Continuing a three-part recap of 2006’s Superman Returns, Bryan Singer’s bigger, faster, louder ode to the original 1978 film. But before we get back into the plot, a word about Brandon Routh’s eyes.
They are brown. Not in the film, but in real life. Which means that in the film, he had to play the role in blue contacts. And they are very vividly blue. One might almost say impossibly blue (sorry, private joke). Continue reading
With Friday’s latest chapter, Big Bang, we are now about to enter the final act of Hero Go Home. There are still a few months to go, but it is time to start thinking about what comes next. I have another Digger novel in mind (the Digger’s Big Con storyline that I never got very far into as a webcomic). Or something completely different, like my Johnny Dollar meets Cthulhuzilla story that I took lots of notes on, but never started writing.
I’m too pressed for time at this exact moment to install a poll plug-in, so I’ll simply ask for comments. Would you prefer another Digger story, or something different? Do you prefer dark or funny?
There will be some polls coming later in the month over other things, but for this one, simple comments will do.
Thanks for reading.
Through the 70’s and into the 80’s, I was a Marvel fan. I came to Marvel late in my childhood, having been more a DC kid when I was younger. Maybe that explains why I ended up abandoning Marvel long before I gave up on DC.
The other reason is that Marvel put out shit like Secret Wars II.
As should be apparent from the title, Secret Wars II was the sequel to Secret Wars, or more properly, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars. Secret Wars was perhaps the first official comics-universe-wide crossover event. Marvel had flirted with similar ideas in the past, with miniseries like Contest of Champions featuring nearly all of their major heroes (but not crossing over into their books), or events like the demon invasion in Walt Simonson’s Thor run crossing over into the storylines of basically every New York-based hero.
Secret Wars was more ambitious than that. Secret Wars (which I’ll discuss in more detail next week–yes, I’m working backwards) was a year-long miniseries which detailed the events which caused huge changes in the storylines of most of Marvel’s major books. It was a huge success, which is why less than a year after it ended, Marvel rushed out a sequel.
Scripted by Jim Shooter (Marvel’s then editor-in-chief and also the writer of Secret Wars) and drawn by Al Milgrom, Secret Wars II featured the cosmic entity known as the Beyonder coming to Earth to learn more about the people he’d kidnapped in the first series. His initial human form is an amalgam of the costumes of several of the folks who participated in the Beyonder’s contest.
As the series progresses, he tries to learn what it means to be human. Each issue would present the Beyonder grappling with the philosophical issues behind human existence. So for instance, in issue 3, the Beyonder learns about desire, and in issue 4, he learns about love (by falling in love with Dazzler, of all people, in another desperate attempt to make that ill-conceived character interesting and relevant). This makes it sound as if Secret Wars II had some sort of literary pretensions, like a comics version of Huck Finn or something.
Which maybe it did, except that it was unfortunately not a novel, but a comic book written by Jim Shooter, who could never be accused of subtlety. Even worse, it was a comic book whose apparent purpose was to tie in with every single other series Marvel put out, hoping to spread some of that original Secret Wars sales magic to other, lesser-performing books.
Unlike the original Secret Wars, which was a self-contained story happening far away from the rest of the Marvel Universe and whose effects on the tie-in books happened all at once, Secret Wars II took place in New York concurrent with the rest of the line. So, for instance, in issue 2, when the Beyonder encounters events happening in that month’s Fantastic Four, you get scenes like this.
If you didn’t read Fantastic Four, this would make no sense to you. The hope was that this would prompt you to buy Fantastic Four to learn the rest of the story. But seriously, the teaser is so poorly executed that I can’t see anyone who wasn’t already buying John Byrne’s much superior series being convinced to try based on this crappy, random excerpt.
Another guest crossing over in issue 2 was the Amazing Spider-Man, who would be beating up Firelord in his own book not long after (as detailed in last week’s Out of the Vault). The Beyonder decided to ask Spider-Man what being human was all about, which led to one of the most awkward scenes ever to appear in a comic book.
And I get that it’s supposed to be whimsical and funny, but man, it’s just badly done. Even worse, though, were the scenes crossing over to group books, because then Shooter would have to write dialogue to introduce all the characters.
