The Fraudulent Broad (1958)

Dan Slick is a big lug who works a miserable 9 to 5 as a vacuum cleaner salesman. He has his eye on the soon to be vacant manager's position and the cute front office lady, but laments his lot in life and wonders if he'll ever get ahead financially. Things take a turn when Dan somehow manages to sell one of his cleaners to Cleo, the young wife of the chairman of the entire company. Taking more than a passing interest in Dan and his plucky charms, the chairman hires Dan for a very special job: fucking the living daylights out of his wife with a photographer hiding in the bushes so he can divorce the gold digging hussy and leave her with nothing! The only catch? Dan seems to have fallen in love with Cleo, and the only way out for them as a couple with the chairman's millions intact is for the chairman to die...

James L. Rubel, who also wrote under a plethora of pen names, produced a decent amount of novels ranging from crime to westerns during the heyday of pulp between the 1930's to 1950's. Unfortunately, his name doesn't seem to be talked about as much as some of the luminaries of the genre and the majority of his work existed for decades only in used bookshops, but perhaps that can change with some recent reprints from publisher Cutting Edge Books. One of these reprints is The Fraudulent Broad from 1958, a sleazy sex and murder tale with more than a hint of Double Indemnity in the mix.

While the press for this book warns the reader it's for "adults only" and there's some loose, adulterous women and themes of cuckoldry abound, Rubel never actually ventures into true erotica here. Beyond some scenes of heavy making out and implied sex off-screen, The Fraudulent Broad is actually rather tame by today's standards.

What the novel does have going for it is its sleaze factor. If this were a movie it would have been made in the 1970's on super 8 with that greasy, muddy hue of the cheapest film stock at the time. Every single character in this novel - from the lughead main character to the conniving chairman to the drunken money hungry wife to the flamboyant family attorney with his own agenda - they are all complete slimeballs. Even the minor characters like Dan's office rival and the police officers who show up towards the tail-end of the story are still dripping with sleaze. I honestly struggled to find a likeable character throughout the entire novel.

However, I don't necessarily see the lack of likeable characters as a drawback in a story that's intended to be this dark and salacious. As a treatise on greed and what the pursuit of easy money will do to already damaged people, The Fraudulent Broad is a home run. It doesn't have anywhere near the hypnotic poetry of something like a Chandler novel, but I still found Rubel to be a competent wordsmith who seemed to have a knack for pacing that the likes of Elmore Leonard would perfect to a science in the decades that followed.

And like any crime novel of this era, there's also plenty of twists and double-crossing to be had. Some you'll see coming, some you may not...

Recommended.

The Punisher (2004)

In the quaint, sun-drenched town of Pastryville, Frank Castle, once known to the public as the notorious "Punisher", has hung up his guns for an apron and traded in the skull and kevlar armor for a smile and a rolling pin. After a life-altering incident involving a misadventure with a down on his luck pastry chef, Frank unexpectedly finds himself the owner of "Castle's Cakes", a bakery that becomes the very soul of the community. Gone are the days of vengeance - now Frank's only 'war' is the war within himself to bake the perfect croissant...

...or not. I mean, I'd probably put down money before you could blink an eye to see a story where my favorite comic book character did something as ridiculous as become a pastry chef, but alas, we're actually here today to talk about author D.A. Stern's novelization of the 2004 film The Punisher starring Tom Jane as the eponymous gun enthusiast himself. The actual plot of this story is every single Punisher origin you've ever known about: bad guys kill Frank Castle's family - Frank Castle goes on murderous rampage against any and all bad guys - the end. For the 2004 film, screenwriter/director Jonathan Hensleigh made some... changes to the lore and the overall setting, including moving the action from the gritty streets of New York City to... Tampa. Yeaaah. Tell me your film project is trying to save money without telling me your film project is trying to save money.

Hensleigh also made sure to exclude characters like Microchip and Jigsaw because he saw them as "lacking the spirit of the urban vigilante". This tells me Hensleigh didn't actually 'get' fuck-all about the comics, because while the Punisher's roots are undoubtedly part of that 1970's Mack Bolan/Death Wish stew, there's just as much of a place for high-tech Bond style gadgets and over the top supervillains in the Punisher's universe. It is a comic book property, after all. As such, the 2004 film suffered from being turned into a mostly by-the-numbers 1970's style revenger flick. Tom Jane, who actually *is* a fan of the Punisher character, does his damnedest to give his performance as much of a tortured soul pathos as possible, but ultimately, the Punisher versus a fruitier than usual John Travolta as the bad guy is missing something and it's no surprise the proposed sequel was turned into Punisher: War Zone with a completely different director, writer, and lead actor several years later.

