Category Archives: comics

Legenderry: A Steampunk Adventure

My 2011 novel Owl Dance, and really the entire subsequent Clockwork Legion Steampunk series, grew out of three short stories. In “The Persian Witch,” I introduced Ramon Morales, a sheriff from New Mexico, and Fatemeh Karimi, a healer from Persia as heroes with complimentary skills. They stood for right, even if they had to stand up to authority to make the right choices. In “Electric Kachinas,” Ramon and Fatemeh have their first brush with a visitor from the stars called Legion, an alien interested in all life and perhaps a little too willing to intervene with that life. Legion would go on to inspire humanity to develop new technologies to see where it would lead them. Finally, in “The Clockwork Lobo,” I introduced Ramon and Fatemeh to Professor Maravilla, an itinerant genius who had created a mechanical wolf to study real wolves. He showed how humans themselves often came up with ideas that hadn’t always reached fame and notoriety. It was interesting to see several of these ideas reflected in Bill Willingham’s graphic novel Legenderry: A Steampunk Adventure, which was comprised of seven comic books that began publication in 2013.

Featuring art by Sergio Fernandez Davila, Legenderry imagines a number of Dynamite Entertainment’s heroes and villains converging in a steampunk world. The book opens when a woman named Magda Spadarossa takes refuge in a club owned by Vampirella. Magda is being chased by a mysterious group of men in armor. However, Vampirella is able to quickly dispatch them. She and her friend, newspaper owner Brit Reid, soon discover the men are all identical. We also learn that Magda is searching for her sister, Sonja, better known to those of us who’ve read comics for a while as Red Sonja. Realizing something very dangerous is afoot, Brit disappears and reappears in his Green Hornet persona. Along with his partner, Kato, the Green Hornet spirits Magda off to an airship commanded by Captain Victory, so he can take her take her to the city of Landing, where she might get help from the famous Flash Gordon.

Meanwhile a cabal of villains including the likes of Ming the Merciless, General Tara, and Doctor Moreau have gathered to summon a demonic entity who will help them take over the world so they can divide up the spoils. Indeed back on Captain Victory’s airship, some of Doctor Moreau’s creations escape their crates, attempting to get their hands on Magda. Fortunately, test pilot Steve Austin is aboard with his pal Oscar Goldman. Steve was wounded in a heliogyro crash, but Oscar has built amazing prosthetics for him and dubbed him the “Six-Thousand Dollar Man.” The resulting battle destroys the airship and our heroes survive and make their way to a mysterious island, but are separated. Fortunately Magda is found by the mysterious Phantom and his sidekick, a mechanical wolf named Devil.

As Magda continues her journey, we learn that long ago, Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless were locked in battle and crash landed on a primitive world. Ming had just taken a potion to give himself long life and disappears to contemplate what to do next. Flash started carefully sharing technology in hopes of advancing the world enough to build a rocket ship to return to his own world. He would portion out some technology, then go to a cryogenic container and sleep for a decade, then wake and portion out more technology. As such, it’s Flash Gordon who makes this a steampunk world.

All in all, Legenderry: A Steampunk Adventure proved a satisfying and action-packed tale that reimagined some familiar comic book and TV heroes in a steampunk milieu. My only disappointment is that it seemed to end on the penultimate battle. It felt like we needed two or three more issues for our heroes to finally come together and confront the cabal of master villains in an ultimate battle. Alas, this is sometimes the nature of comic books.

If you would like to check out my Clockwork Legion series, you will find epic heroes and villains, including some familiar faces from history such as Billy the Kid, Dimitri Mendeleev, and even Doc Holliday in a world altered by a creature from the stars. There will even be some chapters with a mechanical wolf! Learn more at http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#clockwork_legion

A League of the Extraordinary

This weekend finds me at Wild Wild West Con in Tucson, Arizona. If you’re in town and able to come to the event, please drop in to the dealer’s room or see me on one of my panels. This is one of those rare conventions I have been fortunate enough to attend every year it’s been held and this will be the final year. I’m looking forward to this being an event to remember. One of the things I have loved about this convention is that it’s a very immersive steampunk convention where people really get into the spirit of the event and dress up. Over the years, both at this convention and at other events, we have delved into the question of what steampunk is and where it started. At its heart, I’ve long felt that steampunk celebrates science fiction’s eighteenth and nineteenth century roots. It looks to works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and tells stories in a similar milieu. Of course, those works are just early science fiction. Who told the first steampunk stories which looked back at the past and told stories in the style of those earlier works? I once heard an interesting case made that Edgar Rice Burroughs could be considered the father of steampunk. After all, in Burroughs’ first novel, John Carter was a post-Civil War soldier who finds himself transported to a very retrofuturistic Mars. Meanwhile, At the Earth’s Core also has very steampunkish Victorian elements.

