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At the Smodcastle

November 23, 2022 at 2:19 pm
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New Jersey is in my blood.   I was born in Bayonne in 1948, and hardly set foot outside the city until I finally went off to college in 1966, way way off to Northwestern in scenic Evanston, Illinois.   Most of my family still lives in the Garden State, and I like to get back to see them whenever I can… which has not been very often since the pandemic hit two years ago.   I need an occasional Jersey bar pie too, the best pizza in the world, and Judickes’ sprinkle donuts from old Bayonne.

Kevin Smith is a Jersey boy too, and a hard core nerd and fanboy.   He has had his own comic book shop in Red Bank for years; they even had their own TV show.   More recently, Kevin bought an old 1920s movie theatre, refurbushed it, rechristened it the Smodcastle, and reopened it.   I was delighted when he invited me down for a night of conversation.

It was a ton of fun.

And turnabout is fair play, so watch this space.   Kevin will be headed down to the Land of Enchantment next year, to speak at my own mini movie palace, the Jean Cocteau Cinema.

Woot!

Current Mood: dorky dorky

Fanboying

July 2, 2022 at 8:45 am
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These past couple of years, what with covid and all, I have fallen way behind on my movie-going.   Which is a shame, since I loved going to movies… in a movie theatre, ideally.   Hell, I own a movie theatre.   And we have the best popcorn in Santa Fe, still!

We did not have DR. STRANGE AND THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS, however.   Elsewise I might have seen it sooner.   Parris and I did finally catch it a few days ago, though, and…

I have to say, I loved it.

Sam Raimi has always been one of my favorite directors.   And Dr. Strange has always been one of my favorite Marvel characters.   And this version of Dr. Strange, slipping through portals into surreal dimensions full of floaty things and alternate realities, was the Doctor I fell in love with, way way way back when world was young (and so was I).   They even gave us CLEA!   I love Clea!

Seeing this movie brought back a cherished memory, of the day I attended the world’s first comicon, in 1964 in Greenwich Village.  I was fifteen years old.   The whole con was held in one small room in some sort of union hall, with hucksters selling old comics from cardboard boxes along one wall, and the speakers at a podium in the front.   Fabulous Flo Steinberg turned up.. and so did Steve Ditko.   It might well have been the only comicon he ever attended… but I got to talk to him, and tell him how much I loved his art.   Especially on Dr. Strange.   Ditko was reserved, maybe a bit shy, but genial enough.   He told me that Dr. Strange was his favorite as well.   Yes, even more than Spider-Man.

He’s still one of the best comic artists who ever picked up a pencil, in my not-so-humble opinion.

Anyway… MULTIVERSE woke the sleeping Marvel fanboy in me, and that was a joy.

So says a former member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society.

 

 

 

Current Mood: nerdy nerdy

Make Mine Marvel

February 19, 2022 at 11:32 am
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Me and Marvel Comics go way back.

The first words of mine ever to appear in print (well, not counting my high school newspaper) were “Dear Stan and Jack,” the opening of my letter of comment in FANTASTIC FOUR #20.   That was my first appearance in the lettercols, but not my last.   I became almost a regular in Marvel letter columns over the next few years… which led me to the nascent comics fandom… and my first published stories in the comics fanzines of the early 60s, superhero stories in prose featuring characters of my own creation like the White Raider, Manta Ray, and Garizan the Mechanical Warrior, along with a few I was “hired” to write (without pay) like Powerman and Dr. Weird.

Those tales started my career, in a strange roundabout way.   As a professional, I wrote science fiction, fantasy, and horror… but I never lost my love of superheroes.   And that eventually led me to a role-playing game called SuperWorld, which in turn led to the creation of the Wild Cards series along about 1986-7.   And now, some thirty-odd books and thirty-six years later, Wild Cards and Marvel are coming together once again.

https://www.marvel.com/articles/comics/george-r-r-martin-s-legendary-super-hero-universe-comes-to-marvel-comics-in-new-wild-cards-series

The series is an adaptation of the Wild Cards origin story, scripted by our own Paul Cornell, novelist, scriptwriter, and creator of Abigail the Understudy, a serious actress.   Mike Hawthorne provided the art, and Steve Morris the cover.

