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Check out the new stretch goal mini for the Zombie Plague Kickstarter campaign. Dead Sexy is a former pin-up girl and dancer whose extraordinary muscle memory gives her a grace and speed unseen in other zombies. She's dangerous, fast, and Dead Sexy.
Her paper mini and Zombie Plague game card can be found here:

So back in the mid 1990s I got involved with a project called noir: The Film Noir Roleplaying Game. It was meant to be a very open roleplaying system that allowed for a cinematic type of game to be run. The game itself turned out okay. My relationship with most of the people involved didn't. I stopped watching a lot of the old black and white crime films that I loved and went into a sort of anti-noir phase. The stress of making the game had soured me to the genre that I had once loved. But the experience itself was hugely valuable and I'd do it again in a minute. But this time it would get copyedited more.

Here's the cover art from noir by the great Howard Chaykin. While talking to him on the phone he told me that I had a voice like a child. I've been trying to deepen my voice ever since.

A few years back I started writing fiction again and found myself settling back into my old stomping grounds. I started a cooperative piece called The Dogfight with Chad Eagleton and it really empowered me to write more. The great thing about writing on the internet is that I immediately began to find like minded folks who were often more passionate than me when it came to creating crime fiction. One of these passionate bastards is Jimmy Callaway.

When Jimmy asked me for some artwork for the cover of Laura Robert's Black Heart Magazine that he was guest editing I said "heck yeah" and started brainstorming ideas for a cover. The thing I kept coming back to was the Saturday night special, a small and cheap handgun that was often used in drunken crimes of passion. The basic set up of a good noir story is a sucker who makes one mistake and then follows a predestined spiral to the bottom. I'm pretty sure that Saturday night specials sent a lot of suckers down that particular track.



The final piece is called The Life and Deaths of a Saturday Night Special. Pick up a downloadable copy of the noir issue of Black Heart here.

And finally I have five new illustrations in a new book published by Alec Cizak. Pulp Modern is one class production. From the stunning cover by Jeremy Selzer (see below) to stories by Lawrence Block and other crime fiction masters, Pulp Modern is a book well worth adding to your collection. Pick up a copy through CreateSpace or soon through Amazon.



Although I write more than crime fiction I'm always drawn back to it since it allows me to write characters that don't live by normal constraints or laws. Although I loathe this lawlessness in real life I enjoy it in fiction because it allows me to create seemingly real world scenarios that have the inherent chaos of dreams. Thanks to Chad, Jimmy, Laura, Alec, and the other groovy people that I've become acquainted with, I'm now looking forward to writing and illustrating more of these dark and twisted worlds.

~Brian S. Roe

O.K., let's get this out of the way right away--I am the cantankerous coot of this review staff. I love old stuff first and foremost--Comics/Movies/Furniture/Toys/ and Music. I am not a complete coot but I have a foot in the door--I am willing to give most things a chance (unless it says IMAGE on it).

There's something about comic books that symbolize childhood in the way that fireworks, birthday presents, and root beer floats do. They are little events that contain an amount of excitement and joy that often seems leeched out of adult life. Those of us who continue to enjoy comics, as well as the occasional root beer float, often find it difficult to find a book that can make us feel the same sense of adventure that we did as children looking through a drugstore spin rack for whatever comics our allowance could snag for us. Basically being an adult can really be a drag and it helps to occasionally be reminded that there are still good stories to be found between the pages of a floppy paged comic book.

As many of you may have noticed zombies are everywhere these days. Being a collector of comics and horror movies, I am very pleased that these two genres are combining to bring me and many others, I am sure, pure bliss. Whether its The Walking Dead, Marvel Zombies, iZombie, or 68 there are so many awesome choices out there. Anyone who is into zombies or who has been alive for the past 43 years is at least somewhat familiar with the classic that started in all, George Romeros amazing Night of the Living Dead. The brilliance of this film speaks to me on many levels. Romeros classic takes place in Pennsylvania in 1968, a time in this world which is iconic for everyone, even for those, myself included, who were not even thought of yet.

If I were to create a Venn diagram using comic readers and gamers (electric and unplugged) as my subjects the overlap would be near 100%. So I find it strange that there are few comic books about the subject of gaming. Yes, there are niche online comic strips like Penny Arcade and Order of the Stick as well as print story adaptations of existing game franchises, like Mass Effect, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and Mirrors Edge. (Does anyone remember the great Atari Force of the mid-1980s? Seriously, Atari Force was a wonderful sci-fi comic.) But there are few traditional comics that address games and our interaction with them as the actual subject matter; for example, Joe Casey's tearful I Kill Giants which featured a little girl obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons and monster slaying as a coping mechanism for grief.(

The omnipotent narrator has largely fallen out of fashion in superhero comics in the last ten or fifteen years. A lotta comics enthusiasts will bemoan the passing of such a staple within the art form, but comics readers are largely a nostalgic lot, and personally (though I can relate), I think this sense of nostalgia holds the form back. One of the marks of fine story-telling is showing rather than telling: its the rule of thumb they hammer into anybody taking even a beginners creative writing class. To have a narrator explaining to the reader every possible interpretation of the action taking place on the page relegates superhero comics to the childish and sub-literate ghetto so many detractors have banished it to already. In so many words, the loss of the narrator shows superhero comics have grown up. Or at least have begun to.

I have never been what I would call a huge fan of noir style comics. While most crime comics always seem to me to be one trick ponies with very few bringing something new to the table, The Bronx Kill serves up a buffet of dark twists, troubled/flawed characters, and an ending that made me feel uncomfortable and enraged at the same time. I loved it all.

Let me first say, that growing up in the 70s, I was immediately a Marvel-Head. Secondly, I cared very little for any kind of space adventures with my heroes. Space adventures clearly were Star Wars or Space 1999. Why would I read a comic for those? I felt it was (yes, I know it was nerdly hypocritical of me) corny for heroes to be flying about all willy-nilly in space without the use of a ship or some kind of suit. That is why I, as a child, could never buy into the DC Universe; too much Green Lantern, Superman, Legionnaire stuff for my rigid little imagination to handle. Even in my beloved Marvel Universe I steered away from Silver Surfer (unless he was rolling with my boys in the Defenders), Guardians of the Galaxy, Nova, Captain Marvel, etc. I mean, yeah, I was down for the occasional adventure of my heroes into space and other worlds like the Skrulls, the Kree, and Shi'ar, but they went there in ships and they always returned home to Earth. Then, in 1979, a different kind of silver adventurer flew into my life; Rom, the Spaceknight. Here was something I could get behind. He was a dude grafted into space armor!! This all was way more plausible to me AND he fought an unseen menace to the human race, the Dire Wraiths. Plus it was drawn by the legendary Sal Buscema. Little did I know, but my undying love for this shining Galadorian would open the door, decades later, for a tremendous Space Superhero ride.