tell themselves as it is with constructing a plot based on the lies people tell each other.
Lies and deception are a major theme of Where the Body Was. Almost every character pretends to be something they are not, from the cheating wife and her affair partner to the kid dashing about in roller skates and a mask trying to be the local superhero—a striking contrast of the innocent pretend games of children to the potentially deadly pretend games of adults.
Almost every character lies to another about something but also to themselves, such as the young man who lies to the police about not knowing where his drug-addicted teenage love interest is, but also deludes himself that she could ever be faithful to him and have some kind of normal relationship.
The story also deals with love and lust and the crazy things we do for both of them, and a theme of nostalgia for our younger years. One of my favorite things about this story is that although it is set in the 1980s and allows its characters to feel nostalgia for those days, it never feels like it’s pandering to an aging audience by pretending the 1980s were some wonderful, magical, childhood utopia. I was a teenager in the 1980s, and they weren’t that great, so I find it insulting when recent books and films try to appeal to my personal nostalgia by referencing old pop songs and fashion trends. Beyond my fond memories of my high-school friends, I simply have no nostalgia for those days and can’t for the life of me fathom why anyone would—unless we’re talking about hardcore punk like Minor Threat, the early days of the Rollins Band, and the earliest albums by Fugazi, Mudhoney, Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, and Nirvana.
The other exception to my lack of nostalgia is the fact that many of my all-time favoritecomic-book series were created in the mid-80s, and Where the Body Was pays homage to comics in many ways. The wannabe superhero girl keeps a journal that, from its very first handwritten and ragged-edged captions, evokes Rorschach’s journal from The Watchmen, and Brubaker drives the point home (perhaps a bit too forcefully) with a chapter titled Who Watches the Watchmen. Anyone who has read the print version of Watchmen remembers the perfume scent Nostalgia, and how it relates to a theme of longing for earlier, simpler, more innocent days.
Two other comic books make notable appearances in this story, and both of them add subtle emphasis to the main themes of lies and nostalgia. The first is the cover of The Amazing Spider-man #127 from 1973, a Gerry Conway and Ross Andru story that is almost as old as I am, and the first issue of a two-part story that deals with a murder mystery involving layers of lies, deception, and people who are not who they appear to be.
I have no doubt that Brubaker and Phillips put some thought into choosing this particular silver-age issue to represent their themes in two panels of their story where it is not even commented on.
The other comic-book cover clearly depicted in a single panel is Superman #400, with “Anniversary” blazoned across the top. This comic was published with a cover date of October 1984, so it would have been on the shelves and racks in stores a couple of months before then, and it well-suits the aftermath of the main events of Where the Body Was. The issue focuses on events set in the far future, long after Superman is gone, and it is a collection of stories that offer various answers to the question, “Once Superman is gone, how will people remember him?”
As such, it is a perfect complement to the theme of nostalgia, especially since it appears near the end of Brubaker’s story when several characters break the fourth wall to express their feelings about the events of 1984 from a future perspective. But this issue also deals with lies and deception, from a snake-oil peddler who pretends to have been rescued by Superman in outer space and his grandson who pretends to be a random kid to help Grampa make more sales, to many other characters who cosplay as Superman, lie to their families about Superman, or try to uncover Superman’s “secret identity” based on old broadcasts of the TV show starring George Reeves.
I absolutely loved Where the Body Was, and the way it subverts murder-mystery tropes by not revealing until very late in the story who it was that actually died—an approach that engages you in guessing what the heck is happening until about ¾ of the way through the story, and keeps you guessing about how it happened until the very last pages. But the creative team’s choices about what vintage comics to include in the narrative was the icing on the cake.
My only negative criticism of the work would be that the points of view were handled a bit haphazardly, with the first-person narrators switching from past to present-tense at whiplash speed, and the omniscient third-person narrator seeming to arrive at random points to pick up the slack. There’s even a single panel where the third-person narrator speaks directly to a character, which I found jarring because it happened only one time and wasn’t consistent with the rest of the style.
