Out of the Vault has been postponed until tomorrow, partly due to yesterday’s chapter being extra long, partly due to some last-minute problems in selecting which book to due next. But I promise, by this time tomorrow, there will be an entry.
I promised last week that I would talk more about James Maxey’s work this week. I first discovered James when my friend M.T. Â Reiten was published in a Phobos anthology, All the Rage This Year. When I visited the Phobos website, I discovered that they had also published a superhero novel titled Nobody Gets the Girl by James Maxey. I figured I ought to get around to reading it someday.
Some time later, I joined the Codex Writers Group on-line, and Maxey was one of the members. One of the benefits of membership has been to be able to read some of James’s stories before they were published. That was how I became a fan. But still, I never got around to reading Nobody Gets the Girl, even after experiencing in short story form his deft handling of the genre.
That changed recently when he finally got around to publishing a Kindle version of Nobody Gets the Girl. I read the book a couple of weeks ago and got a real kick out of it.
Nobody… is the story of Richard Rogers, a guy with a boring job and boring marriage who’s trying to start up a career as a stand-up comedian when his world suddenly changes. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, he no longer exists. He is invisible and immaterial, except to a very select few. He is suddenly Nobody.
He joins a team of superheroes, the coldly brilliant Dr. Knowbokov and his two beautiful daughters, Rail Blade and the Thrill. Nobody becomes their secret weapon in their secret battle against Dr. Know’s greatest enemy: the evil Rex Monday.
This was Maxey’s first published novel, so it’s not the best work of his career. He has grown as a writer since, in novels like Bitterwood and Dragonforge. But in Nobody Gets the Girl, Maxey demonstrates his ability to tread the fine line between awesome and silly that it is so hard to get right in superhero fiction, leavened with real humanity.
If you like Hero Go Home, I think you’ll like Nobody Gets the Girl as well. It’s available for $4.99 at Amazon for the Kindle, and at Smashwords in other formats as well.
After I joined Facebook, I decided to try a game I saw being promoted called Superhero City. Clearly (it seemed to me) trying to capitalize on name identification with City of Heroes, I wondered if the experience would be at all the same.
There was one slight similarity. You could design the look of your avatar. Other than that, there was no real comparison. Superhero City is a Flash-based browser game closer to Farmville and Mafia Wars than City of Heroes. Its two big innovations: it featured animated battles between your avatar and your enemy (either another player or mission-based enemy), and you could design the look of your avatar (although it was not nearly as customizable as City of Heroes).
Yeah, that’s my guy on the left, recycling the Metalord name yet again.
The good: it’s free, advancement is fast, and some of the powers have cool animations attached to them.
The bad: in order to excel in the ranks of players, you have to either pay big bucks for special extras, or else pump up the ranks of your allies by “befriending” lots of strangers who only count as “game friends.” Or both.
Also, some of the missions are really stupid. For instance, in one mission, you’re supposed to break through a security door with your powers. Good concept. Problem is, instead of simply saying you got through the door, it makes you fight the door, in a battle like the one above, with you and the door facing off in front of a background location. Even worse, the door has a pretty high Agility, so it often dodges your attacks. It’s a door… that dodges.
I’m not really a fan of this genre of game, but it’s free, and I play several. But Superhero City was never more than the barest cracker slightly taking the edge off my gaming hunger. What I really wanted was to get back into something like City of Heroes, only I couldn’t afford the monthly subscription.
And then, I found the answer.
Next week…
This is it, the conclusion to our titanic three-part recap of Superman Returns, and the end (sort of) of our months-long odyssey through the Superman theatrical films.
When we left off last week, Lois (with Lois Jr. in tow) had tracked down the origin of the mysterious blackout to a mansion on the shore of the Hudson River (or whatever the Metropolis equivalent is). Then she had  to sneak on board a yacht only to discover Lex Luthor in his bathrobe.
