Announcing Roswell, Texas

Imagine a world in which Texas never joined the United States, NAZI Germany conquered England but was held in check by a nuclear-armed Irish Republican Army, the Catholic Church has moved its headquarters to Brownsville, Texas, and Mexico is ruled by a neo-Aztec emperor in partnership with French colonial bureaucrats-in-exile.

In this Texas-that-might-have-been, residents are required to have permits not to carry firearms. The Federated States of Texas includes most of what we know as New Mexico and Colorado, as well as Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, parts of Wyoming, Nebraska, and Missouri. Not to mention Alaska, Cuba, Venezuela, most of Central America, and the Philippines. Its currency is based on petroleum, and its limited government is financed entirely by a monopoly on garbage collection.

And in 1947, Texican President Charles A. Lindbergh was faced with a most amazing, and potentially world-changing, situation — reports of a flying saucer crash in far west Texas, near the town of Roswell.

Big Head Press announces plans to publish the first all-new novel-length story in nearly five years by award-winning sci-fi author L. Neil Smith, to be titled Roswell, Texas. Co-written by Wall Street Journal and National Review cartoonist “Baloo” (in his other identity as Rex F. May), and illustrated by Scott Bieser, the story concerns what happens when a special team of Texas Rangers races an array of spies, troops, and operatives of neighboring nations to the UFO crash site, and discover a truth even stranger than any of them could have imagined.

“As a graphic novel, Roswell, Texas will mark another first for Big Head Press: it will be the first BHP project serialized on the World Wide Web, with a printed version possibly to follow as market conditions permit,” said publisher Frank W. Bieser.

“Current plans call for the first chapter to be uploaded to a new, completely revamped BigHeadPress.com site around February 1, 2006,” said Scott Bieser, who in addition to being the story’s illustrator is also Director for Big Head Press. Access to the site will be free, at least for a limited time, and will be supported financially by banner advertising and merchandising, he explained.

Roswell, Texas will be illustrated in full color, and when completed “in late 2007 or so” will consist of 576 computer-monitor-formatted “pages,” he added.

Big Head Press, founded in 2002, is a publisher of graphic novels, including A Drug War Carol and Prometheus Award-winner, The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel.