Showing Tag: "book" (Show all posts)

SOME OF MY FAVORITE DC COMICS STORY ARCS

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, June 11, 2021, In : Pop Culture 

So somebody today on a DC Comics fans page asked fellow members to post their five favorite “DC Events” of all time. And then provided a list of storylines that included Crisis on Infinite Earths and all the post-Crisis usual suspects (Death of Superman, Nightfall, Infinite Crisis, Blackest Night, Final Crisis, et al).


My initial response was to yawn and mutter under my breath, “Not this stuff again.” Then I gave the question some deeper thought and - being the rapidly aging, unapolo...


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CATCHING UP ON THE MOVIES: MONSTERS, WESTERNS AND SUPERHEROES

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, April 14, 2021, In : Pop Culture 

I had the opportunity this past weekend to finally catch a trio of movies I‘d been wanting to see for some time.


First up was the current blockbuster Godzilla Vs. Kong, the fourth (and final, according to some reports) entry in the Warner Brothers “Monster Universe” series that began with 2014’s Godzilla. Like its predecessors, it is a no-holds-barred roller coster ride; not so much a remake as a complete reimagining of the 1962 Japanese film King Kong Vs. Godzilla, the new film makes ...


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CATCHING UP ON MY READING: FOUR HITS AND A DUD

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, In : Review 

It occurred to me this past weekend, as I closed the cover of a book I had just completed, that the one good thing that came out of this past year - what with all the quarantining and fighting off the virus and shivering in that recent Arctic blast - was that I had ample opportunity to catch up on my reading.


Even when you’re a lifelong bookworm like myself, there are times when you have little choice but to stifle the urge to curl up with that latest acquisition from Barnes and Noble beca...


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THE KLAUS PROTOCOL (A Review)

Posted by John Allen Small on Monday, April 27, 2020, In : Review 

I have been a fan of Frank Schildiner's tales of Frankenstein's Monster and Napoleon’s Vampire Hunters for some time. Recently I was given the opportunity to read an advance copy of Schildiner's latest novel - an historical novel entitled The Klaus Protocol, and I have to say this this his best work yet.


Opening in 1938 (the year my late father was born, which made the story all the more interesting for me on a personal level) then flashing back to incidents that occurred two years previou...


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WHEN JOSH THE LAD MET STAN THE MAN

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, November 14, 2018, In : Reminiscence 
(Stan Lee as he appeared in a 1977 in-house ad for Marvel's then-new teen-oriented publication, Pizzazz.)


One of the unexpected gifts that has come my way as a result of my chosen profession as a journalist and author has been the occasional opportunity to meet one of my childhood heroes.


Over the years I have written in this column about some of those one-on-one encounters with such luminaries as country music legend Johnny Cash; actor Adam “Batman” West; and two who actually became perso...


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GIVE THE GIFT OF READING

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, December 1, 2016, In : Pop Culture 

I have always loved the written word – reading it, writing it, at home or at school or at the office or sitting in the back seat of one of Mom and Dad's old Volkswagens when I was a child – and it has been my great fortune to have been able to turn this love into something resembling an actual career. (Much to the surprise, I'm sure, of a certain fifth grade teacher who once made the mistake of telling me that I would never amount to anything… but that’s a discussion for another day.)...


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HAN SOLO: A LITERARY CHRONOLOGY

Posted by John Allen Small on Wednesday, July 29, 2015, In : Pop Culture 

Here's something I promised Win Eckert I would post when I got home, following a discussion on the topic that we had at his house during our recent visit... 


During the first wave of Star Wars prose fiction that began with Del Rey’s publication of Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye in 1978, L. Neil Smith’s Lando Calrissian trilogy (which takes places prior to Han Solo’s ownership of the Millennium Falcon) represented the earliest chronological adventures in the series; t...


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RETURN TO PAL-UL-DON: A REVIEW

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, July 3, 2015, In : Opinion 

In his tribute essay “Caliban,” one of the several items of supplemental material included in the 2013 deluxe hardcover reissue of Philip José Farmer’s classic fictional biography Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Meteor House), author and pulp historian Will Murray twice makes statements to the effect that no other writer was as qualified as Farmer to step into the shoes of Edgar Rice Burroughs with regard to the task of telling new tales of Tarzan of the Apes.


Those comments of Murr...


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BOOKS I READ THIS SUMMER

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, September 12, 2013, In : Pop Culture 


It was nice to see Tishomingo resident and fellow writer Tom Morrow stop here at the newspaper office the other day bearing copies of his recently released second novel, Yesterday’s Gone – The Senior Class of ‘61


Yesterday’s Gone is a follow-up to Tom’s first novel, Dust In The Wind, which followed the adventures of  17-year-old Dave White as he leaves his home in Oklahoma for a job harvesting wheat in the summer of 1960. The new book begins with Dave returning home, and follows ...