So Luthor tells Lois his plan. This may shock you Continue reading
So we continue to work our way backwards from Spider-Man beating up Firelord, former herald of Galactus, to Spider-Man teaching the cosmic, godlike Beyonder how to go poop, to the miniseries which started this whole chain of events, the year-long mega-event, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars.
It all started in December of 1983 (cover dated April, 1984), when in the final panels of their various books, a number of the Marvel Universe’s greatest heroes–the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man–either mysteriously disappeared or else decided to enter a strange alien structure which had appeared in Central Park, which itself disappeared after they entered.
In January 1984 (cover dated May), the heroes returned, but with big changes. She-Hulk was no longer an Avenger, but now a member of the Fantastic Four, replacing the Thing, who did not return. Magneto, long the X-Men’s greatest arch-nemesis, was now a sort-of member of the group. And Spider-Man had a mysterious new black costume.
At the same time, a new series, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars, published its first issue, which would tell the entire story in twelve issues over the full year. Scripted by Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter and drawn by Mike Zeck and John Beatty (with one fill-in issue by Bob Layton, and some various uncredited art assists), the series opened with the heroes appearing inside a mysterious alien structure in outer space. And even though they pretty much all know each other, the first thing they do is introduce themselves.
If you plan to read Secret Wars, get used to that level of clunky, rote exposition, because you’re going to read a lot of it. Every issue is going to have a bunch of obligatory recap that becomes sheer torture to read by the last few issues.
Not only are there 19 heroes, but another structure appears nearby, full of villains, from the world-eating Galactus (!) and Doctor Doom, all the way down to losers like the Wrecker and the other three members of his Wrecking Crew (who?). And then there’s Magneto, ostensibly a villain, but he winds up in the heroes’ lounge for some reason.
Suddenly a rift in space appears, and a disembodied, godlike voice starts out by saying, “I am from Beyond.”
This was, of course, the first appearance of the Beyonder, who would quickly descend from omnipotent cosmic force to incredibly boring buffoon by the midpoint of Secret Wars II. Then, just to show off, the Beyonder destroys a galaxy for our heroes’ amusement, after which he assembles a planet from pieces of hundreds of other worlds, and orders the two sides to fight it out.
Galactus decides he doesn’t want to play and goes after the Beyonder himself, pursued by Doctor Doom. But Galactus is casually tossed away, and Doom as well, which is how we discover that Galactus may be ultra-powerful, but even he sometimes puts his shoes on the wrong feet. Or maybe his feet are just backwards.
Anyway, there’s a lot of fighting. Both the heroes and the villains bicker amongst themselves, split apart and recombine in various configurations. Eventually, Galactus tries to eat the planet, so the heroes try to stop him and fail. But Doctor Doom manages to figure out a way to steal Galactus’s power, and uses that plus his incredible intellect to figure out a way to steal the Beyonder’s power.
At which point Doctor Doom has basically become God and decided he is above fighting the heroes any more. In Shooter’s characterization, he was basically always fighting them just to prove his superiority, and now he really has nothing left to prove.
A word about Shooter’s characterization: as you might expect, even with 12 issues to play with, a book featuring a cast of 20 heroes and a like number of villains does not allow much room for any sort of in-depth or subtle characterization. Shooter tries to give everybody their moment in the spotlight, but some folks inevitably get short shrift, like Nightcrawler and Rogue from the X-Men, or the Wrecking Crew (seriously, who?).
What he has to do for the most part is resort to “funny hat” characterization, giving everybody one basic characteristic that is a consistent part of their character. So Hulk is belligerent, the Human Torch is cocky, Colossus is lovestruck, Wasp is a spoiled rich girl (at one point, she seriously gets upset after crashing in the middle of nowhere in a stolen hovercraft because she broke a nail). And for an action-packed story for adolescent boys, there’s a ton of mooning over girls, and even a little romance, like this interlude between Magneto and Wasp, which gives you an idea of how much Shooter has to compress his dialogue to cram everything in.
