Welcome to our revised Tandra Newsletter.

Most of you receiving this letter have signed up for it or have contacted us in some other capacity. If it happens you feel you have been included on our mailing list by mistake and do not wish to have your mail box cluttered up with our newsletter, hit the reply button and type UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Your name and address will be immediately removed from our data base. We honestly have no desire to annoy you with unsolicited email. Our purpose is to inform and entertain you, and possibly sell you something along the way. Research indicates that annoyed people are not potential customers, so tell us if you do not wish to be annoyed by replying with UNSUBSCRIBE, either upper case or lower case or any combination, we will get the message, and we will remove your name and address promptly and completely from our files, guaranteed.

Now that's out of the way, for those of you who signed up to receive this newsletter...onward.

This is the first Newsletter using a new app. As many of you are aware, there were numerous problems with our previous attempts at a newsletter (actually, many of you may not be aware of any problems aside from the fact that you never received the Newsletter you signed up for.) and we have high expectations the new app will allow us to send the Tandra Brigade Newsletter in a more reliable manner. We shall see.

WEB SITE OF THE MONTH

For comics fans, one of the more interesting sites on the web is http://www.moderntales.com with its wealth of professionally created comics features. The selected features run from cutting edge weird thorough humorous to continuity adventure strips in the classic golden age of newspaper syndication. Then there are a couple of features that are difficult to catagorize. I must admit those that most appeal to me, given my tastes, are the classic style adventure pages as exampled by Athena Voltaire and another titled Terranauts. My personal preference, however, is whatever creator Joe Zabel happens to be working on at the moment. Joe is a former ink on paper writer/artist but, at Modern Tales, Joe has embraced use of Poser, a computer 3D app that generates images of human figures that can then be manipulated and posed, thus Poser, to create almost photo-like illustrations. Joe's feature, Return Of The Green Skull, was very enjoyable. His new project, Fear Mongers, shows great promise. Validation of my liking for Joe's work is evidenced in that I have created a link on my own Tandra site to showcase Joe's Fear Mongers feature. This is accomplished by way of a syndication service initiated by Modern Tales that allows other sites to add Modern Tales features as part of their own content. Check out Fear Mongers from the home page at http://www.tandra.com or go directly to Modern Tales to check out their full selection. Current samples of most features are free, but you will likely find yourself wanting to subscribe for access to the extensive backlog.

THE LONE RANGER on DVD

It's no secret I am a big fan of The Lone Ranger, primarily as portrayed by Clayton Moore. I wrote an appreciation of Moore upon the occasion of his death a couple years back and posted it to the Tandra site. I purchased on DVD the first of two big screen movies of The Lone Ranger starring Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels a bit over a year back and was pleasantly surprised to notice how well it held up almost fifty years after production. We are not talking Clint Eastwood's THE UNFORGIVEN here. This is, after all, a movie made from a television series and with a modest budget. On the other hand one is reminded how poorly some entertainment one loved at twelve years of age holds up with the perspective of maturity. THE LONE RANGER big screen production is still, half a century on, a pleasant evenings entertainment. With this in mind, I bought a recent package of seventeen of the first Lone Ranger installments from the television series. These shows set end to end are the first sixteen b/w shows as first aired on ABC in the fall of 1949. These include the first three shows that tell how The Lone Ranger came to be. If the Lone Ranger big screen film was shot on a modest budget, the television series was shot on a shoestring. Budget restraints are evident in every scene. That said, these shows are still enjoyable and I recommend the television collection to any fan of television westerns and to fans of The Lone Ranger in particular.

It is worth noting the impact The Lone Ranger had in historical context. ABC television was a small potatoes third network struggling against NBC and CBS. The Lone Ranger series, the first western series to be made for television, put ABC on the map. Other westerns were shown on television before The Lone Ranger, but they were theatre features cut down for television. Check out The Lone Ranger collection and see how content was produced in the infancy of television.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

Since this is our Tandra Newsletter, we would be remiss if we failed to try to sell you something from Tandra Dot Com. In the spirit of commercialism, we want to remind you we have a holiday promotion in our store. Any order that comes in before January 1, 2004, will have included in shipment a free quality art print in full color of the first Tandra plate and will be signed and personalized by Hanther. This print is suitable for framing and hanging on your wall or for hiding under your mattress where, hopefully, your mother won't find it. So order a bunch of stuff from our store and spend lots of money as we have promised our employees a lavish New Years bash and the bills are running up.

LETTERS SECTION

This section will, in the future, be your area in which to sound off. Want to tell us how you feel about Tandra, about our site, or about something in this newsletter? Want to suggest other features for the letter or to recommend web sites and/or DVD's for consideration. Whatever you have on your mind, drop us a note and get our reply.

NEW TO TANDRA DOT COM

Just in the event you have not visited our site in the last few weeks, we now have a Charlie's Truck Stop archives on line. Charlie's is a small country store with real people and real events. If you thought Hanther could only write exotic adventure on distant worlds, check out the Charlie's feature from the Charlie's icon on our home page and let us know what you think.

That's it for this time. Check out the Tandra site, read the free Charlie's reports, and send us feedback.

Now I've got to get back to work,

The Crew at http://www.tandra.com

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