One truly standout work of steampunk literature is the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. This book literally brought many of the great heroes from Victorian adventure fiction together to battle a seemingly insurmountable menace. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bill Willingham took some inspiration from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen when he realized that the Edgar Rice Burroughs canon consists of a rather extraordinary group of heroes and villains who could be brought together for a truly epic team-up against some rather implacable foes. His graphic novel The Greatest Adventure, released by Dynamite Publishing in 2017 did just that.

Featuring art by Cezar Razek, The Greatest Adventure imagines that Tarzan villain Count Rokoff and a band of Black Martians have captured a fabulous space vessel from the planet Poloda. Rokoff has also captured Jason Gridley, whose Gridley Wave has been used to communicate with many of Burroughs’ worlds including Pellucidar, Mars, and Venus. He wants Gridley to use the technology of several worlds to build the ultimate weapon, which will give him and his battleship almost Death Star-like powers. Fortunately Gridley escapes in a fighter craft before Rokoff can find the one piece he needs to complete his weapon, a legendary crystal which can only be found on a lost island inhabited by dinosaurs.

Although Gridley hopes to make it home to California, he finds that his craft will make it no further than Africa, so he seeks out Tarzan and his wife, Jane Porter. Willingham is well acquainted with the Tarzan canon and knows that Lord Graystoke has considerable resources and is a leader to be reckoned with. Lord and Lady Graystoke summon their children and head to New Mexico to build team of heroes culled from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Among them are Ulysses Paxton who brings a sky ship from Mars and the team sets out to seek the missing crystal before Rokoff can lay his hands on it. When they reach the island, they find the crystal has been taken to Pellucidar at the center of the Earth. Our heroes follow only to find that Rokoff has beaten them to it and departed for Mars.

Of course our heroes are hot on the villain’s tail. When they reach Mars, it doesn’t take long for Tarzan, Jane, and Gridley to team up with John Carter and Dejah Thoris. All in all, I found this a satisfying and fun adventure that honored the heroes of Edgar Rice Burroughs. I didn’t know all of the characters, but the graphic novel made me want to get to know them better through the source material. I’ll be certain to seek out more of the adventures of Carson of Venus, Tarzan and Jane, and Jason Gridley Was this collection steampunk? I certainly think it had the retrofuturistic, steampunk-like vibe many of Burroughs’ stories maintained.

My own Clockwork Legion steampunk series is about a group of unlikely heroes banding together to thwart an emperor’s ambitions to capture the United States. In many ways, my series owes a strong debt of gratitude to adventure stories such as those written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. You can learn more about my series at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#clockwork_legion

The Fall of Barsoom

I remember going to the library with my older brother when I was in elementary school. He suggested that I should pick out a book – one of the novels for adults, not a kid’s book and not a movie or TV tie-in. He was encouraging me to try out a world that was only in print. I checked out a copy of The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs because I liked space and I liked chess. I remember the book being weird and wonderful with strange spider-like creatures who controlled headless, humanoid drones to play Jetan, the Martian version of chess in Burroughs’ world.

I went back to read the first book in the series, A Princess of Mars some months later and fell in love with Dejah Thoris and befriended green fighting man Tars Tarkas alongside series hero, John Carter. I also came to see how Burroughs depicted Mars as a dying world of dried-up oceans and barely holding an atmosphere. In fact, it only had an atmosphere in Carter’s time because of technology built by an earlier generation of Martians.

Much as I loved the books, I was still a nerdy science kid who couldn’t help but be a little incensed that the books depicted a Mars that couldn’t be. After all, the Viking Lander had recently shown us that Mars was just an empty desert, even more barren than the Mojave Desert near where I grew up. Undoubtedly, this was much of the reason that it took me a long time before I sat down and actually made a concerted effort to read the series. When I did, I was struck by how rich a world Burroughs created in eleven short novels. Admittedly, there are contradictions and some of larger-than-life exploits feel almost laughable, but it occurred to me that the series could have continued on long after Burroughs if his estate had allowed it.

While there are only one or two licensed novels that I know of set on the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Barsoom as the natives call it, the world has been explored and expanded upon several times in comic book form. Recently, I read Warlord of Mars: Fall of Barsoom, which is a prequel to the John Carter-era novels and seems to have been timed to precede the 2012 Disney film. Set 100,000 years before John Carter is first transported to Mars, this series of comics, which have been collected into graphic novel form, imagine Mars when it still had oceans and the native atmosphere was waning.

