Greetings Loyal Airmen, as so many of you know, one of our earliest comic creations was Mr. Jigsaw Man of a Thousand Parts which I created with artist Gary Kato over thirty years ago.  Since that time he’s appeared in lots of comics, more often as a back up feature and then thanks to Rob Davis’ Redbud Studio Jiggy finally got his own series a few years back. To date we’ve done 15 issues.

So you can well imagine our surprise when we logged on to FB earlier this week and found the picture above. Brandon Penny is a super Jiggy fans from Ohio who decided to make his own Mr.Jigsaw action figure. By cannibalizing other figures and then painting the resulting construct, he ended up with what you see above. We think it is absolutely fantastic. You gotta love Jiggy fans. Thanks so much Brandon.

A couple of weeks ago I published the above picture of the Air Chief and his first writing class at the Front Range Community College here in Fort Collins.  Well, as you might we recall we mentioned it was an 8 week course and unbelievable as it sounds, those eight weeks ended last night. No one was more surprised at how fast those weeks went by than the Air Chief. Meeting once a week with these five super talented young writers was pure delight and what little we could teach them about comics scripting they picked up fast. By the end of these eight weeks, all of them know the proper formats for professional scripting and more importantly how to assemble a presentation package to show editors and publishers.  We predict in not time flat all of them will be successful creators in the comics world. Now it is time to start planning for next year’s class.

Since writing the above, the Air Chief met with the head of the college Adult Continuing Education program and our next course will kick off in Feb. 2018 and be an expanded version of the one we just gave. Seems student feedback demanded a longer course and longer classes, so next one will be ten weeks instead of eight and two hours per night instead of 90 minutes.  Wow, the Air Chief is flabbergasted.  When they want more it’s a good sign we did it right.

Finally, in a few weeks we will be debuting the latest volume of MYSTERY MEN ( & Women ) Vol 5.  This is our series anthology that showcases brand new pulp heroes by today’s writers. The feature story in this volume is a full length novella by writer Gene Moyers featuring his newest character, a mysterious female crimefighter known simply as THE SHRIKE.  Canadian artist Ted Hammond and the Air Chief did some talking as to how this new deadly dame should look and we agreed on classic 40s beauties like Greta Garbo, Marlene Deitrich and Ava Gardner (above). Ted loved the idea and ended up delivering one of the most beautiful pulp covers we will ever put out. Stay tuned Loyal Airmen, it is on its way.

And that’s it for now. We sign off with wishing all you Loyal Airmen a truly Happy Thanksgiving.

Ron – Over & Out!!