The Diamond shipping chart says this is the week for not one, not two, but three Star Wars comics — including Knights of the Old Republic #27, the third part of "Vector." Notes on the issue to come — after I recover a bit from New York. Well, maybe more than a bit!

4/28 Update: And now the notes are online. Enjoy!

Just back in from New York Comicon, and all I can say is — well, exactly nothing, because I lost my voice on the first day of the show and it never realy came back. I went from a sort of Sally Kellerman rasp to a Lionel Stander croak (Max from Hart to Hart) to nothing at all.

Not the sort of thing that makes it particularly easy to call a taxi, although I did meet one of the more interesting taxi drivers while heading to Times Square. Instead of simply swearing at the workmen in the road, he'd give them a personality review worthy of Babu from Seinfeld. "You are a very bad flag man! A bad flag man and a very bad human being!" I also got out to he touristy ESPN Zone, where I couldn't have heard myself speak anyway during the hockey game. Something about that experience suggested that New Yorkers may not exactly like Bostonians much, sportswise...

And film ads for Indiana Jones and Iron Man were everywhere. A big Indy ad is the first thing I saw on the island, and there were gigantic ads on buildings for Iron Man. Speaking of which, Andy Mangels' new book, Iron Man Beneath the Armor, was out — including a nice section on my time on the series. It's a book worth checking out — follow the link to more info.

I did a signing at the Dark Horse booth with Rob Williams, the writer of Star Wars: Rebellion and the upcoming Indiana Jones mini-series, Tomb of the Gods; that's him on the left and me on the right, below, flanking an Indy fan. (That's Dark Horse publisher Mike Richardson in the background left.)

One of the interesting things was the Firaxis booth, where they were showing the new Civilization version for consoles, Revolution. This mural artist worked throughout the show...

Thanks to everyone there, especially Marc Patten, Chris Revekant and the Heroes in Action crew!

OK, it's not really — but evidently the folks at Wookieepedia have Jarael as their Featured Article for the week, and that should count.

Something to add to it — at a con, I had trouble naming a real person who I "hear" when writing her. I don't go in for a lot of the  dream-casting stuff, but I guess Catherine Zeta-Jones is a pretty good fit — and, of course, she did the whole Zorro thing. (Now, the creepy thing is that when I very first started writing Lucien, I was imagining a Michael Douglas voice... fortunately, that changed!)

That didn't take long: The Knights of the Old Republic short story "Labor Pains" is now online at the premium Star Wars Hyperspace service. Members can reach it by clicking the link above: To register, click here. Illustrations by Pablo Hidalgo!

The story takes place approximately 3,963 years before the battle of Yavin, and is set between issues #12 and #13 of the comics series. Or Volumes 2 and 3, if you're counting that way. Enjoy!

I am cleared to report that my first Star Wars prose fiction (if you don't count such prose-ish things as the Knights of the Old Republic Handbook or the KOTOR Campaign Guide for the RPG) will be appearing soon on StarWars.com's subscription service, Hyperspace.

It's a KOTOR story, set in continuity and featuring several of the comics characters in an untold story narrated by The Gryph, in his own... er, unique voice.

I'll post an alert when "Labor Pains" is online!

OK, there's a lot of stuff to talk about here — if I had any sense, I'd parcel it out over multiple blog entries, but these shouldn't wait.

First, solicitations have been released by Dark Horse for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Vol. 4: Daze of Hate, Knights of Suffering and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic #31. Pages are now online here for these as well. I have also fixed the navigation for Vol. 3, so that should now work. and

Second, I have posted to the upper left my tentative show schedule for the next couple of months. You'll see it includes New York Comicon, where Rob Williams and I will be signing together Friday afternoon at 4 at the Dark Horse booth. More details as I have them.

Now, going back in convention time, I have a meager few pix from Midsouthcon. I have to learn to set the camera right — and then to actually use it. I enjoyed the con as ever — and there were highlights including hanging out with Len Wein, this year's comics guest of honor, and with the local Star Wars Fanforce.

Below, a shot of the character-writing panel with me, Lin Workman, Len, and Mike Curtis...

...and then we've got Nicki and Traci, moderators at TheForce.net, wearing their home-brew Zayne/Jarael shirts featuring Zayne and Jarael (images composited from #13, I believe).

Not to say that they favor Jarael, but they said they considered wearing shirts showing a picture of Shel with her face crossed out. Poor Shel...