If you haven’t been reading the Wild Cards books for the last  thirty years… well, shame on you… but here’s your chance to see how it all began.   Jetboy, Dr. Tachyon, the Four Aces, and the Great and Powerful Turtle are waiting for you.

Current Mood: bouncy bouncy

Tuf Is Coming… Back

August 10, 2021 at 8:06 am
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Long before I ever dreamed of Westeros, I had another setting I returned to again and again and again in a long series of short stories, novelettes, novellas, and even one novel (DYING OF THE LIGHT).   The Thousand Worlds stories spanned centuries and light years and had their own cast of heroes, villains, legends, and colorful characters… none of them more colorful than the trader (and ecological engineer) Haviland Tuf, the protagonist of a long series of stories I collected together in the fix up TUF VOYAGING.

I always meant to write more Tuf stories.   At one point, back in the 80s, I planned a second collection of stories (TWICE AS TUF) and a full-length Tuf novel (TUF LANDING)… but, alas, other novels and television and ICE & FIRE came along, and what with one thing and another I never got around to writing them.   From time to time, I’ve even played with the idea of a television series about Tuf and his adventures… the stories are presently under option, as it happens, but… well, that hasn’t come to pass yet either.

But I am thrilled to be able to say that Haviland Tuf and his cats (he likes cats, y’see) ARE coming back… in a graphic novel.

We have closed a deal with the good folks at Ten Speed Press and Random House for VOYAGING, an adaptation of  my novella “The Plague Star.”   The very first Tuf story… well, not the first to be published, that was “A Beast for Norn,” but the earliest in Tuf’s personal timeline.  More than that I will not say, for fear of spoiling the tale for those of you who have not read it.

The amazing and inimitable RAYA GOLDEN will be doing the adaptation and the art.   It will be the third of my projects that Raya had adapted: she did the graphic story version of MEATHOUSE MAN a few years back (and snagged a Hugo nomination for it), followed by a wonderful version of STARPORT, an unproduced television pilot I wrote in the 90s.   I loved what she did with that one, but VOYAGING promises to be even more fun.

….these are rough color tests and they may or may not end up looking like this in the end, but I think they’re pretty close to the final versions which I’ll be working from once I finish up the script…

Here’s Raya on the project:

So I’m doing a NEW graphic novel, another adaptation, but THIS one I’ve had my eye on for almost a decade. It’s not slated for release till 2023 as I actually have to Draw the sucker first, but boy am I excited to bring this one to life. For those of you familiar with GRRMs Science Fiction work will be very familiar with this set of short stories BUT due to the nature of this introduction story I don’t want to talk too much about that yet and if y’all remember the story you’ll remember why it’ll be fun to keep the secret with me! Suffice to say this story is an adaptation that is NOT set in GRRMs usual medieval world of Westeros, but instead in his Science fiction universe called The Thousand Worlds.

This first story is just an introduction to this universe, but HOPEFULLY there will be more volumes to come!

Here is the official description:

George R.R. Martin and Raya Golden’s VOYAGING, VOLUME ONE: THE PLAGUE STAR, the first volume of a graphic novel adaptation of TUF VOYAGING, Martin’s short story collection set in his science fiction universe the Thousand Worlds, to be adapted and illustrated by Golden, which follows a group of unlikely spacefaring rogues on a mysterious mission involving unfathomable galactic fame and fortune (but only if they can survive), to Kaitlin Ketchum at Ten Speed Press, in an exclusive submission.

I’ll be working with a friend of mine from College a very talented artist by the name of Ann Marcilleno

https://annmarcellino.tumblr.com

And I’ll be sharing more info as it arrives, but for now I present the cast of the first volume of VOYAGING; from right to left we have: RANITTAS, MUSHROOM (THE CAT), KAJ, JEFRI, CELISE, HAVILAND WITH HAVOC (THE KITTEN), AND AWHINA

Please help me spread the news and like my illustration page

https://www.facebook.com/rayagoldenillustration

AND my website 😉

www.rayagolden.com

 If VOYAGING does well, our hope is that Raya will go on to adapt more of Tuf’s adventures into comic form… and who knows, perhaps in time there will even be some NEW tales to tell of our intrepid hairless hero.

