Signal Boosts and Tab Clearing

All the news that's fit to print, but maybe doesn't justify an entire post to itself.

First off, as we were just speaking of Atomic Robo, a month or two back the spinoff comic Real Science Adventures went live as a similarly presented webcomic - as of this posting it updates Tuesday-Thursday while Atomic Robo is Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Thus far the entirety of Volume 2 ("The Billion-Dollar Plot", one of Tesla's pre-Robo adventures) has been posted, along with the beginning of "Raid on Marauder Island", an all-new Kickstarter-funded prequel to The Flying She-Devils of the Pacific. No word yet on whether any stories from Volume 1 will be making an appearance, but I imagine it's only a matter of time until they're up, complete with covers imitating hilarious old men's magazines.

Also funding on Kickstarter is a new fantasy fiction magazine that I'm quite interested in. The chief draw of Skelos: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy is the promise of a never-before-published Robert E. Howard fantasy piece. which would be quite a find after eight decades. As it turns out, however, "unpublished" doesn't mean quite the same thing as "unknown":

"The REH piece in this first issue is a fictional essay in the form of three drafts written in early 1926. It's much like a prototype for Howard's later essay "The Hyborian Age" written as backstory for his Conan tales. This early essay tells the story of the rise of the Lemurians, Atlanteans, and the prehistoric Picts. It represents one of Howard's earliest attempts at true world-building and is the very beginning of the fictional prehistoric setting of the later Kull and Conan stories. The final version of this essay would eventually be inserted into the Bran Mak Morn story "Men of the Shadows" where it was narrated by the Pictish shaman Gonar."

Even so, it still sounds like an interesting read, and at $3 for the first digital issue there's very little buy-in if it's all one's interested in.

Also in the pop-literary-criticism vein, the Sherlock Holmes Pastiche Characters website I mentioned last fall has added an index for Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers 2 to its list of Indexes to Classic Sherlockian Works (it's currently listed as a second Volume One, but it's definitely for Volume 2). This is a much-needed and sorely appreciated project, and I for one am very grateful that it exists.

Finally, the long-awaited followups to the Crossovers books are now available for preorder from the Meteor House Press website. Now called Crossovers Expanded, they look very comparable to the original volumes, and will be shipping sometime in the late summer. The new covers look particularly slick, and so of course Sean Levin has added them to the headers of his Crossover Universe blog:

But will they have indexes?

I know I'm greatly looking forward to these, they'll be great references for a couple projects I'm working on . . .