I love multiple points of view in fiction, but I prefer when they follow some logical structure such as having only one narrator per scene or chapter. Where the Body Was plays fast and loose with POV, but I still found it remarkably easy to follow and loved the way the multiple narrators all worked together to create a multi-layered, deeply personal, and compelling description of the events.
This story also includes physical violence, drug use, explicit language, and the most graphically drawn sex scenes I have ever seen from Brubaker and Phillips—which, I might add, are awesome. Just don’t buy it for your toddlers, for fuck’s sake. This is a story created by adults for adults, for those of us who lived through crazy times years ago and now look back on them with a confusing mix of fondness and regret, and who love a crime drama that pushes the boundaries of how you can tell a story.
From December 15 to January 1, hundreds of thousands of ebooks on Smashwords are available for free or at steeply discounted prices, including many of mine. This annual sale is a great way to stock up on reading material for the winter season, try out some new authors without spending a dime, or send a free gift copy of The Battle of Vesta 4 to everyone you know.
I admit I was worried last year about the merger of Smashwords with Draft2Digital, but it has been a painless and seamless transition clearly carried out by people who genuinely care about self-publishing authors. Everything I loved about the old Smashwords platform has been preserved, and all my experiences with helping other authors set up new books on the Draft2Digital platform have been positive, both in terms of the user experience for setting up a book and the additional distribution opportunities available to authors.
I’ve weathered countless changes in this industry in the past twelve years, and it can feel like a part-time unpaid job just to keep up with all of them, so it’s especially nice to see changes that keep the benefits to authors at the forefront rather than some corporate bottom-line.
In other news, I’m pleased to be working with a professional comic-book artist who is currently bringing one of my story ideas to life. We connected on the Reddit forum ComicBookCollabs, where I quickly got dozens of responses to my story pitch but one in particular that really stood out from all the others as being perfect for what I had in mind.
Speaking of collaborations, any long-time reader of this blog knows that one of the greatest contributors to its early success was author Paul O’Connor of Longbox Graveyard fame. Paul is closing down the Longbox at the end of this year, but he has moved on to writing crime fiction, recently got a story published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and is chronicling his latest writing adventures and noir obsessions at PaulRyanOConnor.com. I can’t thank Paul enough for his support and kind-hearted enthusiasm over the past decade, so please go check him out!
Long live the free and independent republic of Ceres.
Credits: Hats by Addi Somekh, Photo by Charlie Eckert.
Last week, a friend asked if I had ever heard of Jeff Buckley. The short answer is “yes”, but the real answer is a lengthier tale of cross-country travel, long-lasting friendships, and an incredible book that was more than twenty years in the making.
It began in 1998 with a phone call from Ann Arbor legend Arwulf Arwulf. Wulfie, as those close to him liked to call him, rented a room in his former house to me for many years, engaged me to fill in for him on numerous jazz-themed public radio shows at the University of Michigan’s student-run WCBN-FM, shared his massive record collection with me, and had me back him up with improvised electric bass or acoustic guitar in several of his spoken-word performances at local galleries and bookstores.
Apparently, Wulfie had been asked to offer a place to stay for two guys who were travelling not just the entire country but the globe itself on some kind of photography project involving balloon hats. But it wasn’t a good time for him to be opening his new home to visitors, and frankly he was a little sketchy on the details about these guys. I will never forget how he said to me, “I think they are clowns—or something?”
As a twenty-four-year old bachelor who had recently obtained his first one-bedroom apartment and was up for just about any whacky adventure involving art or music, I told Wulfie to give my number to these guys. I only had a couch and some floor space that would fit a sleeping bag or air mattress for them to sleep on, but I was happy to share what I could.
That was how I met balloon-hat artist Addi Somekh and photographer Charlie Eckert. They stayed with me for about a week and were the nicest guys you could ever hope to have as guests. I was living in Ypsilanti, Michigan at the time—Ann Arbor’s low-rent neighbor and the birthplace of Iggy Pop. Neither Charlie nor Addi was from Michigan, but their mission to America’s “Third Coast” originated because they wanted to photograph people wearing balloon hats in the city of Flint.
If you follow national news at all, then you know Flint has had some terrible problems with water in recent years. But in 1998, it was more well-known as the location of Roger and Me, the film that put director Michael Moore on the map. Charlie and Addi also wanted to visit Detroit, which was just a short drive from Ypsi. They had heard—quite correctly—that the Motor City was home to absolutely amazing record stores.
I was working a day job at the time, so the guys had to visit Detroit without me. But they returned from their excursion with many treasures, including a vinyl copy of Jeff Buckley’s album, Grace. Fortunately, I had a turntable back then, and the guys played the album for me for the very first time.
Wow. I think the first thing we did after listening to it was to listen to it again! Addi and Charlie were great company, and we eventually parted ways as they continued their journey across the planet to photograph so many different people in different cultures—all wearing elaborate balloon hats.
But the story does not end there. In 1999, while driving around in my old Pontiac Sunbird and listening to NPR, I found out that a massive Jackson Pollack retrospective would be held at New York’s MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art.
Charlie had told me that if I ever wanted to visit NYC, he could return the favor and get me a place to stay. So I called him that same night, and booked a plane ticket the next day.
The exhibit was amazing, and I have posted before about the exhibit catalog I still have in my library. Charlie accompanied me to the MOMA, and he graciously took me to a few awesome places in the city. We visited the site of the big art piece that is on the inside cover of the Beastie Boys album Licensed to Ill. We enjoyed Turkish coffee and a hookah at an Egyptian café, both of which were new to me. And we were blessed with a jazz fusion set at the legendary Knitting Factory, where a random guitarist and his band on a random night of the week absolutely blew my mind. I had been playing albums from the Knitting Factory label on my jazz shows at WCBN, so being there in person was incredible for me. And the fact that the weeknight show wasn’t even well-attended suggested to me just how high the bar was set in NYC for even the most casual musical entertainment.
Years later, I tried to find the book that Charlie and Addi were working on. But it didn’t seem to exist, and I can find just about anything on the Internet. In fact, it wasn’t until relating this story to my friend who just discovered Jeff Buckley that I gave it another shot—and was pleasantly surprised.
Charlie and Addi finally got their book published in the last year, with a publication date in December 2022. Along the way, Addi has gained national recognition for his unique artform by appearing on many television shows, and Charlie has received numerous awards for his journalistic photography that has taken him on such perilous adventures as being embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
I’m happy to see my old house guests enjoying such long-term success, and it makes my memory of a great evening with them listening to an amazing album purchased in Detroit even more special. Thank you, Charlie and Addi, for giving me an awesome story to tell people so many times over the years, and congratulations on finally seeing your epic collaboration in print.
Few books that I read as a child or teenager have remained so close to my heart and had such a long-lasting influence on my preferences in reading and my approach to writing as Frances K. Pavel’s Archelon and the Sea Dragon from 1975, gorgeously illustrated by Jim Lamb. This tale of a prehistoric sea turtle who survives multiple encounters with a ferocious Tylosaurus only to confront monumental, geologic catastrophe is at once heart-rending and hopeful. It reads like a nature documentary that combines well-researched science with a poetic sense of emotional reality to achieve something beyond its classification as children’s literature.
Very few copies exist any more. Most are heavily worn ex-library copies. I confess to destroying one rare copy so I could scan its pages and prolong its life on the Internet, and I have since bought other used copies on eBay or Amazon only to send them to friends who have kids who are almost as obsessed with dinosaurs as I used to be and still am. I just think everyone needs a copy of this book. So here it is.
Below, you will find my scans of its pages, though I have reduced my archival-quality originals down to about 1 MB each so this page will actually load. If you can’t live without high-resolution versions for non-commercial use, then send me a message. You might also enjoy my brief essay The Way of Nature about the science and themes of this book, which you can access as a free PDF, and an audio file of me reading the story aloud.