As Tuf would say… “Indeed.”

 

 

Current Mood: bouncy bouncy

Bring Me My Pipe

November 18, 2019 at 9:42 am
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I try to get to New York City once or twice a year.  It’s one of my favorite cities in the world, and my visits there are always half business, half pleasure.

On the business side, I check in with all my publishers (I have several), my agents (I have several), with my editors (past and present), with my friends and colleagues at HBO (past and present).   I often do a signing, an interview, or some other sort of public event.  On this most recent visit, Raya Golden and I did a signing down at Midtown Comics for her wonderful graphic novel of my unproduced pilot, STARPORT.   We scribbled in hundreds of books, and afterwards sat down for a short interview.

Autographed copies of STARPORT may still be available from Midtown Comics in Manhattan.  Or not.  We signed a lot of stock, but I am not sure how long they will last.   In any case, copies are certainly available from Santa Fe: https://jeancocteaucinema.com/product/starport-graphic-novel-pre-orders/

On the pleasure side… well, we often try to get to a Broadway show or two, but I was too busy this year.  I did find time to get together with my friends Ellen Datlow and Mr & Mrs X for a pizza crawl through the wilds of Jersey in search of bar pies.   This year we managed to hit the Landmark Tavern in Livingstone and the Star Tavern in Orange, both of which were amazing.

((And if you don’t know what a bar pie is, you don’t know pizza)).

I also combined business and pleasure with a dinner at the historic Keens Steakhouse with Kay McCauley, queen of agents, and my friends from Tor, publisher Tom Doherty and our Wild Cards editor, Diana Pho.   http://www.keens.com/

Keens has been a Manhattan mainstay since 1885, famous for their fabulous steaks and mutton chops… and for the hundreds of clay pipes that adorn their ceilings and walls.   In ye older times, no meal was considered complete without a bowl at its conclusion, and the regulars at Keens traditionally left their long, fragile “churchwarden” pipes at the restaurant, to be called for at need.

Keens still displays the pipes belonging to Teddy Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, Will Rogers,, Albert Einstein, George M. Cohan, J.P. Morgan, Stanford White, John Barrymore, David Belasco, Adlai Stevenson, Douglas MacArthur, “Buffalo Bill” Cody… and now me.

At the conclusion of the meal, Keens presented me with my own pipe and had me sign it.

My pipe will now join the other celebrity pipes in Keens display cases.   And presumably I can call for it at need, the next time I visit New York City and have a hankering for a mutton chop and a bowl.   Not that it’s likely to happen, since I don’t smoke.   Never have.

And for that matter, Keens Steakhouse does not allow smoking these days, no more than any other Manhattan restaurant.

But it’s still a cool, and unique,  honor.  My thanks to Tom Doherty and Kay McCauley, who arranged it.

Current Mood: calm calm

Raya Rocks Starport

March 24, 2019 at 10:20 pm
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My friend, minion, and collaborator Raya Golden has been blitzing the Pacific Northwest this week, promoting her graphic novel STARPORT, based upon an unproduced pilot of mine from 1994.  Raya did the adaptation and the art.

She started out at the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle, where she was joined by a couple of buds of the Lobh.

After the con, she headed down to Portland, to sign copies at Powell’s, surely one of the great bookstores.  (I have signed at Powell’s myself in years past.  My name is scrawled on one of their pillars, amongst all the other writers who have had signings there).

STARPORT is now available from your favorite bookstore or on-line bookseller.   It’s one of my favorites of my unproduced pilots, and Raya did an amazing job with the adaptation.   If you like SF, give it a try.

Oh, and where was I, you ask?  Why wasn’t I with her?   Well, I’ve been busy at home.

Who loves the infants??

 

Current Mood: pleased pleased

The Starport Is Open

March 12, 2019 at 6:29 am
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Hey, hey, hey.   It’s March 12… publication day!

