Mummy and Creature

I put up a children's story called Mummy and Creature, about Mummy, Creature, and their cat and dog.

Check it out!

The Story of Mummy and Creature

Mummy and Creature ~a story of two monsters~
Mummy and Creature got tired of their lives as they had been living them, and because they had been friends for a long time, they decided they would live together.
Because they lived in a rather small town not far from a large city, the two of them were able to find a nice house with two stories and enough room for both of them.
Mummy had a cat named Swanson. Creature had a Collie dog named Gil.
They had their disagreements.
Mummy needed to keep the house very dry, which also suited Swanson. This was a problem for Creature, who loved baths and often fogged up the house with extremely hot water.
Mummy only liked to watch educational programming, while Creature preferred to keep the TV tuned to anything with a lot of explosions.
Sometimes the stress of dealing with a houseful of monsters and dogs and cats got the better of them.
Sometimes when there wasn't much to do, Creature would clown around. Mummy never really cared for Creature's humor.
In the evenings, they would relax on the balcony and review the events of the day.
There was always a lot to talk about.
Mummy and Creature and Swanson and Gil remained in the house for a long, long time.

"Whiteout"-- a killer mystery with a fantastic lead (graphic novel review)

NOTE: In light of the release of the movie WHITEOUT, I wanted to share my review of the graphic novel, which I love and was inspired by when I started creating Sword of Dracula's Van Helsing Family, especially Ronnie.

Whiteout (1999)
$10.99 from Oni Press

Credits:
Writer: Greg Rucka
Artist: Steve Lieber

The cold, US Marshal Carrie Stetko knows, does things to you. It makes your blood pump slower, slurs your speech, numbs your hands. On Antarctica, the bottom of the world, the cold can drop to 89 degrees below zero. Outside, your lungs can freeze. Outside at night, in a storm called a Whiteout, men die a foot from safety because they can’t see the door.

This is the world of Whiteout, a masterful detective novel in graphic novel format by Greg Rucka. The frozen wasteland is the milieu Rucka masterfully uses to frame his story of murder and cover-up. His heroine is Carrie Stetko, a Marshal in virtual exile after a problem she had four years earlier. The cold has changed Carrie as it changes everybody; she’s become cold and cynical in a place of Naval grunts, scientists, and sulking roughnecks, where the ratio of men to women is roughly 200 to one in the heavy season, 400 to one in the winter.

Whiteout works like the best-selling Kay Scarpetta novels Patricia Cornwell writes. The trick is to make the reader feel privileged to learn things few men get to see, and have the outsider become the victor, after many grueling tests. Writer Rucka plunges us into a world he knows inside and out, giving us details of how men talk and work in exotic places, and gives us a character both at home and alien to the landscape. Carrie Stetko is working hard to escape her past and find peace, a peace that is shattered, as these things go, by a murder on the ice.

The man whose face has been blown off lies in the snow in a place where a team of geologists was supposed to have a camp. Around him, deep holes have been drilled into the ground. The other geologists are nowhere to be found, and Carrie must search four bases on a 1600-mile continent to identify both killer and victim. Suddenly she finds that someone out there doesn’t want her to learn the truth, and anyone witness she locates seems to get killed before she can talk to them.

Enter Lily Sharpe, British Intelligence agent. Lily is keeping an eye on Carrie, and may know more than she lets on. Of course the two become allies, and soon it’s the both of them being beaten, frozen, threatened and grievously injured. Rucka lays it all out at a fast, authentic-feeling clip that keeps you guessing, and the Steve Lieber’s art is so cold and ominous you can almost se your breath freeze. The team is willing to put their characters through hell, and in Carrie’s case, it’s a Hell that may heal.

Take a note: this is how mysteries are supposed to work: a dangerous setting. An inscrutable murder. A sympathetic, wounded character. It’s a recipe for the best the genre can offer, and Rucka has made a fine, fine shot at the target.

Awesome Vampire Flashbacks: Samson Versus the Vampire Women

This is wonderful-- a ten-minute montage of the best gags from the MST3K version of Samson Versus the Vampire Women.

For the uninitiated:

• Samson was the American name for El Santo, the Mexican Superhero/Wrestler of comics, books and movies
• Samson Versus the Vampire Women is a movie I have in both English and Spanish-- I still have a fondness for the awful American dubs of these movies, which were all produced by American shlockmeister K. Gordon Murray. These Murray dubs used to show up a lot on basic cable midnight movie shows. Hey, I feel a debt towards Murray-- without him I never would have discovered foreign horror in the first place.
  

Enjoy!

Alex Van Helsing #1 Final Rounds

This is what it looks like when you near the end: Harper and I are now at the point of rapidly shooting edits back and forth to one another as we close on the September deadline to have all edits on Alex Van Helsing #1 completed. What you're looking at is a snapshot of pages 107-148. Note the vast seas of red ink and comments. Now we're down to fairly minor edits. I love this process!

Awesome Vampire Flashbacks: Samson Versus the Vampire Women

This is wonderful-- a ten-minute montage of the best gags from the MST3K version of Samson Versus the Vampire Women.

For the uninitiated:

• Samson was the American name for El Santo, the Mexican Superhero/Wrestler of comics, books and movies
• Samson Versus the Vampire Women is a movie I have in both English and Spanish-- I still have a fondness for the awful American dubs of these movies, which were all produced by American shlockmeister K. Gordon Murray. These Murray dubs used to show up a lot on basic cable midnight movie shows. Hey, I feel a debt towards Murray-- without him I never would have discovered foreign horror in the first place.
  

Enjoy!

Midnight Movie: Terror in the Wax Museum

This movie scared the bejesus out of me when I saw it on TV as a kid. All I remember now is the nightmare sequence. Brrr!

From the Deep Vault: Phantom of the Opry

When I was about twelve, the first Creature Feature of the old hosted, pun-ridden style was this: basic cable's Phantom of the Opry, filmed at the Grand Old Opry House in Nashville. Saturday mornings, Sir Cecil Creape played a lot of imported ba...dness, especially poorly dubbed Italian and Mexican horror. You may not remember this, but if you do, give it a watch.