Written by Robert Place Napton and illustrated by Roberto Castro, we’re introduced to Tak Nan Lee, a scientist who has discovered a way to replenish the waning atmosphere of Mars by using the power of the “Ninth Ray” of sunlight. Tak Nan Lee has created his invention so that all of Mars will survive and when one of the red Martian women is found near his laboratory, he brings her in so he can teach her and her people how to operate the equipment. We also meet Van Tun Bor, a general who must defend the Martian country of Orovar and Tak Nan Lee’s atmosphere lab from outland tribes who are seeking shelter and oxygen on the dying world. If they break through, they could destroy Tak Nan Lee’s work. They all answer to the Jeddak of Orovar, a prince who has his own designs on the atmosphere lab.

Reading the graphic novel, I came to appreciate that Burroughs had given us a backstory for Mars that imagined the difficulties of a world undergoing climate change. He imagined new technologies being developed to stave off the worst effects. He imagined the social pressures that happen as people are driven from the hardest hit areas to less unpleasant climes. While the details of the “science” Burroughs invented seem silly over a century after the publication of A Princess of Mars, he gave us a lot of serious things to consider when imagining living on a planet going through climate change. He also gave us hope. I like that Burroughs suggests that science can help and that Martians (and metaphorically, humans) can learn to adapt to their world if they can avoid doing too much harm. The graphic novel feels like a plausible prequel and presents fun earlier versions of the technology we would see in Burroughs’ novels. It adds to the lore by warning us to be wary of politicians who would use technology for their own selfish aims instead of allowing it to benefit the world as a whole.

The collected edition of Warlord of Mars: Fall of Barsoom was published by Dynamite Comics and is available at Amazon or wherever fine books are sold. I pay homage to the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs when my intrepid explorers visit Mars in my novel The Solar Sea.

Holy Nostalgia, Batman!

Back in November, when I posted about spending time with Mike Esch’s great Batmobile replica in Ruidoso, New Mexico, I mentioned that my wife and I had been rewatching the 1966 Batman series starring Adam West as the Caped Crusader and his alter ego Bruce Wayne. Burt Ward played Robin, the Boy Wonder, and his alter ego Dick Grayson. My wife and I completed our rewatch just a couple of weeks ago, just in time for the 60th anniversary of the show’s debut. Both of us grew up watching the series and we had fond memories of it. We’re both a little too young to remember it in first run, but it was regularly rerun on local stations during my early school years. Batman and Robin were my first TV heroes, even before I discovered Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

The Batman television series debuted in 1966 near the advent of color television and ran for three TV seasons. It was one of the first series designed to show off color television’s abilities by delivering content in eye-popping color. For the first two seasons, there were two half-hour episodes each week. In most cases, the first episode of the week would end in a cliffhanger which would be resolved in the second episode. I remember being truly worried about Batman and Robin’s fate during those cliffhangers. Fortunately, because I watched in syndication, I only had to wait one day to find out how they escaped each villains’ trap. When the series started, it was so popular that it was considered the show for Hollywood’s biggest stars to appear on. Sammy Davis Jr., Phyllis Diller, and Edward G. Robinson were among the stars who made cameos. Burgess Meredith, Caesar Romero and Vincent Price were all big stars who made regular appearances as villains. However, the popularity faded fairly fast as did the budget. By the third season, the series only aired once a week and it was clear that eschewed much location filming for sound stages.

As a kid, my favorite villain was Burgess Meredith’s Penguin. Indeed, he’s the villain who actually appeared the most. I liked his penguin-like waddle, his tux and his “waugh, waugh” interjected from time to time. In fact, I actually believed that was a sound Penguins made, although it was actually Meredith’s way of covering up coughing since he was made to smoke, even though he’d quit some years before. My least favorite villain was Frank Gorshin’s villain because of his goofy laugh and antics.

On the rewatch, I still really liked the Penguin, but now it was because he was the one with the clever schemes that sometimes didn’t even seem illegal until you found out how he intended to turn them into get-rich-quick schemes. I was amused to see that he wore fuzzy gloves. I always thought they were smooth gloves like you’d normally wear with a tuxedo. Now, I appreciate Frank Gorshin’s Riddler much more. I see how committed he was to the part with his antics and hijinks. I realize now the reason I didn’t “like” him as a kid was that he was the villain who literally scared me. I also developed a new appreciation for Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman. Julie Newmar did a fabulous job during the first two seasons, but was unavailable in the third, so Eartha Kitt stepped in. I realized that Eartha Kitt, in her way, inhabited the role of Catwoman just as much as Frank Gorshin did the Riddler.

