Odds and Ends

Looks like my good pals in The Murder Junkies are needing some help filling in some holes on their next tour itenerary. It's shaping up to be a Southern jaunt starting in early October. Merle Allin says, "We have booked some shows for our Southern tour but we still need shows in the following areas: Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Missouri. If you know of any clubs or promoters that would like to book us, please let me know as soon as possible. Hope to see you on the road in October." If you can be of service, drop Merle and the boys a line at their MySpace page by clicking here: THE MURDER JUNKIES.

In The-Best-News-I've-Heard-All-Year department: filmmaker Jim VanBebber has stated online that he has "red hot irons in the fire," but that he will "release no wine...before it's time." I personally don't care what it is he's got going on; I'm just excited to know there's something in the works. Anybody that knows me, knows that VanBebber is probably my favorite filmmaker ever. He's proven that he can do more with a meager budget and his own dogged determination than anybody else going today. While I personally don't see the point in spending fuck tons of money on DVDs and the like, I will go on record stating that Visions of Hell: The Films of Jim VanBebber is absolutely essential. It includes Deadbeat at Dawn, The Manson Family, Roadkill: The Last Days of John Martin, My Sweet Satan, two feature length documentaries, and so much more. As long as I have the VanBebber set, Freaks, The Born Losers, and Billy Jack close at hand, I'll always be able to keep myself reasonably sane and happy. Get yourself a fix here: VISIONS OF HELL.

You think you dig metal? Not as much as The Rock'N'Roll Outlaw. And I'll damn well guarantee that few people on earth have his vast knowledge of classic underground metal's more nefarious realms. When he's not making his own classic records with The Hookers and Blade of the Ripper, he's sharing his love of the rawk by blogging away here: GOODNIGHT WHATEVER YOU ARE.

When I was but a wee piss-ant of a kid, I used to pray my mom would have enough coupons saved up to make the weekly grocery run to Kroger instead of the other grocery store in our one-horse town. Why? 'Cause Kroger stocked Creepy, Eerie, and Savage Sword of Conan. Great black-and-white comics magazines that had incredible art, incredible stories, and the very real possibility that you just might see some realistically depicted, bare-naked titties. Dear god, I was in heaven. Mom never let me have the Creepy or Eerie titles (somehow she found stories of a barbarian fucking and killing his way across the land to be more suitable for a lad of my tender years), but I'd devour every last panel while propped up on the trusty Kroger magazine rack.

Not only has Dark Horse Comics taken me back to those marvelous and awkward days of my youth by issuing those great (yet prohibitively expensive) Creepy and Eerie Archives hardcover tomes and the wonderful (and affordable) Savage Sword of Conan trade paperback collections, they've now gone and rebooted the Creepy series as an on-going quarterly title. From what I've read of the first issue, it's pretty damn good - much better than the horrible latter day versions of all the other classic horror comics titles that have been revamped over the years. It would have been even cooler if they'd relaunched it as a full-size mag, but that's just nitpicking. They've also got some cool Creepy swag to go along with the new book. Remember those cool Uncle Creepy patches and buttons being hawked in the back of the original mags? You can finally nab some of those as well as t-shirts, zippo lighters, Uncle Creepy statues, and the like. (Hey, I like Uncle Creepy so much, I had him tattooed on my arm when I was a young hooligan.)

As if that's not enough, they're also releasing an uber-affordable 416 page Solomon Kane omnibus that collects all of Robert E. Howard's Kane stories from Savage Sword. Yeah, yeah...it should be against my nature to dig a Puritan adventurer that acts as a weapon of god against all the cool things in the world (cannibals and pirates and devils, oh my!), but what the hell. If the Bible had ever been this cool, they maybe coulda duped me into all that hogwash. For the latest skinny on this stuff and more: DARK HORSE COMICS.

TIL NEXT TIME -