December 4, 2009
Nippy out this morning. Went for a brisk walk with Peaches. Ran into Joe Yager. He's coming over in the morning to work on the John Deere (can't get the fuel glass to drain). Nice to have tractor savvy neighbors (hint: it helps if they're from Kansas).
Last night Abby and I posted the
Ten Years: 100 covers feature. If you followed it here on the blog you may still want to tra…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on December 4, 2009 at 10:00am —
1 Comment
December 3, 2009
Last minute typo flurries. For example, I emailed Marshall Trimble after lunch thanking him for all his help on the Edward Cross vs. Sylvester Mowry gunfight. I also told him we gave his book a plug:
Recommended: Arizona: A Panoramic History of a Frontier State by Marshall Trimble, published by Doubleday and Company
Got this email back at 2:30 (a half-hour before the magazine goes out the door to Kansas City):
"Thanks for the plug but that book went out o…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on December 3, 2009 at 2:44pm —
No Comments
December 3, 2009
January issue is almost put to bed. Last minute corrections and typos being corrected, late ads coming in over the transom, I mean, internet.
Meanwhile, just got word from a friend of mine that Gale Cooper has a movie in the works based on her self-published novel
Mega Hoax. As mentioned, The Top Secret Writer, Meghan Saar, Bob McCubbin and myself are prominently mentioned as being part of a nefarious plot to elect Bill Richardson president of the United States. A…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on December 3, 2009 at 11:32am —
2 Comments
December 2, 2009
Hall monitors have been the bane of my life. I've always hated hall monitors. All through school, I was never good enough to be one, and the ones who were, always seemed to catch me and punish me every chance they got, which, I seem to remember, was quite often. So, it's a little ironic that as the co-moderator of this site with Trish Brink, now I are one.
Furthermore, it's not my idea of fun to tell other people when to shut up, or even when to tone it down. After all,…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on December 2, 2009 at 5:09pm —
25 Comments
December 2, 2009
Well, here is Dan The Man's first crack at the cover for January featuring the editorial style cartoon I created last week:
Notice that the top heads aren't written and Dan is putting in filler type. (He often makes these rude and crude to inspire us to fill them mucho pront…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on December 2, 2009 at 3:00pm —
12 Comments
December 2, 2009
My speech at the Heard Museum yesterday was a ton of fun. First off, my hosts, Jan and Jim Patten, from Pella, Iowa, bought me lunch at the Heard Museum Cafe which has excellent food. I had the spinach enchiladas, and we talked about Wyatt Earp's time in Pella (Jan's family lore lays claim to the story that her Dutch relatives beat up the Earp boys).
We had a packed house for the speech at 1:30, including, not one, but two folks from Kingman (who didn't know each other).…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on December 2, 2009 at 10:30am —
3 Comments
December 1, 2009
Man, where did this year go? Home stretch. We've got a great issue going out the door tomorrow. I'm scrambling to finish several pieces of art. Yesterday Ron F. posed for me to represent Edward Cross, the first newspaper editor in Arizona. I couldn't remember if he was the tall one, or was his dueling opponent, Sylvester Mowry? Went home for lunch and whipped this sketch out:
…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on December 1, 2009 at 10:00am —
6 Comments
November 30, 2009
For the past week or so, I've been studying famous battle paintings and I've noticed that the fighters in the portrayals always seem to be of two types: the heroic, chest-out defiant one (think Joan of Arc or Custer), and the fatally injured, but heroically posed woe-is-me-dying pose, complete with knitted eyebrows and a hand to the breast right out of some 1890s melodrama. These have never seemed very accurate to me. They certainly don't look like the fights I have witn…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 30, 2009 at 12:26pm —
3 Comments
November 29, 2009
Had a nice, four day stretch at home to work on a variety of artwork. Began an ambitious splash-page painting of the Mesilla shootout (January CG) complete with clarinet beatings and French horn whipping (as opposed to pistol whipping). Lots of dust, lots of blood, lots of anatomical problems. Hope to finish tonight.
Also finished an overview of the Burnside rifles duel at forty paces, and by the way, I'm assuming that in a duel like this, the two stood back to back in…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 29, 2009 at 4:03pm —
1 Comment
November 27, 2009
Time to catch up on some William H. Bonney clarifications. Last week, on the Kid's alleged birthday, I launched off on a series of statements that caught the eye of a certain scholar in Chalfont Saint Giles, England. Here are his corrections and the subsequent exchange:
"Actually Our Billy told the 1880 census taker (or the census taker, deciding discretion was the better part of valor, skipped that particular house and wrote down the first thing that came into his head…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 27, 2009 at 8:26am —
2 Comments
November 25, 2009
Finished Blazing Pols at 3:30. Would have finished earlier but my computer kept beeping. When there are comments on my blog I get a beep and a link to approve them and yesterday's Brokeback Mountain post created a three ring circus of comment.
