THE COPPERHEAD STRIKES COMIC BOOK STORES! (The Further Adventures Of A Professional Liar)

My pulp hero short story "The Copperhead Strikes!" made it to the comics shops yesterday, March 11th, in the pages of AHOY Comics' Captain Ginger Season 2 # 2. If you're interested in buying a copy (and I certainly hope you are!), you can use Comics Shop Locator to find a funnybook retailer near you. I would advise contacting a bookstore before crusadin' your way to its door, just to be sure the store stocks AHOY titles and has this specific issue in stock. Most will order it for you if it's not on hand.



The timing is cool. Yesterday also marked the one-year anniversary of my first fiction sale, which was another (as yet unpublished) short story sold to AHOY. AHOY bought and paid for four of my little prose creations in 2019, and has now published two of those four.



"The Copperhead Strikes!" is set in the same fictional universe as my Western short "The Last Ride Of The Copperhead Kid" (which was published in AHOY's The Second Coming # 5). It's not a sequel, and it doesn't share any of the same characters, but there is a connection. That connection carries forward into a third story, "The Copperhead Affair," a secret agent adventure set on December 31st, 1965. "The Copperhead Affair" remains unsold, but I'm hoping the good folks at AHOY decide to pick it up for publication. I have started writing a fourth Copperhead-related story, set in 1983, but that's not finished yet.

When I send these stories out, I have no idea of what artwork will accompany the fortunate ones that are chosen for publication. So far, I've really lucked out with the artists AHOY has assigned to illustrate my stuff. Ed Catto's rendering of my Old West gunslinger The Copperhead Kid was spot on, and now Shane White has made my 1930s pulp avenger The Copperhead come to life; his depiction of The Copperhead is exactly how I pictured her, and I couldn't be more thrilled.

The Copperhead, as depicted by Shane White

A couple of quick notes regarding The Copperhead. The fight scene in "The Copperhead Strikes!" is repurposed from "The Undersea World Of Mr. Freeze," a Batman short I wrote for this blog. The chances of me ever selling that story to DC Comics seem slim, so I figured it was fair game for me to reconfigure it for my own character The Copperhead. "The Copperhead Kid" contains an unfortunate typo that I tried to correct before publication, but the best laid plans of mice and merchants often go astray. If the story is ever reprinted, I'll fix that, and I'll also change the age given for one of the characters; well after the story was written, I decided that character should actually be about four years older than the story claims. Retroactive continuity.

AHOY still has two more of my stories in inventory, "Guitars Vs. Rayguns" and "The Portrait Of Amontillado," and I hope you'll get to read those some time soon. But right now, I hope you'll contact your local comics retailer and grab a copy of Captain Ginger Season 2 # 2, and let me know what you think of "The Copperhead Strikes!"



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