Greetings Loyal Airmen. So here we are only four days from Christmas as we write this entry. And as to be expected there is very little news to share with all of you this week.  Rob and the Air Chief pretty much shut down Hangar 27 as all our amazing writers and artists are off enjoying well deserved time with their families. Last minute shopping need to be done and a whole lot of cookies baked before the Jolly Old Elf makes his appearance. Anyway, that’s all a good thing in that it is our fondest wish all of you of faith, doesn’t matter which, will take some time to thank the Creator of All for the blessings we all have beyond counting. As Christians, our family will be remembering the baby Jesus in that little manger in Bethlehem being welcomed to our world by both poor shepherds and rich wise men. He came to love us all, to serve others and in so doing give us the example of how each and everyone should live our lives….in the service of others. Be they family, friends or neighbors. That is the message of Christmas to our family and we hope it is for yours as well.

In the course of this year, Airship 27 Productions released a whopping 24 titles. We kicked off 2017 with our second  “Quatermain – The New Adventures Vol 2” and just a week ago released “Tales of the Golden Dragon,” by Barbary Doran.  This is the third in Barbara’s series about two Kung Fu heroes, Dragon & Tiger, who live and protect the Northwest city of Strikeport. This book contains interior illustrations by Gary Kato and Rob David furnished the beautiful cover you see above.  The book, as all our titles, is available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon. So it has been another truly stellar year and we have to thank special groups for making it all possible. The first being all our amazing writers and artists who have produced these wonderful books and the second is YOU, our Loyal Airmen who have continued to support us; not only by purchasing our books, but by telling your friends about them, sharing your reviews on-line etc.etc.etc. We really can’t thank you enough. Whereas the Air Chief does promise we will endeavor to continue bringing the best in quality New Fiction in the coming year. We’ve tons of great projects on the way, both continuing series and the launching of brand new ones. Trust us, you won’t want to miss any of these coming your way in 2018.

Finally, this being Christmas, we wanted to give all you Loyal Airmen a little gift, ala a peek at what will become the cover to our first new book of 2018 – SECRET AGENT X – Vol 6. The above was penciled by art Director Rob Davis and features a scene from writer Kaushik Karforma’s story.  And wait till you see it completed. Till then, be good to one another, pray for Peace on Earth and Good Will to All men.

Ron – Over & Out!

Greetings Loyal Airmen, we hope all of you are getting into the wonderful spirit of this holiday season. So many things to do, to see, to participate in etc..etc.. etc..no matter how you celebrate.  As for the Air Chief, we received our first Santa surprise last week and to say it was a surprise, is an understatement.

One of Airship 27 Productions most welcomed new writers is Michael Housel.  Michael’s been with us over a year now and gave us the new mystic hero, the Persona a year ago. Note, a sequel is coming your way in 2018. Anyways, a few weeks back Michael wrote us saying he’d walked into a store and seen something he thought we’d truly appreciate and it he bought it for us. Naturally the Air Chief felt really awkward here as we really don’t want our creators buying us anything. Totally NOT necessary, as they already give us their amazing stories and art which fuel Airship 27 in the first place. At that balking, Michael assured us it was just a little something.  Yeah, right. Two weeks later we go to the post office and are handed this big, heavy box with his return address on it.  Upon getting home, we opened it up to find a limited edition fully painted King Kong model kit.  WOWSER!!  Obviously Michael had seen some earlier posting when we mentioned it being our favorite movie of all time. And so, being the overly generous soul he and his lovely wife Donna are, they bought it for the Air Chief as a Christmas gift.  Of course Valerie has made us promise not assembling it with glue (the smell sickens here) until warmer climes when we can put it together outside on the backyard picnic table.  Ha. Rest assured, when that day comes, we’ll snap a few good pix of the assembled kit and post them right here.  As for Michael & Donna Housel, you folks rock!!!

And speaking of generous giving, the Air Chief wants to thank all his old friends at Alpha Productions. After twenty-five years they finally released the long-lost superhero comics team title, TASK FORCE ALPHA. The Air Chief had created Major Liberty for that project and contributed a back up story featuring the hero known as Nightflyer. And today the mail brought us a big box filled with these, more so than we ever expected.  So we tip our hats to old amigos Leni Gronros, Bob Cram, Paul Pelletier & Chris Mills.  Trust me, if you can ever get a hold of one of these, you’ve got yourself a real collectors item.

