All posts by Paul Kupperberg

Author's Spotlight

Listen to Your Toaster!

Leave a comment

A free sample short story from The Devil and Leo Persky

I used to be a writer and editor for Weekly World News, the fake news supermarket tabloid that chronicled such phenomena as Bat Boy, Big Foot, alien babies, and Elvis sightings. The job of a WWN writer was to think up crazy shit and write a couple of hundred humorous words on it because, of course, everything we published was fake…except for the disclaimer in six-point type at the bottom of page three that confessed we were just funnin’ you for entertainment purposes.

I missed WWN when it folded in 2007. Not only was it a great day job where I got to work with a small staff of friends (including fellow Crazy 8’er Bob Greenberger), but writing those wacky articles was fun. It was all about starting with a premise loosely based on reality; an idle thought about what happened to the rest of the rabbits whose feet were used to make good luck charms, I wrote an article about the disabled surviving hares bringing class action lawsuits against rabbit’s foot manufacturers. I turned historical speculation about Abraham Lincoln’s mental health into a story in which he was a straitjacketed lunatic. Anything and everything was fodder for a WWN story. Continue reading

Uncategorized

Talking About DIRECT CONVERSATIONS: TALKS WITH FELLOW DC COMICS BRONZE AGE CREATORS

Leave a comment

Quite literally, the first “stories” I ever wrote when I was six and seven years old were comic book stories. I also drew then because obviously a comic book needs pictures to go along with the words. Neither my writing nor pictures from those days pointed to a career in the arts, but I was only just getting started with comics. And writing. But they’ll always be intertwined for me, even now, almost 60 years later when I work primarily in prose.

Writing for DC Comics wasn’t just an idea. It was my goal, my ambition. Even more than that. It was a dream. I didn’t have the easiest childhood and the world of Superman and the Martian Manhunter and the rest of the Justice League was where I went for solace. I wanted to be as close to them as I could get.

In 1975, the dream became a reality. Coming up through the ranks of fandom and fanzines I finally stumbled through the door of DC and never looked back. Until now, in Direct Conversations: Talks With Fellow DC Comics Bronze Age Creators. Nearly 50 years and more than a thousand stories later I sat down with ten old friends and colleagues to talk about those good old Bronze Age days when we were first breaking into the business at a time when the business itself seemed to be on the verge of breaking apart. Another old friend, fellow DC, Weekly World News, and Crazy 8 Press pal Robert Greenberger wrote the introduction. Continue reading

Author's Spotlight, New Releases
Leave a comment

Mel Brooks summed up my feelings about life in the title song of his film, The Twelve Chairs: “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

In The Devil and Leo Persky, you’ll meet Leo Persky, the living embodiment of that philosophy. Under the penname “Terrance Strange” (the earlier pseudonym of his grandfather Jacob, himself a monster-hunter and journalist of the weird), Leo is a columnist for World Weekly News, a supermarket tabloid of the supernatural and strange in a world where every Bat Boy, Bigfoot, alien baby, Satan visiting, Elvis sighting story is the truth. A world where vampires exist, magic is real, and extraterrestrial visitations routine.

What you may not know about me is, I was once a reporter for Weekly World News (1979 – 2007), the black and white tabloid that billed itself as “the world’s only reliable newspaper.” There was truth in that statement; you could rely on virtually every word in it to be made up, excluding the trivia column and the 6-point type warning at the bottom of page two that virtually every word in it was made up and suggesting readers suspend their belief for the sake of enjoyment. From 2005 to 2007, I wrote close to 100 bylined stories for the paper, as well as ghost writing at least that many more under the names of our numerous fictitious columnists ranging from “Miss Adventure, the Gayest American Hero” to “Ed Anger” to “Lester the Typing Horse” and “Sammy the Chatting Chimp” once I was on staff as Executive Editor from February 2006 to the end in August 2007. Continue reading

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

A Magic Tunnel, a Magic Rowboat…What’s the Difference? As Long as it Gets You to Yesterday!

Leave a comment

One of my favorite books as a kid was The Magic Tunnel, by Caroline D. Emerson. I read it when I was nine or ten years old, right around the time a paperback edition was released in 1964 (the book was originally published in 1940) through the Arrow Book Club, a service of Scholastic Books that brought book sales to schools around the country. My school was P.S. 233 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.

The Magic Tunnel told the story of brother and sister John and Sarah who, on a New York City subway ride down to Battery Park to visit the Statue of Liberty, suddenly find themselves transported back in time to 1664, during the last days of Dutch rule over the city then called “New Amsterdam” before the new British colonial masters changed its name to New York.

I rode the subway all the time as a kid. We’d always ride in the first car so we could watch the track ahead as we sped through the tunnel. Now and then, we might catch a brief glimpse of an old, abandoned station my dad said were called “ghost stations,” or even dark, mysterious figures tromping along adjacent tracks, or hugging the tunnel walls as we flashed by. There was, I was convinced, magic in those dark and creepy underground passages. Anything could happen. Continue reading

Author's Spotlight, New Releases

JSA RAGNAROK: Escape from Limbo!

Leave a comment

All writers have them, those stories or books that are written but for any number of reasons never see publication. Often, the reason is as simple as it didn’t sell. Other times, it can get a lot more complicated.

JSA: Ragnarok is one of the complicated ones, which explains why it was a long time in the publishing.

I signed the contract to write the first of what was supposed to be a trilogy ofJustice Society of America novels in 2004 for iBooks, whose publisher Byron Preiss had a license with DC Comics to publish a line of novels. My first draft was delivered on July 27, 2005, and my revised draft in October; the book and its cover (a painting by Alex Ross as seen below) were designed and laid out by early 2006; the color printout I have of the original cover is dated February 16, 2006, even though according to the publishing information on the title page in the PDF I have of the designed book the “First iBook edition” date is given as January 2006.

But there was a good reason for the delays and confused timing. Continue reading

Uncategorized

My Favorite/Most Influential Anthology: Danger Visions

Leave a comment

By Paul Kupperberg

I don’t read many anthologies these days. Maybe I should. I’ll usually read those containing one of my stories, like the upcoming Thrilling Adventure Yarns, edited by my friend Bob Greenberger and featuring my short barbarian adventure story, “Dreams of Kingdom,” but it’s been decades since they were regulars in my to-read pile.

I used to read them by the stack when I was kid, back in the 1960s. Science fiction, fantasy, sword and sorcery, mysteries, and even literary anthologies (once I discovered literature). Anthologies are like treasure chests full of every conceivable kind of wealth, no two objects alike. If you don’t like one story, chances are the next one (or the one after that) will be more to your liking.

The first anthology I remember reading was Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking 1967 collection of state-of-the-art-and-beyond science fiction short stories by the elite of science fiction, past and present, from Isaac Asimov to Robert Zelazny. This 500-plus page tome took the SF community by storm, and it was home to that year’s Hugo Award winners for best novella (“Riders of the Purple Sage” by Philip Jose Farmer) and best novelette, “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Lieber (which also won the Nebula), and the Nebula Awarded best short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Delany. Continue reading