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PIC O' THE DAY

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, June 20, 2013, In : Pictures 

Ah, the Good Old Days...
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BOOK REVIEW: SKULL ISLAND, BY WILL MURRAY

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, April 18, 2013, In : Pop Culture 
(Cover art by Joe DeVito)


The year 1933 was an important one for American pop culture. That was the year that saw the debut of not one but two of our country’s most popular and enduring fictional icons, characters who still live in the hearts of millions of fans nearly a century later. 


One was Dr. Clark Savage Jr. - better known to his legion of admirers as Doc Savage, the intrepid adventurer, surgeon and crimefighter who was the lead character in 181 issues of his own pulp fiction magazin...


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RECENT READS WORTH SHARING...

Posted by John Allen Small on Monday, January 21, 2013, In : Pop Culture 


As a lifelong bookworm I always like it when I get the opportunity to read books in order to review them in my weekly newspaper column. Over the Christmas-New Year’s holiday season I had the opportunity to peruse several such recent releases that I felt were worth passing along to our readers. 


It will come as no surprise to longtime readers of this column (or anyone who knows me well at all) that my favorite among this crop of recent material is the long-awaited biography of my all-time f...


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PIC O' THE DAY: "ELSEWORLDS" IDEA

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, March 16, 2012, In : Pictures 

Got inspired last night to do another "fantasy crossover" comic book cover like the one I posted yesterday. In this case i guess it really isn't so much a crossover as it is an "Elseworlds" or "What If?" sort of thing. Looking at it now I realize I should have included Reggie as Cyborg; maybe I'll go back later and redo it.
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Won't Find These In Overstreet's...

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, September 8, 2011, In : Pop Culture 


A while back I wrote about a website where a fellow has been designing his own fake comic books covers and shared an example of his work. That got me to thinking that I've taken a stab at that same sort of thing every now and then for the past few years, and thought maybe I'd share some examples of my own work from time to time. This is one I did about six or seven years ago; it was inspired by a discussion I had with my son Joshua, who was about 13 or 14 at the time, regarding the fact that ...
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PIC OF THE DAY: All You Need Is The Thing!

Posted by John Allen Small on Friday, July 15, 2011, In : Pop Culture 


There's a great blog - http://braveandboldlost.blogspot.com - manned by a fellow who does a killer job of creating his own team-up comic book covers. He originally did a series of imaginary "Brave And The Bold" team-ups between Batman and a myriad of guest stars you'd have to see to believe; more recently he set Batman aside to concentrate on a new series of "Marvel Two-In-One" covers featuring The Thing in similar team-up situations. I was glancing through the site today after not having had...
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PIC OF THE DAY

Posted by John Allen Small on Thursday, June 30, 2011, In : Pictures 

This is a picture I cobbled together on Photoshop just for fun a few years back. Always kinda liked this one, silly as it is...
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About Me


John Allen Small John A. Small is an award-winning newspaper journalist, columnist and broadcaster whose work has been honored by the Oklahoma Press Association, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press, the National Newspaper Association, and the Oklahoma Education Association. He and his wife Melissa were married in 1986; they have two sons, Joshua Orrin (born 1991) and William Ian (born 1996). Mr. Small is the News Editor and columnist for the Johnston County Capital-Democrat, a weekly newspaper headquartered in Tishomingo, OK. He obtained his nickname, "Bard of the Lesser Boulevards," from a journalism colleague - the late Phil Byrum - in recognition of the success of his popular newspaper column, "Small Talk." (In addition to the many awards the column itself has received over the years, a radio version of "Small Talk" earned an award for "Best Small Market Commentary" from the Society of Professional Journalists in 1998.) John was born in Oklahoma City in 1963; lived in the Bradley-Bourbonnais-Kankakee area of Illinois for most of the next 28 years (with brief sojourns in Texas and Athens, Greece, thrown in to break up the monotony); then returned to his native state in 1991, where he currently resides in the Tishomingo/Ravia area. He graduated from Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School in 1981, and received his bachelor's degree in journalism from Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais in 1991. The years between high school and college were a period frought with numerous exploits and misadventures, some of which have become the stuff of legend; nobody was hurt along the way, however, which should count for something. In addition to his professional career as a journalist he has published two short story collections: "Days Gone By: Legends And Tales Of Sipokni West" (2007), a collection of western stories; and "Something In The Air" (2011), a more eclectic collection. He was also a contributor to the 2005 Locus Award-nominated science fiction anthology "Myths For The Modern Age: Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton Universe," edited by Win Scott Eckert. In additon he has written a stage play and a self-published cookbook; served as project editor for a book about the JFK assassination entitled "The Men On The Sixth Floor"; and has either published or posted on the Internet a number of essays, stories and poems. He has also won writing awards from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the National Library of Poetry. He is a past president of the Johnston County Chamber of Commerce in Tishomingo; was a charter member and past president of the Johnston County Reading Council, the local literacy advocacy and "friends of the library" organization; served as Johnston County's first-ever Americans with Disabilities Act coordinator in 1994-95; served two terms as chairman of the Johnston County (OK) Democratic Party; and has taught journalism classes for local Boy Scout Merit Badge Fairs. He is a member of the New Wold Newton Meteorics Society.

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