After a series of delays, Go Hero’s ultra-detailed 1:6 scale Buck Rogers action figure is finally rocketing out of his warehouse.

Hop over there to gander at the features – everything from a detachable, glass space helmet to an internal audio device that plays old Buck Rogers radio shows (or whatever you upload to it via USB). Neat!

His gun is (of course!) a replica of Buck’s iconic Atomic Ray Pistol… and Go Hero is also selling a 10″ version of that famous ray gun. In fact it’s not an exact replica, since it combines features of the original toy Atomic ray gun with the postwar Disintegrator Pistol. Comes complete with pops and sparks.

And still coming down the retro-futuristic pike is Go Hero’s 1:6 scale Flash Gordon, a similarly detailed 1930’s version of the character based on Buster Crabbe in the famous movie serials.

All in all, a pretty wonderful line of retro space heroes and replicas, all ready and eager to defend your desk from evil emperors and the Awful Green Things From Space.

Rick Remender’s FEAR Agent – the comic book tales of Heath Huston, hard-drinking alien exterminator in a retro future – is being developed for the screen at Universal. I’ve liked the series, and not only for its occasional homage to Wally Wood (or to Jeff Brewer’s Cool Rockets, for that matter).

Right out of the gate the stories had me going when Heath, in the middle of a pitched battle with aliens, was trying to figure out if they were intelligent enough that he’d get prosecuted for killing them. It’s a difficult future this guy has to contend with.

The series started at Image Comics and then made a slightly unusual sidestep over to Dark Horse. I wondered at the time whether this might have something to do with Dark Horse’s media contacts, and maybe I was right to wonder.

It’s early days, but this film – if it makes it through the gauntlet – could be loads of cliffhanging, drunken fun with Heath and his intelligent spaceship roaming the galaxy and getting into trouble. The news appears at the Risky Biz blog, and my thanks go to to Sci Fi Wire for pointing me that way.

In a surprising instance of somewhat academic thoroughness, Discover magazine has cited my “Speed Limit” tee shirts in what is (otherwise?) a pretty impressive article about near lightspeed travel using pulse drives – whether the altogether possible nuclear version, or the “hey, maybe in a hundred years” antimatter version.

I’m pleased to be a part of it. Even though I quail a little at the thought of using nuclear bombs for propulsion I have to admit that there’s something sort of appealing about chucking those puppies out the back of a spaceship and hanging on. “Fire in the hole!”

[tags]speed of light, t shirt, relativity, 186000 miles per second, retropolis, pulse drive, interstellar travel, spaceship, space ship, who needs a catalytic converter anyway[/tags]

So this whole “women in tubes” thing was preying on my mind, and apparently my mind wasn’t careful enough down by the waterhole… judging by this in-progress scene.

What I’m liking in here (though you can’t really see why, yet) is that it’s a setting that’s guaranteed to seem ominous and sinister, but it won’t be. In fact it’ll be sort of cozy, in an unlikely way. And so, much more Retropolitan in character.

Just a pretty rough layout so far, though I have been experimenting with the lighting because that’s going to be pretty important to the picture. It’s a slow rendering already even though I’m not including the more distant tubes that’ll stretch down the hallway, which will just get composited in at the end. Many lights. Many reflections. Much glass.

I’ve already chosen a title, which is the name of a 1936 song by Milton Pascal and Edgar Fairchild.

Late nights at the Astro Cafe, in the retro future world of Retropolis: ah, the memories! This diner offers anything a spaceman, spacewoman, or robot might want after a night’s revelry, or after a night of dodging space pirates, which is not the same thing. Park your rocket, cadet, and have yourself a steaming hot cup of joe.

As usual, this was done with a combination of 3DS Max and Photoshop. It’s the second of what may be three pictures set in my diner of the Future That Never Was.

This one, like the first, has a title from Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee”. Because my future is just like that.

Still: no women in tubes. Part of me feels wistful about how that might have improved things.

Available as a poster, an archival print, and a postcard.

Posthuman Blues has been posting a series of what I never dreamed is an indispensable theme in golden age science fiction pulps: women in tubes!

I wish that Mac’s posts were tagged so that I could link to the whole series, but if you browse through the posts you can find them. Who knew that this was a subconscious imperative that retro science fiction simply must express?