I’ve always loved Alan Napier’s interpretation of Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred. He’s friendly and helpful. He’s the only character who knows the secret identities of both Batman and Batgirl and he convinces us that he can keep both secrets. The series also introduced us to Dick Grayson’s Aunt Harriet played by Madge Blake. One of the surprises of this rewatch was realizing just how cool Aunt Harriet could be when the writers used her properly. She could be really good at standing up to the villains when needed. Unfortunately, she fell ill late in the second season and, for all intents and purposes, had to bow out of the series.

On rewatching the series, I realized it taught me a lot about finding ways to blend action, humor, and even some scares. Yes, as an adult, I laughed more at the absurdity than quaked in front of the television. Still, there were moments villains like the Riddler and Joker could be outright creepy. Yes, the part of me that’s susceptible to the male gaze does appreciate the suits they put Catwoman and Batgirl in. My wife noted that she appreciated Frank Gorshin’s tights in much the same way. You can learn more about my fiction at http://davidleesummers.com/. If you’ve read any of my books, I’d enjoy hearing the ways you think Batman may have influenced my writing.

Saddle-up for the Weird and Wild West!

I’ve been a fan of Weird Westerns ever since I first discovered the television show The Wild Wild West starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin. I loved the idea of adding aliens, mad scientists, and maybe even some magic into the west. Later, I would discover comics like Jonah Hex and books like Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, which would increase my appreciation of the genre. Today, I’m highlighting four of Hadrosaur Productions’ Weird Western titles. The first two are short story collections by veteran author Lyn McConchie. Next up is the standalone novella, Fallen Angel by the late David B. Riley. Last but not least is Legends of the Dragon Cowboys, which contains a pair of novellas, one by David and the other by long-time Hadrosaur Productions cover artist Laura Givens. She created the cover image as well!

These deals are exclusively available at Smashwords, which can deliver your ebook in a variety of formats and they’re all free of digital rights management, so you can load them onto the reader of your choice.

The Way-Out Wild West

Lyn McConchie’s The Way-Out Wild West is a short story collection set in Bodie, Arizona along with a handful of other western locales.

Bodie, Arizona can be a difficult place to locate on a map. Some say it’s because Bodie has been home to inventors who meddled in things humans weren’t meant to know. Others say it’s the visitors from the stars who seem to frequent Bodie. It’s just possible Bodie has become unstuck in time, making it a difficult place to pinpoint. Being unstuck in time, Bodie may have drifted close to the boundaries between life and afterlife. Whatever the case, Bodie is a wild place. In this collection, Lyn McConchie chronicles the adventures of Bodie’s denizens and those of nearby towns, counties and states from the nineteenth century to the present. Saddle up for this collection of twenty-two tales where you will glimpse the way-out, wild west.

The Way-Out Wild West is available for half off the cover price at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1125221

The Far Side of the Wild West

If you travel west, you can go around the globe as many times as you like and you may never reach the far side.

However, if you go to the wild places in the west, you may find the far side closer than you think. You might find a family of werewolves over the next ridge, or a portal to a new world. Those wild places don’t always exist where and when you think they should. Visit a place like Bodie, Arizona and the far side of the wild west may be quite close at hand. Take a trip to Granny Jarni’s and you may find she’s well acquainted with the people and places of the wild west’s far side. Go back to the old west and you might stumble into a haunted house.

Join Lyn McConchie as she takes you on a tour of the wild west’s far side. Over the course of twenty-two stories, she will introduce you to the ghosts, aliens, robots and a few felines who may be more than they appear at first sight.

The Far Side of the Wild West is available for half off the cover price at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1612078

Fallen Angel

Fallen Angel is the story of Mabel, an angel from Hell, who accompanies General Grant’s army during the last days of the Civil War only to discover that Martians are watching the Earth with envious eyes and slowly drawing their plans against us. Not only that, but Mabel has to contend with her evil sister, who wants to have humans for dinner. Although Mabel and Grant get the upper hand before the war ends, the battle of good against evil isn’t won so quickly. Several years later, in San Francisco, Mabel just wants to have fun with her friend Miles O’Malley, when she discovers her sister and the Martians have joined forces with a college fraternity and humanity may be on the dinner menu.

Christine Wald-Hopkins of The Arizona Daily Star writes, “This quirky new novel by Tucsonan David B. Riley is a cross-genre romp, religious fantasy meets historical fiction, science fiction, zombie ‘Animal House.’”

Get the book for 50% off at: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/924099

Legends of the Dragon Cowboys

Legends of the Dragon Cowboys brings you two weird western adventures by authors David B. Riley and Laura Givens. Their heroes ride boldly out of the Far East to find their way in a mythic land of danger, romance, and adventure.

