S!

 Look! A comics post not about death!

This is just plain good news. My friend Elliott Maggin is doing what I had, time and again, thought about doing, and time and again ended up not doing.

To wit: he's writing an online novel and putting it up on his site. It's called Lancer. And that's all you're getting out of me. Go to maggin.com. Costs you nothing.

That ol' publish-for-free thing exercises a powerful pull, even if there's a "Wait! In a world with justice in it, I'd be getting paid for it!" counter-pull. I envy him his folly..  

Eliiott actually did the impossible: he broke into comics by mailing in a sample script, cold. You just don't do that, even if the story was as good as "What Can One Man Do?" Nope. Not fair and doesn't happen. So maybe it's karma that he's hurling a novel out into the void and waiting for the splash. 

Lancer books, by the way, introduced the world to Conan the Barbarian and  printed editions of Isaac Asimov's novels with gorgeous Kelly Freas covers. They were also the shoddiest paperbacks ever made that weren't distributed for free by religious fanatics. The clue of the spine came loose inside of a year and they fell apart in your hands like vampires at dawn.

So the poor guy already has all these strikes against him. Go over and help him out.