Greetings Loyal Airmen, we kick off this week’s Flight Log with the story behind the Air Chief’s latest published short story.
THE LOST JUNGLE
Last while attending the Windy City Pulp& Paper show in Chicago, writer/publisher Robert J. Mendenhall asked if the Air Chief might write a short story for his pulp anthology series called CNI CLASSIFIED. The concept concerns a top secret military group battling Nazis before the start of World War II. At that time Bob had already assembled three volumes and was looking to put together a fourth. The Air Chief was happy to sign on. The book is now and available at Amazon. It features, beside our own, stories by Fred Adams Jr., John C. Bruening, Gordon Dymowski, Andy Fix & Bob himself. It is really a great collection. So here’s how we came to write our story, “The Lost Jungle.”
DIGGER DOWNES MEETS LULAMA
Part of the deal was the Air Chief had to make one of the team members the protagonist of our tale and we were free to choose any of them we wanted to shed the spotlight on. From the start, the Air Chief had affinity for Master Sergeant “Hammer” Downes as a rough and tumble character we could have fun with. So next it was coming up with a plot. We wanted to set his adventure in an exotic part of the world in that era and that was when we remembered Luluma, Witch Queen of the Jungle. She was the invention of our late dear friend, writer Charles Saunders. Luluma only ever appeared in one story, which Charles wrote for the anthology “Black Pulp” published by our colleague, Tommy Hancock over at Pro Se Press. Before he passed unexpectedly, Charles and the Air Chief had discussed the possibilities of his doing more with her for Airship 27. So what if we were to send Downes on a mission to the Republic of the Congo and there he would cross path with the beautiful and mysterious Lulama. And thus our tale was born. We hope you’ll check it out. And we’d like to think Charles would have approved of our bringing her back in action.
JIN & TONIK # 2
Artist Cesar Feliciano is hard at work on bringing “Jin & Tonik” # 2 to gorgeous visuals as seen by the three pages above. Starting with his roughs at left during page composition to his masterful inks in the middle page. And lastly we tip our hat super colorist Matt Webb who lends his talent to that far right page. The Air Chief is wicked excited about this series and is currently scripting issue # 3. Stay tuned.
BEYOND THE STARS # 5
Andrea Bormida delivers pages 10 & 11 of “Beyond the Stars” issue # 5. As it’s a 22 pg comic, he’s now officially half-way complete. And trust us, Loyal Airmen, the action in this only gets wilder and faster.
THE BOSTON BOMBERS Vol 2 # 3
Finally, this week we’ll wrap things up with artist Rob Davis’ newest page from “The Boston Bombers” Vol-2 Issue # 3. We especially wanted to bring to your attention one of the many aspects of Rob’s talent as a comic artist. Often times artist find themselves having to draw what we call “talking head” pages. That simply means there is not physical action occurring in the scene, ala people fighting, running etc. These kind of slow paced scenes primarily involve character development and become a real challenge to the artist to make them interesting for the reader. Issue # 3 of this project had many such “talking head” pages and yet as you can see above, from Rob’s panel compositions, he deftly keeps the reader’s eye moving along and add some subtle drama to the interchange between the two characters with the intent of drawing (no pun intended) deeper into the story itself. Honestly, no one does this better than Rob.
And there you have it for this week, Loyal Airmen. Thanks as ever for dropping by, be well and stay warm. It’s cold out there. Ron – Over & Out!
STILL KICKING