In “The Venerable Travels of Ling Fung” by David B. Riley, a wandering businessman encounters a Mayan god, crooked enterprises and Yeti, the Abominable Snowman, when all he really wants is to open a gun store. Ling Fung is not any ordinary Chinese entrepreneur–he’s highly skilled in Kung Fu and he can shoot good, too. While his heart is set on business, providence seems to have other plans for him.

Laura Givens brings wily acrobat Chin Song Ping to the Wild West in search of adventure and fortune. He finds little fortune, but plenty of adventure. Chin Song Ping is a scoundrel, a gambler and a trouble magnet. His heart of gold lands him in schemes to outwit would-be gods, cannibal ghosts, insane robots, Voodoo despots and the ultimate evil–bureaucrats. But he is a romantic, and the love of his life is the true treasure he seeks. The odds are always against him but if he survives he will become the Western legend he always was in his own mind.

The Wild West just got a lot wilder!

Midwest Book Review says, “These two Western novellas are seasoned a dash of exotic adventure, featuring cowboy protagonists who hail from the Far East and pursue their dreams in the tough-as-nails frontier. Riveting from first page to last, Legends of the Dragon Cowboys is enthusiastically recommended for public library collections and connoisseurs of the genre!”

Get the book for 50% off at: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/751811

Vampirella – The Movie

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been reading and enjoying the various incarnations of the comic book Vampirella. In short, the comic book tells the adventures of a vampire from another world who fights the forces of evil here on Earth. The character was created to be the “host” of a horror comic anthology magazine created by Warren Publishing. The company had success with two similar magazines hosted by the monstrous Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie. The difference is that Warren asked writer Forrest J. Ackerman to give Vampirella a backstory. The Vampirella story was so popular that her adventures became a regular feature in the magazine. Vampirella was a direct homage to Maila Nurmi’s TV horror host character Vampira with some additional inspiration from Barbarella. The character would be picked up by Harris Publishing and most recently has been published by Dynamite. Over the years, clever writers have found ways to alter Vampirella’s story and question the reliability of her memories and her own reliability as a narrator. The comic can be simple good vs. evil and it can have some really interesting psychological nuance, depending on the writer. As a result I’ve enjoyed the ride.

Not long ago, I learned that a Vampirella movie had been produced by Roger Corman in 1996. This was done during the Harris Publishing days and Forrest J. Ackerman was one of the producers, so the script pretty much followed one of the early storylines from the Warren Publishing days, which Harris subsequently continued. The movie opens in the distant past on the planet Drakulon. Vlad, played by Roger Daltrey, is a criminal about to face justice. However, he manages to attack his jailers, and make his escape. In the process, he kills the council’s leader who happens to be Vampirella’s father. Vampirella, played by Talisa Soto, vows vengeance and goes after him.

Vlad finds refuge on Earth where he adopts a name based on his home world and, you guessed it, becomes known as Dracula. Unfortunately, poor Vampirella’s craft crashes on Mars. She survives in a cryogenic tube until humans finally explore and she hitches a ride to Earth only to find that Vlad’s progeny have become a real menace. While hunting Vlad, she comes into contact with Adam Van Helsing, played by Richard Joseph Paul, who belongs to a secret organization known as Purge, whose mission is to fight monsters. After some initial mistrust, the two begin to work together and hunt for Vlad begins.

Overall, I thought the story worked. Roger Daltrey reportedly agreed to play Vlad because Keith Moon was a fan of the comic and he did it to honor his friend. I thought Talisa Soto and Richard Joseph Paul turned in fine performances. Yet, even giving the movie allowances for its low budget, the movie never quite works. I think part of the problem is that Daltrey understood the nature of the character from the early Warren days and played Vlad as a camp villain who would have been perfectly at home on the 1966 Batman TV series. However, Soto, Paul, and much of the rest of the cast played it straight and serious, much closer to the tone the Harris comics had adopted by the 1990s. What’s more, it’s clear that Purge, which was invented for the movie, was an homage to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. However, aside from the scientist character and his goofy-looking, but highly effective anti-vampire “sun gun,” we weren’t given the kind of wry, tongue-in-cheek humor the earlier show delivered. In effect, the movie couldn’t seem to decide on a campy fun approach to the material or a more serious, grim take. Thing is, either approach would have been valid, but the approaches shouldn’t have been mixed.

Reviews of the movie are almost guaranteed to point out that Vampirella’s iconic costume, as shown on the action figure in the picture above, was altered for the movie. That, in itself, didn’t really bother me. It’s hard to imagine that costume working on a real actress having to do action scenes. Also, after the film, Dynamite’s artists started giving Vampirella other things to wear and a lot of those outfits actually look more practical and well designed. However, in the film, Vampirella effectively wears a vinyl bikini with extra straps. I had no problem with the director changing the iconic costume to make it more practical. I just wish he had also made it look like something someone would actually wear!

