#Vault Comics#

First off, those homage covers I mentioned? Well, I've tried to track down all of them, and here's what I found:

With some of these, I could identify the source cover immediately, some took a little work, and one I just couldn't nail down:

Crisis on Infinite Earths #7

Daredevil #184 

Madame Xanadu Special #1

House of Secrets #92

Transmetropolitan #1

Action Comics #1

Swamp Thing (1972) #9

Saga #1

Deadly Class #1

Tomb of Dracula #1

Gray Morrow Thing

Adventure Comics #381

Fantastic Four #220

Wonder Woman #1

Love and Rockets (1982) #1

Detective Comics #31 
Afterlife With Archie #1

And I have to say...I want all of these comic books, man. I don't know if I want to spend $70 to acquire all of them, though, so the images might have to be enough. But you can bet that I'll be keeping my eye out for Vault Comics when I hit the stands every week.

Speaking of, if you go to the Vault Comics website, there's a Free Firsts pull-down tab (https://vaultcomics.com/free-firsts/) which allows you to have free reads of 13 different comic book first issues. That's pretty damned sweet, ennit?


P.S. Found it. The Gray Morrow Thing is Marvel Preview #3--which presents Blade, the Vampire-Slayer. 

This made me think of you, sweetheart.

from the 12th Harry Hole novel

Knife

by

Jo Nesbø

Jo Nesbo & Deep Purple

In Knife, Jo Nesbo's new Harry Hole (pronounced Ho-lay) novel, Harry refers to Deep Purple as the best group in the unintentionally ridiculous but still good category. 

Sounds about right.

Here's Something I Never Thought I'd Be Saying:

I'm going to try to make a doll dress.

Mmm-hmm.

My experience in making any kind of clothing, doll-sized or other?

Zip. 

My confidence in my ability to do this?

Between Slim and Less Than Zero.

But my motivation is pretty fuckin' high, so we'll see.

It's for my daughter. See, some time ago she happened upon a book series entitled Alice in Bibleland at Half-Price Books. I have no idea which book of the series she started with, but she immediately fell in love with it, and every once in awhile she'd find another one (there are 28 of them, and I just saw a complete series listed on Amazon for $195--used), and they were only a buck apiece, so we kept on picking them up. Eventually we had to make a list to make sure I didn't buy duplicates if I spotted one on the shelves. (There was little chance that Jacqueline would do that, since she is gifted with a prodigious autistic memory.) And more eventually we got to where we only had six titles left to go. But search as we would, none of those books showed up at either Half-Price stores in our area. So I started scouting the internet on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, Jacqueline announced that once we had acquired all of the books, she would get a Special Prize. I asked her what the prize would be, and she told me it would be an Alice in Bibleland doll. So I scouted the internet for that. And guess what? Unless it's well hidden, no such doll exists.

And then I found all six of our missing Alice in Bibleland books at reasonable prices--five of them at Thrift Books and one at Amazon --and ordered them. When they arrived, I hid them away. No easy task, since Jacqueline is Jane on the Spot for getting packages from the mail...and because she regularly searches my room for gifts that I've hidden away. But I was determined (and successful) on both counts, and now I am determined to make Jacqueline an Alice in Bibleland doll.

If you've got any advice, I'd be glad to hear it.

More Asimov About Foundation & Hari

Started reading Forward the Foundation and I have to admit that it felt a bit off...which was disappointing, especially so in that Prelude to Foundation was SO good, and I finished it not only in a great rush of excitement, but also hungry for more more more. (How do YOU like it?)

But I continued reading, of course, and it got better. And then it got good. And then...part one ended and I dutifully stopped reading and turned to Gregory Benford's Foundation's Fear, the first book of the second Foundation trilogy. (The prescribed reading order according to Someone Or Other.)

Speaking of which...who writes a trilogy that's kind of a prequel but actually a sequel to 1 and 1/4th of the original author's prequels...and which weaves in and out of two of the other books in the series...not to mention that it's written by three different writers. That's really pretty fucked up, ennit?

I thought so.

Anyway...Foundation's Fear started out pretty slow. Benford hit a lot of bad notes. And I was just piddling along, not really all that motivated to get through it. I even stopped completely for a while to check out Famous Men Who Never Lived (by K Chess), which came in for me at the library...but after getting halfway through that I was ready to get back to Benford. (Interesting premise, not very well written. Don't know if I even care enough about it to go back and finish it off. Which is kind of funny, because I was so hot to read this when I first heard about it that I was seriously considering buying the Kindle version, which is something I rarely do for full price books. Matter of fact, I don't know if I've ever done that.)

And within a few pages of resuming Foundation's Fear, I encountered Joan of Arc. And Voltaire. Well. Voltaire was still fresh in my mind from Buckle's comments on him (mostly effusive praise), and Joan was still in my mind from her (to me) unexpected appearance in Shake-speare's Henry VI, Part 1, so that was happy for me. And the book got pretty interesting...though it did veer away from Hari Seldon completely for about a hundred pages, which was strange...and probably not the ideal for structural integrity. But it was good enough for me.

