Tag: Arkhaven

An Echo of Eco

Chapter Two: Bibliothecarius Scriptor Timoris

“For whoso speaketh of Time’s lie, seeketh his own destruction, wherein the keepers of chronology shall pursue him like water pursues the lowlands.”

— Anonymous marginalia, Codex Sangallensis 193

I could still feel the weight of the mysterious tome in my hands as I made my way to Father Umbertus’s private study. The symbols on its cover—a circle quartered by a cross—seemed to burn in my mind’s eye. What had I stumbled upon in that forgotten corner of our library? And why had the sight of it transformed our normally impassive librarian into a man seized by fear?

These questions churned within me as I approached his door. I had been summoned, as I knew I would be. Father Umbertus von Kreuzlingen had been the keeper of Saint Gallen’s literary treasures for longer than I had been alive—thirty-seven years of vigilance that had etched deep lines into his face and turned his beard the color of aged vellum. He was not a man easily disturbed. Yet when he had seen the book in my hands, his face had drained of color as if he beheld not parchment and leather, but the very gates of Hell.

The second episode – the first part of Chapter Two – is up on Arktoons and can be read there. I’ll be posting ~1000-word episodes five times a week, M-F, but I’ll only mention it here if there is a new chapter starting.

If you want to start from the beginning, please begin here: Annos Dormi.

And if you’re an Eco fan, let me know if you think it works or not.

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A WORKING MAN Review

Fandom Pulse reviews the film based on Chuck Dixon’s first Levon Cade novel.

A Working Man with Jason Statham is out in theatres this week and is beating Snow White for the top of the box office. The movie is a lot of fun with Jason Statham’s action delivering with a great character in Levon Cade and a cool supporting cast. There are some problems with the film, however, which stem from caricature villains as well as a couple of moments where the kidnapped young girl Jenny Garcia gets a little too “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” as a strong female lead in moments. These elements were not in the book Levon’s Trade, which was a much darker, more serious action thriller, and it’s a shame they didn’t follow the tone of that book more closely.

There are always going to be changes and compromises when translating a story from one medium into another. What works in a novel, or in a comic book, simply doesn’t work on film. And, of course, different media have different tropes and cliches toward which those who are operating in that medium tend to gravitate; given that David Ayers directed both THE BEEKEEPER and A WORKING MAN, the chances that the villains weren’t going to be colorful cartoons was zero.

However, the rising profile of The Legend suggests the possibility that the next movie in the Levon Cade series will be more true to the books, especially considering that nearly all of the criticism of what has thus far been a very successful film has been focused on various elements that were never in the novel. Chuck was not involved in writing the script, but we can hope that he will be in the next one.

And there will be no Hollywood influence at all in the films on which we are presently working; I’m very pleased to be able to say that not only has The Legend’s BLACK WARRANT already been optioned by a film production company, but there is a significant level of interest in what we’re tentatively calling the Silververse, a century-long shared Arkhaven comics universe that includes traditional heroes created by The Legend, Razorfist, JDA, and myself.

RED HORNET is a 1980s superhero.

The Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equality initiatives imposed by Marvel and DC Comics has utterly destroyed traditional superheroes such as The Punisher, Spiderman, Batman, and The Phantom, but when the old heroes fall, new heroes rise.

On a side note, those who have been around for a long time will recall the eerie coincidence when, two days after I published a short story called THE DEPORTED here on this site, the small Italian town in which it was set was completely destroyed by a landslide and had to be evacuated. So, you can probably imagine the thought that crossed my mind when two days after completing a climactic scene set in an abandoned skyscraper in certain city in Asia, I was greeted with headlines that read “Massive Earthquake in Bangkok; Tower Collapses”.

Fortunately, it turned out to be a different tower. And honestly, I don’t think I can be held responsible for the fates of all the towers in Bangkok. Although if a natural disaster takes place in Stockholm this week, I will have to give serious consideration to laying down my creative pen.

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A WORKING MAN Wins

The Legend Chuck Dixon is having a good weekend, according to Fandom Pulse:

A Working Man edged out Snow White on Friday with $5.6 million at the box office, which analysts are predicting will result in a $15.6 million opening. Box Office Theory predicted the movie would have a projected domestic box office total of $13.4 million, meaning the current tracking with Friday’s actual numbers has the film overperforming expectations by more than 16%.

