Okay, the work is done and Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom is on the verge of its rebirth as a much improved, fully illustrated edition. We even have the bar code.

One of the final delays was that we wanted to include an excerpt and the cover from the second book, Doc Wilde and The Mad Skull, in the back of Frogs, so Gary Chaloner actually had to paint the thing. Seems like that takes time. Who knew?

Anyway, though it will get some tweaking between now and its actual  publication, it is effectively done, ready for your eyes...

UPDATE: To see the cover complete with title and branding, just look in the sidebar. Click on the image there and it'll zoom out...]

Attention fans of Doc Wilde and great pulp adventure in general:

The 1994 film version of The Shadow is coming to Blu-ray.

This isn't just good news because the film is a visual delight and should have already been available thus, but because in the nearly twenty years of the film's existence, it has never been released on disk in the USA in its proper widescreen aspect ratio. The DVD is one of those butcheries known as “pan and scan,” in which they’ve sliced the sides of the image off in order to make it fit on an old-fashioned, non-widescreen TV screen. This kind of treatment is a travesty for any film, but The Shadow is a really nicely shot, lushly designed film, so it’s doubly so.

Here's a short review Doc Wilde author Tim Byrd wrote of the film a couple of years ago:

I know a lot of pulp fans don’t like this movie. But I (almost) love it.

It does make the common error of not trusting the source material and playing things for laughs, but unlike Doc Savage, it doesn’t descend into Adam West’s Batman levels of camp, and actually earns some real laughs. There is silliness in the film, but there is also some real wit. The banter between Lamont Cranston (the Shadow’s secret identity) and Margo Lane often feels like it came from an old Billy Wilder flick:

Margo: We need each other.

Lamont: No we don’t.

Margo: We have a connection.

Lamont: No we don’t.

Margo: Then how can you explain that I can read your thoughts?

Lamont: My thoughts are hard to miss.

Margo: And why is that?

Lamont: Psychically, I’m very well endowed.

Margo: I’ll bet you are.

Alec Baldwin is fantastic in the title role. As Lamont Cranston, who was Bruce Wayne before Bruce Wayne, he’s dashing and charismatic and smart. When he takes on the Shadow identity, his appearance actually changes, showing the darker self he usually hides, with his eyes going black and his nose taking on the sharp aquiline shape that was seen on hundreds of pulp covers.

And the Shadow looks AWESOME. Baldwin has great physicality in the role (including a snappy two-gun quick-draw from his shoulder holsters), the costume design is gorgeous, and director Russell Mulcahy, for all his foibles as a storyteller, makes him look great both in some great action sequences and in some brilliantly composed and iconic hero shots. For that matter, the film in general is beautiful, capturing the Art Deco style of the era with elan. And Penelope Ann Miller’s Margo Lane is sizzling hot.

Over at deviantART, artist Muzski has posted a series of cartoony covers for some of H.P. Lovecraft's classic pulp horror stories:

Here's one with relevance to Doc Wilde, because the story it illustrates is a strong influence on Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom:

Fun stuff.

Over at Goodreads, the Pulp Magazine Authors and Literature Fans group is discussing my book, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom (it was the official common read for November, but the discussion is only really just beginning).

I’d like to invite any and all of you to join in, or at least hop by and take a peek:

Pulp Magazine Authors & Literature Fans Home Page

“Common Reads” Discussion Board

If you’re a reader and you’re not taking advantage of Goodreads, you should be. It’s a great site for sharing and discovering books, and there’s a lot of dialogue between not only readers and other readers, but readers and writers.

I found wisdom in a gamebook the other day, advice I think everyone should take, everyone should remember, everyone should act on.

Author Will Murray just posted these short comments on my book in various forums devoted to pulp adventure fiction:

Over the weekend I read Tim Byrd's young adult Doc Savage pastiche novel. Let me say that DOC WILDE AND THE FROGS OF DOOM is a pulp-pounding ribbiting croaker of a tale! It mixes a 21st century version of the Man of Bronze and his extended family of adventurers with evil Lovecraftian frogazoids infiltrating our reality via the South American republic of Hidalgo. It's out in May.

This is a particularly gratifying review for me, because Doc Wilde is in many ways an homage to the old pulp hero Doc Savage (see more on the Suggested Reading page), and Will is the official manager for the literary estate of Lester Dent, Doc Savage's creator. Will has also written seven actual Doc Savage novels (published under the pen name "Kenneth Robeson," just as all of Dent's stories were).

So the current keeper of the Doc Savage literary legacy loves Doc Wilde.

That's pretty cool.