What's interesting about the novelization of The Punisher is that author D.A. Stern (aka Dave Stern) appears to be a legitimate fan of the character. If he's not a fan, he certainly fooled me, but there are enough little tweaks to what we saw on screen to convince me he's down for some Marvel style street justice. I'm not suggesting the author went beyond his mandate here in adopting the screenplay to novel format, but I get the feeling nobody was really paying too much attention to some of the flourishes Stern added to this version of the story. From minor lore things, like the acknowledgment that Castle's family are actually the Castiglione clan, to an obvious foreshadowing of Microchip about halfway through the novel:

A shame, but the contents of this particular bin would probably end up on Saint's cigarette boats later today. Envisioning this morning's operation, Castle had originally thought to deactivate the bay's sprinkler system and burn the money, but he found he didn't have the necessary computer skills. A weakness, a chink in his armor: he would have to address it at some point.

The fact that the film's director hated Frank's sidekick enough to exclude him entirely from his film tells me he probably didn't find the time to read Stern's novelization and catch the above moment. But what really convinces me this novelization flew under the radar and was simply pushed out by the publishers for an attempt at a quick buck is THIS piece of beautifully batshit nonsense early in the novel where the author is describing some of Castle's escapades as a ruthless special ops guy long before the murder of his family takes place:

Buccaneer Bay was an Orlando tourist attraction that featured the Jose Gasparilla-the world's only remaining fully rigged pirate sailing ship. Six members of Sato X, a Japanese terrorist organization, had somehow snuck weapons onto the boat, which they then used to take sixty-five innocent tourists hostage.

The group they captured, however, included a sixty-sixth person, Frank Castle, who escaped during the terrorists' assault. He'd then donned a pirate's outfit, complete with skull mask (courtesy of one of the animatronic attractions on the ride) and set about rescuing the hostages. Within an hour, the terrorists were all dead, the tourists safe and sound, and their anonymous rescuer had mysteriously vanished.

I can assure you, nothing quite so gut-bustingly AWESOME made its way into the mostly drab film version of this property.

To me, these little flourishes are enough to make the novelization of The Punisher shine and might actually make it one of those somewhat rare instances where the film novelization outshines the big screen version of the same story. I figured going into this book that it would be a curio for hardcore fans of the comic books only, but I can see a greater appeal here. I won't pretend this is anything close to high literature, but Stern's novelization ends up reading very much like one of the Bolan novels with lots of action and goons getting exactly what's coming to them, so if that's your jam, this ain't a bad read at all. Recommended.

The Man Called Noon (1969)

Ruble Noon awakens laying on the dirt with a broken window above him, a wound from a bullet that just grazed his noggin, and no memory whatsoever of how he ended up in this predicament or the bad hombres that appear to be after him. Unsure if he's supposed to be a lawman being chased by outlaws or an outlaw being chased by lawmen, Noon crawls his way out of Dodge and ends up hitching a ride on the next train out of town, eventually making his way to a ranch with a pretty lady proprietress and a stable of unsavory hands. Every time Noon tries to lay low and wait for his memory to come back, trouble seems to find him. But Noon will quickly discover that he's not so bad at shooting his way out of trouble...

I'd seen a few western movies based off works by Louis L'Amour (there seemed to be a steady supply of them that appeared as TV movies in the 90's into the early 2000's) and of course I was familiar with the name, but I'd never actually read one of his hundred or so novels... until now. Given my love of pulp, spaghetti westerns, and Old West history in general, it's surprising I'd passed by L'Amour for so long: he's like the Elvis Presley of western fiction in terms of name recognition and his novels continue to sell a tremendous amount of copies even today as reprints. The dude lived one hell of a life and also seemed to be insanely humble about his own literary prowess ("I'm just now getting to be a good writer" he said... when he was 80 years old.)