ADDENDUM (8/12/19): Well, that was awhile back. Since then I finished reading Foundation's Fear...which never really clicked for me. And started reading Forward the Foundation (by Isaac Asimov)...and it was just not clicking, either. I abandoned it for awhile, then started back up a couple of weeks back and have been getting into it. I might be able to see this Foundation Project through after all. Of course, I still have those two New Trilogy books to get through, and all I can say about that is that I hope Greg Bear and David Brin are up to the challenge in a way that Gregory Benford wasn't. But first, back to FtF. News as it happens. 

AS IT HAPPENS (8/30/19): Finished Forward the Foundation a minute ago, and it ended well, I'm happy to say. I think relegating it to bathroom book status really helped, as that meant I was only reading a few pages per day, but was reading every day. Maybe I'll try that out on Foundation as well, because that's what's walking up to the plate right now. Which is pretty exciting. I last read that book 44 or so years ago. 

More news as it happens, of course.

"happy and I'm smiling walk a mile to drink your water" (Ian Anderson, "Living in the Past")

"Over and over again, he felt the past in his mind, ran his mental tendrils along the line of development of his life. It was part of growing older, no doubt. There was so much more in the past, so much less in the future, that the mind turned away from the looming shadow ahead to contemplate the safety of what had gone before."

Forward the Foundation

(the last book written by Isaac Asimov before his death April 6, 1992)

Trumpgrad

"But the greater Hitler's success, the blinder he became. He was unable to conceive that not everything in the world was propaganda or political posturing, that there might be other real forces in the world.... Hitler was unable to conceive that his fist could not smash through everything."

Stalingrad 

by Vasily Grossman

Well...that rings a bell. 

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman

As soon as I heard about it, I wanted it. And I counted down the days until it was to make its appearance...and when it did, I hit the bookstores, hoping to find a copy on the shelves so that I could take a few hits. But it didn't show up on the shelves of either Barnes and Noble store...or the Books-A-Million store...or either of the Half-Price Books stores. And I don't usually go to Carmichael's so I don't know if it showed up there or not.

I thought about just going ahead and buying it. But at a list price of $27.95, Amazon price of $18.01, and Kindle price of $17.99, that wasn't likely. So I downloaded a free preview and whetted the knife of my appetite on that.

And when I finished those pages, I was ready to throw my money down, but first I thought I'd check the Louisville Free Public Library one more time (I'd been checking it every day for a long time)...and there it was. I put in my request. I was 1 of 1 requests for the title. And it arrived yesterday, and I picked it up today.

Oh, my...it's big. 

RAIL big.

I have a few pages of Antony and Cleopatra  to finish up tonight to keep up with my My Shake-speare Project, but as soon as I do, ahmo be getting me a piece of Stalingrad, man.

News as it happens.

As It Happens, Part One:

As excited as I was to get my hands on this book...which, by the way, bore this stamp--

--and I picked it up on August 3rd, so

it is 홑 off the presses indeed...but I was also weary and having some heart issues, so I only read about half of the introduction before succumbing to sleep. But there was a line which really struck me, so I came back to it this morning. 

To continue to write when you have been ignored, neglected, mocked, and / or abused...that does take some guts, doesn't it? And, indeed, that does say a lot about your character.

And I have spent a very large portion of my life writing. Thousands and thousands of pages. With very little success. And I've received very little support. Most of my friends and all of my family completely ignore me as a writer. I managed to persevere...if belly-aching mightily...for many years. But when my heart started screaming five months ago, it drowned out most of my ambition. I would sit down to write and think, "What's the use? I'll be dead soon, and this is just shit that no one will ever see." And it didn't stop me completely, but it was pretty damned close.

And I think that's understandable. It makes me think back to a writing conference I attended in 1979, wherein a guest writer was speaking, and she said something like, "One of the most painful questions I've ever been asked by an audience members was, 'How do I know when it's time to give up?'" I remember thinking at the time, "Never!" Because you write because you write. You write because that's what you are, who you are, what you do. You write in the way that Jacqueline talks about St. Lucy and Jennifer Connelly and Laura Mooney and St. James.

But my heart attacked me, and I gave up.

I don't want to be an unread writer. But I think I don't want to be a writer who gives up even more than that. 

I think I want to get back on that horse.

Thanks, Robert Chandler. Thanks, Vasily Grossman.


As It Happens, Part Deux:

Is it just me, or does reading this make you think "Trump," "Illegal Immigrants," and "Moscow Mitch"? 

Also, this is how you replace The War on Terror, isn't it? It was about time to get a new straw man up and running.

This Just in to the You Can't Make This Shit Up Department:

I was doing my daily Henry Thomas Buckle devotional in his Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works Volume II today when I happened upon this:

I mean, SERiously...are we sure that Mr. Buckle wasn't a time traveller with a sense of humor?