Greetings Loyal Airmen, a few years ago we wrote a manga inspired comic strip called DEATH DERBY, done as an over-the-top silly story wherein savage racers drive their super-charged cars through a dense, high populated city causing all kinds of mayhem along the way.

An artist friend agreed to illustrate and produced a character sketch design and actually drew the first page of the script. Then, due to other obligations, had to drop the project and so the script languished in our files. The pieces above were from that first artist. Recently, another local artist came on the scene and decided to take a stab at it.

Above is artist Brian Loner’s interpretation of our two main characters and we’re happy to say he’s very much committed to actually completing DEATH DERBY. Note, the illustration above is meant to be a promotional piece, whereas the finished strip will only be in black and white. When finished it will be featured in our continuing anthology comics series RON FORTIER’S TALES OF THE MACABRE.  Stay tuned.

On the pulp front we’ve peeks at artwork from two titles in production. To the upper left is an illustration from Ed Catto that will appear in RAVENWOOD – Stepson of Mystery Vol 4 – The latest anthology featuring this classic Occult Detective with four brand new stories.  To upper right is an illustrations by Clayton Murwin from the novel THE EYE OF DAWN, a suspense thriller by writer Brad Sinor.  Hopefully both titles will be out within a few months, Loyal Airmen.

And back to comics we go.  A short while after the Air Chief and partner Rob Davis began publishing the Mr. Jigsaw comic book series, we had the idea of doing collected edition. Thus ever three issues of the 24 pg books would be collected. At that time, another outfit named Wild Wolf Entertainment produced what we called THE ADVENTURES OF MR. JIGSAW and sold them at Amazon.  Eventually Rob’s own Redbud Studio comics took over and recently, during our last Airship 27 Podcast, the subject came up about these ADVENTURES titles. We agreed it was time to go over them and correct any mistakes or omissions and eventually do a firth volume containing issues 13 – 14 – 15.  In the past few days Rob has started on this. Above is the new Redbud edition of issue #1.

And here we have the new edition of ADVENTURES # 2. This one actually had several great new Jiggy pin-ups by various artists added to the book that were never in the original edition.  It also appears that issues 3 & 4 are in good shape and will remain as is.

All that remains now is for Jiggy artist to do a cover for ADVENTURES # 5. Once in Rob will assembled the collection and have it up at Amazon, at which time we’ll notify all you Loyal Airmen. It is the Air Chief’s plan to have lots of these at our convention tables this year. Meanwhile, you can buy these first four books at Amazon.

And there you have it for this week’s Flight Log, Loyal Airmen. As ever thanks for stopping by and we’ll see you back here next Friday.

Ron – Over & Out!