Thanks to Lin Workman, creator of Bushi Tales, I have finally located some photos from Midsouthcon 25 which are not only from events I attended, but where I'm at least semiconscious, to boot. Surprisingly, while I felt lousy in the morning of the day I had four panels, I perked up as we went along — and the Star Wars 30th anniversary panel, speaking between Memphis Fan Force President Tim Brown and X-Wing Rogue Squadron artist  Jim Hall (seen below) was probably the most fun I've had at a panel in a long, long time. The room was packed and there was a lot of energy. Just goes to show I should schedule my first panels no earlier than 7 in the evening, and then go from there...

Check Lin's site for more pix including of  Mark Waid's signing that weekend at  Comics & Collectibles.



By the way, Greg Mitchell  (alias Hedec Ga, a poster on this site) dropped me a note at the convention to check out Outsider, and online zine he's been working with. Be sure to check it out!

And we've lost another cool actor, no pun intended. I first saw Roscoe Lee Browne when he played Box, the robot who worked in the freezer section (and took his job a little too far) of the City of Domes in Logan's Run, but he also played in two of the best episodes of All in the Family (the elevator episode) and The Cosby Show (the card game, where he utteres the immortal "I'll bump your rump with my trump!") as well as following Robert Guillaume as the Tates' butler on Soap. An unmistakable voice, that will be missed...

Hard to believe, isn't it? But that's what you'll find in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic #15, the climactic chapter to "Days of Fear"!

The production notes are now available — click the link above. Then be sure to click back here and share your thoughts on the issue!

While a lot of the obituaries of Johnny Hart have focused on his more controversial cartoons later in his career, I'm always reminded of his earliest work, as reprinted in the old Fawcett mass-market paperbacks like Hey! B.C. and What's New, B.C.

These are pretty hard to find, so it's not surprising more haven't seen them. I had a discussion with a couple of cartoonists  a few years ago (Ted Rall and John Kovalic, not to drop names) about Hart's body of work, and I mentioned that if all readers had seen were the later stuff, they might be surprised to learn how edgy B.C. was regarded in its earliest years, versus everything else on the comics page.  Charles Schulz was a huge fan, and  The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling wrote the foreword to B.C. Strikes Back.

The strips of 1958-60, when the characters first discover simple items (and more complicated ones, like women) really make the best use of the concept. And there's a fatalistic ring to many of the early strips that speaks a lot more to the late 1960s than the late 1950s -- but then, it's hard not to be fatalistic when you're a caveman! Where Schulz had Happiness is a Warm Puppy, Hart had Loneliness is Rotting on a Bookrack.

I'd really like to see a decent reprint program for these early strips. The mass-market paperbacks are out there, but are all abridged — and if there are larger versions like there were for Peanuts, I've never seen them.