Greeting Loyal Airmen, we hope you are surviving the holiday season. Seems like each new time we go shopping, even for groceries, there seem to be twice as many people crowding the stores. Oh, yeah, it certainly is that time of year.  Ha. Anyway, lately we’ve been devoting a great deal of talk to the marvelous new audio-book version of our Airship 27 Productions’ pulp books.  Last week, the Air Chief managed to spend a little each time each day listening to our own book, GHOST SQUAD – Rise of the Black Legion, co-written with Andrew Salmon, and honestly, it was truly fun experience.  Over seven hours long, the narration is by one J. Scott Bennett and he does a truly amazing job reading the book. In fact, so enthusiastic was he in his reading, there were lots of times when the Air Chief would get lost in listening to the action that we would momentarily forget we’d actually written the darn thing! That’s how much fun these books are.  We hope you’ll get them a try. Again, all those currently available can be found on the book’s Amazon.com page. Last week Radio Archives released the first Sherlock Holmes book from our catalog of Holmes titles and believe, Loyal Airmen, we can’t wait to give that one a listen.  Oh, yeah.

In keeping with our Advent theme which we began last week, we wanted to share with all you Loyal Airmen the Air Chief’s favorite Christmas story; Charles Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL.  We only read the actual story a few years ago having been introduced to the tale via many of its movie and TV adaptations. The story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchet and Tiny Tim resonated with us upon first viewing. Elements are quite frightening, as it is very much a ghost story, but one with a message of redemption in its climax. That despite a life of bad choices, Scrooge is still granted the ultimate blessing, time enough to change his ways…for the better. Now if that hopeful message isn’t what Christmas is all about, then nothing is.

Of course, as mentioned about, there have been dozens of film versions of this tale. The most notable is the classic black and white movie with Alestair Sims (in the center above) and then there was the TV special with Patrick Steward and even our beloved Muppets did their own CHRISTMAS CAROL with Michael Caine wonderfully touching as Scrooge. And no, we haven’t forgotten George C. Scott’s take either. In fact it would be fair to claim, the Air Chief has enjoyed all but one of the adaptations we’ve seen over the years.  That one sour note, SCROOGE with Bill Murray. Don’t get us wrong, we do like Murray as a comedian, but this picture just doesn’t hold and carries no emotional weight at all. Whether it is because it takes place in modern times (a really bad decision on the filmmakers part) or that Murray just can’t help mugging the role…it is a mess and after only one viewing, we do our best to avoid it at all cost. Whereas the recent animated version starring Jim Carey in the major roles won us over completely and we hope to added to our Blu-Ray collection some day.

And lastly for this week some major news concerning one of the two new pulp comics the Air Chief has been writing for Moonstone Comics.  GUNS OF THE BLACK BAT #1 will be solicited in the pages of the next Diamond Catalog, and above is the first official promo picture from that announcement. This art was done by Michael Stribling, who did all our covers, while the interior pages are by the amazing Silvestre Szilagyi. We cannot tell you how much fun the Air Chief has had working on this series and how beautiful the pages are. So if you are a comic collector and get the Diamond catalog, do keep your eyes peeled for that solicitation.  We’re counting on your support, Loyal Airmen, to make this a winner.

Ron – Over & Out!