We're still under the weather here, and I had another crushing deadline on a project that really had to be done by the end of the year, and, well... something had to give. So this week in lieu of the usual column I'm just going to point you to some other fun internet things I ran across that may be of interest. X-Men, a new Star Trek series, interesting old "men's adventure" books, a new Wonder Woman.

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"How Would you Fix...?" Nathan Adler does a blog devoted to continuity fixes-- the kind of thing that used to earn you a No-Prize from Marvel, back in the day. I always enjoy reading it because-- well, because I'm a huge nerd. But I like the challenge of working out the fix as well as spotting the inconsistency, and I've always felt that should be a fan thing, whether it's just sitting around shooting the breeze at a convention or reading your paper on Professor Moriarty's Dynamics of an Asteroid at the Baker Street Irregulars annual banquet. When pros do it, like when Roy Thomas or John Byrne tried to do actual stories based on continuity patching it just gets kind of embarrassing.

Anyway, Nathan shares my nerdy pleasure at working out the fix and I like reading his theories even when I may not agree with them. The current entry has him trying to figure out the origin of Gateway from the X-Men's Outback era.



I enjoyed it and I bet X-fans will get a kick out of it. Link here. While you're there you could do worse than to amble through the archives, there's lots of other interesting speculations to think about and argue over.

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End of the Quest: I have a soft spot for "men's adventure" trashy numbered series paperbacks from the sixties and seventies, and the king of them all was Mack Bolan, the Executioner.





I'm a bit of a purist in that I only care about the originals that Don Pendleton actually wrote himself-- the first thirty-eight of them, starting with War Against the Mafia and ending with Satan's Sabbath.





There are about seven hundred other ones ghosted by various hands, and all sorts of spinoffs like Able Team and Stony Man and so on. But I haven't bothered with any of them though I gather that some of them are quite good.

My first encounter with the Punisher's spiritual godfather was in an omnibus edition I picked up in a drugstore, collecting the first three novels. Lost it in a move and I've been trying to get it back for years... not obsessively, of course, but it's one of those things that's always in the back of my head when I go into a used bookstore.

It seems silly when the first three books are easy to scoop up used for less than a buck each. But I'm sentimental, and I wanted my omnibus three-in-one back, dammit. It really was getting to be a thing with me because most booksellers thought I was making it up or had gotten mixed up somehow. I couldn't remember what the exact title was and with six or seven hundred Bolans out there, online searches were fruitless; even Mack Bolan fan sites didn't seem to know about it. I was about ready to give up.

And that's when I found one. finally.



It's called The Executioner Trilogy: The Beginning and it's apparently a little bit of a collector's item... even Linda Pendleton herself says they're hard to find. Anyway, if you want one of your own, listings are here. You'll see that prices start to spin out of control for it pretty damn quick. I assure you I did not pay nearly that much for mine, but now I am gloating over it far more than any grown man should.

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Trekking, old-school: There was a cool Star Trek fan-film project that came out a few years ago, a movie called Of Gods and Men.



It starred Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig and the interesting thing about it is that it's the only project that brought together actors from every single iteration of Trek-- in addition to Ms. Nichols and Mr. Koenig, you had Grace Lee Whitney and Lawrence Montaigne from the original series, Alan Ruck from Generations, Tim Russ and Garrett Wang and Ethan Phillips from Voyager, Cirroc Lofton and Chase Masterson from Deep Space Nine, Gary Graham from Enterprise, and even James Cawley from New Voyages. The story dealt with an aging, vengeful Charlie X using the Guardian of Forever to remove James Kirk from the timeline. In terms of the movies I guess you could call it... oh, Star Trek 6.5, let's say. You can read more about it here, and view the whole movie here.

But the reason I brought it up is because they're doing it again. Tim Russ directed Of Gods and Men and he's reassembled a lot of the same cast and crew for the pilot to a new series, Star Trek: Renegades.



The web site is here, and the new trailer for the project is here. The short version, as nearly as I can tell, is that it's basically the Dirty Dozen in Starfleet. Which sounds like fun to me, and the cast they've lined up is pretty impressive considering it's a crowdfunded fan project. Julie and I are certainly looking forward to it.

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One for Kelly: And finally, speaking of fan films, here's a Wonder Woman short that showed up a couple of months ago, for the three or four of you that missed it.



I'm not all that invested in Wonder Woman as a character but it always has befuddled me that the fan films about her generally are better than the official ones. If I was the Time-Warner guy in charge of the new movie, I'd be trying to get this actress on the phone to at least come in and read for Diana. Your mileage may vary.

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And there you go. Back next week with a full column, I promise. See you then.