Snow White was predicted to win the weekend with a predicted $17 million box office, but the film is currently underperforming on Friday with a $3.7 million opening for the day, with new predicted totals dropping to $13.7 million on the weekend. At a drop of 68%, The second weekend drop-off is steeper than what was seen with Dumbo, which had a 60% for the second weekend total. Apparently, audiences are not thrilled, and word of mouth has failed to generate any momentum for the film.

Quite the opposite is true with A Working Man, which is sitting only slightly lower than Jason Statham’s The Beekeeper from 2024, which opened at $16.3 million. The numbers for the new film are within the margin of error, meaning there’s a comparable audience for what was considered quite a financial success for the $40M budgeted film. The total box office haul for The Beekeeper sat at $162.6 million, and if A Working Man does similar numbers, it appears as if Amazon will have quite the franchise success on its hands.

This is also good news for some of the Legend’s other projects, as his success is definitely stirring up interest from other film production companies around the world, who are very interest in a number of Arkhaven properties.

Speaking of Arkhaven and movies, we’re still waiting for the thrice-delayed trial of the accused Rebel’s Run scammer to begin, which is presently scheduled for May.

Not a good weekend for the denizens of the Hellmouth, given the toxic masculinity and Christianity on display.

A Working Man $5,604,992
The Chosen: Last Supper $5,095,027
Snow White $3,700,000
The Woman in the Yard $3,650,000
Death of a Unicorn $2,272,250

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The Legend at Work

You’re not going to want to miss this one. The movie is based on the first of The Legend’s Levon Cade novels, which we will be publishing collected in leather as part of the upcoming Black Warrant campaign, which will be launched in April. I want to get the standard Hypergamouse books delivered before the Chuck Dixon campaign begins.

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An Interview with The Legend

Fandom Pulse interviewed The Legend Chuck Dixon about his forthcoming film, A Working Man, which launches on March 28th. It’s based on the first book in the Levon Cade series, Levon’s Trade.

Chuck Dixon is a prolific comic book creator having created the infamous Batman villain Bane and crafting the popular Knightfall storyline for DC Comics. He’s also had lengthy runs on the Punisher, Robin, Batgirl, and helped create the Birds of Prey. He even did a comic book adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit as well as adaptations of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. But he’s also done yeoman’s work with novels crafting an entire time-traveling science fiction series in Bad Times as well as his vigilante thriller series Levon Cade, which is being adapted into a film starring Jason Statham and titled A Working Man.

Dixon spoke with Fandom Pulse about the upcoming film, his relationship with Sylvester Stallone’s Balboa Productions, which is producing A Working Man, and his views on wokeness following the second election of President Donald Trump and how he sees it affecting Hollywood.

Fandom Pulse (FP): You published Levon’s Trade over a decade ago, was there any particular reason why Balboa Productions wanted to adapt this first novel of your series?

Chuck Dixon: I sent both my Levon Cade books and my Bad Times series to Sly and he liked both and discussed with me plans to make either films or a series of both of them. There was, for a moment, a suggestion from him that I recast Bad Time with the Expendables for a feature film. Time traveling Expendables!

Anyhow, Sly decided Levon was the way to go as it wouldn’t require a large budget. It’s not hard to see why the books appealed to Sly. Levon’s the kind of hero he’s played so many times and the books are pure action with an emphasis on fast pace and rapid character development.

FP: Do you know why they decided to retitle it A Working Man instead of Levon’s Trade?

Dixon: No idea. The marketing department tested some titles and this one was chosen from the results, I imagine. A shame since the Levon books have the sequel titles built into them.

As Darkstream viewers know, The Legend and I have been signed to write the script for a supernatural action thriller for an Asian film production company. The script is mostly complete, but rest assured that we’ve made sure to retain the rights to do it as a comic or a novel if the movie doesn’t get made in a reasonable time frame.

