Greeting Loyal Airmen, and a Happy 4th of July to all of you.  We kick off this week’s Flight Log with the truly awesome image above.  As some of you may recall, the Air Chief will be making two appearances at the local Barnes & Noble bookstore here in Fort Collins in the coming weeks.  First we’ll be doing an Author’s signing and talking about the history of American pulps.  The following week, on a Sat. afternoon, the Air Chief and his friend, comics writer Todd Jones, will be putting a fun childrens workshop on how comics are made.  Although store police forbids us from selling our comics at this even, the young woman planning it all suggested we do up a Jiggy flier which she would in turn get printed up and we’d could hand those out at this fun workshop. We thought it a cool idea and immediately contacted artist Rob Davis who, within minutes, whipped up the above image.  Upon first viewing it looked very busy…then we realized Rob had actually put together every single Redbud issue of our Mr. Jigsaw series, to include the Mr. Jigsaw How to Make A Comic Special.  Wow. We absolutely love this and had to share it with all our Loyal Airmen.

Continued the comic book news, we’re thrilled to announce that Mr. Jigsaw Man of a Thousand Parts # 14 is now available for sale at IndyPlanet.com  (http://www.indyplanet.us/product/137094/) This is a truly special issue as it was both drawn AND written by artist Gary Kato….without any help from the Air Chief. The truth is, Loyal Airmen, Gary had been waiting a long-long time for us to send him a new script, but our work on the Airship 27 titles kept us so busy, we just couldn’t get it done.  So Gary squared his shoulders, remembered a phone conversation we’d had about some ideas for future issues and ran with it.  What he ended up with is one of the best Mr. Jigsaw tales ever done. We are truly excited about this issue. We hope you’ll check it out.

And a last comic item of much fun.  Over the years many Loyal Airmen have inquires as to how the Air Chief and his partner Rob Davis met and ultimately became co-creators on both comics and pulp books.  Well the story does go back to the late 80s and early 90s when both the Air Chief, as a writer, and Rob, as an artist, were breaking into the pro ranks.  We became aware of Rob’s work through some of the comics he was drawing and we wrote him telling him how much we enjoyed his work. He kindly replied and thus began our correspondence friendship.  Then when the comic biz imploded and both of were pretty much kicked out of jobs, we lost touch with each other.  Almost twenty years later the Air Chief was surfing the internet one night when he came across a webstrip called “The Spirit of 66″ by one Rob Davis. Of course we logged immediately and sure enough it was our old pal producing this weekly colored web-strip about a young man traveling America’s fabled Route 66 looking for adventure. It was of course an homage to that old 60s TV series starring George Maharis and Marty Milner.  Anyway, the Air Chief immediately wrote Rob via this webpage and soon we were once again writing each other and catching.  All of which eventually led to Rob drawing my graphic novel script “Daughter of Dracula” and then joining me in starting up Airship 27 Productions and then his own Redbud Studio.  All because of that fortuitous reconnect on-line.  Well, Loyal Airmen, after all these years, Rob’s decided to collect those strips into a comic book and will soon be releasing via Redbud.  Above is his cover.  Sincerely, we can’t wait to get a copy. That one strip was instrumental in so many amazing, wonderful things. We hope you’ll be as thrilled by it as we are.

Moving on to pulp stuff, if all goes well, we will be releasing our latest Airship 27 Pulp novel this weekend. It’s called “The Persona” by writer Michael Housel and the interior art is by Art Cooper.  Above is a sneak-peek at one of his amazing pieces.

And a final reminder to all our Fort Collins friends, we will be at the Barnes & Noble next Wed evening, July 6th at 7 p.m.  Hope to see many of your there. And that’s it for this week, Loyal Airmen.  As ever, thanks for stopping by.

Ron – Over & Out!