Jason Franks's Blog, page 37

Rambles Review of The Sixsmiths

Tom Knapp over at Rambles.net has reviewed The Sixsmiths.

He says: "Some are funnier than others. Some are even a little touching. The final sequence is startling, and leaves you hanging..."

Which I think sums up the book nicely.

Check out the full review over here:

http://www.rambles.net/sixsmiths_the10.html
--JF

Crossovers in the Comics Mainstream

Emmet O'Cuana, S. Raynard Haynes, Hubert Vigilla and I discuss crossovers and what they mean for mainstream comics at TLC:

http://www.tasteslikecomics.com/2011/09/crossovers-the-only-game-in-town-or-running-the-industry-into-the-ground/

Kagemono: Flowers and Skulls review @ COTBF

Nice review of Kagemono: Flowers and Skulls from Children of the Burning Fist:

http://childrenoftheburningfist.wordpress.com/2011/07/16/kagemono-flowers-and-skulls-review-tales-of-terror-from-down-under/

Not just a nice review, but also the coolest name for a website that I've yet come across.

XDA ZAI: First Draft

My dimension-hopping assassin's travelogue novel, ZDA ZAI, is now a complete story.

First draft: 92,783 words.

19 September 2006 to 19 September 2011.

First chapter is sub-ready. Chapter 7 was published in 2009 in the Assassin's Canon anthology from Utility Fog Press.

Hopefully this one will not take longer to edit than it did to write.

-- JF

Nerd Culture Podcast: Sixsmiths Review

The fine folks at the Nerd Culture Podcast reviewed The Sixsmiths.

http://nerdculturepodcast.com/2011/09/meet-the-sixsmiths-a-review/

Check it out. Buy the book.

McBlack One Shot

The McBlack one shot is now ready for print.

Written by me. Art by Mike Athey, Tom Bonin, Trevor Wood and me. Colours by Luke pickett. Cover by Rhys McDonald. 

Should be out for Armageddon on October 22nd, and I'll start serializing it on the website during that same week.

Yippie kay yay.

-- JF

Brandon Seifert's THE WITCH DOCTOR

I interviewed Brandon Seifert about his hit Image/Skyboud series, THE WITCH DOCTOR, for Tastes Like Comics.

Check it one time:

http://www.tasteslikecomics.com/2011/09/creator-owned-spotlight-the-witch-doctor-2/

-- JF

Pack Rules

And here we are, folks. At long last, Black House Comics' After the World #3 my pulp novella "Pack Rules" is out in newsagents across Australia.
[image error]"Pack Rules" is a story about three groups of survivors competing for resources in zombie-infested Melbourne: a group of yuppies, a band of blue collar workers, and a pack of feral dogs. A football badboy, an IT contractor, a medical student, a former soldier with a secret, a family with an intellectually disabled child, a german shepherd... I've tried to put as much of Melbourne on display as I could, from the inner city Docklands developments to the outer suburbs. 

"Pack Rules" is set in the same continuity as the preceding After The World volumes, "Killable Hours" and "Gravesend", but it's a discrete story with an all new cast of characters. 

I tried really hard to come up with a new angle on the zombie apocalypse and I think this delivers a story you haven't seen before amongst the metric tonnes of zombie literature that have been delivered over the past five or six years. I worked my arse off on this and I am really proud of it. 

The book has a gorgeous cover by Jason Paulos (EEEK!) and it also contains some stories by a number of notable Aussie writers, including Jason Fischer, Raymond Gates, and B. Michael Radburn.

Please check it out--it's in newsagents across the country, or you can buy it online from blackboox.net.

Bucket of Glass at the Downtown LA Art Walk

A page of artwork my upcoming project with Jose Pimienta, BUCKET OF GLASS, is being exhibited in the Black and White gallery as part of the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk. September 8th, Los Angeles, CA.

I haven't talked about this project here yet, but if you're in LA (and I know some of you are Angelenos) and you want to see a preview, you'd best get down there in a couple of days time and have a look!

http://downtownartwalk.org/lisa-b-gallery/

-- JF

ZAI

We are cranking here at Casa Franks, boys and girls.

I slowed down a bit over the weekend, but right now, until I start work again, I'm able to turn out approximately one pencilled CBlack page a day. I have also been writing. Boy howdy, have I been writing.

My current project is XDA ZAI. For those fo you who've been following this blog for a while, this a novel about a dimension-hopping assassin whose chief joy in life is in the travel. I sold one of the chapters to the Assassin's Canon anthology (Utlity Fog Press, 2009) but I put the book aside for a while because I felt as if I was too unfocused. Now that I've completed the other big projects that were on my plate at the time (Bloody Waters, Faerie Apocalypse, McBlack vol.01 and The Sixsmiths) it's back at the top of my pile and I picked up where I left off--the middle of chapter 8.

I've since then completed chapters 9 and 10 and I'm now working on the eleventh and final part of the book. This one, for some reason, is slower going than the others. Perhaps because I've tried to pack triple the amount of locations into it (the book is about travel, after all, and I want to go out with a bang... er, so to speak). Perhaps it's because I enjoy writing these so much and I don't want to see the end of it.. even though the book is structured in a way that will let me add new adventures any time I feel like it. This was not an accident--most of the chapters functin discretely, although there is a clear throug arc across all of them.

But of course, this isn't the end of it. IUt's the end of the first draft I can see bearing down on me. After that the fun is over and it's time to edit the fucker into submission-readiness. Perhaps it's that editing slog that I am afraid of--it feels as if I've already spent most fo the year doing exactly that.

My goal is to have this final chapter ready by the end of the week. Let's see how it goes...

Hopefully I will have another announcement by then as well.

Cheers,

-- JF