STARPORT is now available for order from your favorite online bookseller, and it should be on the racks at your local comics shop or brick ‘n mortar bookstore.   Buddy Lohb, the Topman, Staako Nihi, and children of the endless night  await you in Starport Chicago.

(For those who missed my earlier blog post, I am of course talking about the new graphic novel from Bantam (in the US) and HarperCollins Voyager (in the UK), adapted and illustrated by Raya Golden from my teleplay).

 

Current Mood: excited excited

Yay for Captain Marvel

March 11, 2019 at 10:25 am
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The newest Marvel movie, CAPTAIN MARVEL, is a lot of fun.

As an old (very very old) Marvel fanboy, I am a little saddened that they dropped the original Captain Marvel (not counting Fawcett’s Big Red Cheese), the Kree warrior Mar-Vell, from the continuity.   THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN MARVEL was one of Marvel’s classics, way back when.   Maybe that’s just me, though.   I am kind of a purist when it comes to adaptations.

Considered just on its own terms, the movie is hugely entertaining.   I look forward to seeing how the Marvel teams uses the captain in the forthcoming Avengers movie.  Once she comes fully into her powers, she is far and away the most powerful character in the MCU.   She could eat Iron Man for lunch and have Thor for dessert, with a side of Dr. Strange.   Thanos is in trouble now.

Be sure to stay to the very very end of the credits.   The film has TWO Easter Eggs at the end, not just one.   In the theatre where I saw the movie, most of the audience left after the first of those, and missed the second.

Current Mood: cheerful cheerful

STARPORT Is Coming

March 4, 2019 at 6:37 pm
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A million years ago when the world was young and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I spent the best part of a decade working in Hollywood.   In television, mostly, though I did a few feature scripts as well, for films that never got made.   My television career began on the CBS revival of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, along about 1985-1986.   After that I wrote a couple of MAX HEADROOM scripts, but they never got made either.  The show was cancelled when one of them was still in pre-production.   Then I spent three years on BEAUTY AND THE BEAST.   Not the recent one, of course, the first one, the good one, with Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton and Roy Dotrice and Jo Anderson and Jay Acovone.

By the time B&B wrapped up I had climbed the television ladder from freelancer to staff writer to story editor to executive story editor to co-producer to producer to co-supervising producer to supervising producer, and was in line to be showrunner.   But B&B got the axe too before that could happen.   But I’d now accumulated enough credentials and credit to take the next step, and I moved into development, pitching ideas for shows of my own and writing pilots.

In Hollywood they call it “development hell,” and for good reasons.   You work just as hard, you make even more money, you pour your sweat and blood and tears into your creations… but most of what you create never gets aired.   I stuck it out for five years, pitched more series concepts than I can count, and wrote a half-dozen pilots, everything from a medical show about the CDC (BLACK CLUSTER) to an alternate world adventure called DOORWAYS, the only one of my pilots that was actually filmed.   We did that one for ABC and they loved it, enough to order six back-up scripts in anticipation of a series order.   The scripts were written, but the series order never came, and DOORWAYS died unborn, like the rest of my pilots.

Not long after that I left television.   I had an overall deal at Columbia, I was making good money, but I’d had enough of development hell.   There were things about working in television I liked a lot, but spending a year or more developing a world and creating characters and writing and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting a pilot for four guys in a room (sometimes three guys and a gal) that the world never got to see… that was not for me.   I wanted an audience.  Needed an audience.   Writing scripts for TZ and B&B, that was one thing.   Hard, challenging, stressful, demanding work, but at the end of the road the cameras rolled and a few weeks later millions of people were watching what I’d written.  The audience might like it or hate it, but at least they got to watch it.   Writing for the screen, be it the small screen or the big one, that’s fun.  Writing for a desk drawer, not so much.    So I put Hollywood behind me and returned to an unfinished novel I’d begun in 1991 and shelved for a few years because of film and tv deadlines, a book called A GAME OF THRONES, and… well, you all know how that turned out.

Which brings me back to STARPORT.