And that’s it for this week Loyal Airmen.  As ever thanks for stopping by, hope you survive the holiday craziness out there and we’ll see you back here next Friday.

Ron – Over & Out

Greeting Loyal Airmen, as we rush full tilt towards Christmas, we here at Hangar 27 are keeping as busy as ever doing out best to get out our last few projects of 2017.

Mystery Men ( & Women) Vol 5 out this week, is our 23rd release of the year. It features three great pulp adventures starting with the introduction of writer Gene Moyer’s new character THE SHRIKE in a full length novella.  She is spotlighted on the cover by the super talented Canadian artist Ted Hammond.  Then we have a new Nightbreaker tale by Thomas Deja from his popular Shadow Legion books and finally a Doc Atlas adventure by writers Michael Black and Ray Lovator.  Art Director Rob Davis provides the 12 interior black and white illustrations to make this one of our stellar titles ever.  Available at Amazon in both paperback and on Kindle.

Meanwhile as we’ve mentioned Doc Atlas, here’s some other great news.  Doc Atlas is the creation of writers Michael Black and Ray Lovato, childhood pals who grew up loving pulp fiction.  They created Doc Atlas years ago as their homage to the classic heroes ala Doc Savage, Jim Anthony and Captain Hazzard. Since then they’ve written a half dozen Doc Atlas adventure that have been published via various publisher.  But as of 2018, Doc Atlas will be exclusive to Airship 27 Productions. We’ve entered into a mutually beneficial agreement with these talented writers in which they have agreed to produce one new Doc Atlas book (be it a collection of shorts or full length novel) each year exclusively through Airship 27.  Believe me when we say, we couldn’t be happier. You Loyal Airmen are going to be getting some really great New Pulp fiction from these two amazing writers.

As we always love to show off new artwork, here’s a penciled page from a new Captain Jain Marlee Space Smuggler story we wrote called Ghost World. Our pal Ariel Aguire is inking it over another artist’s pencils and we thought you’d enjoy see how a great inker enhances a comic page.  Enjoy.  And finally, Rob and the Air Chief recorded episode # 34 of our monthly Airship 27 Podcast this evening.  Next week, once up on-line, we’ll post the link to it. And that wraps up this week’s Flight Log.  Now get out there and wrap up all your Christmas shopping.

Ron – Over & Out!

Greetings Loyal Airmen, this week we wanted to chat with you about just how cool the internet can be. One has to figure most of you Loyal Airmen have either watched or been told about the amazing new western mini-series that is currently running on Netflix.  “Godless” is a seven hour classic western melodrama written and directed by Scott Frank (pictured above). At this writing Valerie and the Air Chief have seen the first five episodes and we are totally hooked. Honestly, this series has echoes of every classic cowboy flick you’ve ever seen from Lonesome Dove to Shane with little touches throughout that pay homage to a half dozen other great westerns. The large cast is fantastic with so many interwoven stories as to keep even the most jaded viewer on board. Frank is a truly original writer.

Another aspect of the production we absolutely love is the lush, bold music score by composer Carlos Rafael Rivera and we confess, until today we had never heard of him before. Then, through the magic of the internet we learned Mr. Rivera lives in Florida where he is a musical director at a school and has worked with Frank before on the gruesome crime thriller “A Walk Through the Tombstones.” Anyways, on the whim the Air Chief reached via Facebook and lo and behold was able to connect with Mr. Rivera and tell him just how much we love his music. He was grateful and responded almost immediately. The Air Chief is keeping his fingers crossed the studios will record all of the music to “Godless” on disc so that one day we can own it and listen to it over and over.  You gotta love the internet.

