Tony Caballero (75)
Take an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, a retired Army Major, and a founding member of the renowned US Navy SEAL Team 6. Put them in a room. Throw in one of the most classic films in Japanese cinema. Add the talents of a brilliant Italian artist. Mix well, and what do you get? Something timeless, moving, and chillingly exciting.
A team of ex-Special Forces is raiding small towns in rural America and killing everyone they come across. In and out in 39 minutes, with clockwork precision. And, after being wrongfully imprisoned in Fort Leavenworth, Marine John Clayton is offered a deal he can’t turn down. Help the government track down and capture them and receive a full pardon. The reason? They’re his former squadmates. His alternative? The revocation of his plea bargain and a guaranteed execution for war crimes.
“Can you see the fear . . . the pleading in their eyes? Can you smell the piss running down their leg? Can you hear their final death rattle?
If you can . . . then your enemy is already dead. Help them along, as you wish. Just to be certain of their reckoning with you.”
Lost and hiding in the Harz Mountains of Germany at the end of the war, a group of boys struggle to maintain their balance in the face of the Third Reich’s imminent defeat and their leader's loosening grip on reality. Alone, desperate, and hungry, they live under the will of an escalating madman, while a lone boy is sent to a distant rendezvous point in the hopes of finding supplies.
In the Internet world, self-publishing is always a crapshoot for both the creator and the reader. You never know what you’re going to get. But, with Twisted Dark, writer/creator Neil Gibson seems to be consistently throwing elevens and sevens. And, while people may say that self-publishing is a vanity thing, this volume is anything but vain. This is a rampaging bull-ride of a talented storyteller, deservedly forcing his way into your consciousness.
Twelve-year-old Jamie Baldwin is having a bad day.
On his elementary school graduation day, the campus is attacked by the Technivore, and he’s rescued by Rocket Girl . . . errr, Queen, only to have her suit shut down by a stray shot and crash land, where he’s forced to reboot her armor by hand, using instructions radioed by his hero, Captain Zoom.
And, what did you do on your elementary school graduation?
Come on, who doesn't love clowns?
With their bulging, maniacal eyes and grotesque, painted-on smiles, their shrill shrieks of delirious glee and their frantic desperate caperings . . . who doesn't like that?
Besides most people with half a brain. Go to any circus and for every kid laughing with glee, there’s another trying their damnedest to throw mom and dad in front of them and make a mindless escape. Because let’s face it . . .
Clowns can be freakin’ scary.
“In one unintentionally comic motion, my audience all swung around in their seats to face me, ready to hang on my every word, minds already dancing with accusations at the same time they were formulating their own finely worded excuses. It was too bad my buddy Ralph Marley wasn’t here to watch the show. But, Marley was dead. And, that left only me to play Scrooge.”
Detective fiction comes in many flavors. You've got your dainty Miss Marples, your wise and mysterious Charlie Chans, your erudite Sherlock Holmes, your witty and pithy Nick and Nora Charles, your agoraphobic gourmet Rex Stout, but coming in ahead of all of them in terms of flavor and style, there is only one . . . Mike Hammer. As penned by Mickey Spillane, Hammer puts the “hard” in hard-boiled.
“What would you do if you woke up in a strange room and didn’t know where you were or what you did the night before to get there?”
What if it happened again . . . and again . . . until you were scared to fall asleep for fear of the blood you might shed once unconscious. Dark Horse’s Dream Thief asks that question with chilling consequences.
“Live faithfully, fight bravely, and die laughing.”
-motto of the Hitler Youth
Chapter 2 of Alterna’s chilling and challenging work, Wolves of Summer, has arrived, and the story continues to evolve, to grow more resonant and disturbing.
Okay, there’s some good news and some bad news . . . Which do you want first?
Okay, the good news . . . Monkeybrain Comics has released the third rollicking issue of Mask of the Red Panda, and it's every bit as full of chewy pulp pleasure as the first two.