The Man Called Noon (which was made into a euro western film - Hombre llamado Noon in 1973) starts off with pure action and the pace never seems to let up. One of the more remarkable things I found in this novel was L'Amour's pacing as a writer. This is lean, pulpy fare that doesn't have time for wasted words and unnecessary distractions. Because of this, I breezed through the book in record time. Even the dialogue kept up with the constant forward momentum of the writing: 

"You should have listened when you had the chance," she said. "Now you have no chance."

"That's a matter of opinion," he said cooly.

"There are five of us," she said.

"But only one that's you," he replied calmly, "and that needs only one bullet."

"You'd shoot a woman?"

He smiled. "You've chosen to play games with the boys, and when you do that, you accept the penalties. I see here only four men and one cold, treacherous wench who would betray her best friend for a dollar."

Oh, did I mention the character Ruble Noon is BASED as fuck too?

This is a dude who gets shot I don't know how many times throughout the course of the novel and is still up the next day to drink black coffee and show off his five o'clock shadow. Of course, Noon was played by a different actor in the film version, but the way he reads in this novel kept making me think of a Charles Bronson type of man's man in the role. The manner in which the amnesia plot surrounding Noon unravels is also highly satisfying, with one particular gut-punch twist that forced me to put the damn book down for about twenty minutes and take a walk. Don't you love when a book throws you like that?

The other characters are your usual assortment of outlaws and bad men, along with a friendly maiden, the treacherous wench quoted above, and a helpful Mexican bandito that Noon busts out of jail because at a certain point the odds are so stacked against him he needs another gun on his side. Some might scoff at how cliched the romance between Noon and the ranch owner Fan is given how quickly they appear to be falling in love with one another, but I accepted it as believable considering Fan has recently lost her father and is surrounded by mostly scumbag ranch hands on her property. When another decent fellow finally comes into her orbit, it's unsurprising she'd be interested in him.

The Man Called Noon culminates in a frenzied search for long-hidden gold somewhere in or around Fan's ranch with more than one set of players vying to get their hands on it first. I won't spoil the finale, but it goes without saying that the lure of gold and riches really does bring out the worst in certain people.

Recommended.

No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987)

An ambitious honeypot operation against the Soviets has gone off the rails, and now the KGB are out for revenge. Before the Ruskies can eradicate the entire list of young assets, Agent 007 is sent into the field by M to locate and rescue as many of the survivors as he can. An exploding pen, Irish castles, turncoats galore, animal abuse (maybe?), and Bond with only a half-loaded Luger in a "The Most Dangerous Game" finale! Da-da-DA-DA! 

Okay, let's get it out of the way right now. The title of this novel: No Deals, Mr. Bond. It's not great. A lot of fans are going to say it's easily the worst title in the history of Bond media, and it's difficult to argue that point. Personally, I have come to appreciate the title No Deals, Mr. Bond in an ironic 'so-bad-it's-good' kind of way, but even then it's a tough sell. In defense of author John Gardner, he hated No Deals, Mr. Bond as a title but was kinda-sorta strongarmed into going with it at the behest of the publishers, who also suggested the equally terrible 'Oh No, Mr. Bond!' and 'Bond Fights Back' as alternate titles. What were these idiots at the publishing house smoking at the time? The only thing I will say in favor of No Deals, Mr. Bond as a title is because it's so odd and cringey, it at least stands out when you're looking at all the Gardner books on a shelf. It's certainly more remarkable than one we'll get to a couple of reviews from now (the utterly generic titled Win, Lose, or Die - blah!).

Anyway, No Deals, Mr. Bond has a lowly reputation among certain literary Bond fans and is often derided as the beginning of John Gardner phoning in stories, recycling plots, and over-utilizing the concept of double or triple agents carrying out last minute betrayals at the behest of their true masters. I can't deny Gardner certainly loved his double agents, but it's not as if the idea of double-crosses is entirely alien to the genre of spy fiction. Gardner also played this hand many times over in his third Bond novel Icebreaker, which I found to be beyond tedious, but here in No Deals, Mr. Bond, I don't find the trope too bothersome. Perhaps it's because Bond dispatches the characters who turn out to be villainous double-crossers in short order, thus they don't have a chance to wear out their welcome once it becomes apparent they're baddies.