This is somehow even clumsier than his attempts to do the same thing in the first Secret Wars. As the series progressed, the storytelling got even more fragmented. The Beyonder would decide to visit someone, disappear, and appear in the next panel saying, “Wow, that was a mistake,” with a little message in the bottom of the panel telling you to read whatever book it was to find out the full story.
But geez, why would you? The Beyonder was just a boring character. He could do literally anything, and he had no purpose and no personality, because he started out as a blank slate. And a blank slate can be fascinating if done well, as in the movie Being There, but it requires a deft touch and interesting characters for the blank slate to play off of, and Shooter provided neither of these.
As the book progressed, it seemed to become ever more desperate to maintain interest, mainly by having a series of ever-more-perfunctory fights. The Beyonder would appear, somebody would shout, “Get him!”, and there would be a dogpile.
And at this point, Shooter has stopped even trying to make the dialogue seem at all natural, just turning the dialogue balloon into a laundry list of the characters appearing in this panel. This scene is from issue 5, the cover to which appears just above, where you’ll notice Doctor Strange gets a special mention with an arrow pointing at him.
If you think that means Doctor Strange will play some special part in the story, you would be mistaken. After his brief namecheck in the panel above, he appears in the background of the fight along with twenty other heroes, then gets one line of inconsequential dialogue before the issue ends. And somehow, this was supposed to get people to want to buy his series?
The entire thing was a misfire, from start to finish (I’m guessing, because I never got to the finish). And worse, because Shooter was editor-in-chief, the entire Marvel line was suffering from this kind of mindset. Even books I had previously liked, like Uncanny X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man, were getting tired and convoluted. I dropped Secret Wars II after 5 issues, and dropped the entire Marvel line not much later.
Ya down with OPB? Yeah, you know me.
OPB means Other People’s Books, which means I’m talking about fiction other than my own. In theory, given what this site is about, that means I should be trying to track down obscure superhero novels and review/recap them. In practice, I’m mainly going to be pimping out work by people I know and like.
First up, a dude I first encountered in the Codex writers group on-line, Mr. Steven Savile. He has published a lot of novels through Games Workshop as well as media tie-novels for series like Dr. Who and Torchwood, and is lately publishing his own original work. His thriller Silver sold well in print and the ebook release is now tearing up Amazon’s charts. The Hollow Earth and Other Stories (From the Annals of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club) is a collection of macabre stories with a proximate connection to Digger.
Which is to say that the connection has nothing to do with theme or content, but simply proximity. One of the stories in this collection, “A Madness of Ravens,” had its first publication in the anthology Daikaiju! 3: Giant Monsters vs. the World (and was, in my opinion, the best story in the volume). The story directly after it was “Out of His League,” my first Digger story (which can be heard in a special audio presentation here), and his was a tough act to follow.
There are three stories in the volume: “The Hollow Earth,” “A Madness of Ravens,” and “The Mechanisms of Grief.” The stories all take place in Victorian England, in a world where both magic and clockwork super-science exist (assuming all three take place in the same continuity, given the branding in the sub-title).
Perhaps strangely for a collection of stories within the same milieu by the same author, the stories vary widely in tone. “The Hollow Earth” is a gory tale of demons and sorcery, while “A Madness of Ravens” is an action-packed tale of a sort-of giant monster battle between sorcerers. “The Mechanisms of Grief,” on the other hand, is a quiet tale, with advanced mechanical science taking the place of magic in the story.
Although “The Hollow Earth” is the lead story, it’s my least favorite of the three. The writing is a little too florid, the gore a little over-the-top. Â And there’s a lot of build-up for less payoff than I would have liked.
On the other hand, I’ve already said I really liked “A Madness of Ravens.” The giant monster menace is a really unusual take on the idea, and Savile’s interpretation of magic fits his setting very well. I had a little trouble getting into “The Mechanisms of Grief” (truthfully, all three stories suffer a little from meandering beginnings), but once it got rolling, I enjoyed it.
The link above is to the Kindle edition, which is only 99 cents! Seriously, that’s a great value.