STARPORT was one of those pilots I wrote during my years in development hell.   In some ways it was my favorite.   When pitching a television series, there is a certain shorthand where you describe your new show by comparing it to existing shows (preferably successful ones).   Gene Roddenberry sold STAR TREK as “Wagon Train to the stars.”  HBO bought GAME OF THRONES as “the Sopranos in Middle Earth.”   I knew how to play that game too, so I pitched STARPORT as “HILL STREET BLUES with aliens.”   The idea was that, in the very near future (that would have been the late 90s, since I wrote the script around 1993-94), a great interstellar civilization called the Harmony of Worlds decides that humanity has finally advanced sufficiently to be admitted to the ranks of civilized races, and reveals themselves to us.   After first contact, they build three great starports for purposes of trade and diplomacy: one in Singapore, one in Copenhagen, and one in Chicago… out in the lake, where Mayor Daley always wanted to build an airport.   But the focus of the show was smaller than that: our viewpoint characters would be the cops and detectives of the police division closest to the Starport, who suddenly had to deal with all sorts of strange aliens coming and going, and with the sorts of problems they had never previously imagined.

It was a fun show to write.  Fox wanted a 90-minute pilot, which was all the rage back then.   My first draft came out closer to two hours, so of course I had to go back in and cut a lot of stuff, but that was pretty much par for the course for me.   My first drafts were always too long and too expensive.   The development process was pretty much the old Hollywood cliche: they loved it, they loved it, they loved it, they decided to pass.   We shipped it around to other networks, but there were only four back then, so finding a second buyer was a long shot.   No dice.   STARPORT went in the drawer.   Years later, I included one version of the script in QUARTET, a small press collection from NESFA Press to mark my being GOH at a Boskone.   But aside from that, the story remained untold.

Until now.

Enter RAYA GOLDEN.   My friend, my minion, the art director for my Fevre River Packet Company, and a very talented comic artist in her own right.   A few years ago she adapted “Meathouse Man,” one of my darker and more twisted short stories, as a comic.  It earned a Hugo nomination in the Best Graphic Novel category (did not win, alas).   But she was only warming up with that.   Afterward I gave her a much bigger challenge: STARPORT, both drafts.   And she’s been hard at work at it for the past two years, adapting the teleplay to comics format, fixing all my dated 90s references (the jokes about VHS tapes did not work so well any more), and penciling and inking it.

 

It’s huge fun.   And now, at long last, it’s almost here.

Random House and Harper Collins will be releasing the graphic novel of STARPORT next week, on MARCH 12. 

You can order a copy by Clicking HERE

(I am amused to note that “Hill Street Blues with aliens” is now too dated, and has been replaced by “Law & Order meets Men in Black.”   The more things change, the more they stay the same).

Eventually, we will also have signed copies available for sale from the bookshop at my Jean Cocteau Cinema.

I hope you all enjoy it.   For my part, I am thrilled that one of my orphan children has finally escaped the desk drawer to wander out into the wide world.   If the book does well enough, I can see the possibility of further issues of STARPORT down the road.

And who knows?  Maybe someone will even want to turn it into a television series.

Current Mood: pleased pleased

Farewell to a Marvel

November 16, 2018 at 9:49 am
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Unless you have been hiding in a cave somewhere… or down with the Mole Man in the bowels of the Earth… by now you will have read that Stan Lee has died, at the age of 95.

A good age, that.   Stan Lee lived a long life, and leaves a grand and glorious legacy behind him.   He has been part of my world for so long that it seems impossible that he is gone.

Not that I can claim to have been a friend.   I never had that honor.  Oh, yes, I met Stan a dozen times or so, at various San Diego Comic-Cons over the years.   Every time I did, it was like meeting him for the first time; he never remembered our previous meetings, and I don’t think he had any idea who I was.   It made no matter.   He was always genial and generous to me, as he was to all the fanboys who surrounded him at those cons.  And when I was in Stan’s presence, that’s just what I was: a fanboy, slightly tongue-tied and more than a little in awe.

