Originally published October 25, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1197
“That’s all I can stands ’cause I can’t stands no more.”
—Popeye the Sailor
How much is one supposed to take? And, when one has taken as much as he thinks he should, how does one fire back and to what degree? And where does the demarcation between fans and pros lie, and is there one, and should there be one?
Originally published October 18, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1196
“No one ever said life was fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”
—from The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
I don’t remember when I met Lee Tennant. He was just always… there somehow.
I was at Shea Stadium at 1987. It was a beautiful day for baseball, and it was policy that they let everyone attending the game, no matter where their seats were, to come down to field level and watch the Mets take batting practice. So there I was, standing at the railing, with dozens of fans of various ages all around me. My favorite player, Gary Carter–the guy who started off the rally that salvaged Game 6–was just finishing up batting practice.
Back when I was live-blogging the Super Bowl, I opined that teenagers today had no idea who the people she named in “Vogue” were. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Bette Davis: all these and more had no meaning.
Well, I was at the supermarket yesterday, and the cashier seemed quite young. And at a supermarket checking out groceries is pretty much the only circumstance under which some random middle aged guy can idly chat with a teen girl (she turned out to be seventeen) and not have it come across as creepy. As she ran the items across the scanner, I said, “Hey…you know the Madonna song, ‘Vogue?'”
“No.”
UPDATED 4:41 PM–Okay. Because a lot of fans on various sites were disappointed having to wait another month, we’ve decided not to go with B&N exclusively and instead are releasing it on Amazon simultaneously. Here you go. Paperback should be available next week.
For years, people have been asking me, “Where’s Book 2 of ‘The Hidden Earth?”
I had no ready answer. I had turned in the contracted manuscript years earlier, and it simply languished, untouched, on someone’s desk.
They had eighteen months to publish it, and after all that time, we’d reached the promised pub date and it had not even entered the production system. And I said, “This is not how you treat authors. This is not how you do business.” (And believe me, I wasn’t the only author in that situation. I encountered quite a few bemoaning their manuscript being in limbo.)
So when Mike Friedman suggested that a group of us take our destinies in our own hands and form Crazy 8 Press, this was the book that prompted me to join up.
I basically torched my relationship with that publisher–and quite possibly crippled my career, because book publishers don’t like troublemakers–to get back this book and the one before it (which was out of print). So that people could read it.
Book 1, “Darkness of the Light,” is on both Amazon and B&N. Book 2 is out right now for the Nook and will be out on Amazon and in paperback next month.
You can order “Heights of the Depths” here.
Please help send a pro-author message to certain publishers by supporting this and other endeavors at Crazy 8 Press. Thank you for your attention.
PAD
PS–I’ve noticed that no matter what format we put something out with, people immediately say, “Oh, I don’t have that; can you put it out in (fill in the blank).” Yeah, not this time. Nook (and Kindle, for that matter) have made it so dámņëd easy to have their platform available that you’re out of E-xcuses. To get the Nook app for just about anything electronic you’ve got, go here.
Originally published October 11, 1996, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1195
I think I finally understand Rob Liefeld. Which is cold comfort I suppose, considering the last couple of weeks he’s been having, but there it is.
Several things crystallized this newly-found comprehension for me.
We took Caroline to see “The Phantom Menace” in 3D yesterday. She’d seen the commercials for it a few weeks ago and said she wanted to see it; we then insisted she watch what we consider the real “first three movies,” namely episodes 4, 5 and 6. She did so with some reluctance and found them enjoyable in her own way, as I mentioned in an earlier posting.
So we were most interested to see how she would react to a “Star Wars” film that she had not first seen parodied on “Family Guy.” One that is generally reviled as being boring, turgid, poorly acted, badly written, badly directed, and the debut of a character so detested that he actually made people nostalgic for the Ewoks (no small feat, that.)
Personally, watching the film yesterday–the first time I’ve seen it in its entirety since it premiered years ago–I found it as dissatisfying as ever, with 3D effects that were lackluster at best. Even the pod race, which should have rocked in 3D, was unimpressive.
So what did Caroline think of it?
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