As most of you Loyal Airmen know, it has been months now since the Brother Bones movie project came to a unsuccessful finale. Since that time the Air Chief has devoted himself to focusing on the positive and writing brand new Brother Bones adventures to share with all of you. But at the same time we’ve felt really bad that all our great supporters never even got to read the amazing movie script writer Erik Franklin had written based our our collaborative story.  The more we thought about that the more we began realizing there might be something we could to correct that one issue. So we entered into talks with both Erik and Airship 27 Productions Ace Art Director Rob Davis. The result is we’ve all agreed that movie script needs to be published and we are going to do it. As yet we’ve not decided on a final format (wither paperback or comic shaped) but one thing you can tell you, it will be the actual shooting script from which the movie would have been made….and…Rob is going to profusely illustrate plus doing a new original cover.  We’re excited about the project and hope you will be as well. Don’t expect too soon, as all of us have lots on our plate to wrap up before the end of 2017 but a good bet would be this book will be available at the start of next year.  As ever, we’ll keep you posted.

And that’s it for this week, Loyal Airmen, as ever thanks for stopping by.

Ron – Over & Out!

Greeting Loyal Airmen, one of the questions the Air Chief often gets asked is not only where do our ideas come from, but how do some projects get started. So we thought we’d address the second one this time around. As most of you know, we recently thought an eight week college course in How To Write Comics & Graphic Novels. Among those attending the class was my young high school artist pal Jon Bonjour.

Now I’ve known Jon for almost three years now after he joined our local monthly comics breakfast gathering, the Fort Collins Comics Coffee Clutch Crew, with his older sister Jamie. Jon and Jamie have been making comics together for many years, she writing and he drawing. Anyways, this friendship allowed me a bird’s eye view of how much this talented young man’s art was rapidly progressing. At the end of the writing class, we talked a little bit about possibly doing something together soon.

Then a few months ago two of our colleagues, Dave Noe and James Ludwig started a comics outfit called inDellible Comics to bring back long forgotten, and very obscure Dell Comics characters.  At that time, Rob Davis and the Air Chief signed on to do an Owl prose story (Rob providing a spot illo) and submitted.  Above is their cover to issue #1 of what they are calling POPULAR COMICS.  It is available at Amazon for $11 and really worth your support. This is old fashion comics done the fun way. Anyway, issue # 2 will feature our Owl tale. In the meantime, the Air Chief kept looking at what other old Dell Comics characters he might enjoy playing with and found such called NUKLA, the story of a pilot/spy for the Air Force who only had four issues of his own comic.

We wrote Dave a letter asking for more info on the character and his powers and he gladly provided those. Realizing this would be a really fun character to play with, we asked Jon if he’d be willing to be the artist on such a project and then shared a plot idea we worked up over the past weekend. Jon loved the concept and immediately set about doing his own wonderful sketch of NUKLA, see above. If all goes well, the Air Chief will start on the script in a few days.  And of course we’ll keep all you Loyal Airmen updates and the strip moves along.

Last week, if you’ll all remember, we showed off pictures of the Mr. Jigsaw custom action figure made by fan Brandon Lee. Well, Brandon and the Air Chief agreed to a swap, another such figure for the entire Mr. Jigsaw comics run autographed by us personally. At the offer, Brandon said he was sending over the one he’d made and would later do another for himself.  And sure it enough it arrived in the mail yesterday and we snapped the above photo on our book shelf.  Brandon, your comics are on their way to you. Again, heartfelt thanks, we love this.

Finally, today being Thanksgiving, we pray all you Loyal Airmen had an opportunity to spend the day with your loved one. There is no greater treasure in this world than friends and family.  God bless you all and see you back here next week.

Ron – Over & Out!!!

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!!

Greetings Loyal Airmen, a while back we told you that our latest Brother Bones adventure, “Then and Now,” would soon be appearing in Pulp Adventures # 26.  Well that book is out now and on sale at Amazon. We received our comp copies in the mail the other day.

Editor Rich Harvey once again did a magnificent job the the books layout outs. It’s a beautiful package.

The story is illustrated by three beautiful pieces done by artist Ed Coutts and tells a story from Brother Bones sordid past as Cape Noire hitman Tommy Bonello and the woman he might have loved had things been different. We are damn proud of the story and hope you Loyal Airmen will check it out.