At the same time, in order to make the series the Coolest! Thing! Ever!, Shooter feels the need to shovel endless amounts of hype over everything. So when the Beyonder demonstrates his power, he destroys a galaxy! Molecule Man drops an entire mountain range (that we’re told dwarfs the Andes) on our heroes! Which Hulk catches and holds up to keep everyone from being crushed! Then Reed Richards (super-brain) builds an ultra-super-blaster from Iron Man’s repulsors, Hawkeye’s arrows and Spider-Man’s webshooters, in minutes, with his bare hands, despite having never seen what components any of these devices contain.
Even in the non-action scenes, Shooter feels the need to pump things up. Alien machines are unimaginably complex, made of alloys that are super-hard, in rooms that are incredibly big. The problem is that the hype is empty, never really earned.
And by the end, the characters become so extremely one-note that it becomes almost unbearable to keep reading. Doctor Doom is supposed to be super-smart and super-ambitious, so he steals the power of God himself. But Captain America, who believes in Justice and Never Quits, decides to fight Doctor Doom. Because in Jim Shooter’s moral universe, Lawful Good Does Indeed Mean Lawful Stupid, so Captain America decides to throw his shield at God. And because Good must triumph over Evil, it works.
About the only character to escape this awful fate was Spider-Man, who gets the requisite funny hat characteristics of wisecracks and an inferiority complex. But he is refreshingly human, and he gets not one, but two moments of cool, neither of which is too over-the-top. First, he manages to run rings around the entire team of X-Men, and then, in issue #8, he stands toe-to-toe against the super-strong Titania, who has struck fear into the hearts of the other heroes with her incredible strength and invulnerability.
But in the end, although the series was in parts a fun read, its good was mostly overwhelmed by the boring and the stupid parts. Even worse, it gave birth to the wretchedly awful Secret Wars II, which we unfortunately cannot wish out of existence, but can mostly ignore. Within a year or two, all of the supposed world-shaking changes had been undone–the Thing had returned to Earth, Magneto had become a bad guy again, Spider-Man had dumped his alien black costume. The most enduring legacy of the entire series was the fact that writer David Michelinie and artist Todd McFarlane later resurrected the abandoned black costume years later to create the fan-favorite villain Venom, long after Secret Wars was a distant memory.
Well, that and the fact that huge multi-character crossover event miniseries are now Standard Operating Procedure at both Marvel and DC. And Marvel continues to try to milk that original cash cow, as well, through reprints of the series. The latest gimmick has been to reprint every issue of the original miniseries, packaged with two action figures for around $15 each. That would cost you around$180 to read the entire series from beginning to end.
Trust me, it is so not worth that much.
Okay, the chapter is not happening today. But in the interest of not leaving you with nothing worthwhile to read, some further explanation.
The story has reached the end of the second act, which climaxed with a huge action scene. And now it’s time to take a breath, reorient, and get things sorted out for the final push. And while I have written a couple of drafts of this story already, some very significant things are new this time around. That whole sub-plot with Digger being Rev’s mentor? Brand new. The sub-plot that climaxed with the shocking revelation about Rusk and the Kaos Kings right before everything blew up? Brand new to this draft.
So I can’t fall back on the previous drafts as much because the characters in this story have gone through some very different things, learned different things, and will have different reactions. And because of an increased workload at work, along with the increased workload of the March Experiment, I haven’t had as much time to really think through the reactions of all the characters as much as I should. And I owe you the best chapter I can write.
So next week, on Friday, March 18, you’ll be able to read Chapter 29, “Crawling From the Wreckage,” and the week after that, on March 25, comes Chapter 30 and the moment you’ve all been waiting for (without, perhaps, realizing you were waiting for it, but you’ll know it when you see it). I sincerely hope you’ll stick with me and not adopt Whiz’s attitude from the end of the last chapter.
Oh, and of course, donations are always welcome.
I still intend to put the chapter up today, but it may be a little later in the day. I’ve also got to carve out the time to do some site cleanup. I picked up an extra shift at work, though, so I have less time than I thought.
