Welcome back, Cliff Galbraith! Those with long memories will recall that in the primordial days of 13th Dimension more than 12 years ago, I had a partner who co-founded the site with me: Cliff Galbraith. Cliff is an artist, entrepreneur and promoter of such popular shows as the late, lamented Asbury Park Comicon and East Coast Comicon, both wonderful events for the comics cognoscenti. Unfortunately, COVID did in his convention biz and in the intervening time, Cliff has added a new chapter to his creative life: novelist. Cliff’s first book, Jagged Worlds: Avoid a Senseless Death, is available now and had a long and meandering path to publication, dating all the way to the turn of the 21st century when he lived in Los Angeles. (He’s actually an avowed Jersey guy.) “I had plenty of time during the pandemic and decided to work on the sprawling sci-fi graphic novel I’d always wanted to complete but never found the time,” he told me. “I originally conceived the story back in 2002 while living in Los Angeles. From July to November 2020, I made piles of sketches of characters, environments, vehicles — the kind of drawings that would be considered pre-visualization for a film. I created several pages in graphic novel form and had settled into a style. Then one day I glanced at my notes on my computer, and they looked like pages in a book, which I found funny because I didn’t know how to write a book. The next day I began writing, and 13 months later I finished my first manuscript.” “As the Parthenon hurtles through space with its 82,000 crew members, deals are made, egos clash, and fortunes are won and lost,” reads Jagged Worlds’ official description. “Planets and moons are divided into plots and auctioned off to acquire precious minerals, exotic life forms, alien technology, ancient artifacts, and habitable terrain. The humans are coming, and they didn’t travel all this way to make friends. “Arturo Foster finds himself ever closer to the end of what was once an illustrious career, now struggling to eke out one last score. Meanwhile, young Thabo Van Hoven is desperately trying to find an opening in the acquisition trade. And the clever business-minded Alta Corbis may be in over her head and blind to forces that could ruin everything she’s...