Jim Beard introduces the world to Saucy Robot Stories!

Almost any genre was possible in the classic pulps, and just about everyone of them had a "spicy" version. The spicy pulps were the back counter magazines of their day, although by today's standards they were far more tame than your average PG-13 film.

But that grand tradition of the pulps never quite combined with the emerging tales of mechanical men also prevalent in the 30s and beyond. Until now.

Series creator Jim Beard teams with co-editor Nicholas Ahlhelm to bring the adventures of Sam, the world's first fully automated man. (And we do mean fully automated.)  Saucy Robot Stories introduces him and his friends Augie and Doona as they have weird adventures across New York and beyond.

In six new stories by Sam Gafford, M.H. Norris, Travis Hiltz, Justin Bell, Aaron Smith and Chuck Miller, the pulp genre is stretched with new and unique ways our heroes face down new threats and new weirdness. All with just a bit of sauciness to go along with it!

Saucy Robot Stories will be available in April from Metahuman Press.

Talking Pulpsploitation: Nicholas Ahlhelm on Airboy

All three of these characters will play a
part in future Airboy stories.

Why Airboy?

He certainly isn’t a character that went without a revival in the 1980s. Chuck Dixon and Tim Truman created a rather amazing series at Eclipse (now being collected by IDW) with art by the likes of Stan Woch, Ben Dunn, Ron Randall and Tom Lyle.

Flying Dutchman will be the first other Air Fighter to
make an appearance in the new book.

But that series didn’t tell the story of the original Airboy. Instead it focused on Davy Nelson Jr., the son of the original character and his interaction with a mix of the original Air Fighters and new “ripped from the headlines” adventures. Despite being written by well known Republican writer Chuck Dixon, it was even famous for being the anti-Reagan comic. But while it offered great stories, it wasn’t the take on Airboy I wanted to see.

I wanted to go back to the original, I wanted to make him a fish out of water and I wanted to update the Air Fighters in a very different way.

In my initial short story, Misery and the Airtomb play their part in the first story, but they are really a subplot as Airboy finds himself young and alive again in the early 1980s. He’s immediately thrust into a plot to stop the massive super-weapon that nearly killed him once before.

The tale will hopefully kickoff a new series of adventures starring the high-flying adventurer beginning in 2017.

Pulpsploitation is now available in print and ebook at Amazon.

The Horror Heroes are back!

It has been three years since the first edition of Horror Heroes launched with stories of Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein and the Invisible Wolfman. Since that time, fans have asked when another edition of monsters turned heroes would make it on to shelves. That time is now, as Horror Heroes 2 has arrived in print and digital.

The new anthology features two short stories and a novella by three writers all returning from the previous volume.

Travis Hiltz kicks the anthology off with his own take on Frankenstein’s Monster as he turns the creature into a modern adventurer with his own team of off-the-wall allies in “Frankenstein & The Rejects”.

Editor Nicholas Ahlhelm adds a little romance to the scares as he takes readers to “The Beach House”, the location Lynda travels to in order to finally spread her wings after years of being the good girl. There she meets a strange young man, one that might actually be a legendary sea monster!

Darrin Albert closes things out with “Steamed!”, a new novella featuring his bigfoot hero Littlefoot. Darrin designs an entire world between human and sasquatch, one which Littlefoot must bridge in order to find her future and possibly save all of human and sasquatch-kind!

These three big stories are now available in print and Kindle editions. Metahuman Press continues its devotion to low prices with $12.00 print volumes and $3.99 digital editions. Readers can take their pick, or get the digital edition free as part of Kindle Unlimited or with Kindle Matchbook (and the purchase of the print volume.)

Horror Heroes 2 makes the monsters the heroes just in time for some amazing Halloween hijinks. Pick it up today!