I hope you all had a good October!
The next anthology I’m editing is announced! Lie Machine will open submissions December 1st.
Pretty quiet this month. I’m doing my Saturday morning/afternoon movies. On the 8th we are watching The Fall, the 15th All the Presidents Men, the 22nd the Breakfast Club, and the 29th the Day the Earth Stood Still. If you wanna hang and watch these, here is a link to join. And as usual, I’ll be streaming.
Everything else will be the streaming schedule:
- Tuesday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Art times
- Wednesday at 4pm – 6pm PST – Art times
- Sunday at 8pm – 10pm PST – Baldur’s Gate 3
Bones and I have officially moved Wolf & Bones Comic Club to a blog write up. I posted our thoughts on The Dark Phoenix Saga on my Patreon. If is free to read. Next we will be reading the first 1/3 of Bone by Jeff Smith.
I was a guest on the podcast World Anvil. I was part of their halloween line up where I talked about werewolves in fiction today and in the past. You can give it a listen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHd2DpwNWe0
I also did an incredibly bad job playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. I have never played a metriodvania game. So after I was done, I got told I have to HOLD the jump button rather than just press it. I might give it another chance. But I think I’ll finish Slay the Princess and Disco Elysium on stream first.
I’m in the home stretch of writing Blue Moon. Just got a murder and the climax to write. Been awhile, but I’m excited to get to the end so Meredith can start drawing.
I’ve also been doing some end of year stuff for Iron Circus. Last week I went through all the titles sales. I made notes on what is selling and what isn’t. So usually books do really well when they first come out, then their sales slowly peter out. I took note on what kinda books continue to sell consistently after they aren’t in the spotlight. Like even though the Cautionary Fable books are mostly a bit old, they continue to sell well (3 of them are in Iron Circus’s top 20 titles for the year). So I’m talking to Spike about what we should look for when submissions open again.
Just a few days ago I found out about the webcomic Dust ‘n’ Dread by Lesle Kieu. I immediately read all of it in one go. The premise is a Frankenstein and a werewolf are hired guns in the old west. The inking is excellent and Kieu does a great job with spot blacks. It also has some excellent monster designs and uniquie takes on things. Like in the original wolfman, werewolves see a pentagram in the hand of their victims. Kieu ups the horror by having the werewolf see they damage they will cause and that reveals the pentagram. Haunting him in a way similiar to how the ghosts of the werewolf victims haunt David in American Werewolf in London. Also, the undead man/frankenstein character, is partly animated by a system of bugs inside him, making any damage he takes more gruesome. I highly recommend it.
I also grabbed the newest volume of Power Fantasy. I read the first trade back in July. I had some minor issues with the pacing in volume 1, but volume 2 smoothed at out. I summed it up to Spike as superpowered people arguing politics and philosophy. One of the characters has a superpowered child. It is very much about how despite attempts to shield his son from the bad of the world, the emotional volatility teenagers go through is a bad combination with this much power, even if his parents are powerful enough to keep him inline. And everyone’s fears combined with their own huge amount of power, only add to that danger.
Good Devils Don’t Play Fair With Evil by David Brothers and Nick Dragotta. was something I picked up as soon as it came out. It’s a collection of shorts Brothers and Dragotta that are them channelling all their favorite shonen manga. They got a good handle on the action in all of them. I particularly liked Fight Like Hell which follows a kid that has fought to survive all his life. He is killed in a fight and since fighting is all he knows, he wants to fight in Heaven. But without the need to survive, he loses his edge.
I also checked out the prose YA book Library of The Dead by T.L. Huchu. It’s about a teen that delivers messages for ghosts. She gets tied up in a mystery involving missing kids because one of the ghosts is the mother of one of the missing kids. I have owned the book for awhile. I heard about it last year at Worldcon because Huchu was on an urban fantasy panel about making the city a character of your book. He had some interesting things to say building the city into the story, so I grabbed a copy of Library of the Dead. However, while the world building was interesting, it didn’t have a lot of baring on the plot of the book. So the pacing was very uneven. I felt like 80% of the plot happened in the last third of the book. I’m gonna hold off on checking out any more of this series until I hear if people think the pacing improved.
The werewolf movies I showed in my discord were some of my favorites, so the only new movie I saw was Del Toro’s new Frankenstein movie. Like all of Del Toro’s movie, it’s beautiful. It is closer to the book. He used Bernie Wrightson’s illustrated Frankenstein as inspiration (Bernie Wrightson is credited in the movie), and some of the shots are right out of the book.
And while on the topic of Frankenstein, Matt Baume did a deep dive into James Whale, the director of the original Frankenstein. It was a really interesting dig into how he got started and then pigeon holed as the monster movie guy.
And the thing that inspired me to give Castlevania a try is I wanted a very long video that is the history of the franchise. The youtuber dug into the topic because he was wondering why there isn’t a new Castlevania game when the Netflix series seems to be doing so well. Turns out it’s because the real villain of the Castlevania franchise is corporate mismanagement.
Hope you have a good month. As always, thanks for your support!