And as you might imagine, I’ve searched my own work for tube women and I have to confess that I come up short. I feel completely inadequate, in fact. I have a feeling that I’m just going to have to do something about that before long*. I mean, sure, I’ve put toasters in globes… but no girls in tubes? What the heck was I thinking?

And I wish that I were as clever as the commenter who called them “Tubular Belles”, too.

*Update: Yep, I couldn’t resist.

Just Imagine – now available at Amazon

This is momentous news, dear reader, and I have no idea when exactly it finally happened – but the world’s first all singing, all dancing science fiction musical is finally available on DVD.

“Just Imagine” was a landmark film, in which the 1920s and 1930s vision of the future was captured for all time – with amazing miniature sets and rockets, the most famous of which rose out of the prop room to become Flash Gordon’s rocket, in the movie serials – and it is simply not to be missed by anyone who loves the retro future.

It is also a profoundly silly film. Don’t let that stop you.

For years, it’s been impossible to find a commercial tape or disc of this movie, though bootlegs showed up often at eBay.

Just Imagine – now available at Amazon

Just Imagine was an early sound picture – it was released in 1930 – and it features both Maureen O’Sullivan and the vaudeville comic El Brendel. The film takes us (and Brendel) to the astonishing world of 1980 – where we all have flying cars and New York is a multilayered city of public and private transportation, with traffic cops on floating platforms blowing their whistles at us. The sets are fantastic; the rockets are wonderful; and it’s just sort of mind-blowingly naive and silly.

There is (of course!) a trip to Mars, but possibly the best times are to be had here on Earth with its arranged marriages, its food pills, its whiskey pills, and its numerous jokes about Prohibition.

If Metropolis is our serious and socially conscious great-uncle of the retro future, Just Imagine is its jazz age slaphappy cousin.  The one we actually want to hang out with.

This is a great day. A tremendous day. It’s good to be here in the future. Now if they’d just release “Madam Satan”. But that’s another story.

Here’s the first of what I think will be three pictures set in my retro-futuristic Astro cafe. That’s a scene I started working on in 2004 and plugged away at for quite awhile (in the shadow of the then Day Job). I dusted it off and found to my surprise that it only took about a week to finish it up.

Oddly (or not) I once lived just around the corner from a coffee shop called Astro in LA’s Silverlake neighborhood; and there was a hostess there who was not unlike Mabel, in some ways. But although I did once see a rocket go by, I never saw anyone wearing goggles in there.

This one’s available as an archival print, a poster, on blank books, and a postcard – the sort of impulse buy you’re likely to make at the counter, no?

The unsinkable Molly “Porkshanks” Friedrich has added these handsome retro rocket patches to her Etsy store.

You don’t need to be a card-carrying member of the Innuendo Division to admire these. In fact, you can still want one if you’re just a Suggestive Commando or a Winking Wingman. Person. Whatever.

She doesn’t mention how many of these are available but since it is an embroidered patch you can bet that it was a limited run.

So I’d suggest you order yours on the double – some of these Aether Patrolpersons seem to dabble in temporal acquisitions… and so they might beat you to it even if you’ve got yours already. Which makes my brain hurt.

[tags]steampunk, dieselpunk, rocket, retro, porkshanks, costume, patch, aether patrol, embroidered[/tags]

Okay, I’ve explained before that I hate posting work that’s not finished, and I speculated about what deep seated psychological warpage that implies – but I’m just having too much fun with this and I’m going to risk the damage that my rampaging Id may cause to me and to you and to anyone who gets in its way.

This is a rough layout. It really is. The figures are just blocked in (mainly), the lighting needs tons of work, and there are all sorts of things wrong with it.

But I like it already. So there.

This is the first of what I think will be three high resolution pictures for prints, all set in the Astro Diner. That’s a 3D “set” I worked on for quite awhile back in 2004 but then set aside till about a week ago, when I dug back into it. (I posted some small shots of the diner here, when I’d finished the robot waitress we see in this picture.)

I have the same problems a camera crew has in a tight space – for many of my shots in the diner I’m going to have to cut out parts of the set that are in the way. But this one hasn’t required any major surgery yet.

Okay. You’ve seen it. That will be all.