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Webtoons in Decline

As Fandom Pulse reports, it’s not just Marvel, DC Comics, and Diamond that are in an obvious death spiral. Webtoons, their obvious digital successor, has been in decline ever since going public in 2022:

The company lost approximately $153 million in Q4 2024, which is up from $33 million in Q4 2023, posting a full year loss of $214 million up from $135 million in 2023. The company blames a lot of the assets on one-time IPO-related costs and aggressive marketing to get more creators on the platform.

Users note in recent years, Webtoon seems to have gotten more desperate to try to monetize their site, which has created a worse user experience. There are ads above every Webtoon stack which promote “treasure hunts,” where users get coins to spend on the site by signing up for brand email lists and watching more ads.

While they had a “Fastpass” situation where users could read ahead on monetized webtoons to pay creators in advance of the rest of the public, now users don’t have to have coins but can watch ads to get it, and some now have discounted coin prices where readers watch 30 seconds of ads to increase ad revenue. On top of this, they’ve introduced tipping to the website, encouraging creators to get their readers to do so by having an incentive-based leaderboard to do so.

None of this has brought the site to profitability, though Reddit users have noticed the changes to the site not being positive and have posited that Webtoon is on its way down.

Meanwhile, competitor Arkhaven Comics has reached over 16 million views on its website, running without ads and quietly being built entirely on user support. With Webtoon’s functionality getting more difficult to use, the environment seems ripe for a competitor to take over as the leader in web comics

Arkhaven has been very quiet in the last year. That’s not a coincidence. When the environment is not ripe for advancement, it’s always best to harbor one’s resources and await the right moment to aggressively move forward. The time is not yet right, but there are some signs that before long, it will be.

In the meantime, we’re making sure that when everyone else is going down in flames, Arkhaven will be the one left standing. The recently-approved proof of the HYPERGAMOUSE VOL. 1 hardcover for the backers will make it clear how, while the market leaders are spiraling downward, we’re raising our game.

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Odds and False Ends

A few things. First, I’ve got two related posts up at White Bull that may be of interest to those who are either a) trying to break into a new industry or b) interested in the history of the game industry. I used my own experience of going from a complete outsider to an industry oldtimer as a practical example; the first post is here and contains a link to the second one at the end.

Second, if you’d like to see what the very large and very pretty Hypergamouse hardcover looks like, there are some pictures up at Sigma Game. The pictures and a video will go up on Arkhaven later. And speaking of Arkhaven, the Dark Herald has a detailed discussion of one of my favorite books by Tanith Lee, Delusion’s Master, that is well worth reading by anyone who enjoys the dark side of fantasy.

Third, we’ve opened up the SOULSIGMA campaign again for the nine backers whose backings didn’t go through due to some vagaries of the way the FMC system interacts with the payment processor; apparently I selected a suboptimal setting when setting it up. So if you’re one of those nine backers, or if you weren’t but you’d like to jump in there ex post facto, you can back the album here.

And finally, a reader had a question about Umberto Eco’s work and how it relates to conspiracy theory:

I have reread Foucault’s Pendulum and I have read The Name of the Rose and The Prague Cemetery. You said in your 2013 top ten list of books that “Perhaps my subscription to the conspiracy theory of history is one reason I rate Foucault’s Pendulum so highly, but I stand firmly by my high regard for Eco.” I have tried to get a more subtle read on Eco’s work rereading “FP” but It seems to me he is very much interested on demystifying these tropes, for example by constructing a plot in which the conspiracionist take the mad theories from three leftist editors very seriously and end up killing the main architect of the madness because the only way to salvage his hurt pride (the novel is very funny in the constant humillition of Belbo, specially the scenes in which Lorenza is involved) is to not reveal the secret: that there is no secret, it is all false.

In the “PC” something similar happens, where all the conspiracies of the late 19 century are pinned under a despicable guy who has no values but the love of money and will invent anything, including a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. So Eco gives us a fictional account of the birth of a text, “The protocols of the elders of Sion”, that in the official history is considered to be a libel. Now I am sure these things don’t escape you, because you are much more smarter than me, but I still don’t see how his work vindicates your phrase I quoted. Is it just that you enjoy these themes treated in such a beautiful and sophisticated way, even though the author does not believe in them? Or is it the classic the message trascends the writter, and the story is more true than he seems to believe?

