Over at CoolandCollected.com there’s an article that links to several bits of vintage Buck Rogers mayhem on auction at Hake’s – like the Cocomalt premium Buck Rogers Cut-Out Adventure Book, probably my favorite. That’s where this incredibly buildable rocket ship design drawing comes from, along with a bunch of cut-out characters and scenes. Oh, to be a kid again, twenty years before I was born!

Also not to be missed: the 1934 wind-up rocket ship, with loads of neat box art. To see the whole article, just go here.

As you’ll see in (um, lemme do the math there, well, okay, I dunno)… a while*, Osgood Finnegan will be making his return in The Lair of the Clockwork Book: older, perhaps not wiser, but certainly more knowledgeable than he was when we last saw him.

This is the first time I’ve created an aged version of an existing, younger character. It was pretty interesting: more so, I guess, since I didn’t do what you might suggest by just retexturing his young head. I wanted to experiment with a new tool that has some nice features and in order to do that I had to start more or less from scratch. So far nothing’s exploded and I’m happy with the results. Fingers crossed.

JhJHGJ Kg;g hgl;ghghfd ssf?

Okay, not a great idea to type with my fingers crossed. Life is so complicated.

My lateness in this part of the schedule means that in order to catch up I need to build a bunch of other new things; that will no doubt push me back even a bit later. Eventually, though, I’ll catch up. The good thing is that I’m doing all of this so far in advance that it hasn’t any effect at all on the publication schedule. The only thing that gets delayed is my temporary return to The Toaster With TWO BRAINS, which I really would like to be working on right about now. But that’s the way it goes.

I’m still working away at the new illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book – mostly – but I had to set aside a little time to finish this piece, an entry for a Starbucks contest at DeviantArt. Really, I had to. I had enough time invested in it already that it would have been wasteful to be more responsible and stick to what I really should have been doing. Besides, there’s some neat swag. And I do like my swag.

Whatever happens in the contest, though, I have plans for at least one of the elements in this picture… because shortly before I got to work on the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual site I had an idea for a series of travel posters from the Retropolis Travel Bureau. I still want to do those, but the Thrilling Tales have turned out to be a pretty demanding project. So I haven’t been able to, yet.

But anyhow, on the Thrilling Tales front I am indeed gradually filling up my buffer of illustrations for the Clockwork Book, so that before too long I should be able to go back to Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS as planned. But since I’m late in filling that buffer it’s now getting used as I go: in order to have my roughly 32 unseen pages banked in advance, I have to keep making even more till the buffer’s full. The longer it takes, the more I have to do. Math is cruel.

Anyway, at the right is a little snippet from something that’s coming up for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. I know you need proof, and I don’t blame you: it’s because I’ve got these shifty eyes.

Over at Pappy’s Golden Age Comics you can see two different Gray Morrow comics from 1965’s Creepy #3. As Pappy rightly observes they’re interesting partly because they’re so different, although drawn at about the same time.

Morrow was all over these old Warren magazines – and of all the things I wish I still had, well, those are high up on the list – and his was a familiar hand on paperback books and their frontispieces back in the day. Very nice stuff.