Greetings Loyal Airmen, as we continue to live through the current health threat, the Air Chief is extremely proud of his family and friends who have all rolled up their sleeves and are determined to follow the guidelines set by health officials and our President to make this awful virus go away quickly as is humanly possible.

Of course if you are a writer or artist, then this new self-imposed isolation isn’t really anything new, as our work is pretty much done in our inner sanctums. Thus we tend to look at this time as a period where we can be super productive in doing new stories, books and comic strips. One such artist with such a positive attitude is our friend Mike Belcher who a few days ago surprised us with this truly awesome pin-up of our lovable super-hero, Mr. Jigsaw Man of a Thousand Parts. It was a special treat for us and we couldn’t wait to share it with all of you.

Every now and then, certain projects fall through the cracks and somehow get forgotten along the way. Several years ago, at the behest of Moonstone publishing, the Air Chief wrote a short story featuring a classic pulp detective called I.V. Frost…and three short comic strips with the character. By the time we’d finished the scripts, the intended project fell through. And after artist Jake Minor had actually illustrated one of the comic stories.  So we recruited our pal Gary Kato to draw the other two stories and Redbud Studio put out their first ever full color comic, the I.V. Frost Scientific Investigator comic.  Now a few months go back and we’re notified Moonstone was going to go ahead with an I.V. Frost prose anthology and our story would be in that collection. This would be a soft-cover paperback. Then later they would do a hard-cover edition and offer that Jake Minor completed script as a bonus feature. We loved the idea. The paperback anthology came out and it was great. But for whatever reason, Moonstone changed their plans and never did a hard-back edition. And those 8 wonderful comic pages have yet to be published. Above is page one for your enjoyment. Will it ever see print? We only just recalled it was even out there. We plan on talking with Joe Gentile at Moonstone and see what we can do…after all these years. Jake’s work is stellar and deserves to be seen and appreciated. As ever, we’ll keep you posted.

And finally we’re going to leave you with pages from two exciting projects the Air Chief is involved with. To the upper left is another page from the new spy thriller JIN & TONIC, that we are working on with artist Cesar Felicano. Soon this should be ready to post on some manner of funding site to solicit your financial aid in getting it launched. Still a ways off set. Then we have super colorist Mort Todd assisting us and artist Gary Kato in getting our old Peter Pan story, RETURN TO NEVER-NEVER LAND back in print. Originally published by Adventure Comics, we’ve taken the original black and white pages, and happily recruited Mort to re-color them for publication. His work is just amazing.  Again, we’ll keep you posted.

And as we sign off, we want to wish you all of you out there both a Happy Passover and Happy Easter. May God, in these hard times, shower all your Loyal Airmen with his love and eternal graces.  See you next week.

Ron – Over & Out!