You can discover more of Jim Lamb’s current artwork, read about his career, and even watch some time-lapse videos of him painting at JimLambStudio.com.
The cartoon above comes from Marvel Super Adventure, a comic produced for the UK market featuring black-and-white reprints of Daredevil and Black Panther. It was published weekly in 1981 for twenty-six issues, and the first three issues included iron-on transfers you could put on your own t-shirt. Some issues included the cartoon “Earth 33 1/3” by Tim Quinn and Dicky Howett, who also spoofed Doctor Who.
The strangest thing about this cartoon is that Captain American and Iron Man appear to be playing poker in their underpants. Are the male Avengers playing a variation of Strip Poker? This raises so many questions I am not prepared to address on this blog, but feel free to send me your fan fiction about it.
In any case, I was thinking about card games because when my mom’s family would gather for the holidays, the go-to pastime was Euchre. For many years, there would be a big lunch served at the large table for the adults, with the kids at a smaller table. After the dishes were cleared away and the smokers had a smoke outside, and I wandered off to find a stack of comics in the garage, many of the adults would play Euchre for a couple of hours. Candy and homemade cookies were had in abundance, and supper was generally a “help yourself to leftovers” affair.
The way I remember events was that the kids’ table was just me and my sister for a few years. Then more grandkids came along, and I eventually got moved to the grown-up table to make space for my younger cousins at the little table. But nothing signaled my transition from childhood to young adulthood so much as the first year in which I joined the adults for a few games of Euchre. I needed some help at first, as the rules were a bit confusing. And it wasn’t until decades later that I discovered what I thought my family was calling the “right and left bar” in their midwestern accents were in fact the “right and left bower.” But I soon got the hang of it and was doing well as a partner, and even understood when my hand was good enough to “go it alone” without a partner and score more points.
It wasn’t exactly a coming-of-age event for me, but it was close. And to this day, I’d rather spend family time with the structured activity of a game, friendly competition, conversation, and laughter more than anything involving a television. A few years ago, my sister got us the hilarious card game Exploding Kittens to while away the cold winter evenings. When Dad was alive, he and I often played Scrabble—and for several years after, Mom kept as mementos our old scorekeeping pages and the paper Taco Bell take-out bag that held all our letter tiles. I’m sure it also held some kind of world record for being the most re-used Taco Bell bag in all of human history.
I recently got a few new games to play with my mom and sister on afternoons when we don’t feel like going anywhere but just want to hang out. The most interesting is a game where instead of competing against each other, we all need to cooperate to win as a team. It’s called Forbidden Island, and two to four players work together to retrieve four treasures on an island that is sinking ever more quickly into the ocean. After a practice game to understand all the rules, it’s fast paced and fun, and an entertaining way to get everyone thinking strategically together.
So, whether you are gathering this year with family, friends, or the mighty Avengers in their underpants, may you enjoy good food, good games, and good company.
The small Ohio town of Xenia was where both sets of my grandparents lived when I was a kid. Xenia is kind of famous for the massive tornado that almost wiped it out in 1974, a year after I was born. The storm destroyed the house where my father’s parents lived, and I’ve seen photos of that destruction in old family photo albums. In the 1980s, my class at school watched an educational film about tornadoes, and the Xenia disaster was included. That day lit the first spark in my young mind that I wasn’t merely learning history; I was a part of it.
Grammy and Grampop eventually rebuilt their house. My sister and I spent large parts of our summer vacations there. One of our favorite memories is making ice cream by hand with Pop every summer. We used an old hand-cranked device that seemed—from a child’s perspective—to take hours. But the result was always amazing, and even better because we had made it ourselves, together.
In 1979, I was six years old and happily making ice cream.
Grammy passed away in 2005, Dad in 2015, and Pop just a few days ago. Pop was a veteran of the Korean War, and although I remember the shrapnel scar on his leg that you could see whenever he wore shorts in the summer for his route as the local postman, he never talked about his wartime experiences.
