Roy Thomas Joins PS

PRESS RELEASE: MONDAY 16 JANUARY 2012

ROY THOMAS JOINS PS

PS, the UK's multiple award-winning publishing company, today announced the appointment of legendary comics writer/editor Roy Thomas to the position of Series Consultant for the company's specialist comicbook line, PS Artbooks.

Although his Marvel Comics writing debut was the story "Whom Can I Turn To?" in the Millie the Model spin-off Modeling with Millie (1965), Roy Thomas soon established himself fully with stints on The X Men, The Avengers, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, Sub-Mariner and Daredevil. But it was perhaps the groundbreaking, brave and even audacious idea of introducing Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian to four-color fandom that will forever cement Thomas firmly in the minds of comic-readers (and moviegoers!) the world over: certainly the first 24 issues of the Marvel comic with Barry Smith holding the artwork reins are widely considered as indispensible.

Since 1964 Thomas has edited and produced the much-loved and highly respected fanzine Alter Ego, the Bible of the comicbook field for new and old readers alike (picking up an Eisner Award for the magazine in 2007), and he became Stan Lee's first successor to the post of Marvel Comics' Editor-In-Chief. He is the recipient of the Alley Award (1969) and the Shazam Award (three times: 1971, 1973 and 1974) and he was inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2011.

"I was delighted to discover PS Artbooks' ambitious reprint programme," he says, "making available again some of the finest and most influential comicbooks of the pre-Comics Code years and after. And, following an extensive and excitable exchange of letters with Peter Crowther, PS head honcho, I was thrilled when he asked if I would serve as Series Consultant on the entire line.

"Peter and his business partner in the venture, Paul Stephenson have great plans for many titles in the months and years ahead and I'll be working closely with them to facilitate various peripheral opportunities and developments along the way. Already I'm suggesting titles they may consider and they're being very receptive. As they say, watch this space!"

PS Artbooks has already produced the first volumes of the old Harvey horror magazines Chamber Of Chills, Witches Tales and Tomb Of Terror and the influential ACG titles Adventures Into The Unknown (the very first horror story anthology comic) and Forbidden Worlds. Next up is volume one of Harvey's Black Cat Mystery, the second volumes of the two ACG titles plus volume ones of Planet Comics and Black Magic.

A lifelong fan of comics, PS founder Peter Crowther is openly critical of the current fashion of 'slabbing', sealing comic magazines behind plastic and then selling them on at multiples of guide value. "I'm sick and tired of having to pay ridiculous amounts of money just so I can read stories that appeared before I was born," he says. "All of Dickens's work is readily available at easily affordable prices, as are Homer's Odyssey and Iliad and, frankly, the great comicbooks of bygone years are of equal importance. Will Eisner's Spirit tales (thankfully reprinted by DC Comics), the various Archie family of magazines (from Dark Horse and IDW) and DC's Chronicles, Showcase and Archives series plus Marvel Masterworks are all showing the way forward for the industry . . . but, with the possible exception of Craig Yoe's work for his Yoe! Books, the more obscure and esoteric titles are getting overlooked time after time. I've read and enjoyed Roy's work in the field for many years and, with his help, we're aiming to redress the balance. And then some!"

Over it's fifteen-year life, PS has worked extensively with giants in the field of speculative fiction (Brian Aldiss, Ray Bradbury, Ramsey Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Erikson, Joe Hill, Stephen Jones, Stephen King and many others) producing more than two hundred titles in desirable and collectible volumes, many of them signed and slipcased/traycased. In spring 2010 the company launched Stanza Press, a new imprint dedicated to poetry, and the first PS Artbooks title--Tomorrow Revisited, a celebration of the life and work of Dan Dare creator Frank Hampson--appeared later that same year.

SO LONG, MARTY!

Martin H. Greenberg: March 1st 1941—June 25th 2011

I don’t propose to go railing on at the chaos inflicted by the Reaper on each and every one of us, as he casually, callously and almost gleefully removes loved relatives and friends from our communal hearthside, because Harlan already did it par excellence in his Foreword/Intro to Angry Candy. But what the hell: I simply cannot allow the death of Marty Greenberg to pass without any comment at all: indeed, anything that I say should ideally be accompanied by a hawk of well-chewed tobaccy-spit down the Grim one’s black tunic.

Along with Ed Gorman and Richard Chizmar, Marty was instrumental in getting my then fledgling short work to a wider audience (ie. USA) when, having read one of my horror yarns, he wrote me (by letter, of course, in those fondly remembered pre-email days) and suggested I try him with a darkish crime tale for an upcoming anthology . . . the only slight potential difficulty being that it had to have a cat in it. “But,” I suggested when I called him up, “I’ve never had a cat!” To which Marty reminded me that I had never killed a man (or so he hoped) and yet I was able to document such in my writing with apparent ease. A fair point. Thus followed ‘Constant Companion’, the first of, I think, seven stories involving cats (and I still don’t have one) and another fifty or so more for a wide and wild variety of anthology projects and editors.

