Looking for Positives

Back in the early eighties, when killing off characters was starting to become the tried-and-true comics-industry Standard Method of Boosting Sales, comics satirist Fred Hembeck poked fun at the trend with a fake cover showing nearly all the Marvel Heroes laid out at the foot of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, with the caption “DEATH! DEATH! AND MORE DEATH!”

That’s kind of how I feel about the month of February, and I know my friend Howard would get a giggle out of that if he wasn’t… you know… stone dead. 

February has been like … bad comic book writers run amok. Kind of like DC’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” in Micronaut form. Somewhere out there in the cosmos there’s an Earth-One Howard still out there, still giving them hell, maybe in a slightly different costume that evokes that of our Earth-Two Howard. 

By the way, his Super-Hero name is “The Mangler.” And he would have some elaborate story of how the Earth-Two Mangler was brought down by an army of genetically-enhanced Cherry Poptart clones. Or Space Knights. Take your pick.

The Big! Shocking! Death! events have definitely overshadowed everything else this month, including the fact that somehow, in spite of the Great Cosmic Funnybook Editor going all-out to increase his sales, I have managed to make a few things happen in the Counter-Counter-Counter-Earth Realm of Duck Soup Land.

Thanks entirely to making a daily schedule and sticking to it, I’ve managed to design three or four cards a week for my Tarot of the Zircus Mägi; to the extent that what amounts to the equivalent of an entire suit has been completed. Some, but not all, of these designs have been revealed at the Circus Tarot site. Early in the month, The Circus Tarot Book, complimenting the limited Majors edition of the deck, was published to Great Acclaim from Me, Myself and I (all three stooges rolled into one) and is now available through all the usual outlets, including your friendly neighborhood Independent Bookseller (though you’ll likely need to ask for it)… 

Oh, yeah... my latest novel See Them Dance (a fantasy adventure from beyond the Lunatic Fringe) is still New News. And my novel for 2015, Baxter Bunny Escapes, proceeds at a pace. Just not as rapid a pace as I would like. Well, you can’t rush weirdness.

Normally I’d have been all over this site with banners and declarations and “Yeee! Whoopie! Hoop-la! Looka What I Done!” — but it’s just not as much fun to toot your own horn when the Great Cosmic Funnybook Editor (whom I secretly suspect to be Jim Shooter in Super-Villain drag) has been hard at it, and you suddenly have friends and family who will never be able to toot again.

At least not here on Earth-Two.

— Freder

www.ducksoup.me