Greetings Loyal Airmen.  Your Old Air Chief is very excited today because we've got some really wonderful news to lay on all of you. There's an old literary adage that claims “you can never go home again.”  It's off course a metaphor meaning as you mature in life, you supposedly cannot reclaim the joys and innocence of one's youth.  To which we here at Hangar 27 say, Bull Feathers!!!  Not only do we go back quite often, if only in our vivid imaginations, but we often have the fun of taking you Loyal Airmen along for the ride.  This week is such a case.

                       
Back in 1982, artist Gary Kato and the Air Chief broke into the ranks of professional comic-dom with a 12 pg. science fiction story for Charlton Comic's Bullseye title.  The good people at Charlton liked our efforts so much they asked us to give them something else.  That something else was the 11 pg. origin story of Mr.Jigsaw, Man of a Thousand Parts; a funny superhero story that both us had so much fun doing.  Charlton appreciated that effort and made it the cover feature for their book, Scary Takes # 38, dated May 1983.   Which both of us truly consider the launching our our respective careers.  Only a handful of people ever saw that particular comic, but among those who did were comics pro/writer/columnist Tony Isabella and the late comics historian, Don Thompson.  Both of them became avid Jiggy (as we came to call him for short) fans and helped spread the word about him.

                  
All of which lead to this one-shot Mr.Jigsaw comic book from Ocean Comics out of Rhode Island, owned and operated by our old pal, Bob Palin.  This garnered a lot of great reviews and we even did a few nice interviews in a lot of New England newspaper.  At point we even had a TV agent option the character for a possible Saturday morning cartoon show.  Keep in mind this was the age of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and cartoons were very, very big.  Alas the options expired and nothing along those lines ever materialized.  If you haven't guessed it by the covers yet, let me provide a little more info on the actual character.  Charlie Grant, alias Mr.Jigsaw, was a young man with the ability, since birth, to dismember himself and then control mentally the various parts of his body while they were separated.  Creepy, huh?  Still, Gary and I managed to convey some good-natured wackiness and most of our readers found Charlie loveable.

               
Jiggy disappeared for a long-long time after that Ocean Comics gig.  He would resurface in two more events in the intervening years.  Alpha Productions out of Maine, a small independent comics company did a series of E-MAN comics starring the electricity hero created by my good friend Joe Staton and writer Nick Cuti.  The editor of the book, Chris Mills, wanted to fill it with short back up stories and remembered Mr.Jigsaw.  So Gary and I did three short pieces that appeared in the back of those hard to find E-Man comics.  A few years later the same editor found himself working for an internet website called Adventure Strips, which every day of the week featured two new pages of comics.  We were invited to participate and in a six month period, the webstrip adventures of Jiggy featured three stories, two that were completed; “The Lobster That Ate Portland” and “How It All Began,” and had started a third, “The Icemen Cometh” when the project folded, and it was never completed.   Until now that is.

          
And that's our happy news, Loyal Airmen.  In just a few weeks, working with my pal Rob Davis, Gary and I are about to release a new series of Mr.Jigsaw comics to be published via Rob's Redbud Studio.  The first three issues will reprint ALL the previous Jiggy adventures ever done. Yup, every single one of them, to include the entire Icemen Cometh story.  Oh, and that's the cover # 1 above.  We don't want to reveal the fully colored version yet, we're saving that for the debut.  Again, in  just a few short weeks.  Once we've finished getting these three issues in print, then we are going to start producing brand new Mr.Jigsaw tales with issue # 4, and our plan is to continue doing them until…well, until, we can't anymore.  Hopefully that will be a long, long time.

In my entire career as a comics writer, no other single character has brought us so much good old fashion fun.  It seems appropriate in a time when things are really bleak all around us, with many of our Loyal Airmen unemployed and facing difficult challenges, that we try to maybe lighten the mood of things a wee bit with a few good-natured laughs.  Its our hope Jiggy will provide those for all of you.  Stay tuned. We really think you are going to love this guy!

Finally, several Loyal Airmen wrote this past week mentioning the very cool Airship 27 Prod. baseball shirt we are wearing in photos from last week's Log Entry and they wanted to know if those were for sale.  But of course, and you can find it and lots of other very cool Airship 27 merchandise by going to our Air Fare page and clicking on to the dirigible logo. That will bring you to our Cafe Press store were we have tons of great apparel and stationary stuff all bearing our cool logos and pulp covers.  Please stop over and check it out. And as always, thanks so much for you support.

Ron – Over & Out!