There's a slightly understated thread in this novel of M becoming more fatherly towards Bond, which we see hinted at on occasion in both the book series and the films. It comes to Bond's attention after speaking with a fellow British agent in the field that the mission to save the young ladies (and gent) who were involved in the honeypot is less an official mission from Queen and country and more of a personal request from M, as the brewing scandal of a botched honeypot potentially becoming public knowledge is threatening to take M's job as the head of British intelligence and the only agent he felt he could rely on for such a personal, off-the-books task is Bond. And despite the mortal peril this ultimately puts him in, Bond is more than willing to go through with the operation to help M because that's just what bros do, right? While the reader isn't battered over the head with this theme, it's kind of sweet to see how deep both character's loyalty goes for one another.

I wouldn't say this novel is anything near outstanding, but I had a pleasant enough time reading it. From the extremely filmic opening chapter which could have easily been a Roger Moore era pre-title sequence to the setting bouncing around from the streets of London to the Republic of Ireland to Hong Kong (with a one chapter diversion in Paris), I found it easy to lose myself in the brain candy of No Deals, Mr. Bond. The ending in particular, which see Bond stuck on a small island off the coast of Hong Kong, completely outnumbered by a group of bloodthirsty hooligans, and with only four bullets to his name is some truly priceless pulp action that kept me turning pages until the very end.

Don't be deceived by the stupid title, No Deals, Mr. Bond is another worthwhile John Gardner 007 novel. Recommended.

Doctor Who: Dragonfire (1989)

The Doctor and Mel arrive in the space trading colony known as Iceworld in search of adventure. There they discover the intergalactic rogue Sabalom Glitz, a dodgy stolen treasure map, and tales of a dragon's horde hidden deep in the ice caverns below. Oh, and a precocious teenager with a fondness for explosives named Ace. The only thing standing in their way is a banished ice vampire by the name of Kane who just so happens to also desire the treasure. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll have a face melting good time. It's Dragonfire!

My continuing journey with Target Books' novelizations of Doctor Who stories continues with Dragonfire by Ian Briggs. I'd heard good things about this one (namely the author expanding some sections that were cut from the screenplay he wrote) and it's a television story I find to be fairly decent, but ultimately this one was as by-the-numbers and run of the mill as you can get with the old Target collection. Competently written, but extremely workmanlike throughout most of the pages.

The story is sort-of The Maltese Falcon in a bunch of caves beneath a shopping mall in space. It's also the late 80's in the midst of Thatcherism when this was written, so I'm sure there's supposed to be some standard Britbong angst over the 'evils of capitalism' or some such doggerel worked into the background of Iceworld, but it never truly feels like a fully baked idea. For the most part, Dragonfire is standard Doctor Who running through corridors kind of stuff. There is quite a... not necessarily a plot hole, but a staggering logic gap when it concerns the villain Kane and his ongoing exile on Iceworld. He apparently has great power even in his banishment, yet chooses to become what is essentially the hermetical landlord of the trading post for what seems hundreds of years. And of all the probable competent types to land in Iceworld over the many years, Kane chooses the halfwit Sabalom Glitz to try and use as a patsy to get the coveted dragon's treasure for him. There's some strange plotting and character decisions going on here, as if the story was rushed out the door to meet a deadline.

Dragonfire is also notable for being the introduction of Ace, played by Sophie Aldred in the television series. The Seventh Doctor and Ace are probably my favorite pairing on-screen, so I have no complaints about the character appearing here for the first time. Her introduction is obviously an allusion to The Wizard of Oz with how she is a seemingly normal girl whisked away from her bedroom to a strange new world. Many stories and one hell of a character arc later, we discover the reason for the time storm that brings Ace to Iceworld in the first place and how her meeting with the Doctor was fated to happen. But that turn of events is thanks to then-script editor Andrew Cartmel. It's telling that the best part of this particular novel is the Doctor's farewell scene with Mel, which was dialogue originally written by Andrew Cartmel and not Ian Briggs. It's elegance stands out noticeably amid the standard dogsbody prose:

That's right, yes, you're going. Been gone for ages. Already gone, still here, just arrived, haven't even met you yet. It all depends on who you are and how you look at it. Strange business, time.

I will concede that the expanded areas of the story by Ian Briggs are at least somewhat interesting. The notorious cliffhanger at the end of part one where the Doctor is hanging by his umbrella from the edge of an ice chasm now at least makes a modicum of sense. And there's some brief but powerful character development for a couple of redshirts in Kane's crew. You'll also never feel so sad about a child losing a teddy bear as you will in this novel.

