Frazetta painted the artwork in 1963, if I am not mistaken. This particular reprint of the Burroughs classic was published by Ace Books in 1969.
The Piker Press features “November, Blue Ridge Mountains, 1992”
I’m happy today to see The Piker Press publish one of my short poems — “November, Blue Ridge Mountains, 1992.” You can find it right here.
Thank you, Editor Sand Pilarski, for allowing me to share my work once again with the creative community of The Piker Press!
“Autumnal Landscape,” Stepan Fedorovich Kolesnikov
Kolesnikov appears to have painted multiple works with the same or similar titles. I am unaware of the year.
Hey, it beats being one of the Axis Powers.
(Drama stinks.)
I came a bit too close for comfort just now with the skunk who lives around my street, Leonardo da Stinki. I can usually saunter right by animals without them even noticing me, which I suppose is sort of a weird trait, or maybe a really boring X-Men mutant power. Leonardo and I both sort of stumbled upon one another, halted abruptly, and made some awkward eye contact. (It’s like running into your ex at Costco.)
He thankfully ambled off, after I oafishly backpedaled. (I can do oafish really well and with precisely zero effort; that’s another one of my superpowers.) I’d like to think we had a tacit exchange:
“I don’t want any drama tonight, do you?”
“Nah.”
So there was no odoriferous outcome, and I’m grateful for that. Leonardo has gotten quite big now that he is an adult, and I’m sure his own special abilities have correspondingly magnified. (Why is there no skunk-themed member of The X-Men, anyway? That feels like a creative oversight.)
I really want to snap a picture of him, because my aspirations in life make sense only to me, and he was crossing a well lit yard during his exit. But this is The South, and I’m not sure how the average Roanoker might react if they discovered a weird, New York liberal taking pictures their property at night. I have a feeling that’s a story that doesn’t end well.
By Twitter, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77807699
Cover to “House of Mystery” #252, Neal Adams, 1977
DC Comics.
“Watermelon Haiku,” by Eric Robert Nolan
This slimming man slups
another watermelon
dinner in earnest.
“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle …”
“When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.”
— Pearl S. Buck
Cover to “House of Mystery” #212, Mike Kaluta, 1973
DC Comics.
“Denmark’s a prison.” “Then is the world one.”
Hamlet: Then is doomsday near! But your news is not true. Let me question more in particular. What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?
Rosencrantz: Prison, my lord?
Hamlet: Denmark’s a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
Rosencrantz: Why, then your ambition makes it one. ‘Tis too narrow for your mind.
Hamlet: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Rosencrantz: Which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Hamlet: A dream itself is but a shadow.
Rosencrantz: Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
Hamlet: Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretch’d heroes the beggars’ shadows.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 