Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5: Cover Painting Revealed

And herewith: The cover design for Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5, coming soon to an Amazon-dot-com near you...

"Pasteboard Demons" Back in Print for the First Time

Just now digging out from beneath the book-building foundations of Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5: The Atom Age. A long and mostly lonesome process. And pending receipt of proofmarks from co-authors John Wooley and Jan Alan Henderson, it's all wrapped but for the indexing process. Can't have a movie-history book without an index.

This one will pick up where Forgotten Horrors 4 leaves off, covering 1949-1954 in terms of horror and science-fiction movies from the American independent studios. A fascinating period for horror and S-F films (plus selected crime dramas and some out-and-out oddities), especially in their reflections of the political and social turmoil of the 1950s. Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5 should make its splash at Amazon-dot-com within the month. A sixth volume is in preparation -- drawing from John Wooley's and my long-running monthly column in Fangoria magazine.

Many distractions, otherwise. Meanwhile, I've finished a true-crime anthology called Pasteboard Demons, compiled from the Bloody Visions trading-card sets that provoked such a ruckus upon their original publication 19 years ago. They're all here, reproduced from the original artwork, with quite a few outtakes and bonus tracks (including a batch of my crime-comics stories from such magazines as Heavy Metal and Taboo). All on view at www.amazon.com, a.k.a. http://www.amazon.com/Pasteboard-Demons-Ruckus-Bloody-Visions/dp/1453764798/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295916527&sr=8-1

Or as Amazon's pitch tells it: "The crime-card controversy of the 1990s comes rampaging back to life in Michael H. Price's anthology of his notorious Bloody Visions trading-card folios -- all together in a single whopping volume, larger by far than the original pieces. Rare bonus-card images round out the set, with an additional selection of Price's true-crime comics stories ... Veteran journalist and courtroom sketch artist Michael H. Price combines these backgrounds in Pasteboard Demons -- an expanded survey of the author's popular and controversial Bloody Visions trading-card sets of 1992-1995. Reproduced from the original artwork, with curatorial notes and a new commentary on the petty ruckus that greeted the original set's arrival in 1992. Price is the author of the long-running Forgotten Horrors series of movie-history books, and the writer-artist responsible for the Rondo Award-nominated Carnival of Souls graphic novel."

And more presently about Forgotten Horrors Vol. 5 and some other new projects.

-- MHP

Superman Checks In

Just finishing up the addition of Jan Alan Henderson's chapter on Superman & the Mole Men to the manuscript of Forgotten Horrors 5. Busy week overall so far, what with the return of our blues ensemble, Bruton & Price Swingmasters Revue, from the T-Bone Walker Blues Festival at Linden, Texas, and preparations for Saturday's (June 26, 2010) concert by The Self-Righteous Bros. at Arts Fifth Avenue in Fort Worth.

Aiming to add another coupla thousand woids to Forgotten Horrors 5 by day's end, in addition to a couple of magazine pieces and a page or two of comic-book restorations for the Comics from the Gone World series. Meanwhile, check out the comic-book edition of Forgotten Horrors at www.janalanhenderson.com...

Overdue, Yeah, No Doubt

Delinquent at updating this journal, sure enough. Been shackled to the manuscript for Forgotten Horrors 5, all the same. Here to report in brief that I've wrapped the 1949 section as of this evening with a chapter on I Married a Savage ... a presumably lost film starring career stripper Zorita -- primarily a matter of transferring her burlesque-show snake-dance routine to a (melo)dramatic narrative...

And more as things develop. Substantial progress already in place on the sections for 1950, 1951, 1952... you get the idea...

MHP on CSI at S&H Museum: April 17

If you're in shouting distance of the Museum of Science & History in Fort Worth, Texas, on Saturday afternoon (2 p.m. April 17), drop by and catch Mike Price's open-to-all program on the "Prehistory of CSI," a tie-in with the CSI: The Experience interactive exhibition at the Museum. Mike will be covering a concise history of forensic detection in popular fiction from E.A. Poe and Conan Doyle in the 19th century through such last-century benchmarks as Chet Gould's Dick Tracy and Seabury Quinn's Jules de Grandin tales. Click for more: http://fwmsh.org/special-events

Mike has, meanwhile, just finished final edits on his chapter for The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy, Vol. No. 10 -- forthcoming from IDW Publishing of San Diego.

John Wooley Weighs In...

Just now received John Wooley's chapter on The Man from Planet X as a key element of Forgotten Horrors 5. A significant piece, indeed, in view of the book's concentration upon otherworldly science fiction as an emerging, ultimately dominant, element of the indie-horror genre of the postwar 1950s.

Genuine pride-of-place, here, in that the modest but aggressively positioned film beat both The Thing and The Day the Earth Stood Still into play as a cautionary space-intruder yarn. About which, more presently.

Iger Comics Sweatshop Scenes

Back to woik on Forgotten Horrors 5, following this digression (below) into another stage of the pre-Code comic-book parody project. Essentially, a Theatre of the Absurd takeoff on the Farrell companies' Fantastic Fears magazine of the 1950s.

But enough such foolishness. Good productive story conference today with co-author John Wooley on Forgotten Horrors 5, which is falling nicely into shape despite real and imaginary distractions on this end of the assembly line. The book should be completed (manuscript and art selections, that is) by summer's end for shipment to Baltimore's Midnight Marquee Press.

Meanwhile: Fantastic Frogs.