One original idea by Ian Briggs that was dropped from the television adaption because of sensitivity issues is the idea that Ace and Glitz had a relationship of some description before the Doctor and Mel arrive. I'm guessing it was axed because Ace is supposed to be a teenager and Glitz is a hairy forty-something dude. There's just a hint of the idea still in this novelization though, as Glitz "knows the way to Ace's room". Scandalous!

Ultimately, Dragonfire is not a terrible read, but it's certainly one for the top-tier superfans of Doctor Who only.

Star Trek: Bloodthirst (1987)

Captain's Log, supplemental. A distress call from the outpost Tanis has put on hold any chance of me bedding down another alien babe. Now, the only survivor of a hot lab catastrophe is loose aboard the Enterprise, and some of the crew think the man is a... blood sucking vampire of old Earth mythology. Naturally, Mr. Spock believes this theory to be most illogical. But some of our crew are now displaying signs of... vampirism. The only cure may be to record another half dozen Priceline commercials and hope for the best. Kirk out.

I usually have mixed feelings about Star Trek trying its hand at the horror genre. None of the horror-themed episodes from the original series right up until the Star Trek series concluded with Enterprise would make a 'best-of' list for me. I concede there's more than enough room for a horror element to be explored in the Trek universe, but the way the series would usually approach it always came across as a television show trying too hard to do something it's not normally equipped for. That, and the horror episodes usually became fairly one-note in a hurry. How many dreary 'nightmare' episodes of The Next Generation did we endure through anyway? The few times horror did work in Star Trek was usually more of the psychological variety and it very often involved Chief O'Brien being made to suffer in various sadistic ways in the dreaming world to further amplify the true horror of being married to series villain Keiko O'Brien in the real world. But I digress...

Bloodthirst is a Star Trek novel set in the original series timeline that takes that spooky Spirit of Halloween set from the episode "Catspaw" and turns it up a notch. It is, more or less, a version of Dracula in space. And the entire novel builds itself up to one shining moment when our erstwhile Russian navigator Pavel Chekov gets to say the word... "wampires". No, I'm not kidding. Yes, it's as awesome as you think it is.

The author of Bloodthirst wrote a number of Trek novels between the mid 80's into the early 2000's, including several of the film novelizations. J.M. Dillard is the Star Trek pen name of one Jeanne Kalogridis, who unsurprisingly went on to write a series of vampire novels in the 90's. Bloodthirst is clearly something of a love letter to Dracula and a plethora of other vampire related fiction, although the main antagonist is not a traditional vampire. Dillard cleverly spruces the story up with a sci-fi aspect, fashioning the villain's bloodthirsty state as the result of an illegally developed bioweapon from a backwater Federation outpost. There are other villains for Kirk and the crew to contend with besides the would-be Nosferatu, including a rogue admiral and an eleventh hour visit from the Romulans.

Because there's only so much that can be done with the series regulars, Dillard introduces several of her own original characters to the crew of the Enterprise. The original characters are mostly red shirts in the security team, but surprisingly none of them feel like throwaway characters. We have Stanger, a former lieutenant demoted down to the lowest ranks because of a rather foolish decision to take the blame for a crime he didn't commit. Tomson, the stern-faced viking woman who has become the ship's chief of security. Lamia, an Andorian ensign who is one of the few blue-skinned women in proximity to Kirk that hasn't boned with him yet. And Lisa Nguyen, the sensitive one who is wrestling with the idea of leaving the Federation for life on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. There's also a kooky admiral named Waverleigh who is apparently old friends with Kirk, drinks heavily, and talks to taxidermic animals. There's one exchange this character has with Kirk where the captain concludes the conversation by saying: "Admiral, you are weird." which had me rolling because it's such a bizarre line but I can also hear Shatner delivering that line with the usual ham.

Of the regulars, while Kirk and Spock have some moments, because the story doubles as a medical mystery, Bloodthirst is undoubtedly a McCoy episode. Good ol' Bones gets plenty of screen time in this novel while he struggles to understand the bio-engineered virus and plays human chess with the vampiric virus creator Dr. Fauci Adams. Nurse Chapel is also featured prominently in the story, but I won't spoil her role for anyone interested in tracking this novel down in the future.

