Stay tuned because Tyrel Helm’s story isn’t finished yet.

I will also have The Prevailist preview books as well as several art prints and sketch cards. Want an original piece of art? I’ll be taking commission orders as well.

I hope to see you there!

There are many exciting possibilities ahead for comics that are built specifically for tablet readers but the two-page spread will soon be utilized less and less.

One of my favorite books. It starts out with a brutal and vicious close quarter fight with Apache warriors and only gets better from there. There are scenes through out that are breath takingly cinematic in execution. And it is  absolutely dripping with wonderful cowboy poetry:

“We were hard and lonely men who rode a hard and lonely way. We had known nothing of each other until this ride began in Yuma, and even now we knew scarcely more. But we had sweated and thirsted together, we had hungered and fought, and eaten trail dust together; so now we rode as brothers ride.”

That is just one example of the myriad of rich passages through out this awesome book.

The story follows Tell Sackett who is asked by his sister-in-law to go deep into Apache territory in Mexico in order to retrieve her kidnapped son. The problem is that there is no kidnapped boy. It’s a revenge plot to get back at her ex-husband, Tell’s brother, because she blames him and all the Sacketts for the death of her father. It’s a simple western adventure plot filled with wonderful details and stoic men of action. I constantly refer back to it for inspiration when writing. It strikes the kind of tone that I would love to come close to capturing with my own story.

If you’re looking for some good old fashioned western yarns then you can’t go wrong with a Louis L’Amour book. And The Lonely Men is one of his best.

It was recently announced that the film Atlas Shrugged part II is in production and will be released this October. This is great news. I highly recommend the first film. It’s not a great film in the sense that the direction, cinematography, score, acting, etcetera is ground breaking. All of those things service the story just fine but they’re not the reason to see it. It’s the ideas of individual achievement, keeping what you produce and showing government as the blockade to prosperity that the movie promotes and that I found so thrilling. These are all themes that are rarely, if ever, presented in mainstream entertainment.

My one disappointment with this new film, so far, is that the entire cast from the first has been replaced. Now I have nothing against any of the actors for the second film but I really appreciate continuity. It can pull me out of a film very easily when characters who I was introduced to and invested in are suddenly played by different people. Even if the new actor(s) is much better. (For example I much prefer Don Cheadle to Terrance Howard but I would have liked to have kept the actor continuity between Iron Man and Iron Man 2.) I thought that Taylor Schilling as Dagney Taylor and Grant Bowler as Henry Reardon were excellent and I’m disappointed to see them not a part of this second film.

If you haven’t seen Atlas Shrugged Part I,  please go rent it. When Part II opens later this year please go support it.