Jason Franks's Blog, page 39
August 2, 2011
July 27, 2011
Can't Stop Progress
Hey folks,
Been making some good progress here.
Bloody Waters is done. Faerie Apocalypse is done. A slew of short stories, done. My novella "Pack Rules" will be available soon–I'll post when I have links–and I have had another exciting new comics project greenlit, which I hope I will be able to share with you very soon.
The new McBlack full colour one shot will, I hope, be ready for Armageddon in September, and I hope to announce the next Blackglass Press anthology then at well.
In addition to that, I have new comics projects are almost ready to pitch. The first is a social-realist story about a bunch of goth kids who live in rural Victoria called Bucket of Glass. The art is by Joe Pimienta (penciller/plotter of A Friendly Game, SLG Publishing 2010). I met Jose at San Diego Comicon last year, when SLG had us both signing at the same time, and we've been conspiring on this since then. It's looking superb and we should have that pitch out this week.
The second is a police procedural/horror/fantasy book, illustrated by the one and only Paul Abstruse (Witch King, Gaining Velocity) with colour by David Aravena. I think will be called the Tigers of Wrath, but you may have heard me and Paul referring to it as Zycorax. We have the first scene wrapped up and it's yielded a lot of good feedback already. Paul will be cranking out the second half of the pitch once he gets back from California.
There's more, of course. I'm now working up a project called Last Recon, which is a military/superhero book that I think is very different to the other books we've seen in that genre–and I know that's a lot of books. I don't have an artist yet, but this one feels like another goer.
So that's where I'm at right now. I will try to post some artwork for Bucket of Glass and Zycorax here soon. Meanwhile, stay tuned–I've got some cool stuff about to break.
Cheers,
– JF
June 28, 2011
eBook Badassery
New eBook editions of the Bad-Ass Faeries books are now available in multiple formats. Vol. 2. has 'Shadowcutting' in it, by me and Steven Mangold, and Vol. 3 has my Ozsploitation Tarantino fairy tale, 'Theatre of Conflict'.
They're like five bucks each--cheap as some very bad ass chips.
Bad-Ass Faeries 2: Just Plain Bad
Mobi Pocket/ All Romance/ Amazon Kindle
Bad-Ass Faeries 3: In All Their Glory
Mobi Pocket/ All Romance/ Amazon Kindle
June 24, 2011
Apocalypse: Round 4
It's done.
About 63,000 words.
11 years of struggle and doubt.
Now comes the hard part: selling it. I promised the final draft "by the end of the year" to an agent I was talking to in 2006. I wonder if she still remembers me?
-- JF
Faerie Apocalypse: Final draft
About 63,000 words.
11 years of struggle and doubt.
Now comes the hard part: selling it.
-- JF
RIP Gene Colan
Legendary comics artist Gene Colan has passed away, aged 84.
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2011/06/2...
In the 1980s, when we had first moved to Australia, my folks took me and my brother Gavin to see the Royal Melbourne Agricultural Show. My brother and I were each allowed to choose a showbag, and my brother went for the Horror one. I don't even remember what I bought. Showbags were basically full of sugar and cheap toys, but Gav's had a piece og actual treasure in it: a Tomb of Dracula omnibus reprinting some Gene Colan stories from the seventies. I didn't have a lot of comics as a kid, but I remmember them well--and one (technically my brother's)? Mindblowing. Dracula vs Elizabeth Bathory, a newly-resurrected Vlad Tsepes laying siege to a castle in his native lands... heady stuff, breathtakingly gruesome. I wasn't then much of a horror fan, but I read that comic a million times and when I did start to get into the horror genre a couple of years later it was because that book had slowly ensnared me. (And also because my brother got into sharks and marine life, so horror could be mine, all mine). It was indirectly through Gene that I made the connection to Dave Gutierrez, my good friend and inker of McBLACK. Dave was often Gene's inker in the 2000s and you have no idea how amazing it felt to work with somebody who knew and worked with the great man.
RIP Gene Colan. Always and forever one of the greats.
-- JF
June 22, 2011
Tastes Like Comics: Rebooting the DCU
Tastes Like Comics asked me how I would reboot the DCU (since AOL/Time Warner forgot to CC me in on that one). So I told them.
Given my choice of DC properties to reboot, I chose TAO.
http://www.tasteslikecomics.com/2011/06/how-would-you-reboot-the-dcu-jason-franks-blackglass-press/
– JF
How to Write Good (Prose)
I wrote an essay about how to write good prose for the Literary Handyman blog.
Not how to structure your plot, or develop your characters, or handle exposition or write good dialog… how to write good prose.
Check it out!
June 18, 2011
New Pages
I have added two pages to the site: Essays and Interviews. Here you can find essays and interviews I've done all over the place collected up together so that you don't have to trawl through old postings to find them. Some of them are published or re-published on this site; some link to elsewhere.
The newest addition is an essay I wrote this morning, Fantasy Moratorium. Check it out if you want to see me wax cynical about cliches in fantasy fiction.
June 7, 2011
Robot Reviewage
The Optical Sloth has given Robots Are People 2.0 a nice review:
http://www.opticalsloth.com/?p=18122
The prior review for Robots Are People, Too! #3, is here:
http://www.opticalsloth.com/?p=17063
I'm particularly gratified that they seem to like my Rodney strips; they're some of my favourites.
Robots are People 2.0 is, unfortunately, sold out, but you can read the whole thing online at the Blackglass Press link. (Just click through to preview).
Robots #1 and #3 were published by Greg Vondruska, the editor, not by Blackglass Press, so I can't offer those to you--but Greg Vondruska and I are looking at bringing all of these robot stories back into print, perhaps as a single volume with some new material.
-- JF