As a fan of the comic book, I enjoyed seeing the Vampirella film despite its flaws. There are fun moments, including the scene where Vampirella meets a geeky character named Forrest Ackerman. Still, it either needed more fun moments or it needed to take itself more seriously. If you’re just casually curious about the character and her associates, I’d skip the film and go read some comic books. Dynamite has been reprinting the original Warren Vampirella issues in some lovely archive editions that are worth seeking out. They include some fantastic art by folks such as Frank Frazetta and Jose Gonzalez along with great storytelling by Archie Goodwin and Tom Sutton.

Of course, if you’re looking some vampires who fight evil, don’t miss my Scarlet Order Vampire novels at http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order

The Batmobile!

This weekend, I’m at TusCon in Tucson, Arizona. We’re really excited to have some new and unique items at this year’s show. First and foremost, we’re unveiling a special collector’s edition of The Museum of the Omniverse: Dragon Exhibit collectible USB with the complete audio drama. What’s more, we’re selling Blu-Ray copies of the three movie set: Writing Fren-Zee, The Revenge of Zoe, and The Love Song of William H. Shaw. I have walk-on parts in the last two films, and my daughter appears in Love Song. These special Blu-Rays are available for sale exclusively at TusCon and will not be available after the show. For more information about TusCon, visit https://tusconscificon.com/

Three weeks ago, I was at R2-Doso Comicon in Ruidoso, New Mexico. When we went in to set up, we were excited to discover that our booth was right across from the Batmobile as it appeared in the 1966 Batman television series. This was a special treat since my wife, Kumie, and I have been rewatching the series. In the photo below, Kumie is in the passenger seat and I’m behind the wheel.

In fact, this is not the Batmobile as used in filming the 1966 TV series. However, it is a fully-functional replica built by Mike Esch of Albuquerque. He brings it to conventions and charges a small fee to allow convention goers to have a photo opp in the iconic car and then donates the proceeds to charity. Below is a view of the car from the passenger side. One of my publishers, Tyree Campbell, is standing in the background watching us have fun.

The original Batmobile was built from a 1955 Lincoln Futura. Mike built his car from a 1972 Lincoln Continental, which had a similar structure. The photo below gets a good look at the driver’s seat and you can get an idea of how much detail Mike put into the car. Kumie’s arms are up because she’s holding a bomb, similar to the one Adam West’s Batman had to get rid of in the 1966 movie.

Several Batman actors have visited Mike’s Batmobile and given it their seal of approval. In the photo below you can see some of their signatures, including Burt Ward who played Robin in the 1966 series and John Glover who voiced the Riddler in Batman: The Animated Series.

Mike’s Batmobile is road-worthy. In fact, after the convention was finished we saw the Batmobile driving the streets of Ruidoso which was great fun. If you see Mike and his Batmobile at an event you’re attending, be sure to say “hi” and go check out his work. Also be sure to support the good work he’s doing for charity’s like Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Before I wrap up today’s post, I thought it would be fun to mention just three things I’d never noticed about the 1966 series until my current rewatch.

  1. In the opening credits, I used to think that aside from the Joker, the Penguin and Catwoman, the rest of the villains were just generic gangsters. Looking closer this time around, I realize that a number of villains from Batman’s rogues gallery are actually represented. In addition to the aforementioned villains, I recognize Clayface, King Cobra, and Dr. Hugo Strange.
  2. Most episodes open with the Batmobile pulling up to Gotham City’s Police Headquarters. What I realized this time is that it’s always the exact same sequence. The same men in hats are walking down the stairs. The same three women are crossing the street. Kumie and I have made a game of it. She thinks the women are the Batman fan club and they lie in wait each time he drives up. I think they belong to an HOA and are going to headquarters to complain about a neighbor with tall grass. Clearly this was filmed in an era before anyone anticipated binge watching series!
  3. I never thought the series mentioned the death of Thomas and Martha Wayne. However, Bruce does mention it in the first episode. It’s a moment with some nice emotional weight that’s played in a way that counterbalances the levity in the rest of the episode. It reminds the audience that Gotham’s villains are dangerous and crime fighting has some serious stakes. It was also a moment where Adam West got to display his dramatic strengths. I wish there had been more moments like that in the series.

Unfortunately, we have no Batmobile at TusCon, but we do have some great writer’s and artist’s panels, lots of great vendors in the dealer’s room, and some good company. If you’re in town, I hope you’ll drop by!

