Monday 15 April 2013

Website: Thrilling Tales Of The Downright Unusual

Thrilling Tales: An interactive website featuring gorgeous retro inspired illustrations.


Interactive Stories from the Retro Future Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual is a cool website featuring various pages and gadgets, but as the name suggests the main spotlight of the website is a series of lightly interactive retro sci-fi stories written and illustrated by Bradley W. Schenck.

Some of the Thrilling Tales you can read include The Lair Of The Clockwork Book and Trapped In The Tower Of The Brain Thieves and as you can probably guess from the nature of the titles, the stories are set in a sci-fi retro future in the city of Retropolis.  The stories are free to read on the internet and are accompanied by gorgeous artwork which captures the retro sci-fi vibe of decades gone by absolutely perfectly.

If you'd prefer to own your own copies then there's also the option to buy The Lair Of The Clockwork Book and Trapped In The Tower Of The Bran Thieves as full colour illustrated books:
Buy Thrilling Tales books

Art and Stories from the Retro FutureThere's more to the Thrilling Tales website than just illustrated stories, though.  The website also features a couple of cool gadgets, the first of which is the Pulp Sci-Fi Title-O-Tron which comes up with random retro sci-fi titles reminiscent of B movies from the past such as 'Forgotten in the Tarnished Space Ship' and 'Race Against the Messenger of Doom'.

A far more interactive gadget though, is the Pulp-O-Mizer which is a clever tool which lets you create your own impressive looking retro magazine covers.  First, choose from a variety of magazine titles, then add your headline in a retro typeface.  Next, choose a sci-fi background from categories such as Skies & Stars or Landscapes & Outdoor Scenes, then finally add some characters, spaceships or vehicles from the retro future to complete your cover.

You can render your magazine cover in rectangular 332x509 resolution which can be used on blogs and forums, or there's also the option of producing a square image which is ideal for a facebook or twitter profile photo.  The rectangular versions would make ideal sci-fi book covers and in fact if artist and creator, Bradley W. Schenk, adapted the Pulp-O-Mizer slightly I'm sure many sci-fi authors would be keen to pay to licence his creations to use as the covers for their books.

'How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy'
How the cover might have looked if the book
had been written several decades ago.
To the right you can see an example magazine cover I produced using the title of my own sci-fi comedy novel 'How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy'* and as you can see the artwork expertly captures the retro sci-fi vibe of movies and fiction from the past.

Anyone wanting to have a go at creating their own magazine covers can check out the Pulp-O-Mizer at the following link:
Pulp-O-Mizer

If you create a retro image which you particularly like then there's even the option to have it made into a t-shirt, hoodie, poster or mug.  You can also get some cool retro wallpapers and screen savers from the Thrilling Tales website:
Wallpapers and screen savers on the Thrilling Tales website

All in all there's a lot to entertain you and you can easily end up spending far more time on the Thrilling Tales website than you originally planned.  If you're a sci-fi fan, or even of you're not, the Thrilling Tales Of The Downright Unusual website is definitely worth checking out:
Thrilling Tales Of The Downright Unusual


* Self-promotional plug: The sci-fi comedy novel 'How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy' is available for Kindle (and the Kindle app) from the following amazon links:
US: How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy
UK: How To Save The World: An Alien Comedy


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Please note, all promotional images used on this blog remain the copyright of the respective publishers and are used in accordance with 'Fair Use' legislation for review purposes.

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