Okay, so this is not actually a book. “The Final Flight of the Blue Bee” is a short story which originally appeared in Asimov’s a few years ago, and which I later bought for $0.99 as a Kindle single. It was written by James Maxey, author of Bitterwood (link goes to the Kindle edition, but it is available in paperback as well).
Maxey likes to write about superheroes. And he has a skill which I really admire, to take something that starts out feeling like it might be parody or simple derivative hash, and through a layering on of detail and character development, turn it into an emotionally affecting statement about the human condition while still telling a kickass story.
“The Final Flight of the Blue Bee” is about Mick Payton, out on parole after forty years in prison, and his planned revenge on the man he believes is responsible for his incarceration–the apian superhero, the Blue Bee.
In some ways, the story is not at all what you’d expect. But in other ways, it goes exactly the way you know it has to.
I’ll talk more about Maxey next week, but right now, I’d encourage you to read the story. If you don’t want to spend ninety nine cents on the Kindle version, it is now available to read free at Daikaijuzine.
Last week, I discussed City of Heroes, the Massively Multiplayer On-Line Roleplaying Game featuring superheroes. And before I get to City of Villains, the sequel, I’d like to revisit something I mentioned, but don’t think I emphasized enough.
My attraction to the game was two-fold: number one, the superhero aspect was well executed. Character creation and superpower animation made for an amazingly fun experience. And number two, because the game was on-line, the world of the game wasn’t limited to what the developers could fit on a single disk or your computer’s storage capacity. The world was huge, with hundreds of places to explore.
What did not attract me to the game was the multi-player aspect. In fact, for years before I started playing City of Heroes, I kept reading articles in gaming magazines where they would mention that the future of gaming was in multi-player, or reviews where they would castigate a game for not having enough multi-player options. Solo gaming, they said, would soon go the way of the dinosaur.
And this both mystified and disheartened me, especially after having read stories about MMO’s like Everquest, which had huge problems with player-killers. It was one reason why I refused to play MMo’s for so long. I spent enough time dealing with tools and douchebags on the job all day long. The last thing I needed when I got home and booted up a computer game to escape from all that was to be ganked by some 13-year-old skidmark with nothing better to do than play games all day long and screw with other people’s good time.
Luckily, City of Heroes kept heroes from being able to attack each other except in designated PVP zones. Even better, most of your missions occured in what were called “instances,” small autonomous zones that only you and your team (meaning, usually, just me) inhabited. It was almost as good as playing purely solo. Of course, although people love to sing the praises of multi-player and PVP, in practice, when given the option of not playing PVP, most people didn’t.
It was apparently so bad that Cryptic had to add special incentives to lure people into the PVP zones, like special badges and missions. One of the coolest missions in the entire game was located in a PVP zone, which would have really sucked if there were anybody interested in PVP in that zone. As it turned out, with only one or two exceptions, the only other people I encountered were folks like myself intent on beating the mission and not interested in PVP at all. Suck it, gankers.
So then a couple of years after City of Heroes came out, Cryptic released a sequel game, City of Villains. The twist on the new game was that it was actually an extension of the same game. Not only would City of Villains give you the opportunity to play a bad guy featuring the same incredibly versatile game mechanics and costume creation as the original game, but it would also add new functions to City of Heroes, such as the ability to design your own headquarters.
City of Villains also gave you some new mission options designed to keep you from getting stymied when you ran out of story arc missions and were left having to grind street gangs for several levels before becoming eligible for the next arc. There was a radio which would give you random missions, and there were things called Mayhem Missions, in which the goal was to destroy as much stuff as possible within a given time limit. Fun.
The interesting thing about City of Villains was that, in order to keep from turning gamers off, the villainous missions were never actually all that villainous. Which is to say, you never really took part in missions against innocents. Pretty much all the missions were attacks on rival villainous gangs, so that you were really fighting the same types of enemies as in City of Heroes (and even some of the exact same organizations, meaning lots of Family–yawn). Even the robberies were usually stealing from the other bad guys.
