Greeting Loyal Airmen, things have been busy as ever here at the old Hangar 27.  Still, we do find some time to get away and sneak in a few hours to read a good book or watch movies.  Two of the Air Chief's favorite pastimes.  But before we talk about some movies, old and new, we have a very cool tale to share with you.

Over the years, we've had the good fortune to teach small classes on How To Write Comics.  Early on, in trying to help our students learn the formats of full script writing, we wrote a short four page tale called ROBOT-GUY. It was a humorous ditty paying homage to those wonderful old Golden Age heroes. It featured a robot hero and the lovely scientist, Candace “Candy” Kane who invented him.  We would pass these out to our writing students so they could see first hand how a comic script is written.  Now at the same time we also had the opportunity to expand this course when fortunate enough to hook up with a professional artist. Then the course would double in scope and become a How To Write & Draw Comics class.  Whereas in this course, we actually had everyone, both writers and artists, try their hands at actually drawing the Robot-Guy story. Of course we had no expectations of the writers giving us anything but stick figures, whereas our young artists turned in some really – really cool art pages.

Now one of these art students back in New Hampshire was a talented fellow named David Freeman. Since moving to Colorado we'd stayed connected via Facebook and e-mail, but time, as it always does, rolled on and the Air Chief lost touch with what David was up to. Then two weeks ago David writes to say he recently remembered the old Robot-Guy story he'd had to do in our class. On a whim he decided to draw a pin-up of the characters giving them a fresh look.  He'd since lost the script and his old pages.  Well, what he drew was nothing short of fantastic.  When the Air Chief saw it, he about fell out of his chair. We immediately posted this on Facebook and within hours one of the best inkers in the business, Mark Stegbauer, saw the piece and asked to ink it for us. Wow. Once inked, we re-posted it and then another FB creator, Apriyadi Kusbriantoro asked to color it. We were obviously on a roll.  And finally, our amigo Rob Davis turned in a logo for it.

These folks are now talking of having prints made up of this or even tee-shirts to sell at cons.  Hmmm, we'll give it some thought.  More importantly, the Air Chief convinced David to re-draw that four page story and Mark is on board to ink it.  Once we find a letterer, we are going to get it published in one of our future issues of RON FORTIER'S TALES OF THE MACABRE.  And who knows, there could be a whole new Robot-Guy comic book series in the works.  What do you think?

Getting back to that movie topic, the Air Chief has loved movies ever since he was a little boy. All kinds of movies and we have a very special fondness for the black and white films of the 30s, 40s and 50s.  Thus we were delighted to get the above two collections from Santa this past Christmas.  As most of you know, the Cisco Kid was a western hero created by writer O'Henry and most remember him from the 1950s TV series starring Duncan Reynaldo.  What most don't know is that Monogram did several movies starring the Cisco Kid; some starred Ceasar Romero (the Joker on the Adam West Batman TV show) and while others featured Gilbert Roland. Well, VCI released all six of Roland's Cisco Kid movies in this two disc set.  Having viewed the first two, we are having a blast. Roland plays him with a roguish cavalier quality that is too much fun.  We hope some day VCI does the same with the Romero movies.

The Thin Man was the creation of popular mystery writer Dashiel Hammett.  Written as a stand alone novel, when it came to the big screen with William Powell and Myrna Loy playing the sleuthing Nick & Nora Charles, the movie was a huge success.  Enough so that the studio went back to Hammett urging him to write more screenplays featuring this crime-solving pair and he happily acquiesced, resulting in five more outings for a total of six Thin Man adventures.  This set from Warner Bros. has them all plus a special documentary disc relating the cinema histories of both Powell and Loy.  Believe the Air Chief, no classier detectives ever graced a silver screen than Nick & Nora Charles.

Moving on to the new stuff.  While shopping with Valerie this morning, the Air Chief picked up these new titles, one an action caper starring our favorite tough-guy star, Jason Statham and other a cool looking science fiction story connected with the highly popular HALO video game our grandson, Alex, and millions of other players his age are hooked on. We've been fascinated with this military sci-fi series, though not ourselves gamers, and a few years ago bought the very well made animated Halo movie.  We are anxious to watch both of these and keep our fingers crossed they deliver the fun we think they will.

Finally, the Air Chief this past week was a guest on a very popular internet podcast show called Earth Station One. At one point in the program, one of the host asked if we had any dream we'd yet to realize. Easy question. Loving movies so much, we still hope to one day see something we've written, be it a comic character or pulp hero, brought to life in a movie.  Hey, life is always about reaching for the stars.  If you are going to dream, dream big.  Till next week, be good, be safe and keep on dreaming.

Ron – Over & Out!