Happy Sunday! NERVOSA chapter 43 is up! Go read it and please enjoy!

I originally reviewed this, for a website I was writing for at the time, way back in 2011. Amazon suggested the book to me and I thought, hey, why not revisit it? It's a great book that I'd love to share with a wider audience, so below is a version of my original review.

Remember "Little Golden Books?" If you’re between the ages of 30 and, oh, 70 or so, you should. If you don’t, they’re a very long running series of slim, inexpensive children’s books with subjects ranging from centuries-old fairy tales to Disney and Pixar tie-ins and featuring stories that are intended to both delight children and spur their reading skills on to new levels.

"Grandpa Won’t Wake Up" looks like one of these, but it sure as heck isn’t. It will, however, delight those of us with a fondness for absurd, and slightly morbid, humor.
Written by Simon Max Hill and co-plotted/drawn by Shannon Wheeler, freshly minted Eisner Award winner for his book I Thought You Would Be Funnier and creator of the long-running Too Much Coffee Man comic book/syndicated comic strip, the book starts out innocently enough as two children attempt to wake their assumed-to-be-sleeping grandfather, who had promised to take them to the park that day. It almost immediately becomes apparent to the reader that Grandpa is, in fact, quite dead. This either doesn’t occur to the two children (or the several adults they, at various times, enlist to aid them) or they simply don’t care. It really could go either way as they seem to be enjoying the situation. The result is a series of increasingly absurd, and at times funnily offensive to some (not me), attempts at waking the dead man.

As a fan of Shannon Wheeler’s work since Too Much Coffee Man appeared in Dark Horse Presents in the late 90s, and a daily visitor to his website for his online strips (www.tmcm.com), I was delighted to see his name attached to this when I first heard of it. Here his art is in line with his cartoons that frequently appear in The New Yorker magazine, as opposed to his TMCM comics and books, and fans that are only familiar with his comic book work will be pleased to see this side of his art.
While I am not familiar with Simon Max Hill, it’s obvious that he and Wheeler have a fondness for the Little Golden Book style and Grandpa reads much like a loving, if slightly deranged, homage to both the style of the series and the age group it is aimed at. This book is definitely not something you should give to your kids, unless you want them to be disturbed, but it’s something you should share with everyone you know who used to be a kid. I’m sure they’ll appreciate it as much as I have.

Go read it!

Then come back here tomorrow for a much longer update!

First, stop reading this and go read the new chapter of NERVOSA! Stuff it getting WEIRD!

Next, go here for a chance to win one of ten physical, real-life, honest to god paper BOOK copies of "Winning! A Guide to Games That Never Were", the anthology of video-game guide spoofs I edited (and wrote two stories for) Raven Warren Publishing. The contest runs 'til early May, but don't delay in signing up! There's ten copies available and something like 150 people already entered last I checked!

TL;DR version: GO HERE! FREE STUFF (MAYBE)!

Forgot to update this on Sunday, but Chapter 39 of NERVOSA went up as normal and chapter 40 is up today! Go read 'em both!

Chapter 38! Please go read! :)

First, new chapter of NERVOSA is up! Please go read it, vote for it, favorite it and enjoy it!

Next, a new book...

That's right! It's out!

Currently available on Amazon in print or on Kindle, Winning! A Guide to Games That Never Were features eight short stories that take inspiration from, and lovingly parody, the popular video-game guides of the 1980s and early 1990s, especially the Nintendo Gamer's Guidebooks. These stories provide strategies, tips and cheats to help you excel at a collection of video-games that never were nor ever will be and all in the style of the down and dirty, rough and ready collections so many of us knew, loved and cherished in the by-gone Golden Age of console gaming!

I both created the concept and edited the book for Raven Warren Studios AND contributed a couple of stories myself, so go check it out, read it and let us know what you think!

Get it on Amazon only $5 print or $2 Kindle!