My main villains were Dark Meta, my “evil twin” version of Metatronic, my main hero, and Metalord, a mastermind who led a group of evil robot followers (I later recycled the name for my ferrokinetic character in Sargon’s RPG). I don’t have any screen caps of Metalord, darn my shortsightedness, but here’s Dark Meta, along with a look at how the fog seemed to float a couple of feet above the ground.
And here’s Metatronic in the headquarters he built with the game’s additions to City of Heroes gameplay.
But as much as I loved playing the game (and I really loved it a lot), eventually I had to bow to the economic reality that I couldn’t afford the game’s $15 a month subscription fee, especially once I separated from my wife and had to pay all the bills on my own. So my superhero gaming jones went mostly unfulfilled for a while.
Until I joined Facebook, anyway.
Next week, Superhero City.
I considered throwing together a graphic for “Television Tuesday” or something, but I don’t see doing this as a regular enough thing to merit it, plus that would just be one more damn thing on my plate.
But as No Ordinary Family approaches the end of its first season, I thought I’d revisit my earlier comments. And my early opinion still holds. The show is very wobbly from a writing and plot standpoint, but is helped by appealing performances in the leading roles.
If you haven’t seen the show, No Ordinary Family is about the Powells, a family which gained superpowers when their plane crashed into a particular river in the Amazon.
Jim, played by Michael Chiklis, is the father, a police sketch artist who, like most movie superheroes, is a vanilla strongman. Stephanie, played by Julie Benz, is the mother, a research scientist who has gained super-speed. Their daughter Daphne is a telepath, and their son J.J. is a super-genius. Together, they fight crime.
The bad: As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m not a big fan of the fact that Stephanie’s boss is the Big Bad (although it has been recently revealed that there is a Bigger Bad). Yes, it made for tension, but it also required ridiculous amounts of coincidence and contrivance to keep everyone from discovering each others’ secrets too quickly. Now that everybody knows each others’ secrets, the show requires even greater amounts of contrivance to put off the inevitable confrontation until it’s time for  the season finale.
Yes, I know, much of this is simply part and parcel of the episodic TV format. But I don’t have to like it when it’s not well done.
The Good: As I’ve said, the performances. I like Chiklis, I like Benz and I like their chemistry together. The kids aren’t bad, and Stephen Collins is pretty good as the charmingly evil boss. I initially hated Josh Stewart as the super-hit-man Collins set on the trail of the Powells, but his character grew on me, developing in unexpected directions. Kudos to the writing staff on that one.
And I really love Autumn Reeser as Stephanie’s assistant, Katie. Not only is she gorgeous, but the character is written as total fanboy wank material: a super-hot woman who doesn’t know she’s super-hot, who is not only smart, but also a total comic-book fangirl. The big problem is that, because Stephanie’s the star of the show, Katie often gets relegated to comedy relief, so the writers end up making her head-bangingly naive (a nice way to say stupid) while forcing cringingly clumsy lines out of her mouth. In one episode as she’s talking to her boyfriend “Joshua” (actually the super-hit-man whose real name we have not yet learned), she says something like, “You make my cardiac organ levitate.” And I know that every writer has some bad lines in them, but seriously, whoever wrote that needs to be fired.
The danger sign for the show, I think, is that, while I do like it, I don’t like it enough to put it at the top of my stack. Back when I used to buy comics on a regular basis, I would have the comic book store put aside the comics I wanted to buy, and I would come in every few weeks to pick up a big stack. And I would notice over time that there were certain comics I would read as soon as my fingers touched them, while there were others I would shuffle to the bottom of the stack to read later. And if a comic was a bottom-shuffler for long enough, eventually I would just drop it altogether.
No Ordinary Family is one of the bottom-shufflers in my Hulu queue. I still watch it, but only after I’ve watched everything else I’d rather watch. Which is not a good sign for the show’s longevity, I would think.
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