It’s that time again, or at any rate, it’s that time now: through November 3 you can save $10 on a $50 T-shirt order, or blow out all the stops and save $30 on a $100 T-shirt order, from my online emporia at Retropolis, Saga Shirts, and Hot Wax Tees.

For $10 off a $50 order use the coupon code NOEXCUSE.
For $30 off a $100 order, use the coupon code PFLUVSU.

… and because those three shops all use the same shopping cart you’re welcome to mix and match between the shops to save cross-genre, which has nothing to do with cross-dressing, unless, you know, that’s what you’re into. Honestly, Marge, it makes no difference to me.

In the distant future, humanity will be annihilated by its greatest creation: a half-mad, living computer called… ILLUSIONOID!

Hidden on an abandoned moon post, a lone survivor sends cryptic messages backwards through time, desperate to warn of the deadly danger to come. Will you heed these warnings?

Move a little closer to your Time Radios. That’s it: just like that. Good. For what you are about to hear may change the future… and ultimately spare Mankind from the monstrous menace of… Illusionoid.

Part Satellite of Love, part Twilight Zone, and part An Evening at the Improv, ILLUSIONOID is a bi-weekly (fortnightly?) series of podcasts in which Paul Bates, Lee Smart and Nug Nahrgang take a strange, inspiring title and run with it for a few minutes of demented improv claiming to be a cautionary broadcast from the Last Man in the Universe. They solicit for titles on their Facebook page and now, since they’ve just discovered my Pulp Sci-Fi Title-O-Tron, they may be using that for inspiration, too.

I can’t wait to hear what they make of something like Shadow of the Accountant of Doom or The Astronomer That Misplaced the Galaxy.

The language may not be entirely safe for work (depending on where you work; sailors are probably going to be fine). But with that caveat, go forth to the Illusionoid web site and sample tales like "Whither Saturn?" and "Time Goat". And if you happen to be in Toronto on Sunday evening there’s a live recording session at Comedy Bar.

After a couple of rounds of testing this morning I’ve got page update notifications for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual now up and running on Twitter; it’s a little less optimal from my end than the RSS feed, but it should work perfectly well for the rest of you.

I don’t know yet whether I’ll use that Twitter account for anything else, but if I do I promise to tweet responsibly. Meaning, no OMG THIS COFFEE IS HOT. BUT NOT TOO HOT. JUST REALLY HOT. Sort of thing.

With that extracurricular task I think I’ve finished off my current round on The Lair of the Clockwork Book. Like last time, I’ve never caught up the entire sixteen weeks I like to see in the buffer – I’m at thirteen weeks, now – and I think this is a lesson of some kind involving math, hours, Achilles, and a tortoise. I’ll figure it out.

And just as I did last time around I’m stealing the missing days from Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS, poor thing. Having a running serial really does make it difficult to keep that second story on track. Being as we’re in the time of year we’re in, I’m also going to have to spend some time doing holiday refits for my other web sites; so TWO BRAINS, with its illustrations just a third done (so far!) is about to take another hit.

I guess the good news that when I return to The Lair of the Clockwork Book there will only be about twenty-five more illustrations to go – although when I remember that I wrote crowd scenes into the finale, I question just how good that news is. In fact I somehow wrote crowd scenes into my upcoming pages for TWO BRAINS, as well. How I managed to get those matching mobs right up against each other in the schedule is a whole different question that should probably involve therapy.

I can’t say it’s unique, because even if I ever knew that Berni Wrightson never did another science fiction story that would have been so many brain cells ago that there’s no way I could remember (hey, it was the ’70s). But at Golden Age Comic Book Stories you can see what has to be a very rare thing – Wrightson’s best known for his horror comics, after all, so the space suits and interplanetary rocket in "Breathless" are a real rarity.

One thing I really love in this one is the way he’s spotted his blacks and used rim lighting in a very Wally Woodish way, while the inking is still that nice juicy Wrightson brushwork.

This story first appeared in a magazine called Web of Horror in 1970. I don’t remember ever seeing that one (or I’d have been reading it) in what I do remember as racks full of Warren’s Creepy and Eerie.