Yo!
Happy Birthday today to my darling Sarah! She’s been putting in a lot of work setting up a dedicated print on demand store for my art. And she’s writing. A lot. Go. Read.
Sick leave continues. My right arm and shoulder are in less pain than they were at the beginning of the year but I’m still not ready to go back to delivering mail. Getting doctors’ appointments scheduled has made getting treatment very, very slow. I finally got an MRI week before last but I wasn’t able to get an appointment to see an orthopedist for a diagnosis and treatment plan until this week. At this point I’m not expecting surgery to be necessary but … going back too soon could end up damaging me so that I will need surgery.
I am making progress on my projects. I’m mainly concentrating on Goblin Alpha Seven but, when I get stuck on it, I hop over and noodle on something else. There’s never not something I can do.
| Project | Count | Complete |
| Goblin Alpha Seven (comic) | 40 pages | 7 pages |
| John Bell’s Oz Book (illustrations) | 27 illustrations | 20 illustrations |
| Mighty Nizz: Getting Dressed (comic) | 18 pages | 5 pages |
| Mighty Nizz: Tarot Deck (tarot deck) | 78 cards | 4 cards |
| Skookworks Webstore | 248 designs | new store in progress |
| Observations (comic) | 8 pages | 3 pages |
| Sunk Cost Elegy (comic) | 120 pages (tentative) | |
| The Surrilana Depths (comic) | 200 pages (tentative) | |
| Daughter of Spiders (illustrated short story series) – number of stories, word count and number of illustrations to be determined. |
You can see that I haven’t listed any progress on the three projects at the bottom of the chart. Partly that’s because I want to finish the smaller projects first. That will be satisfying. It’s not as if I haven’t done anything on the big projects. I’ve done a lot of preliminary work – sketches, character designs, plotting and … stuff. Enough stuff that I can write about those projects now.
Let’s start with The Surrilana Depths, shall we?
To get to The Surrilana Depths I need to tell you about Morgo the Mighty. To do that I’m reposting the entry I wrote about it in 2012.
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Earlier this year (2012), I started seeing these cover images online. They started popping up on some of the blogs and tumblr accounts I follow. The paintings are beautiful. If there had only been one of them I probably would have noted the story that the painting illustrated and then quickly forgotten about it. Seeing three covers for Morgo the Mighty piqued my interest enough that I wanted to find out more about the story.
I looked. There’s a mention of it in an essay about Hollow Earth stories. It’s discussed in a few paragraphs at the end of a long article about Tam, Son of the Tiger. Otherwise, there’s really nothing useful. No fansite. No wikipedia article. No author’s bio. No Gutenberg Project e-text.
There’s not much online about the author, “Sean O’Larkin.” I’ll return to him later.
The cover illustrations are by Howard V. Brown. Him you can find info about, and most of it includes examples of his lovely art.
Morgo the Mighty was serialized in four issues of The Popular Magazine. Interior illustrations were by Clarence Rowe.
I may not have been able to find much about the novel online but I was able to find someone selling a facsimile collection of it on ebay. I did find out enough about Morgo to think it takes place in a lost subterranean land populated with prehistoric monsters, so I knew it was a representative of a genre I have affection for. So I bought it.
The seller seems to have scanned and cleaned up the original printed pages from The Popular. Instead of just reading it and keeping it to myself I retyped the story and posted it, serial style, on my blog. The entire novel is 26 chapters. There aren’t, technically, any prehistoric monsters in the story. There plenty of other sorts of monsters so I didn’t mind. We’ve already got Pellucidar; a little variety in underground realms is appreciated. I posted the story over a three month period.
I don’t know if this novel is in the public domain. Since it was published in 1930 it’s possible that it’s under copyright. The copyright lockdown that the Disney corporation engineered has prevented many works published after 1928 from entering the public domain. If J.F. Larkin is still alive somewhere or has heirs who have renewed the copyright, please let me know. I’d like to talk about what to do with this story.
Originally, I’d intended to donate the completed manuscript to the Gutenberg Project. Then, a gentlemen named Andy Beau helpfully compiled all the online chapters into a single file and sent me the file as both a Word doc and a PDF. I’m making those files available to you. Just click on the links below to download the version you prefer.
Morgo The Mighty – PDF
Morgo The Mighty – WORD
For those of you who would prefer a print version of the story, Adventure House Press has collected the novel in High Adventure #173.
“Sean O’Larkin” was a pseudonym for John F. Larkin Jr. I couldn’t find much biographical information on him but John Gunnison of Adventure House Press pointed me to his IMDB page. He was born November 30th, 1901 in New York, NY. He passed away in Los Angeles, CA on January 6th, 1965. After a short stint writing for the pulps and the theatre as Sean O’Larkin he seems to have moved to Hollywood and concentrated on writing films. He married a fellow writer, Eunice Chapin (1893-1978), and they had twin daughters, Morgan and Bourke. He mostly seems to have worked as a writer but he did direct a couple of films. He finished his career as a producer and writer in television.
Sean O’Larkin Bibliography
* The Arson Mob, (na) The Popular Magazine Jun #2 1930
* The Devil’s Widow, (sl) The Popular Magazine Aug #1, Aug #2, Sep
#1, Sep #2 1929
* Exit Laughing, (ss) Cosmopolitan Jan 1931
* Flaming Ice, (na) The Popular Magazine Dec #2 1930
* A Hollywood Murder Mystery, (ss) The Popular Magazine Mar 1931
* The Jade Blade, (na) The Popular Magazine Oct #2 1929
* Morgo the Mighty, (n.) The Popular Magazine Aug #2, Sep #1, Sep #2 1930
* Morgo the Mighty, (sl) The Popular Magazine Oct #1 1930
* On the Spot, (ss) The Popular Magazine Feb #2 1930
God Save the Queen! a farce in 3 acts
Sean O’Larkin pseudonym of John F. Larkin Jr.
copyright Aug 21, 1930
John F. Larkin Filmography at the Internet Movie Database
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Still here? What does Morgo the Mighty have to do with The Surrilana Depths? If you’ve been reading my newsletters over the years you’ve read that I’m adapting Morgo as a graphic novel. I’m making enough changes that I’m giving it a new title. I’ll write more about the process in another newsletter.
How much progress have I made?
That is what this newsletter is supposed to track isn’t it?
First off, I finally copy edited my Morgo manuscript. The two versions linked above are the uncorrected original typings. The version below is a PDF of the novel sans typos, missing words, misspelling and other embarrassing things. Hopefully. It does still contain every word of the pointless racism of the original story. I thought I should warn y’all about that.
Morgo the Mighty – the corrected PDF
How is Morgo becoming Surrilana?
I will go into that next week.
In the meantime – take care of yourselves. Breathe. Touch grass. Touch sand. Have a sandwich. Do whatever you need to get by. If that whatever is illegal – ssssh!
