For the longest time, readers have been wishing out loud that the Vidar Saga, which I wrote back in the 1980s, was available for e-readers. Well, the long wait is over.

It took 28 years, but The Hammer and The Horn–my first book ever–is available in e-book format from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble with a new cover from up-and-coming Brazilian artist Caio Cacau. And as soon as we can, we’re going to get the other two books in the trilogy–The Seekers and The Sword and The Fortress and The Fire–up as well, with Cacau covers of their own.

You see? Patience IS a virtue.

By Robert J. Kelly

“Hey Kids, Comics!”

Growing up, there was no newsstand, supermarket, department store, or convenience store that escaped my laser-like gaze, hoping to see those three words (and exclamation mark!) on display. Those words mean comics are for sale, which means I would be walking out of that newsstand, supermarket, department store, or convenience store with at least one of them in my hands.

Back in 2007, I created a blog based on those memories, betting that there were other people out there that had similarly powerful experiences centered around their love of comic books. It didn’t take long for the stories to roll in, from all walks of life, about how comics profoundly affected their lives. As I read the each new story, I found them so compelling that a thought finally occurred to me: “These would make a great book.”

Hey Kids, Comics!: True-Life Tales from the Spinner Rack features all-new stories of four-color obsession: Paul Kupperberg (Kevin Keller) takes us on a tour of DC’s classic 80 Page Giants. J.M. DeMatteis (The Phantom Stranger) talks about the time he headed out onto the cold New York streets, sick as a dog, just to get some Marvels from a nearby newsstand. Author Alan Brennert (Palisades Park) shares how a Dennis the Menace comic book helped guide his future. Master Cosplayer Roxanna Meta tells us the story of how she found love at a comic book shop. Sholly Fisch (Super Friends) reveals how a Marvel Treasury Edition almost got him killed!

These are only a tiny fraction of the funny, sad, embarrassing, and in some cases unbelievable true-life adventures that are contained in this book. Comic book legends, best-selling authors, Emmy-nominated TV writers, journalists, bloggers (even a real-life physicist!) share their stories and vintage photos of comic reading, collecting, obsessing, making Hey Kids, Comics!: True-Life Tales from the Spinner Rack a must-read for comics fans of all ages.

On a more personal note, I pitched this book to dozens of publishers and book agents, all of whom turned it down because they didn’t believe it was “marketable enough.” They all thought that comic books were too obscure a subject for a book like this, and that people wouldn’t be able to relate. I don’t think that’s true. Obsession is universal—everyone has something in their life that affected them in a profound way. For many of us, it was—and continues to be—comic books. With films and TV shows based on comics raking in billions of dollars and millions of fans, I think now is the perfect time for a book like Hey Kids, Comics!: True-Life Tales from the Spinner Rack. Read it and don’t be surprised if you see yourself in its pages. I know I did.

 Hey Kids, Comics! will be released in print and digital editions in September,

Well, this is a moment for me. Pardon me while I absorb it.

Okay, done.

Twenty-eight years and two months ago, I stood there in the science fiction section of a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Forest Hills and beamed at The Hammer and The Horn–all five copies of it. The cover was painted by Rowena Morrill, a most talented and acclaimed artist for whom I have the greatest personal admiration. But it wasn’t quite right. The antagonist on the cover was too small, too apelike, too spectacularly dressed. The hero was smiling when he shouldn’t have been. And there was orange in the background. A ton of orange.

Quite frankly, it bugged me. Not just then, but for the last twenty-eight years.

And it wasn’t until now that Caio Cacau, a crazy-talented Brazilian artist you’re going to be seeing a lot of, has come forth and un-bugged me. The cover he lovingly rendered for this re-release of The Hammer and The Horn is full-on, take-no-prisoners dynamic. The hero doesn’t look like he’s having fun–and why should he? He’s fighting for his life. His adversaries are big and brutish-looking, as they should be. And, perhaps best of all…orange? Not so much.

The universe is once again in balance. And Caio is busy working on another spectacular cover for me, embellishing a most unusual tale of a most unusual hero–but that’s a story for a different day.