We became friends of a sort—as far as the four thousand mile hike between our front doors might allow—and, starting with Heaven Sent in 1995 we shifted into collaborating on a string of anthologies for DAW Books (Moon Shots, Mars Probes, Constellations, Forbidden Planets and We Think, Therefore We Are) which were great fun to do . . . made all the more easy by Marty’s speedy dealing with the contributors who were paid pronto as soon as the author in each case had agreed to any editorial tinkering (if there were any to be made).

But that’s all business. Still important, of course, but just business.

It was as a person that Marty truly excelled, with an easy but professional manner, a genuine and natural warmth, and a generosity of both spirit and time that was truly second to none. We’re all of us made the poorer by his passing, not just the wonderful team at Tekno Books (long may they shine) or the many publishing houses that enjoyed the fruits of his organizational and editing skills. Geh gesund, Marty!

"...damn fine books at exceedingly fair prices."

Way back when, in the thankfully dim recesses of my earlier life in the so-called corridors of power of one of the UK’s then biggest financial organisations, I was frequently called upon to prepare snappy paragraphs that outlined both the business’s commercial thrust and its moralistic stance . . . generally awkward bedfellows at best in that they need to placate and even please not only the City but also the punters. They were called ‘mission statements’ and they’re still around.

Here’s the BBC’s: “To enrich people's lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain.”

Not bad, I reckon. They have a vision, too: “To be the most creative organisation in the world.” That one sounds a bit like a cross between Wodehouse and Blue Peter: To be a jolly good egg all round, what! And it doesn’t even end there: they also have values (there’s a few of these):

1. “Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest.”
2. “Audiences are at the heart of everything we do.”
3. “We take pride in delivering quality and value for money.”
4. “Creativity is the lifeblood of our organisation.” (We think the guy who wanted this one in is the same guy who came up with the vision.)
5. “We respect each other and celebrate our diversity so that everyone can give their best.”
6. “We are one BBC: great things happen when we work together.”

Now let’s get one thing straight: I have not singled out the BBC for snidey underhanded digs. I simply Googled ‘mission statements’ and the BBC’s was the first specific statement from an actual company after four general references to mission statements per se. The next one was Coca Cola . . . a triptych, no less:

1. “To refresh the world.”
2. “To inspire moments of optimism and happiness.”
3. “To create value and make a difference.”

There’s a fairly cosmic and even New Age Religion feel to these, I feel. They sound like they need finger cymbals and tambourines playing in the background, with the all-pervading smell of patchouli oil holding court. Kind of like the stuff spouted by Galactus when he sent good ol’ Norrin Radd off to roam the space lanes on his surfboard.

But maybe the most famous mission statement for folks who immerse themselves in the worlds of fantasy, horror and science fiction is this one: “To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Yes, it’s the mission statement of the Starship Enterprise, which set off on its course in 1966—though the smart money has it that its genesis actually occurred some years earlier, in 1958, in a White House booklet entitled Introduction to Outer Space.

But the one that made it onto our TV screens wasn’t the first stab. That particular honor belongs thus: “This is the adventure of the United Space Ship Enterprise. Assigned a five year galaxy patrol, the bold crew of the giant starship explores the excitement of strange new worlds, uncharted civilizations, and exotic people.” Which morphed into this clunker: “A five year patrol of the galaxy. To seek out and contact all alien life. To explore. To travel the vast galaxy, where no man has gone before. A Star Trek.”Yeah, right. Thank God they went with the one we know and love. But, of course, that’s only because we know and love it. Familiarity is the name of this particular game.

And so it came to pass, when my good friend and business partner on PS Artbooks, Paul Stephenson, suggested that—given the existence of PS itself these past 14 years and 250+ titles—we needed some kind of statement explaining the need for the new company, I was the hapless soul at whom the fingers of those assembled were quickly pointed. Alas, no excuses were acceptable—even I could see that—and so, even though I had just gone to the meeting for a coffee, I left with a new task: to set the records straight.

We could have tagged Tomorrow Revisited, our celebration of the wonderful illustrator Frank Hampson, creator of Dan Dare and much much more, into PS itself. After all, Colonel Dare’s milieu is Outer Space, huge tail-finned rockets (it’s my fervent belief that, like cars, all rockets should have huge tailfins) and green-skinned BeM’s. And, given the huge inventory of cadaver-filled horror stories, novellas and novels that PS has unleashed, we could have added the Harvey Horror volumes and everything else coming along behind them.

But we wanted to give special worth and significance to this wonderful material . . . wanted to give it its own space in much the same way we created Stanza Press for our poetry volumes. But how to put all of that into a single pithy sentence—that’s the big question. So how does this sound?

PS Artbooks aims to make available—either for the first time or as a reprint—volumes of artwork-based material, sometimes simply paintings or posters, sometimes the sequential work produced by the pioneers of the four-color comic, in collectible but affordable limited editions produced to the highest achievable standards.