And then we have Traci in her Jedi guise, crossing sabers with her husband (and my fellow panelist) Qui-Gon Tim!

Thanks again to everyone — always enjoy Midsouthcon!

...actually at Midsouthcon right now, but I took a moment to post some thoughts about Knights of the Old Republic #26, on sale now.

Also dig ye the latest Sword & Sarcasm strips for the week!

If the Diamond chart does not deceive me, then Knights of the Old Republic #26 is on sale this Wednesday, featuring the next chapter of "Vector." Spring has sprung — and there's something growing!

I wasn't expecting to be able to make Midsouthcon this year, but I find myself in town and will be able to keep my string of recent attendances unbroken. There are five panels on the tentative list I'll be either speaking on or attending:

Opening night: Friday, 9 p.m.: My annual comics panel
Saturday: 11 a.m. : Creating engaging characters
Saturday 2 p.m.: Webcomics panel
Saturday 3 p.m.: Legends Lost — memorial panel on Clarke, Gygax, others; (I'm really glad this came together)
Saturday 6 p.m.: Films of George Lucas — last year's panel was so fun, they did it again

Check the Midsouthcon website for updates. Sorry for the site outage here this past weekend: The servers went down at the host.

This is hard to write — the news was harder to read. Arthur C. Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.

Clarke was one of my favorite authors, period — and his works are one of the reasons I'm writing today. As I may have mentioned earlier on Roy Schieder's passing, the 2001 series of novels had a major impact on my imagination — as did Childhood's End and Rendezvous with Rama and so many more. And lesser known ones, like A Fall of Moondust — and I had just finished rereading another of his short story collections the other day. Plus his straight science books, which I've turnedto again and again...

I wish I had something inspired and eloquent to say right now... I hope I will later. This is going to take a while to digest. I guess I'll suffice for the moment to say thanks, Sir Arthur, for the many, many journeys. You are already missed.

One of the things about working in the creative world is that you have a lot of projects working at different paces — there are the ones you spend most of your time on, and there are the slower-boil ones you develop for a long time before releasing. Which brings me to Sword & Sarcasm, the new medieval fantasy webcomic by Chuck Fiala and yours truly, kicking off today.

Chuck (in period dress, there at right) and I have known each other for a long time — first at Comics Buyer's Guide Picnic-Cons, though I knew his work from Fandom Confidential and the Comics Reader long before that. We'd collaborated some with him illustrating my Longbox Manifesto columns for CBG, but we always wanted to do something that recalled the humor comics we grew up on. Anyway, what seems eons ago, we worked out something that would bring together some of the screwball elements we liked into a reader-friendly story with a broader continuity — and with Chuck doing the heavy lifting in the art department, he built up enough advance work to make a webstrip a go.

The strip follows two main characters in our first story arc: The protagonist, Duke Benedict, is a hateful popinjay; in our first episode, his long-suffering wisely subjects throw him out on his ear. That doesn't stop him from trying to change the equation, of course — which he does by hiring a traveling mercenary to help him reclaim his power. But Herbert the minotaur (or cow — there’s something fishy in his family tree) is more than the simple warrior he seems — and, well, it’s not exactly a match made in heaven for either of them!

I haven't done strip writing in a long time, but I've done it off and on for years — and it's fun seeing what Chuck's come up with. At least at the beginning, Chuck is planning on two strips a week — Monday and Thursday — and we have a pretty good head-start to make that happen. Bookmark SwordandSarcasm.com and check in with our pilgrims' progress!

While I'm still contributing to Comics Buyer's Guide and the Krause book line as time allows, I've been branching out with hobby projects like The Comics Chronicles, Newsarama, and, now, a contribution to the king of all price guides: The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. In advising the guide for this year's edition, I wrote one of the cover features (there are multiple covers) — mine dealing with Star Wars comics history and getting into some of my past research on circulation.

If you were wondering when Doug Wheatley and I would be paired on the same project, the unexpected answer is here — as Doug drew one of the two variant covers for the comics shop market. The book is out on April 1 and you can get it from your local shop or order it directly from Gemstone. Be advised that there are multiple covers, and you must request the one you want. (Actually, the Marvel Villains cover is by my pal Mark Sparacio, so you should get two!) And note that the Star Wars cover is just for the comics shop market, so if you click the Amazon link below, it'll take you to the order page for the mass-market edition, instead.