Greetings Loyal, Airmen, as you all know, one of the things we loved doing with Airship 27 Productions is bringing back long forgotten pulp characters. Several years ago we challenged our writing colleague, Chris Bell, to find us an actual pulp private eye who had appeared in pulp magazines that we could bring back.  After six months of searching, Chris found Marty Quade.  Quade had appeared in the popular Ten Detective Aces magazine and his stories were straight up crime tales.

After reading several of these, Chris made up a bible and we recruited four of our regular writers to whip up four brand new Marty Quade tales. The next challenge was finding an artist to do illustrate these stories. As it would turn out, the Air Chief all but tripped over Brian Loner at our comic shop a few years back during Free Comic Book Day. Although he has his own lucrative business, Brian loves the draw and ultimately we gave him the assignment of illustrating the first ever new Marty Quade collection.  Above to the right are some of his early sketches.

And here is one of Brian’s completed spot illos. There will be a total of 12 in the completed book. With those nearly done, it is up to the Air Chief now to get out there and find a cover painter. With fingers crossed this new title will be out early in 2019 and we couldn’t be more excited about that.

Now that we are in the Christmas season, the Air Chief is really enjoying everything about the holiday. From writing Christmas cards to giving and receiving gifts. Thing is it seems every single year, one or two of our writing colleagues surprises with unexpected gifts of both generosity and thoughtfulness. Such was the case this past weekend when a trip to the Post Office netted the Air Chief a very big package and a very little package, both from wonderful writing pals.

The little surprise came from Emily Jahnke. Earlier this year, she and her family took a great trip to New York City and visited all the fun tourist locales that are so plentiful there. At one point they went to the famous Empire State Building and Emily recalled the Air Chief was an avid fan of the movie King Kong. All of which is gospel, as it remains to this day our favorite. So while passing a gift shop in the building, Emily saw the above little piece and bought it for us. Then she hung on to it all this time so that she could surprise us come Christmas.  Emily, you succeeded superbly. And we wish you could have seen our smile upon opening you box. We truly love this new addition to our ever growing collection of King Kong memorabilia.  Thank you so much.

At the same the Postal Clerk was also handing the Air Chief this massive, soundly constructed box that was darn heavy.  Upon carefully opening it in our office, we beheld this incredible sports plaque featuring six of the greatest Red Sox players to ever take the field. On the top in the large photos are left to right, Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski and David Ortiz, while the lower tier were three actually signed baseball cards with Fred Lynn, Dustin Pedroia and Jim Rice. Honestly, our mouth dropped at the sight of it. This coming on the year our beloved Red Sox won their fourth World Series in 15 years. This amazing gift, which will soon go up on our office wall was the gift of Michael and Donna Housel. Michael is one of our finest young writers at Airship 27 Productions and you can expect to see a whole lot more of his amazing fiction in the near future.  For now, thank you Michael & Emily, from the bottom of the Air Chief’s heart.  A Merry Christmas to both of you and your loved ones.

Finally we want to end this week’s Flight Log with a few words of hopefully helpful advice. Have you ever started reading a book and found it was simply bad? Then you kept pressing on in hopes that it would eventually somehow get better?  The Air Chief does a regular review blog, Pulp Fiction Reviews, and over the course of a year, we normally read and review between 40 and 50 books.  Whereas most of them we can generally find something good to mention, even if it isn’t fantastic. Recently were were send a review book and after some twenty pages realized it just wasn’t our cup of literary tea. And yet we persisted for the next two weeks managing to get through the first 104 pages. But the book was still nonredeemable and we finally had to toss it aside.  No, we do not write bad reviews. If a book is bad to us, it still may be okay to another reader. We merely choose not to review it. Although the Air Chief wishes we’d just put it down two weeks ago.  The great writer James Joyce once said, “Life’s too short to read a bad book.”  Amen to that.

See you all next week.

Ron – Over & Out!