This past Sunday was the Air Chief’s birthday and beside the over 300 well wishes on Facebook, we got a few nifty little gifts, some Amazon gift cards from daughter Michelle and her crew and the above new giant sized Harley Quinn coffee mug from Valerie, which we love. That thing holds a ton of coffee, oh yeah.

And daughter Heather gave me this oh so cool Letscom Smart Bracelet that monitors lots of things to include how many steps the Air Chief takes per day, the quality of our sleep at night, heart rate…etc.etc.etc.  Isn’t technology amazing? Apparently she wants her Old Dad to say healthy. And that’s the plan.

Then today, Tuesday, we woke up to find Mother Nature had baked me a delayed cake.  How do you like her “frosting”?

After a long period of inactivity, Airship 27 Productions has just released its latest title, a weird western novel by Greg Hatcher called THE SILVER RIDERS. It features a beautiful Adam Shaw cover with nine black and white interior illustrations by Chris Kohler.  Book is now available at Amazon in paperback and will soon be on Kindle. If you like your westerns with a taste of the bizarre, you might want to pick up a copy.

And wraps up another busy week at Hangar 27, Loyal Airmen.  Thanks for stopping by as ever, see you next week.

Ron – Over & Out!!

Greetings Loyal Airmen, as we write these words, it is Nov 1st, All Saints Day. Importance to us because it is Mom’s 93rd birthday today. We gave her a call back in New Hampshire this morning to wish her a wonderful day. All of us are betting she’s going to make it a 100, though she scoffs at the idea. Last night was Halloween and Valerie captured this amazing sunset over the Rockies. It is the view outside our front yard.  One of the hundreds why we love living here in Colorado.

Last weekend saw the Air Chief’s final comics event appearance as we were guest, with many of our local colleagues, the comic shops first ever Halloween Comics Fest. Here’s the Air Chief alongside pro artist Zane Degaine. In all it was a great Saturday and we met lots of nice people. Here’s hoping this becomes an annual event.

Nov. 1st also saw the last game of the 2017 Baseball World Series with the Houston Astros winning their first ever franchise championship. We have to tip our baseball cap to both them and the National Champs, the Los Angeles Dodgers for one of the best World Series contest in the history of the game. Both teams were magnificent and we baseball fans got to enjoy some truly amazing games. Congrats, World Champs Houston Astros!!!

Finally, hard to believe but with six weeks done, we only have two more classes in our first How To Write Comics & Graphic Novels course we’ve been teaching at the Front Range Community College.  Working with our five talented writers has been a joy and hard to believe that it will all wrap up in just two more weeks.  As for the future, that will depend on the school and whether they are willing to allow us to continue offering the course.  We’ll keep you posted.

Ron – Over & Out!

Greetings Loyal Airmen, here we are going into Halloween weekend and the Air Chief is excited as ever to enjoy this fun holiday. Again we’ll be guest, along with other comic creators, at Gryphon’s Games & Comics here in Fort Collins, CO, between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. tomorrow, Sat Oct 28th.  The Air Chief will be donning his new top hat for the very first time. Hope to see you lots of local fans and friends. Meanwhile the unpacking in the new house, and new office, continues smoothly.

In the process of going through boxes of things not opened in years, we discovered lots of old comic book ideas that either received very little distribution or where never actually published.  Take the three images above, going left to right.  Black Betty was the idea for a private eye inspired by Queen Latifah, pro artist Dario Carrasco did this presentation page and there actually was a short 8 page strip finished by another artist that never saw print. Then we have Temple & Nash, a cops melodrama created for publisher Tracy Duty’s short lived Comics-For-A-Buck idea. It was 16 pgs and blackand white and this first tale had the cops, a veteran detective and his rookie female partner, on the hunt for serial killer in Tampa. The comic appeared as a mini and maybe a hundred copies were printed and sold during its short existence. Finally we have Satin’s Ways, the concept of a Honk Kong born jewel thief named Satin Wei who moves to Seattle to retire from her line of illegal work.  Gonzalo Martinez was the artist on board and the Air Chief had written a 48 pg debut story. As he was warming up for that project, we whipped out a short 8 pager called the Perfect Murder and Martinez got it finished and it too was published, but in a black and white independent company so again few people ever saw it. And sadly, Martinez, after about a dozen pages on the big book, had to quit due to family commitments. One has to wonder if it will ever be completed?