The reader seems to have a fundamental problem understanding the concept of a novel and its relation to the writer. Contra his assumptions, he has no idea what Eco actually thought about any of these things, which would be true of most halfway-decent authors, but is particularly true of an author who just happens to be a world expert on semiotics, signs, and symbols.

The idea that Eco is demystifying anything is absurd on its face. He loved myths, fables, and conspiracies. To look at his various explanations for them as attempts to reduce them to harmlessness in the service of the mainstream Narrative in which nothing happens for a reason and nobody accomplishes anything is to fundamentally miss the point. Eco was more akin to someone who loves puzzles and enjoys putting them together, which is why anyone else who loves puzzles will enjoy reading his book; moreover, let’s not forget the concept of blown cover as cover.

Being a world-famous public intellectual, Eco would have known better than anyone that there are secrets that cannot be safely revealed to everyone. Ergo, what better way to reveal them than by doing so in an innocuous manner that purports to make it clear that the secrets, such as they are, don’t even exist, especially given the inarguable evidence that they do, in fact exist. And this is precisely the sort of interpretation that one could not possibly rule out, given Eco’s very puckish sense of humor.

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The Books Must Flow

First thing: the new Castalia Library book for March-April 2025 has been announced.

Second thing: DRACULA is being bound. SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON and ASOS 1 and ASOS 2 are being printed. We’ll keep you posted on when they’ve a) been approved and b) are ready to ship.

Third thing: We’ve finally completed the move from the second bindery space to the third one. This was absolutely necessary because the 50-ton foil stamper did not fit in the building. We are now testing our third and fourth glues, and we are optimistic that one of them will be the right one.

Fourth thing: We know we’ve built up a backlog, but we’re not quite as behind schedule as it seems because most of the interiors and the designs are done. We’ve delayed getting them made because we want to know what the full range of our bindery options are, as there were benefits and problems to each of them, even before the new tariffs became a potential issue. The point is, don’t worry, we will catch up fast once all of the necessary details are nailed down.

Fifth thing: The fancy-dancy HYPERGAMOUSE cover proof will arrive on Friday. Once it’s approved, the paperback, hardcover, variants, and book blocks will be printed.

Sixth thing: We’re close enough that we’ve started putting together the interior of THE ILIAD. It’s going to be an original layout with illustrations leading every chapter. It promises to be spectacular. More about it later this week on the Library substack.

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The Legend at Work

A WORKING MAN, starring Jason Statham, will be coming out March 25th. It’s based on The Legend Chuck Dixon’s first Levon Cade novel, Levon’s Trade, was adapted for film by Sylvester Stallone himself, and based on the trailer, appears to be pretty faithful to the novel.

Dixon. Statham. Stallone.

That’s a lot of testosterone right there.

It’s got at least one killer line in it too.

“You a cop?”

It looks like a quality action flick of the sort that Schwarzenegger and company used to make, with the trademark Dixonian working man hero. Should be fun!

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Space Morons

Games Workshop tries to claim ownership of a concept that existed long before the company itself:

Games Workshop, the company that owns Warhammer, is attempting to shut down Jon Del Arroz’s Space Marine comic claiming he is infringing on the company’s trademark. In a post to X, Del Arroz, the co-owner and founder of Fandom Pulse, shared an email sent to crowdfunding website FundMyComic demanding Del Arroz’s The Emerald Array comic be removed from its website.

Fund My Comic’s Founder and operator Luke Stone informed Del Arroz via email that he has no plans to remove the comic or graphic novel from the site. He told Del Arroz, “At this time, the campaign will remain active on our platform. Our preliminary evaluation indicates that while the campaign may contain derivative works, it does not appear to infringe on any trademarks owned by the requesting party.”

It’s an absurd attempt to expand an already-questionable trademark. In fact, the trademark is so questionable that I suspect if Games Workshop were to take anyone to court, even someone infringing upon the protected space of “video computer games, computer software for playing games” it would find itself at risk of losing a trademark it probably should never have been awarded in the first place, just as the Arthur Conan Doyle estate lost its Sherlock Holmes trademark following a misguided attempt to prevent an author from “violating” it.

There are eight hours left in the campaign, so you can still back it if you haven’t already. And while it’s not an Arkhaven crowdfund, Arkhaven Comics will be publishing the retail editions.

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