Hamburger Heaven Wednesday: Francis Bacon, Laurel & Hardy, Silva Thins and Xena the Warrior Puppy

I'm in the middle of proofing HIDDEN GHOSTS; while I enjoy reading these stories once again, proofing is very tiring, especially when you do it during your day job too. I hope to have it done within the next few days. In the meantime, here are some things I found while taking a break and cruising the Internet:

London Daily Photo had this picture of Sir Francis Bacon today. Daisy Bacon was a descendant of this philosopher, writer and scientist. What I didn't know is that he died after contracting pneumonia, experimenting with the use of freezing to preserve meat.



Buzz Feed has a photo gallery of The Most Sexist Cigarette Ads of the 1960s, almost all of them featuring Silva Thins. (Thanks for the tip, Bill Crider.) While my memory tells me that there were a LOT of other ads that were just as sexist, these brought back some nice flashbacks. I smoked for 5 years, in the early 1970s. There was a lot of identity associated with what brand you smoked, especially when you're young. None of the 'female' brands did it for me. I smoked Marlboros like all my friends did.



Davy Crockett's Almanack has a full length Laurel and Hardy movie available for viewing. The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case is from 1930. This is part of the Overlooked Film Series which runs every Tuesday.



One of my favorite pages on Facebook is about Xena the Warrior Puppy. She and her best friend Jonny, who has autism, have become famous around the world. If you don't know the story, here it is from the msnbc.com site:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you do know about Jonny and Xena, I bet you haven't seen this video. If you have, watch it again because it'll make you smile: If you want to know more about Xena and Jonny, go to their Facebook page. And that's all for today! Off to work I go.

Blogs: Are They Still Relevant?

I really need to update my blog list. As many of you know, over the past year I've been taking a semi-hiatus from my own blog. At the same time, I took a break from reading other blogs. It was all I could do to keep mine up, much less read everyone else's. But tonight I started to scroll through my favorites and it was sobering to see that over half of my favorites are inactive or have not been touched in months. I even found out that the owner of one blog, someone I didn't know but followed her blog because of her lovely photos and her brave battle with breast cancer had, sadly, passed away.

I was very happy to see that a lot of my favorites, like Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine, Buddies in the Saddle, Mystery File, Davy Crockett's Almanack, and The Education of a Pulp Writer, are still around and active. But I noticed something that perhaps helps them stay in business: many of them keep their posts very brief, or like in the case of the Mystery File, depend a lot on other contributors.

Are blogs becoming irrelevant? Do people have time to read blog posts nowadays, much less keep up their own blogs? With all the social media, people are distracted in other ways. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are not set up to give people the same experience as a blog. With Facebook, you spent most of your time reading what other people are doing, but it's in snippets of a couple of sentences, or a photo someone has posted. It's quick, abbreviated. You browse, read, smile at picture captions and share. Done. Move on. Twitter is even shorter. They both serve a purpose and they do it very well. Being connected on a daily basis with all the people in my life, wherever they live and no matter how long it's been since I've seen them, is a great experience.

So much so that sometimes it makes blogs an afterthought. Blogs are no longer about keeping in touch, but more about expressing a thought or creative interest. With blogs, it's all about your own personal experience, where you can write for as long as you want. Yes, it's also about marketing, but Facebook can be much more effective in a much shorter period of time. I think that the best way is to have both, but as most people will agree, it's a real struggle to keep up with both. It can take me an hour in the evening to go through all of the posts on my Facebook wall. And that's just what's been posted in the previous eight hours.

I'm glad I went through my list tonight. For those that have closed up shop or have slowed down, I don't blame you one bit. I can relate. For those that are still around: I admire your discipline. And I have a question for you: Are most of you retired? Just kidding.

I'm still in. I've forgotten how much I enjoy reading the short noir fiction on places like Beat to a Pulp and A Twist of Noir, or just to keep up with those who choose not to be on Facebook. And blog writing still helps with my confidence level over my own writing. Even after all these years, I need to remind myself that yeah, I do like the writing experience.

If any of you have recommendations for any new blogs you've started following over the past year? Feel free to recommend them in the comments.

More Information Than You'll Ever Need on Doc Savage

As a follow up to the post a few days ago on the DOC SAVAGE movie-to-be, ThePulp.Net site has an entire page on Doc Savage sources. At the bottom of the page is a list of all of the latest articles on Shane Black writing and directing the Doc Savage movie. It's pretty impressive, all of the information out there.