And that’s the point of this Flight Log Loyal Airmen, because in finding these long lost pages, the Air Chief he had actually had 24 pages total.  Black Betty – 8,  Temple & Nash – 16, and Satin’s Ways 8.  In effect they would have combined to make a nice one shot comic book. Sadly there are no high resolution copies of either Temple & Nash or the Black Betty strips. So for the present we’ll contend ourselves with getting the 8 pg SATIN’S WAYS back in print. Who knows, maybe some day we can interest new artists to do new, high res versions of the other two properties. Hope does spring eternal.

Continuing this week’s Down Memory Lane theme, this coming Sunday, 29th October is the annual Portland Comic Expo in Portland, Maine, and on hand this year will be the four original founders of Maine’s once popular comics company, Alpha Productions. In the photo above taken recently, going left to right are Leni Gronros, Christopher Mills, Bob Cram and Paul Pelletier. After the company folded, both Chris and Paul went on to professional careers in the comic business. Recently it was discovered that all the pages of a super hero comic called Task Force Alpha, thought to have been destroyed in fire, were very much intact in Paul’s attic. Upon this discovery, Bob contacted Leni and plans were made to actually publish the book as a special one-shot and make it available at the con.

Paul did a brand new cover for it, and Bob assembled some added features like a new interview with the Air Chief, allowing me to recount our fun association with this team and some of the comics we created while with them, to include the leader of Task Force Alpha, Major Liberty. If any of you Loyal Airmen are anywhere in the Portland area this weekend, we urge you to check out the Expo and meet the gang. Really wish we could be there, but so happy this has finally come about.

And there you have it Loyal Airmen, Happy Halloween from Hangar 27. We’ll see you back here next week.

Ron – Over & Out!

Greeting Loyal Airmen, as most of you know, in recent years, Redbud Studio has published several issues of my own comic title, RON FORTIER’S TALES OF THE MACABRE and very recently we collected the first 5 issues into one giant comic.  The idea was for us to have this during our Halloween appearance.  And on every cover, including this new collection, the Air Chief is seen donning a top hat with the number 27 (that for our Airship 27 Productions company).

Well, recently Valerie thought we should find ourselves a real top hat and become the Horror Host in the flesh. We were only to happy to play along and above is the result of all that. Another case of life imitating art. So what do you do you Loyal Airmen think?

Speaking of the TALES covers, four years ago this week, grand kids Cora and Alex helped their grandfather by posing for a cover wherein Cora became the vampire queen and Alex the werewolf. As it turned out, Facebook went and reprinted that image this past Tuesday, on Cora’s birthday. So the Air Chief reposted it along with birthday wishes to a truly awesome young lady.  In Kristi, Chelsea, Cora, Alex, Taryn and Logan, we have the most amazing grand children in the world and that’s a true blessing Loyal Airmen. Family is everything.

Now as most of you know the Air Chief is currently teaching an 8 week course on How to Write Comics at the Front Range Community College here in Fort Collins.  Above is yours truly among my really talented students. Seated left to right we have Bran, Melisa & Adam, while standing the back is Aaron, the Air Chief and Jon.

Reaching the half-way point in the course last evening, we invited two extremely talented professional artists to join us.  Above is Olivia K. Degaine, the Air Chief and Shana Moura.  Both young ladies were on hand to help us talk about character building in comics.

To help illustrate key points, the girls volunteered to draw sketches of the students’ character creations. Above here to the far left is Shana’s depiction of one of Adam’s characters, the lizard pirate was invented by Aaron and Olivia drew him to perfection along with the young lady from Melisa’s tale. In all each girl did up five wonderful illustrations, two for each of our five students and you can imagine how thrilled they were to receive them. We had high hopes for this course and thus far they have all exceeded our expectations.

And there you have it for this week, Loyal Airmen. Next week we hope to announce a new Airship 27 pulp title, till then be good, and start thinking of Halloween. It’s just around the corner now.

Ron – Over & Out!