While channel surfing last night I came across a showing of The Singing Detective, a 2003 theatrical remake of Dennis Potter’s powerful 1986 BBC Television miniseries of the same name. The original series starred Michael Gambon as “Philip Marlowe,” a hospitalized writer suffering from psoriatic anthropathy, a painfully crippling arthritic skin condition suffered, not by coincidence, by Potter himself. Confined to bed, unable to move without agony, and totally dependent on an apathetic hospital staff, “Marlowe” fills his days mentally rewriting his old book, “The Singing Detective,” with his healthy self cast in the lead role. “Marlowe’s” days are filled with pain, the humiliation of dependency, and bitter anger in a surreal blend of reality and fever-induced hallucinations in which the players are constantly breaking out into lavish production numbers of 1940s popular songs.

The remake, updated and Americanized, featured Robert Downey Jr. in the leading role (and renamed Danny Dark), and while Potter supplied the screenplay, it lacks the power of the BBC original. Part of that is its length: a sparse 106 minutes versus the 415 minutes of the six-parter; another is Downey’s performance. The self-assured snarkiness that makes him so appealing in roles like Sherlock Holmes and Tony Stark comes across here as his being just another asshole, albeit one suffering from a debilitating disease. But, despite its flaws, The Singing Detective does retain its core theme:

The writer’s need to bring his reality in line with his fiction.

As I wrote recently elsewhere, I used to believe writing fiction was the art of telling lies. It’s only of late that I realized it’s the art of telling the truth with lies. Downey’s Danny Dark makes frequent references to his cheap or crappy detective fiction, belittling the form as he crawls through it seeking out the truths he’s written into it about his past. “Danny” needs to keep rewriting “The Singing Detective” until he can strip away the lies in which he’s disguised the truth and find, if not a cure for his disease, a release from the snare of the past that causes him as much pain and suffering as does his physical condition.

The Singing Detective isn’t a “mystery,” at least not in the sense of an Agatha Christie whodunit. Like any work of fiction, it’s a mystery about a person. No one would ever call F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby a mystery novel, yet what else is it but Nick Carraway’s following clues to unravel the truth about the mysterious Jay Gatsby/James Gatz?

I love mysteries. I read lots of them, schlock and otherwise. But the best are the ones where the mystery goes deeper than finding out who the killer is or where they stashed the loot. James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, John D. MacDonald, Robert B. Parker, Bill Pronzini, Lawrence Block, Jim Thompson, Andrew Vachss…their protagonists don’t just solve the mystery and walk away to be reset, Miss Marple-like, to the status quo for their next appearance. Their characters carry the scars of their lives and their cases and the people they’ve effected along the way. They’re not stories about crimes; they’re tales of human souls caught in life changing, often deadly situations.

All I had in mind when I started writing The Same Old Story was a plot, a whodunit set in the comic book business of the early 1950s. My idea was loosely based on two separate but true incidents from that world: artist Joe Maneely’s 1958 accidental death falling between the cars of a New Jersey bound commuter train, and a scheme perpetrated by at least one comic book editor to defraud the publisher for which he worked. But as I got into it, the “how” and the “what” of the crime seemed less and less the key to the story than did the “who” and the “why”…not as in “whodunit,” but as in “who are they and why did they do it?”

That may sound a lot like I’m belaboring of the obvious, but I don’t think so. I love Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels. Archie Goodwin and Wolfe are old, familiar, and comfortable friends, but they are aloof from the people and the stories in which they become involved. What I know of their backgrounds is interesting but, in the end, superficial. Whatever happens in one novel is forgotten in the next; whatever torments they encounter (and seldom suffer themselves) have no bearing on how they will behave in the novel that follows. Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder, on the other hand, is a tormented and tortured man about whom the author has constructed a thirty-seven year/eighteen book life arc unlike just about anything else in the genre. Wolfe collects his fee and moves on to the next case. Scudder doesn’t care about the money; he’s out to save souls and hopefully, in the process, find a little bit of salvation for his own sins.

My Max Wiser is closer to the latter than the former. He’s a character with a history and he carries it with him wherever he goes. He’s a writer who believes so much in what he writes that, like Potter’s “Philip Marlowe/Danny Dark” the line between what he’s living and what he’s writing becomes blurred. Does life imitate art, or is art imitating life?

Yes, I was an English lit major and therefore suffer greatly from pretention, so pardon my deconstructive ramblings. And, no, I’m not in any way trying to equate myself with these literary giants, just attempting to point to how their works have served as inspirational jumping off points to my own (very) humble attempts at playing in their beautifully tended field. So maybe mine is just The Same Old Story of murder, theft, love, and deceit…but I hope it’s one I’ve managed to tell as truthfully as my lies will let me.