Sam Mercury of the Space Patrol
This is the Rocketeer coming at you with Podcast #34. This week I’m taking a break from reviews to talk about some art. Specifically, my art.
In a few days we’re going to have a local UFO festival here in town called, The Flying Saucer Party. It commemorates Kenneth Arnold’s famous flying saucer sighting near Mt. Rainier back in 1947. The sighting took place in our county—Lewis—and it is from that sighting that the popular name, “Flying Saucer” came into being. Kind of a swell place for a science fiction writer to live, eh?
Anyway, I have been on the event committee since the Party’s inception and have a lot of fun with it. This year will be the first annual Flying Saucer Party Art Show and, of course, I had to have an entry. My piece isn’t the expected UFO fare, however. It does have space ships and...well, I’ll get to that in a minute. Let me first step back to set the stage for the piece. A few years ago I published my first pulp novelette, Landscape of Darkness: A Novel of the Space Patrol. In it, Police Captain Sam Mercury tries to save his colony from a plague of deadly nanobots. Sam is a really fun hero, he’s in his forties, has a temper and an ulcer, and owes a lot to hard-boiled cop stories. I have some other Sam Mercury stories in development but they got shoved down behind a couple of other books that are coming to the finish line right now. I’ve been thinking about Sam recently and when it came time to do a piece for the art show I wondered if I couldn’t bring in something from one of the future books. I decided to do a comic page, as if one of the old Buck Rogers Sunday strips. I haven’t done much comics work since about 2008 when I was doing a web comic with my ex, but I do like doing comics, they’re fun. And being a pen & ink artist at heart, they’re right up my alley.
As the piece took shape in my mind, I realized a few things. I specifically say in Landscape of Darkness that humans had not yet interacted with aliens even though they have colonies away from this solar system. (This doesn’t count ancient half-cyborg Neanderthals which they have interacted with.) In future stories they will have had alien contact, and I think we’ll begin to see aliens on the Space Patrol. So the idea behind this art piece is that one of the first aliens on the Patrol—a green girl whose name I don’t know yet—is trying very hard to prove herself and runs afoul of some nasty customers. Their police cruiser is destroyed and they crash land on some asteroid. Is their communication beam still working? Will that beam be able to reach the nearest colony relay station in time to get help? Will the pirates head down to the asteroid to finish the job? This cartoon page doesn’t answer these questions and neither will I—for now! Anyway the piece is currently hanging at Mint City Coffee in Chehalis, WA until the 21st of the month.
Full caption: “Sam Mercury of the Space Patrol: Planet T-13 — ‘Patrol Ship Crashes’ (page 15).” Pen and ink and watercolor, 14 x 18” framed, and it is for sale. If you’d like to snap it up for your collection, you may! And then later when I need it back for the comic you can refuse and cause no end of mischief.
Find out more about Landscape of Darkness on my Lucina Press site including: a sample chapter, book trailer, and some of the art.
Landscape of Darkness has a fun origin story. You can read about it here.
And let’s not forget the illustrations! How can you root for Captain Sam Mercury coming to the rescue if you can’t visualize him? Well here he is along with some of the rest of the cast:
Finally, if you’d like to look at some of other my pulp art, you can cruise on over to my studio site—Flying Pony Studies—and take a gander at some of my pulp stylings. You can also see some of my newest pieces in the Lucina Press blog, which you can subscribe to and get word about when I post. You can also subscribe to the Rocketeer on Substack, as well, of course. It’s free!
As a last note, we live in a particularly rough moment in history. I believe that it’s a transitional time and we’re moving into something better and freer. Neotopia, as I have called it before. When I write, or do art, I feel it’s a revolutionary act, a piece of the new world (even if in the guise of the old pulp era) being pulled back into our own dark moment. For this reason I do not write fast, nor do I write to conform to what is right now. I dream about lands yet to be seen. Of places and events just over the horizon. All of my current books: Landscape of Darkness, Anchor, and Incorruptible are like that. (Incorruptible was SO much like, in fact, that that I had to delay its release a year so as not to put about a book about a plague in the year of the Covid lockdowns!) My two new books will also be of that quality. I really like them and hope you will, too. If you’re interested in hearing about my new publications keep an eye on this Substack or my Lucina Press blog, or both! That’s where you’ll hear about all the new releases coming out.
This is the Rocketeer signing off for today.