Yes. There will be tentacles.

The CD packaging project I mentioned earlier has been on hiatus through the holidays – until all its text has been massaged and tickled to perfection – so in the meantime I’ve been working away at the future illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. By the time I have to switch back to the CD I hope to have lots of pages ready for you in the buffer. Well, I say lots; there are already enough illustrations done to see you through sometime in February, but I want as many done as I can manage by the time I have to switch projects again because that Clockwork Book buffer is an unforgiving beast… and these are mostly pretty challenging illustrations.

With all of that on my plate I haven’t had a chance to work on the serial that will follow The Lair of the Clockwork Book. In fact I’m so disappointed with my progress on the other story – Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS – that I’m certain that something is going to have to change in the near future; I’m just not positive exactly what is going to change, and how, or when. It’s a mystery.

I’m sure we’ll all find out what that means, eventually. But until then… at least we have tentacles.

Badass Digest has dug up the very first appearance of Buck Rogers on the movie screen in a short film produced for the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair that you can now view in all its rough-hewn glory.

Notable is the space battle, featuring bunches of miniatures that could just be the same toy rocket ships that were part of the Buck Rogers merchandising empire.

Here we see Doctor Huer, musing at some (interminable) length about the mystery behind the attack of the Tiger Men of Mars.

I think there may be a couple of mistakes in the accompanying text – for example, the Just Imagine rocket ship was reused in the Flash Gordon serials, and I can’t think of any sets or miniatures from that film that showed up in Buck Rogers. Though admittedly, I might also be wrong. It’s certainly true that all of these serials recycled some of the same sets and costumes that were warehoused and rented out after the collapse of the silent epics of the twenties.

It’s the space battle that really stands out here: I was amused to find the same grinding propeller sound effects for the rockets that we heard a few years later in the serial – or was that Doctor Huer’s cosmic television tuner? – but all in all they didn’t do badly for a low budget effort from 1933.

The cynical among you might call it “The most stupendous animatic of all time!” but – as can happen – the cynical among you would have gotten it wrong.

That’s because Doctor Professor’s Thesis of Evil is meant to be a motion graphics film: it’s not an approximation of a full motion movie. I’ve mentioned this project before and just as I did then I have to stress how the excellent lighting and artful use of motion graphics make Doctor Professor a real treat to watch. The filmmakers chose a limited medium and then they just plain hammered on those limitations until they’d turned them into strengths. Which is, after all, what you need to do.

I missed the announcement that the film was complete, in early December. Unfortunately I’m also missing the finished film – it’s off on its adventure at the film festivals. So if you happen to be in Norway on January 17-22 you ought to do what I’d do, which is to hike over to the Tromsø International Film Festival and catch Doctor Professor’s screening there. It’s already been shown at the Helsinki Short Film Festival and, following that festival’s first showing, in theaters across Finland. But I guess we both missed that.

In the meantime, enjoy this teaser trailer. There’s another one over at Doctor Professor’s Web Site of Infamy, which is a name I just made up.

I kneel beside the guy and look at the wires. Each wire is as black and as thick as the one that goes from your radio set to the wall. Dozens of these wires snarl around each other, and they drip something green I do not touch. I think the green drips must be the dead guy’s blood, and this raises serious questions about the guy’s place of origin. I have seen several persons with holes of this nature, so I know what most citizens have in their stomachs. It is not black wires and green blood.

James Alan Gardner’s A Clean Sweep With All the Trimmings is a science fiction story told in the manner of Damon Runyon, in a Prohibition era New York whose ever-lovin’ guys and streetwise dolls find themselves inconvenienced by spacemen from Jupiter, maybe, or maybe from someplace that is farther away than Jupiter, and anyway is even stranger than the interest (or interests) of J. Edgar Hoover.

It’s a wonderful romp and you can read the whole story on the web at Tor.com.

You may not have any trouble believing it but I’m still amazed that with this picture – completed a couple of days ago – I’ve finished 100 illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. Just twenty-five more to go!

And neither one of us should be surprised that this is also pretty much the way I feel about that. Click it to embiggify.