In short, as Bertie Wooster might exclaim, “To jolly well produce damn fine books at exceedingly fair prices.” You have my permission to wag a finger at us if we fail to deliver.

The News of the World is history

Here’s something that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with PS Publishing nor even with books (What?! Has he lost his mind?!) but, in many ways, it has to do with words . . . and, let’s face it, that’s what we’re about, you and me.

Like many folks out there—and I’m thinking of mainly British readers, although it relates to us all, irrespective of nationality—I’ve gotten somewhat peeved at the continually emerging underhand activities committed by what I believe (and fervently hope) to be a small minority of journalists and reporters on the News of the World Sunday newspaper who have resorted to hacking the phones of some extremely vulnerable and distressed people. While it was bad enough when the victims of such nefarious activity were celebrities and politicians, the latest revelations simply beggar belief. But the so-called solution put out by Rupert Murdoch’s News International organization to close down the paper after 168 years is absolutely unacceptable.

Desperate to find an analogy, I came up with this: imagine some guy ploughing into a line of people at a bus-stop and killing or maiming most of them; now imagine the solution to this heinous act being to ‘punish’ the car involved by sending it to the scrapyard. Total nonsense, of course—it’s the driver who’s to blame. And, to my mind, it’s the same with the ‘drivers’ of the News of the World.

In the immortal words of the great late Paddy Chayefsky from his Network, I’m “mad as hell and not going to take it any more”. You should feel the same.

Don’t get me wrong: the News of the World was never my personal choice for a Sunday newspaper but I feel desperate for the majority of essentially fine and honourable people who work on it and who have now lost their livelihoods as a result of the craven behaviour of the Machiavellian Murdoch and his helpers. Boy, I sure do hope I never need money as badly as those guys!

My Grecian Odyssey

καλημέρα! Or should I simply say, "kaliméra"?

That's Greek for "Good day" to you less-travelled types than Nicky and myself, jetting around the world, effortlessly crossing datelines while we sip ice-cold booze from airplane aisle trollies and negotiate complex publishing deals for obscene amounts of money on our cellphones.

But, you know . . . it was genuinely wonderful to get back, and I truly never thought I would ever say that about work. The thing is, doing what we do and working with all you folks out there in Pea-ess-land, is just a pure joy—and it's particularly satisfying to return to the office and find that Mike has kept everything in the absolute very best order. In fact, it seems that books have been flying out of our storage facility in record numbers—Bravo, Mike!—but there are still a few older titles that we'd like to scratch from the inventory. So I'm going to let Mike give some additional titles for you to try out. Hey, it's summertime, right, and the vacation season is fully upon us . . . so treat yourself to some things you wouldn't normally consider. It could change your life.

For the record, I think I changed mine a little—book-wise—while we've been away . . . and all thanks to Ramsey Campbell.

After repeated mumbled threats from Ramsey (and keen to try something a little different), I finally gave in and bought Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes—Ramsey has been raving about Ishiguro for a couple of years but I just haven't gotten around to doing anything about it . . . and boy am I fed up that I left it so long. Nocturnes is a delight in every sense of the word . . . five novelettes (and no, it's most assuredly not genre) which, in the words of the cover blurb, are about "music and nightfall". Superb. Go buy it pronto. Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go—which I'll be starting soon—so believe me, I'm a firm convert.

Of course, I read a few things that didn't move me (hey, we were away for two weeks remember!) and we'll say no more about those . . . but the other two that pressed all my buttons were Ravens by George Dawes Green and Michael Harvey's private eye thriller The Fifth Floor: I read Green's The Caveman—aka The Caveman's Valentine—many years ago (three books in some 16/17 years: this man is *not* prolific) and loved it. And Ravens, with its sparkling Elmore Leonard-ish dialogue, is every bit as good. And in Michael Kelly, Michael Harvey has, for my money, come up with a PI who's almost as breathtakingly wonderful as Bob Parker's Spenser. There are a couple other titles with the same character so my order is already in. Yours should be, too.


Now, while I was away, Paul was down at the big ABC comics show at the Royal National Hotel in London showing off the first copies of Chamber of Chills Volume 1, the long-awaited debut volume in PS Artbooks' ambitious (reckless? screwball? downright barmy?) Harvey Horrors reissues programme. The response he got—with just three copies of each state flown in (the bulk is scheduled to dock at Felixstowe on 7 July and we're aiming to have all orders mailed out by the middle of the month) was euphoric. When Paul told me how good they looked—when I called in from Greece—I knew right there and then we'd got a winner. But now that I've seen the book myself, well . . . I think you're gonna be pleased.

The traycased edition is almost gone now and the slipcased state is half-gone, so bear that in mind when you're considering whether to take a shot. Pre-order pages for Witches Tales Volume 1 and Tomb of Terror Volume 1 will be up early next month and priority will be given on the signed states to those who signed up for Chills.