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(Above: The Gulf Stream by Winslow Homer)
Well, people, in case you haven’t noticed, it is a grim time in the empire. When people ask how we’re doing, we keep thinking of the haunting story of the Essex, an 1819 whaleship sunk by an angry whale (one of the few such incidents on record) whose survivors endured a grisly two-month journey in some leaky rowboats. The ordeal included madness, cannibalism, and (ironically) several survivors keeping detailed diaries, since it was before the Internet and they couldn’t Twitter about it.

To sum up, we feel like we’re in a leaky little boat and we just ate Roger the cabin boy, but there is no land in sight.

…and there may not be for a while. Still, idylls of cannibalism and exposure are a bit extreme. After all, the free market will inevitably pull out a sextant and make for dry land, right?

Like John Carter of Mars always said when he was being pursued by some flesh-eating plants and headless Kaldanes…”I still live!” Even if there won’t be any postal delivery on Saturdays any more.

So yeah, in answer to many emails and IMs and PMs and so on, it has been a shaky week here at Stately Beat Manor, not because of anything that happened to me personally, but just the general gloom and doom. But this too shall pass.

In the spirit of survival, struggle, Barsoom references and giant apes, here’s a painting of John Carter of Mars by Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell. Because nothing says hope like half-naked people fighting.

John Carter- Bill

8 COMMENTS

  1. Another survivor ignobly thrown off the lifeboat, Realms of Fantasy is folding, last issue will be April. Thet were a wonderful venue for fantasy writers & artists and they always paid on time and they always let you try out stylistic experiments and they even ran full page B&W illos in every issue.

  2. Another survivor ignobly thrown off the lifeboat, Realms of Fantasy is folding, last issue will be April. They were a wonderful venue for fantasy writers & artists and they always paid on time and they always let you try out stylistic experiments and they even ran full page B&W illos in every issue.

  3. Not just half-naked people fighting, half-naked people fighting FOUR-ARMED GORILLAS. It’s that last, crucial element that creates the hope.

  4. Man, those Bellejo paintings are unappealing. The poses of the people are so posed and static, and there doesn’t seem to ever be any interaction between the characters. It’s as if each thing was created (photographed) independently of the other and then “pasted” together. There is never a feeling like it’s one unified scene. Why are the people always so shiny, almost as if they are manufactured? Remember when there were all those airbrush paintings that people were putting on the side of their vans? This feels the same way, like something left over from 1972.

  5. The man is supposed to walk on the OUTSIDE of the sidewalk, ladies on the inside!
    Here is a fine example of why.

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