Book Review: LOVE ON THE RACKS: A History of American Romance Comics

LOVE ON THE RACKS: A History of American Romance Comics
Michelle Nolan
McFarland & Company, 2008



The romance comic book, like the romance pulp magazine, has always been given short shrift when it comes to being taken seriously. While the romance novel has had several books, some scholarly, published on its history, you'd be hard pressed to find much coverage in those books about either the comic book or the pulp years. Romance comics, like romance pulps before them, have been almost ignored as a subject of study.

With that, LOVE ON THE RACKS is a very important book and one that should be included in anyone who is interested in American popular culture. Not only does Michelle Nolan write a very thorough history of the comics, including an introductory chapter on the influence of the romance pulp magazine, but she puts their history into the context of the bigger story of the progression of all comic books. She covers the beginning of the romance pulp, which seemed to be more of a period when publishers dipped their toes in the water to see what the reaction would be. Even Archie, inarguably the most famous of romance comics, was a minor character during the World War II era. Nolan covers the first romance comic issues and gives entertaining synopses of many of the stories that were included in these issues. She covers the golden years (basically 1949 was the year of the romance comic, without question), the western romance comic (which was just as popular in pulp form), the "crash" after 1949 and the rebound during the 1950s, and how the romance pulp was affected by the Comics Code Authority.

Nolan, who with colleagues spent over two decades pooled together information to verify the existence of every single issue of all comic book genres, includes a Catalog of American Romance Comics as an appendix. The are numerous illustrations, both in color and black and white, of comic covers.

She covers the history of American romance comics brilliantly and not without some humor and opinion tossed in once in a while. It makes for a very entertaining read. In addition, I'll be using this book as a reference in my research on the love pulps.

New Paul Powers Collection: HIDDEN GHOSTS, and the cover!

The new Paul Powers collection has a name now! It is entitled HIDDEN GHOSTS: THE LOST STORIES OF PAUL S. POWERS.

Hidden ghosts comes from several types of ghosts that are in these stories, and I'm not just referring to the four WEIRD TALES stories that will be in here. There are ghosts of a psychological nature, too.

And....here's the cover! I am stoked - I love it! It has two of my favorite photos of my grandfather, and I think the colors are fantastic. A huge thank you to Matt Moring who once again came up with a brilliant design!



Look for HIDDEN GHOSTS to be available some time before PulpFest this July!

Thoughts by Daisy, #1 in a Series

Daisy Bacon says in LOVE STORY WRITER:

"Have you ever stopped to think what this country would be like without our magazines; I have wondered and I simply cannot picture it in my mind they are part of our national life. When they were downtown at 27th St. and Fifth Avenue, I used to go out of my way to look at the cover painting of all the magazines splayed in their many big windows. It never ceased to throw me to see our love story covers by Modest Stein, W.C Scott's famous Western story covers, and those four sea stories by well-known marine artists.

Even when I am hurrying for a train, I never failed to take a quick look at the newsstands as I fly past. To most people however I daresay a newsstand is just a place to stop and buy a newspaper or magazine. It differs little to them in any other place where merchandise is displayed or so. Thus the background becomes pretty much what we ourselves see in it."

DOC SAVAGE MOVIE ON TRACK WITH IRON MAN 3'S DIRECTOR: WILL MURRAY'S THOUGHTS

Some big news was released yesterday that will be of great interest to pulp fans and especially to DOC SAVAGE fans. Shane Black, famed writer and director whose latest directorial effort is a little film that was released last week called IRON MAN 3, is still on board to adapt DOC SAVAGE to the big screen, and is still determined to write and direct it as well.



Black wrote the LETHAL WEAPON series as well as KISS KISS, BANG BANG. But I'm sure the cache surrounding IRON MAN 3 - starring Robert Downey Jr. and Gwyneth Paltrow, and which had the second biggest box office opening EVER - is bound to put legs on this project, finally. The fact that it has also gotten very good reviews is icing on the cake.

I was lucky enough to get a hold of Will Murray, who is considered by many to be the world's authority on DOC SAVAGE, as well as author of the new DOC SAVAGE novels, and asked him what he thought about this latest news.

"I understand that Shane Black is a big pulp fan," he told me. "He has read most if not all of the original Docs. He buys the Will Murray Pulp Classics audiobooks, so his pulp interests are not limited to Doc Savage. So this is very encouraging. That said, Doc Savage will be tough to distill into a two-hour movie. I don't envy him that task. But after forty years of helping to keep the bronze flame burning, I am very, very hopeful."



So keep the faith, everyone. Without a doubt now is the best time to do a movie like this. It's Doc Savage's time to be included.

To see all of the latest DOC SAVAGE novels for sale, go to Altus Press.

To read my review on the latest Doc Savage novel, SKULL ISLAND, go here.

To read my review of DESERT DEMONS, released in 2011, go here.