This Summer we are trying something a little different and producing a little merchandise in the form of prints. The prints are 11″ x 17″ and will be for sale when I am signing at Dragon’s Lair from 1PM to 6PM on July 11th and at the San Diego Comic Convention.

The top print is the entire four page story that Thom Zahler and I entered in the Zuda Competition. The second is a SideChicks print.

I will release a signing schedule for the SDCC as soon as I have a hard set of signing times.

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Work on the SideChicks strip is inching on along including this cover for the next digital issue.

Back in 2005, I wrote a collection of mystery stories under the title of ‘Tokyo Pop & Other Quinn Stories’ not realizing that there was a manga publisher with the same name. It also had more than a few typos.

Next month, I’ll be releasing a re-mastered e-book version of that material with a new cover and a new title. The stories were not changed, but I fiddled with a line here and there as I corrected the spelling errors. It will be available on WOWIO and parts beyond.

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Hello folks. I will be signing Angel comics and other stuff at a few locations in the Austin area on Saturday May 1st. I’d love it if you could come out and say howdy. The wonderful stores listed below will have some free comics for you but supplies may be limited. They will be celebrating all day long, but my wandering is detailed on the list below.

10 AM to 12 Noon
Dragon’s Lair

12:30 to 2 PM
Tribe Comics & Games

3PM to 5 PM
Rogue’s Gallery

The fifth issue of our run on Angel from IDW ships the week before and I should have plenty of copies for sale. So drop by and say hello to some local comic book creators.
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Last year, I stumbled into the garden of Joss Whedon’s characters. Along the way, I wrote a four issue Spike mini-series which will be coming out from IDW in June 2010.

Here are the stats…

Spike: The Devil You Know #1
Bill Williams (w) • Chris Cross & Marc Deering(a) • Franco Urru (c)
While out and about (drinking, naturally) Spike gets in trouble over a girl (of course) and finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy that involves Hellmouths, blood factories, and demons. Just another day in Los Angeles, really. But when devil Eddie Hope gets involved, they might just kill each other before getting to the bad guys.

This issue has the first little Eddie HOPE continued story come to an end which means a bad guy gets it in the neck. But which one?

The television show Castle is entertaining and managed to grow on me after a few episodes. This novel is the book written by the fictional Rick Castle character after his ride-alongs with the fictional Detective Beckett who serves as his inspiration. In this novel a wealthy New York real estate developer is thrown off of a balcony. As Detective Heat and her crew unravel the aspects of the killing they brush against the usual assortment of suspects, the trophy wife, the bookie, the bookie’s muscle, etc.

The meta fiction of the novel is entertaining and it is fun to hear echoes of the episodes in your noggin as you read the prose. But the story itself left me cold. On the show Castle is a bit cheesy but Nathan Fillion infuses the role with wit, charm, and humor. Here the cheese is dialed up to eleven with no performance to carry the material. The prose is entertaining, but it shows the effects of too much research, too much proving he did the homework, in short too much detective slang. I suppose if you consider that the novel was written in character, then that is pardonable, but it might be off-putting to mystery readers who had not seen the show. All in all, it’s a decent novel for something written by a fictional character.

Our little ANGEL comic book keeps rolling on. The latest issue is on sale on February 17th and it features a lead story by Bill Willingham and Brian Denham and a back-up story about Eddie Hope by myself (Bill Williams) and David Messina.

UPDATE: Due to a pretty serious truck accident, this issue is not available in all markets. In some parts of the country, it has been delayed until March 1st.

The hard cold professional thief named Parker makes an attempt to pick up and launder the bank money he stashed in “Nobody Runs Forever” and found too hot to recover in “Ask the Parrot”. The third and final part of the story finds Parker at home with Claire as he decides to make a run back into the police roadblocks to pick up the boxes of cash stashed in the abandoned church. Along the way, he gains partner and kills a few people trying to take back what he stole. It is a perfect examination of the nuts and bolts of a life of crime.

The twenty four books in the Parker series show a change in the country and a change in the criminal world. The writing by Richard Stark aka Donald Westlake, is sharp and the plots reflect the tools, the technology and the mood of the time. While Parker had a run from 1962 to 2008, he never changed. Over the course of Richard Stark’s books, Parker the thief became more than a character. He ended his run as an archetype.

Nathan Fillion carries this welcome take on the police proceedural. He plays Rick Castle, a roguish and charming writer who gets pulled into a murder investigation when a killer pulls a murder scene from one of his novels. He finds that he likes the gig and forces his way onto a unit as he gathers research material for a new series of detective novels built around Detective Kate Beckett the lead investigator played by Stana Katic. Sure, there are some cliches here and there, but there is also at least one clever detective/ writer thing per episode.

Like Burn Notice, Leverage, and White Collar on the cable channels, Castle shows an influence of The Rockford Files by Stephen Cannell. He is all over the DVD extras and even makes an onscreen appearance. It is nice to see a bit of humor in the fictional murder business. The audio commentary give a nice insight into the world of television production.