I had some fun with this one. The writing keeps a fairly brisk pace and there were a few genuinely squeamish moments if you're really into the horror aspects, but the novel manages to course-correct back to traditional sci-fi as the climax draws closer. Recommended.

Aegeon: Science-Fiction Illustrated #9 (2024)

Brace your sphincters for a bevy of bodacious science-fiction, it's time for this crummy review blog that no one reads to venture forth into the world of weird fiction magazines!

I admit, I'm not the best at keeping up with genre fiction periodicals. Even the classic stuff that a fan of adventure, fantasy, horror, or sci-fi should indulge in, whether it's Amazing Stories or Weird Tales, always seemed to slip past my radar in favor of larger anthologies or compilations. However, in recent years we've had an uptick in independently published short fiction magazines celebrating various facets of pulp and genre fiction and I decided it was well past time for me to check some of them out considering the absolute state of mainstream publishing at the present. The first one I gravitated to was the science-fiction magazine Aegeon, mainly because I discovered the editor on X and found his observations on the hell of modern Western civilization to be right up my alley.

So Aegeon #9 is the most recent issue of the magazine as I write this review, and it's quite a breath of fresh air and a welcome respite from mainstream sci-fi. I think the badass 'synthwave Whitesnake music video' front cover probably grabbed my attention first, but the back cover blurb imploring the reader to "put down your soy fiction and your Harry Potterized time-travel stories" was probably what made the sale for me. But does this tome back up all the shit-talking?

Well, they're not all winners. There's a couple of pieces here that are part of ongoing serials, so if you're a dork like me jumping in at issue nine and trying to read them in medias res then you might struggle to understand everything that's going on. (But that's the fault of yours truly, not those stories.) There are one or two pieces that didn't quite grab me all the way - "Fernworld" by Bruce Pendragon for instance - has a plot involving a planet full of... well... ferns and a stranded space traveler. The main character's plight is identifiable by the reader from extremely early on in the story, so much so that I was waiting for an even bigger twist or something wildly unexpected to go down on this weird plant planet... but the twist never came, resulting in what I felt was a muted and flat ending.

However, I ended up enjoying the majority of the short stories featured in this issue of Aegeon. Some of my favorites include the trippy "Mara and Dizzy" by A.J. Bell, which... I'm not sure if it was intended as an anti-drug PSA, but the characters experiencing swift consequences of taking unknown street drugs and then suffering through wild hallucinations that involve living chess pieces in the aftermath sure could pass for an anti-drug PSA. Also, there's a cat in it. Cats are cool.

I also had a lot of fun with "Polybius" by Michael Gallo (who is also credited for a chunk of the interior artwork in this issue too - more on that in a moment). The story focuses on the rather creepy urban legend of the Polybius arcade machine and features an aging Italian pinball wizard and what may or may not be a former member of the 'men in black'. The author is clearly well-versed in arcade machine lore and also has some insight into the myths surrounding Polybius, which adds a nice air of authenticity to the piece. He also manages to convincingly work a Motörhead reference into the narrative, so how could I not give the author his laurels here?

For me, the star of the show is "The Duelists" by C.P. Webster. What starts out as something of a military adventure tale with a German pilot and an American pilot vying for domination of the skies quickly turns into something otherworldly and mysterious as the two pilots whose countries are at war with one another become makeshift allies after crash landing into what appears to be an alien world. It would be a crime to reveal the lovely twist of this story here, so I can go no further with any plot synopsis. But I also liked this story for its brief character studies. One of the characters is clearly more educated than the other and the reader is left wondering if this will pay dividends for him or be his undoing as the story progresses. C.P. Webster's fiction has also been featured in the likes of The Bizarchives and Lovecraftiana, and based on the strength of "The Duelists", I'm definitely going to be seeking out more of this author's works in the future.

Beyond all of the short fiction crammed into this bad boy, there's also a whole lot of black and white artwork to pore over, some non-fiction editorials about the way of the world right now, and a hilarious 'mail bag' section at the end. There's a couple of comics and even a pair of old-school mazes to solve if that's your thing, but neither of these things were really up my alley. Still, there's something for everyone in Aegeon if you're a sci-fi fan - made even sweeter by the fact that it's free of the taint of contemporary social politics. I will very likely be perusing for back issues of this magazine in the near future. Recommended.