You Knew Somebody Was Going To Do It Eventually
Finally, the trailer for BROKEBACK TREK starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy as lovers. I'm sure you're as tired of mock BROKEBACK trailers as I am, but I had to give this one a look, and it's actually pretty good. It's only about two minutes long, so give it a looksee.


I haven't mentioned in awhile what I've been reading. At the moment, I'm about 1/3 of the way through THE BLACK SHRIKE by Alistair MacLean. It's interesting so far, about a British agent who assigned to investigate the recent disappearance of some of the world's most preeminent scientists. All were traveling to Australia, but none arrived at their destination. So the hero and a female agent go undercover as husband and wife and are, presumably, waylaid by the same baddies responsible for the other kidnappings. At this point, the couple have escaped from their cell aboard a dank steamer ship and leapt into a stormy ocean, where they floated all night until miraculously washing adrift on a coral reef, which turned out, when the sun came up, to be near an island inhabited by an old British dude who, I'm betting, is involved with the original conspirators somehow.

I just finished MacLean's FEAR IS THE KEY, which I picked up before, but watched after, seeing the 1972 film adaptation. The movie, directed by Michael Tuchner and starring Barry Newman, John Vernon, Suzy Kendall, Dolph Sweet and Ben Kingsley, is surprisingly faithful to the novel with just a few relatively minor changes.

Before that, I read Brett Halliday's ARMED...DANGEROUS..., in which Miami private dick Michael Shayne goes undercover as a New York bank robber to bust a police corruption scheme, and DC Comics' SHOWCASE PRESENTS JONAH HEX, which is a 500-pages-and-more black-and-white collection of the first couple of dozen Jonah Hex comic book stories from the 1970's, all of which came from ALL-STAR WESTERN. Jonah Hex may be the most popular western character ever created specifically for comic books. As written by co-creator John Albano and later Michael Fleisher, who gave Hex a bit more depth, Jonah is a ruthless bounty hunter scarred physically and emotionally from his experiences fighting for the Confederates in the Civil War. Most of the stories are drawn by DC's stable of Filipino artists, including co-creator Tony DeZuniga, who give the character an appropriately bleak atmosphere. I hope DC releases more Jonah Hex in the SHOWCASE format, which is a thick book that sells for about $17--an excellent bargain.

What are you reading these days?