Before we being, a word from Jermaine: Now that the new Acme site is up and running, we return you to your regularly scheduled installment of M.A. Foster's Eyeless in Gaza editorial feature! Exclusive to Acme Comics.com, look for never before printed pieces as well as archives from the previous incarnation of our website. Coming soon! And now...our feature presentation!
Eyeless In Gaza - June '07
I am Dead and You are Alive?
(Apologies to Phillip K. Dick and Immanuel Carrere, his biographer)
As Paul Harvey used to say - "And now a potpourri of new on.........PAGE TWO." That stretched pause for emphasis was Harvey's trademark. For all you latter-day uninformed, misinformed, and malformed marching, TV-faced Clones of the Mindless Ones, of Dormammu's Dark Dimension, Paul Harvey was a syndicated news commentator for Am Radio, back when AM radio was the onliest radio that was, and FM radio carried local sports broadcasting. Tonight's game will be the Puckersville Poachers facing the Pomona Polecats in Pony League Baseball. Different planet, eh? Different Universe. I feel like the man who fell to Earth. Now go back to marching to destroy the world, screen faces glowing bluish, flickering with the rapid fire action. Well, if not action, rapid scene change. My neighbor's hose at night flickers through the blinds with the TV screens of three or four or five different sets, one in every room, all tuned to different channels. Jeez, they must be twitching in there like a one-armed paper-hanger with the itch. Bet they have one in the bathroom. Why haven't they had the standoff with the SWAT team yet? I shot my old man in the back in Oregon, don't take me alive! Entertainment or disease? Bet they can't find the THIS END UP instruction on a milk carton. They keep looking for the OPEN OTHER END warning. Flip, flip, flip. Keep the hamsters busy turning the wheel, that rolls through well traveled corridors into the valley of steel. (My appreciations and thanks to Roger Waters for that last line.) Anybody remember Roger Waters? Does anyone have the span of attention to remember who Donald Rumsfeld used to be?
In a previous installment of Eyeless, 2005, I mentioned that someone had made me an offer I couldn't resist and six of my previous Sci-Fi novels are going to be re-published in two volumes. Granted, that I'm small potatoes in that universe (and other universe, too. Some are so small that they are hardly at all, and others so great they win prizes.) but still, a reprise is a reprise is a reprise. Posted up on the famous World Wide Web for all the hip and the entertained to see and marvel. Lay down your arms, heeee's back!
The sales, so my royalty report informs me, are ok, even if they didn't sell tickets like Spider-man 3, of which the less said, the better. I posted my address and telephone number in this column. And the response has been deafening in its silence. And I mean dead silent, like the unknown Pharoah's tomb: un-found and un-dug. Nephren-Ka, were are you when we need you? As to any treasures maybe within, it would be imprudent and egotistic to speak, but I can truthfully observe that at least the thieves and tomb robbers haven't broken in.
My detractors will say that's because nobody care - which is old news I set out ignoring in grade school in 1945, and there wasn't any news there to start with. Everyone's entitled to an opinion. If we lived by them alone we'd all be dead and that's what they are generally worth.
I have received precisely three answers to date. (Maybe I am dead. That would be news you should hear, since I'm here writing! Oh well, I had illusions when I was alive. I recall being called a youthful idealist when I was 65.) One old friend wondering what had become of me. One SF fan. One fellow wanting to know if they had yet shipped to bookstores. Stand or Kneel, oh ye multitudes. This is for a fellow who has posted reviews on Amazon.com for 15 years and collared two nominations for New Writer of the Year. Who was Nixon's second vice president? That's how long I've been public.
You saw it here. People who with to speak may do so via the Acme Comics web site. It's not a chat room, its a message pass-on, but I always answer if so asked, and I tend to answer politely, even if abused. My other contacts will be posted at the end. I'm home at night and sometimes by day. Your nickel. I don't have a cell phone nor web address. There's only one TV in my house.
The Book of the Ler and The Transformer Trilogy were published in Overober and November of 2006 and are available on Amazon.com and bog-box bookstores across this vast and restless land. Fifteen Dollars US each retail, and if you check it, that's actually cheaper than comics nowadays. I paid 19.99 for Garth Ennis' 303 and consider that money well-spent. I also remember when paper bound Sci-Fi books were 25 cents (Ace Doubles at that) at Sam and Mack's Newsstand (and comics were 10 cents) - there's been some price inflation since, but the quality hasn't exactly marched along as a brother in arms. And comics have gotten a lot better.
The gotcha in publishing is that if they lease the property in order to publish it, you owe them first crack at the next work of fiction, so I duly sat down at my word-processor and wrote two novels and sent them off. 2005, 2006, yesterday...and the silence is deafening there, too. 18 months of it on the first and 14 months on the second. Even if both sold yesterday, it might be 2010 before they actually saw the daylight. Some career, huh?
This is not cool in an instant hot-wired world. So that nobody wanders around in the dark, writing written stories is not east and it is not quick. Doing it doesn't make it easier, it makes it harder if you do it right. It takes time and attention like every few things in this world do, and measured by what effort and focus goes into it, it is not well paid; and lately by the tavern door agape, what is well paid is essentially unreadable landfill. The DaVinci Code broke a record at my house for the number of pages I tried to read before sending it cartwheeling across the room. Three pages, a record. No recycling. I put the thing in the garbage with last night's stew. At least I used Gordie Dickson's The Genetic General for a refrigerator leveler.
Lash Larue has more of a following and more of a public than I do. He's had two write-ups in the Greensboro paper. Well, they were about felony warrants, but all the same, maybe I need to hire Lash as a coach. Bet he's got a fan club, too. And, well, the genre he works is a little rough.
Questions Department
What has happened to Joshua Middleton? Really good comics artists at that level of drawing are hard to come by. I know he can draw. Why isn't he?
What happened to David Mack? I know he can draw, I've seen the work, collected it, and he can paint, too, fine-art grade watercolor work. Why does he waste the comic fan's time with oh-so-precious third-rate art school cut-and-paste constructions accompanied by doodles and aimless noodling stories going nowhere. Maybe that was avant-garde in New York in 1959, but I prefer artists who can actually draw instead of pose, and I respect storytellers who can come to the point. There is supposed to be one, you know. Even Spider-man can stand up to evil. Even Batman can occasionally relish its bitter taste. Even at Marvel. Even at DC. Even at Dark Horse. Even at ONI Press.
I suppose, in the halls of the suppository, that they are all trying to tell me something. I volunteered to be an unpaid columnist for the Daily News and Record (my son asked if I had volunteered to be a Communist), and I never got an answer. Also sent a prospectus, with illustrations, for a proposed article to Model Railroader, and no answer there, either. Model Railroader? Is there no balm in Gilead? Where do I go from here?
Well, okay. Let's move on. Want to talk to the dead? Do you dare? I'll shoot you for your shoes. And don't even ask about your Momma.
Next exciting issue: God and Death both carry umbrellas, and other marvels.
M.A. Foster, 5409 Amberhill Dr. Greensboro, NC 27455 -> 1-336-288-6442. I do customer service. Ask the Acme guys. I'm as gentle as a little bird.
M.A. Foster is the author of several science fiction novels including Gameplayers of Zan and The Morphodite. He spent over sixteen years as a Captain and Russian linguist in the U.S. Air Force and has seen and done more than most of us will do in two or three lifetimes. M.A. has been a patron of Acme Comics for almost twenty five years and is always a welcome and familiar face that brings cheer and credibility to these dark and uncertain times. Mr. Foster was also the originator of the term "Lord Retail" for which Jermaine is eternally grateful.