Fire and Ice

At this year’s Bubonicon, I was on a fascinating panel discussing the differences between writing short stories and novels. Jane Lindskold made an interesting observation that, in general, short stories should be able to work as the last chapter of a novel. The idea is that in a short story, the characters should either be facing or soon face a problem that can be resolved with a satisfyingly complete conclusion.

Soon after this, while recovering from hernia surgery, I continued my exploration of the adult animated films of Ralph Bakshi. This time, the film was Fire and Ice from 1983, which proved to be a fascinating collaboration with artist Frank Frazetta. As the movie begins, we find two factions at war. In the north at the Citadel Icepeak are Queen Juliana, her son Nekron and their army of Subhuman warriors. At the equator based at Firekeep are King Jerrol, his son Prince Taro, daughter Princess Teegra, and their legions of dragonhawk riders. Juliana and Nekron have used their magic to send glaciers southward, driving humanity toward the equator in a bid to take over as much land as possible. What’s more, Juliana sends agents to kidnap Teegra. On the way back to Icepeak, Teegra escapes her Subhuman captors and meets up with a young warrior Larn, who has been separated from his tribe. They begin to work their way back to Firekeep, only for Teegra to be recaptured. Larn joins up with a mysterious, lone warrior named Darkwolf. They continue the fight against Icepeak’s forces until Larn finds an opening to get to Icepeak and attempts to save Teegra. Unfortunately, he’s repelled by Nekron’s magic and he returns to Darkwolf. Together the two make for Firekeep so they can join the dragon hawk riders in an attempt to raid Icepeak in force.

I gather almost every character in the movie was animated using rotoscoping, the technique where live actors are filmed and then the action is copied onto animation cells and painted. This film features by far the cleanest and most beautiful rotoscoping I have seen in any animated movie. On top of that, the backgrounds were painted by none other than Thomas Kincaid. Visually, the film is a beautiful animated tribute to the quality of fantasy artwork Frank Frazetta was known for. That noted, the film feels like the last chapter of a novel. In that sense, the film basically does work as a standalone story. The only problem is that it’s a little too much like the last chapter of a novel. There are just a few too many characters introduced too rapidly to feel fully invested in their plight. The movie is only 80 minutes long and it felt like another 20 minutes of early storytelling might have gone a long way to addressing this issue.

Fortunately, in 2023, Dynamite Comics started a Fire and Ice prequel series written by Bill Willingham and featuring gorgeous, Frank Frazetta-like interiors by Leonardo Manco. The series, written in consultation with Frank Frazetta’s daughter Sara, has been doing a great job of setting up the world of Fire and Ice. We get a much more complete introduction to Darkwolf, Larn, Queen Juliana, Nekron, King Jerrol, Teegra and other characters we meet in the film. At this point, I’ve only read the first three issues plus the Teegra one-shot and I feel much more invested in the characters and understand the stakes presented in the movie much better. I have read that director Robert Rodriguez has licensed rights to do a live-action Fire and Ice film. If this is still being developed, I hope he uses material from the comics as part of his version.

My first foray into the fantasy genre was my 2001 story called The Slayers. I was especially ambitious and endeavored to squeeze the contents of a very long novel—namely Moby Dick— into a 3500-word short story. In the story, the Pequod became an airship called the Slayer and they hunted dragons instead of whales. Would it have been stronger if I’d focused on the ending? Possibly, but I think this became my first professional short story precisely because it had a strong, non-ambiguous ending. The story has recently been re-released as part of the audio anthology The Museum of the Omniverse: Dragon Exhibit. Learn more and listen to some samples at: http://museumoftheomniverse.com

Vampires in the Twin Cities

I have been continuing my exploration of the world developed for the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade. This led me to the graphic novel Vampire: The Masquerade – The Complete Series published by Vault Comics. This turned out to be a nice introduction to the world of the game. The graphic novel transports the reader to the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul into the heart of the cities’ vampire leadership as they deal with mysteries and crises that threaten to upend the status quo.

The complete series consisted of thirteen issues. The first ten issues feature a story called “Winter’s Teeth” written by Tim Seeley with stunning art by Devmalya Pramanik. This story is centered on Cecily Bain, an enforcer for the Twin Cities’ vampire council. She’s been a vampire for many years and cares for her human sister who has aged and suffers dementia. As the story opens, she also finds herself taking in an abandoned, fledgling vampire called Alejandra whose past is a mystery. While Cecily attempts to show Alejandra how to be the best vampire, hunters have entered the Twin Cities and begin destroying vampires. It’s up to Cecily to put a stop to this incursion while also keeping vampires hidden.

