Author: Park Cooper

Hi there! Sorry not to post on the official first week of the month, but there were a couple of other things I wanted to do, as you’ll see.

Let’s see: I want to point out some stuff that got posted here but which didn’t actually get put in a newsletter until now:

–First up, I made a book trailer for our graphic novel Hungry Ghosts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKrJZh4VH9Q

–I finished posting my old interview with writer Steven Brust– I’ll let you look at that yourself: https://wickermanstudios.com/blog/

–I also did a fun interview with the creators of BITEMARK, a nailbiting manga that is also published by Lucha Comics, just like Wicker Man Studios’ HUNGRY GHOSTS: https://wickermanstudios.com/2023/10/11/interview-bitemark/

–Also, comics legend Keith Giffen passed away. His daughter and son-in-law posted online asking for remembrances and interviews, so I hurried and got mine up. There’s no images, but I feel that that’s appropriately somber: https://wickermanstudios.com/2023/10/12/keith-giffen-2006-interview/

–Finally, here’s footage of our very own Barb Lien-Cooper, being interviewed (and getting just a few words in edgewise during a panel) about her comic Gun Street Girl (see here: https://wickermanstudios.com/2015/04/15/gun-street-girl/ ) as part of Austin, Texas’ Staple! The Independent Media Expo! from 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XM-FwXBgyE

Okay, now that that’s all done, here’s my feature presentation, as it were– every Halloween season, Barb and I try to watch as many scary/intense films and stuff as we can, which we call PARKTOBER. So here’s this year’s report!

OKAY SO HI.

You’ve probably noticed that I/we stopped sending these out every week. Yeah, we decided to move to a new format– they’re not going to be every week anymore– they’re going to be monthly… MOSTLY.

HOWEVER! First we’re going to clear the decks as far as this Steven Brust interview goes! So here’s part two, and part three WILL be later this month, just to make room for other stuff! There’ll be one more thing this month, too, but MOSTLY it’s going to be a once-a-month update– the slight reversion to more-than-once-a-month this month is mostly just to finish what we started.

Steven Brust is a fantasy author who I interviewed one time, but I just found out that the website the interview was on is gone now, so I’ve decided it’s time to post the interview here!

You may remember the name of Steven Brust from my article I wrote on this site about writers who’ve been an influence on me… In the meantime, let’s let Wikipedia help introduce you to the man:

Steven Karl Zoltán Brust (born November 23, 1955) is an American fantasy and science fiction author of Hungarian descent. He is best known for his series of novels about the assassin Vlad Taltos, one of a disdained minority group of humans living on a world called Dragaera. His recent novels also include The Incrementalists (2013) and its sequel The Skill of Our Hands (2017), with co-author Skyler White.

As a drummer and singer-songwriter, Brust has recorded one solo album and two albums as a member of Cats Laughing. Brust also co-wrote songs on two albums recorded in the mid-1990s by the band Boiled in Lead.

Okay, so that’s some stuff you know now, if you didn’t before! So let’s jump into my interview with Steven Brust, who had apparently been recently talking to me, before the interview started, about how he watched the TV show Firefly…

Okay, so the third thing I thought I might write about here is my influences. Barb’s written at least one where she talked about Shirley Jackson (and, I imagine, Jane Eyre, because boy is that an influence on her, too), so I thought I might do the same.

So let’s talk about Roger Zelazny.

Okay, time to find out what Barb and I have been doing for entertainment and to try to relax lately– In general, we like streaming old movies.

–Maigret Sets a Trap: First, we lost our wi-fi connection. So, we watched a blu-ray we own of a movie we hadn’t seen in a while: Maigret Sets a Trap from 1958 with Jean Gabin as French detective Maigret. In fact, he’s the Chief Inspector of all of France’s Quai des Orfèvres– a bit like their Scotland Yard. A serial killer is stalking women in Paris, and Maigret must put a stop to it. A brilliant and exciting film with the excellent Jean Gabin (who used to have a relationship with Marlene Dietrich). And around the time the blu-ray was over, the wi-fi was back!

–Down Three Dark Streets: 1954, with Broderick Crawford and Ruth Roman. An FBI man’s partner is killed in the line of duty– but which of the three cases that he was working on at the time was it that got him killed? Written by a husband-wife team called The Gordons, this film really satisfied, with a great last line that suggested everything you need to know to extrapolate what life is going to be like for the two lead characters after the movie’s done. And Mr. Gordon really was an FBI man for a few years! In fact, J. Edgar Hoover wanted to block this film at first (until we calmed him down) because he was afraid we’d give away all the FBI’s secret crime-solving techniques to criminals!