I owe so much to Stan Lee.   He was, in a sense, my first publisher, my first editor.   “Dear Stan and Jack.”  Those were the first words of mine ever to see print.  In the letter column of FANTASTIC FOUR #20, as it happens.   My first published loc, a commentary on FF#17, compared Stan to… ah… Shakespeare.  A little overblown, you say?  Well, okay.  I was thirteen…

And yet, and yet… the comparison, when you think about it, is not entirely without merit.   There were plays before Shakespeare, but the Bard’s work revolutionized the theatre, left it profoundly different from what it had been before.   And Stan Lee did the same for comic books.  I had been reading comics all through my childhood, but by the late 50s I had started to drift away from them.   I was buying fewer and fewer “funny books” (as we called them back then), and more SF and fantasy paperbacks.   The DC comics that dominated the racks had become so formulaic and tired, they were no longer holding my interest as they had when I was younger.   I was “outgrowing” comics.

And then Stan Lee came along, and pulled me back in.   The first issue of FANTASTIC FOUR that I chanced on (#4, it was, the one where the FF met Prince Namor) caught my interest as nothing had for years.  A short while later, along came Spider-Man.   And then the rest, one by one, in an astonishingly short period of time.   The Hulk.  Thor.  Iron Man.   Ant-Man (and the Wonderful Wasp).  The X-Men.  The Avengers.   Wonder Man (who died in the same issue he was introduced).  Black Panther.   The Inhumans.  Galactus and the Silver Surfer.   And the villains… Dr. Doom, Dr. Octopus, the Vulture, the Sandman, Mysterio, Loki… and on and on.   (We will not talk about Paste-Pot Pete.   This is a tribute).

These characters had personalities.    Quirks, flaws, tempers.  The heroes were not all good, the villains were not all bad.  The stories had twists and turns, I could not tell where they were going.  Sometimes good guys fought other good guys.   The characters grew and changed… over at DC, Superman and Lois Lane had been locked into the same relationship for decades, but Peter Parker went through girlfriends like a real teenager, he graduated high school and went to college, people could and did die.

You had to be there to understand how revolutionary all this was.  Comics as we know them today would not exist except for Stan Lee.   They might not exist at all, if truth be told.

No, of course, he did not do it all  alone.   The genius of Marvel’s artists, especially Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, should never be minimized.   They were a huge part of Marvel as well.   But Lee was at the center of it all.

That letter in FF#20 was only the first of many I sent to Stan and Jack, and Stan and Steve, and Stan and… whoever the artist was on the book I was writing to.  A number were published, with my full address attached.   Other comics fans around the country saw the letters, and began sending me fanzines and letters of their own.  My friendship with Howard Waldrop began thanks to those letters… him in Texas, me in Jersey.   And after reading some of those early ditto’d fanzines, I began to write for them as well.  My first published stories.  Heroes of my own creation.  Manta Ray.  Garizan the Mechanical Warrior.  The White Raider (who, like Wonder Man, died in his first story).  And, then, a little later, heroes created for STAR-STUDDED COMICS by my friends from the Texas Trio, Powerman and Dr. Weird.   I could not draw so I wrote “text stories,” superhero stories in prose.   Which people liked.   Which encouraged me to keep writing.   And as I wrote, I did my best to write like Stan Lee.

These days, in interviews, I am often asked which writers influenced me most when I started out.   There were a lot of them.   For SF there were Heinlein and Andre Norton and Eric Frank Russell, for fantasy Robert E. Howard and JRRT and Fritz Leiber, for horror the inimitable H.P Lovecraft.   Later on, when I was older, there was Jack Vance and Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Zelazny and Samuel R. Delany and Alfred Bester, and later still William Goldman and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But the greatest influences are the earliest influences, I think, and at the beginning there was only Stan Lee.

Comics have had a lot of great writers in the half century since the Marvel Age began.   Neil Gaiman, Len Wein, Alan Moore, and more and more and more… the list goes on and on.   But if not for Stan Lee and the worlds and characters and style he created, their own careers and accomplishments would have been very different, if not impossible.

Let me close with one last letter of comment.

Dear Stan,

You did good work.   As long as people still read comic books and believe in heroes, your characters will be remembered.  Thanks so much.   Make Mine Marvel.

George R. Martin
35 East First Street
Bayonne, New Jersey

 

 

 

Current Mood: melancholy melancholy