Setting up the New Office

I've been working on the new office for weeks now. We moved it out of the back room where it was a combination office/third bedroom. Now that room is going to be nothing but a bedroom and will have Carole's sewing machine in there.

We moved my office into the loft which was largely going unused except as a place to stack newly folded clothes out of the laundry room. For the past few weeks it has been my office under construction. It's still under construction, but is about 60% finished.

Here's where I work, now.

Excuse the cat stuff on the carpet. We're still deciding where those are going. For the first time in a while I have almost enough shelving for more than half of my books. This is the set of shelves to the left of my desk.

This is the set of shelves to the right of my desk, plus some of my Golden and Silver Age comic book collection. (Click to embiggen if you want to see the Frazetta signed and numbered print above the shelf.)

And here is the giant oak desk and oak office chair that Carole bought for me (plus some of the DVD collection in the corner). When we were down in Florida for a signing event for THE FLOCK, Carole told me that we had to go to a house to pick up a desk. She'd apparently arranged to buy an oak desk that she'd found on Craigslist. I did not have high hopes for it, as the price was so darned low. When we got there we found this AMAZING oak desk that breaks down into components, ingeniously designed. And solid, and old. Then Carole found the oak office chair for me also on Craigslist in Raleigh. Wot a dame! (The colored pen & ink print above my desk is an illustration of Solomon Kane as interpreted by Barry Windsor-Smith.)

Two-Gun Bob

When I was in my early teens I was helping my dad stock the shelves of one of his bookstores and I happened across this cover art on one of the novels I was putting up in the science-fiction and fantasy section:

It was, of course, painted by Frank Frazetta, and it was the cover art to one of the Bantam Books editions collecting some of the stories of Conan the Barbarian created by Robert Ervin Howard.

Grabbed by the power of the painting I took the book down as my own and read it. I'd heard of Howard, of course, but it was the first time I'd read his work; and I was hooked. Howard was the quintessential adventure pulp writer. His style was actually rather stark for a man earning his living by the pennies-per-word, but there was brilliance--perhaps even genius--in that style. Other writers have picked that style apart, trying to figure it out and doing their best to copy it. But it was unique and Howard was even, perhaps, doing his best to emulate the likes of Jack London and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Who knows? But whatever his influence, the result was amazing.

Although the quite highly disturbed Howard committed suicide in 1936, his work lives on. He had an amazingly fertile imagination and his output of fiction was impressive. Because his work was so well written and has been able to transcend the passage of time, he remains popular today. In addition to prose, his work has been translated to film, television, and comics. In some weeks, the new version of a feature film of Conan will hit the screens. I was never a fan of the original films that starred Arnold Schwartzenegger, so I'm hoping that the new movie will do a much better job of interpreting Howard's characters and themes.

We'll see.

I May Owe Mars an Apology.

A while back I said that Mars was just a dusty, dead ball of rock. Or something to that effect. Well, it seems I was just a bit off the mark.

The Mars Phoenix Lander has found water ice just below the slight covering of soil. You can see it sublimating here in this very darned cool photo.

Now, in addition to the water ice, the Phoenix is telling us that the soil is not, as some had predicted, toxic. Apparently stuff from Earth could grow in it. So I take back some of those nasty things I said about Mars.

Heck. Maybe there are some hot babes wandering around the planet? Who knows?

Frazetta interprets ERBurroughs.

Rip Off Man!

Some years back I knew a failed comic book artist who was constantly whining about his inability to support his wife and children. I found him work whenever I could, but I really didn’t have that many connections. When anyone would mention to him the fact that he could go out and get a real job, he would scream and yell that he was far, far too talented to do that. And I’m not exaggerating. He really would yell about it. Sometimes he would even hint that he was a new Messiah.

The fact is that he was talented, but not so talented that he couldn’t go out and get his hands dirty to feed his family. But he thought so. He was quite willing to allow his children to go without than work as a laborer, the only job for which he had any qualifications. (It also didn’t help that he’s as crazy as a shark in a tub of blood—and his breath stank like a chimpanzee’s cancerous ass.)

At some point, when no more comic book jobs could be had, as he’d burnt all those bridges, he found himself with a happy decision at a happy time as the Internet exploded and cheap computers became accessible to one and all. At that particular moment, he decided to start plagiarizing the work of Frank Frazetta. He did fairly well at this—plagiarizing Frazetta’s work, I mean. At first, the rip off work sold briskly and he soon had a regular line of folk waiting to buy their Frazetta rip offs.

The genius of Frank Frazetta

And then, apparently, he began to rip off Jack Hamm, telling folk that he was going to do a revolutionary sketchbook that ended up being…you guessed it: a plagiarized and slightly different version of a Jack Hamm sketchbook.

The utility of Jack Hamm

And now, from samples recently shown to me by an art fan as sick of this plagiarizing dog as am I, he’s ripping off the work of Robert McGinnis, who made his fame in the 1960s doing kick ass paperback covers that wowed customers and made many a best seller out of tepid potboilers.

The brilliance of Robert McGinnis

How is it that an artist is allowed to plagiarize another person’s style, even down to stealing whole figures and entire paintings, slightly moving limbs about, or changing the attire of persons, or altering various aspects of the original, but still producing an obvious fake version of someone else’s work? If a writer did that, he’d have his books confiscated and his ass before a judge. But an “artist” can do this at will and go about his way.

How does Frank Frazetta feel about a second-rate rip off copying his style and reproducing his paintings and illustrations almost line for line? How does Robert McGinnis feel about some worthless egotistical maggot taking his unique way of laying down color and figures and calling it just another step up the ladder?

Alas. Well, maybe when this scumbag's mommy dies, there'll be no one left to pay his overdue taxes at the end of the year. Maybe there will be blood. I laff.