These first ten issues also feature a “B-story” called “The Anarch Tales” written by Tini & Blake Howard with art by Nathan Gooden. In this arc, we follow a group of so-called anarchs—vampires who aren’t allied with any of the major houses—as they attempt to find blood to survive without revealing their existence. Primarily we follow Colleen Pendergrass a so-called thin-blood who needs blood to survive, but can be out and about in daylight, though she has few other vampire powers. She was made a vampire against her will but sees herself as responsible for her “family” of outcasts. As the ten issues progress, it becomes clear that the events of the two stories are actually intertwined and happening simultaneously, which proved to be great fun.

The final three issues featured a story called “Crimson Thaw” written by Tim Seeley, Tini & Blake Howard, Jim Zub and Danny Lore with art by Julius Ohta. This story follows the previous stories and characters as they deal with a gang of werewolves who have encroached on the Twin Cities. As the thirteen issues progressed, characters grew and changed and not all survived the events. It made me wish this series had lasted longer so we could continue to follow the adventures of Cecily, Colleen, and the other vampires. That said, this gaming tie-in book featured something I’ve not seen in other gaming tie-in comics. It included character sheets and detailed character descriptions so you could play the characters in your own role-playing campaign and create your own sequels.

As I noted, this was a great introduction to the world of Vampire: The Masquerade. It introduced the reader to many of the vampire clans and showed us how the politics work. It gave us a good mystery with some fun action as you might expect in a satisfying game. It also made me want to explore the world further. As I read, it occurred to me that although there are differences between the vampires of my Scarlet Order novels and those of the gaming system, my vampires could be easily adapted to a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign. You can learn more about my Scarlet Order vampires at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order

As far as exploring the game itself, join me this Thursday over at Threads that Bind when I’ll share my experiences delving into the game Vampire: The Masquerade – Chapters where my wife and I play the parts of vampires navigating politics, mysteries and finding our next meal in Montreal while doing our best to stay in the shadows!

Morgana Pendragon

Back in college, I remember watching the movie Excalibur with some friends. There were debates about how close the movie adhered to the “true” legend of King Arthur. This actually made me to wonder exactly how the legend of King Arthur came about. A couple of weeks later, I was in a very nice used bookstore in Albuquerque and found a book that collected the few historical writings that might have inspired the legend alongside a collection of Arthurian fiction from the middle ages. It opened my eyes to how the King Arthur legend came about and I really wanted to write a King Arthur story rooted in history, trying to imagine what the historical King Arthur would be like. I actually got as far as writing a story called “The Image of Mary.” Set at the Battle of Badon Hill, the story was about the uneasy relationship between a young Arthur and his best warrior and lover, Morgana. They presented the ruse that they were brother and sister to allow her to share Arthur’s tent. However, they actually weren’t related in my story. Morgana would then go on to become the mother of Mordred, the young man who would usurp the British throne from Arthur.

Earlier this year, one of my favorite comic writers, Madeleine Holly-Rosing, announced that she was creating a new comic called Morgana Pendragon. Like my story, hers centered around Morgana. In Madeleine’s story, Morgana is the sister of Arthur and Mordred is Arthur’s nephew. The comic is set near the end of Arthur’s reign. Morgana has been long gone from Arthur’s court and now commands mercenaries who fight in Europe. However, she has been summoned back to Britain to support the succession of Arthur’s chosen heir, a knight called Constantine. He would like Morgana, as his sister, to support his choice. However, Morgana soon learns that other knights would prefer a different successor and she’s now caught in between the two factions.

As the story proceeds, we learn that Morgana had left her son, Mordred, behind when she left Britain and he’s been trained by Arthur’s knights. However, their reunion is not a happy one. Mordred seems to resent his mother’s return. In this world, Morgana had magic but has lost it. It sounds like the reasons for that are part of the story that will develop in future issues.

I know Madeleine’s work largely from her first creator-owned venture, the steampunk comic, The Boston Metaphysical Society. One of the things I really appreciate about Madeleine’s work is her attention to historical detail and her research. She makes plausible connections and, so far, Morgana Pendragon is no exception. I like her portrayal of Morgana as a strong, sympathetic warrior and Madeleine has created a great band of followers to accompany her on her journeys. I look forward to seeing how Madeleine’s Arthurian tale unfolds in future issues. You can order the first issue here: https://morgana-pendragon-1.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

As for my own idea for an Arthurian fantasy, that was folded into my novel Dragon’s Fall: Rise of the Scarlet Order Vampires. The “dragon” who falls is one of the commanders of the British army, Desmond, Lord Draco, who is a contemporary of King Arthur. In my novel, both of them are vying for the title of “Pendragon,” which is the chief commander. Unfortunately, during a key battle, Desmond encounters a vampire, so Arthur goes on to become pendragon. You can learn more about my novel at: http://davidleesummers.com/dragons_fall.html