Here's the finished scratchboard:
…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 25, 2009 at 5:22pm —
5 Comments
November 25, 2009
We have been contacted by more than a few of you about coming up with some rules and regs on this site. We agree that there have been abusive visitors to the site and, while we don't like it any more than you do, we have debated how strong a hand to take in these matters. Here's what we came up with:
The True West Historical Society will be moderated by Trish Brink and myself.
In addition to those of you interested in our Western History, The True West Historical Socie…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 25, 2009 at 10:12am —
25 Comments
November 25, 2009
Worked all afternoon yesterday on the the Blazing Pols illustration. After some 35 sketches, finally got a decent looking drawing of a gunfighting elephant at about two:
Utilizing the old spreading-lead-on-the-back-of-tracing-paper trick, I transferred that sketch to an expen…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 25, 2009 at 9:30am —
5 Comments
November 24, 2009
According to the
Hollywood Reporter "Westerns are hot this year." In addition to
Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) coming out next spring, FX is "saddling up for
Reconstruction, a period Western set in a Missouri town during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and centers on Jason, a proper East Coast gentleman who returns from the war a changed man and seeks refuge in a border state."
The producers, Joshua Brand and Peter Horton, evidently came up with the…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 24, 2009 at 10:00am —
41 Comments
November 23, 2009
Today is allegedly Billy the Kid's birthday. We say allegedly because it appears Ash Upson gave the date to the Kid when he co-wrote
The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid in 1881. Upson had actually roomed for a short time at the McCarty household in Silver City when the Kid's mama was still alive and taking in boarders to make ends meet. After the Kid's death at the hands of Pat Garrett, Upson either remembered the Kid's birth date because they shared the same birt…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 23, 2009 at 3:59pm —
3 Comments
November 23, 2009
Had a very nice weekend. On Saturday night, Charlie and Linda Waters came down from Vegas for Dan Harshberger's birthday dinner at our house. The Waters brought three bottles of Argentina wine and I made Tacos de Bell. We had a grand time.
On Sunday morning, the Waters met Kathy and I, and our son Thomas Charles (yes, he's named for Charlie Waters) at the Matador at Second Street and Monroe deep inside the Beast. While we were all enjoying our huevos rancheros, in walke…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 23, 2009 at 10:00am —
2 Comments
November 20, 2009
All of us who write books about Billy the Kid hope for the three Rs: that we will be respected, get rich from book sales and be fondly remembered for our efforts to get to the truth about Billy. Of course there have been over 1,000 books written about the Kid and as I like to brag, I didn't write all of them. Nope, not even half. I'm not exactly sure of the actual total, but let's just say I'm reading two new Billy books even as you read this.
But, I digress.
In our ju…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 20, 2009 at 12:00pm —
4 Comments
November 20, 2009
About a week ago I asked Carole Glenn to order a book for us on Amazon called
Mega Hoax. I had heard through the Billy the Kid grapevine that a woman from Santa Fe named Gale Cooper has published an alleged expose on the digging up Billy project. We got the book on Wednesday and I saw it in my box when I got back from lunch. My managing editor Meghan Saar had already ear-marked all the pages True West is mentioned (this is especially funny considering that Dr. Coo…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 20, 2009 at 9:30am —
7 Comments
November 19, 2009
Our office copies of
The 2010 Source Book arrived this afternoon and it's a beautiful thing. If you want to find anything related to the West this is the issue you need to have (hint: subscribers get it free). Inside is our
Eighth Annual Best of the West Awards and I predict the following people are going to be very happy: Jim Clark, Steve and Marcie Shaw, Jay Dusard, Pat Kearney and Gary George, Waddie Mitchell, Charles Harris III and Louise Sadler, Robert…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 19, 2009 at 4:22pm —
3 Comments
November 19, 2009
Saw my first Low Pants Lance. I was on my way to yoga last Tuesday when I saw this tall kid angling down the alley by the Career School next to Black Mountain Gym. As I drove by I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the back of his pants hung below the cheeks of his arse! He then jumped a wall so I got a real good view of the entire buttocks area. Amazing. I had seen photos of this phenom from New York City, but had never seen this extreme before, in the flesh.
H…
Continue
Added by Bob Boze Bell on November 19, 2009 at 11:00am —
2 Comments