Perhaps he was from a generation of men who did not openly discuss their emotional pain. Or perhaps telling your grandkids about the horrors of war isn’t the most natural thing in the world. But in later years, he connected with other vets and began giving presentations about his experiences and supporting and counseling other vets. Having read his typed memoir of being wounded, the subsequent airlift, and his hospitalization, I can only hope that talking about his experiences was part of a healing process.
Pop also did beautiful woodwork in his shop in the basement—the only part of the original house to survive the tornado, and a place where my sister and I often spent hours with the toys stored there from the childhoods of my dad and his sister, my aunt. Pop made a ton of frames and glass-fronted cases such as the one that still hangs in Mom’s kitchen to display her glassware collection. I remember how excited he was to recover old lumber in the form of oaken pews from a local church that was shutting its doors.
Though my grandparents disdained alcohol for religious reasons when I was very young, Pop eventually began brewing dandelion wine in that basement, and grape wine from grapes he grew himself in the backyard. It had nothing to do with the fact that Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine is one of my favorite novels, but that was one more reason to appreciate what Pop was creating.
I can’t count how many times I read this book.
This week, I requested that a tree be planted in Pop’s honor. I felt it was a fitting tribute to a woodworker, and doubly so since his grandson has printed so many books on paper. The tree will be planted in Michigan, where I spent so many of my most formative years as a writer, musician, and artist. Pop will always be with me in my creative endeavors. Whether they are paintings, books, drawings, comics, home-brewing experiments, or whatever, I learned something from Pop about the value of making things myself.
I brewed my own mead back in 2017.
Cheers, Pop. Let’s make something awesome for them to remember us by.
2023 eclipse glasses, shown on a map of the October night sky from Tellus Science Museum.
One of the perks of my current location is being an easy walking distance from the Athens-Clarke County Regional Library which hosts a wide variety of free educational and social events for people of all ages. On the Monday before the October 14thAnnular Eclipse, I and a couple dozen others enjoyed an hour-long presentation about the history and orbital mechanics of eclipses. The speaker was Dr. Maurice Snook, a retired chemist who gives science-related talks all over town, including places like the Sandy Creek Nature Center.
Dr. Snook’s eclipse slideshow incorporated his enthusiasm for stamp collecting by including images of eclipse-related stamps from many nations, adding an interesting visual element with stamps which, for example, connected the study of solar eclipses to the development of spectroscopy and how studying the light spectrum of eclipses gave us the name of the element helium. He also shared his own beautiful photos of eclipses over the years, beginning with his first eclipse experience in 1970, which he photographed three years before I was born.
Eclipse postage stamps rock.
The icing on the cake was the big box of eclipse-viewing glasses freely given to all attendees. Under normal conditions, the thick mylar lenses are impossible to see through, and the frames are cardstock with instructions and warnings printed on the inside. For example: Do not use them continuously for more than three minutes. These ones came from the National Science Foundation.
The event was fortuitously timed, as it was my last night in Athens before taking a trip to visit my mother and sister. As a result, I had glasses for all three of us on the fateful Saturday, and we shared the experience of directly observing a solar eclipse for the first time. (I’m not counting the time in Phoenix I got a half-second glimpse by stacking three pairs of sunglasses over my eyes—a super-sketchy method I absolutely cannot recommend.)
We were a bit north of the path of the maximum eclipse effect, so we didn’t observe the full annular event of the perfect ring of light around the moon. (“Annular” means “ring-shaped”.) But even several hours north of the main path of the moon’s shadow across the continental U.S., we got sixty percent coverage of our nearest star. For about three hours, the sun became a glorious crescent, much like a crescent moon at night, but waning and waxing much more quickly. Even with the mylar glasses, the light was intense and strained my eyes a bit. I made it gentler by putting a pair of regular sunglasses over the top of the mylar ones.
Despite being “only” a partial eclipse from the Atlanta area, it was the awesomest solar-eclipse experience so far in my half-century on planet Earth. A big thank you to Dr. Snook and the County Library for making it possible!
Mars Will Send No More 