So yeah, the first big surprise in March is the return of Big Game Wednesday, although in honor of the transition to Hero Go Home, and for one other reason that will become clear in a couple of weeks, I’m going to concentrate on superhero computer gaming. And since the only real superhero games I’ve played on the computer are MMO’s, that’s what I’ll be concentrating on.
In 2004, a company called Cryptic Studios released the first superhero-based Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, City of Heroes, through NC Soft. There had long been rumors that my favorite pen-and-paper roleplaying game, Champions, would release a computer game version, but it never came to fruition.
And really, given the limitations of computer game technology and storage media, there was no way for them to release the kind of freeform adventure in a truly convincing city of any scale that I would want to play. But City of Heroes, because of its on-line nature, came closer than I imagined they could.
One of the game’s coolest features was its character creation. You couldn’t create a character from scratch the way you could with Champions, but even Champions, with all its flexibility, realized after a while that guidelines for character creation could be helpful. So they created several archetypes that you could use for inspiration  (the Brick, the Energy Projector, the Mentalist, the Martial Artist) and gave you helpful tips on constructing the type you wanted to play.
City of Heroes took that idea further by creating specific powersets within each Archetype (which also conformed to the classic MMORPG roles). You would choose an Archetype (Blaster, Tank, Scrapper, Controller, Defender), and within that Archetype, you would pick a power subtype (Blasters could use Energy, Fire, Ice, or others, for example).
Once you’d chosen your powers, you would create a costume, one of the best features of the game. The costume creation system was very flexible and allowed you to get a wide variety of looks.
Once your character was created, you could play in basically two ways. You could be sent on missions by contacts you met within the game (either solo or on a team), or you could go to a PVP zone to battle other players. I always preferred playing solo as opposed to linking up with some random dudes for a few missions, but there were some missions you just couldn’t complete by yourself. They were designed for teams, and some you couldn’t even start without assembling a team first. Which sucked.
But I liked the way some missions linked together to form  story arcs; once you’d completed the story arc, you received extra rewards in the form of a power enhancement and a souvenir. Other accomplishments in the game would yield badges, which you could use to give yourself a title (for instance, my main character, Metatronic, spent a long time identified as “Metatronic, Superspy”).
The world of the game was gorgeous, another thing the game’s makers got just right. Paragon City was full of towering skyscrapers and looming statues and monuments, and it was especially fun just to fly around and sightsee.
One of my more juvenile pleasures in the game during a badge-hunting run was to fly up to the top of a particularly large statue honoring some female hero and literally stand on the shelf of her breasts. It was childish, but cool.
The graphics in these pics don’t really do the game justice. Number one, my graphics card was old, so I couldn’t run the game at its full resolution. And number two, screencaps don’t give you the pleasure of seeing the characters in motion.
Of course, the game wasn’t perfect. For instance, for a city with a million superheroes running around, there were a hell of a lot of muggers committing crimes in full daylight. Even worse, since you stopped getting experience points for them once you got a certain level higher than they were, you had a tendency to just run right past and leave the NPC’s to their fate.
And I didn’t like the way you had to wait and grind your way through 14 levels to finally get a decent movement power, or 20 levels to earn a cape. That kind of stuff seemed as silly and arbitrary as the mission designs which forced you to team up.
Also, although the heroes had a very comic-bookish feel, the enemies didn’t always. It got pretty boring sometimes grinding your way through the same generic street gangs all the time. Some of the villain groups were colorful and interesting (like the Tsoo or the Freakshow or the Sky Raiders), but most were bland and dull (the Outcasts, the Warriors, the Trolls).
My least favorite group was the Family, a generic Mafia clone. I burned out on the whole Mafia thing years ago (odd since I ended up writing Death Wave, in which the Mafia plays a huge part), so the charm of thugs in suits with names like “Johnny One-Eye” was lost on me. The heroes felt like comic book heroes and the world looked like a comic book world, but the villains you fought just didn’t feel like comic book villains.
Still, I enjoyed playing while I could afford to subscribe. I liked completing story arcs. I liked collecting badges and souvenirs and decorating my base once they released an update which allowed them. I liked designing power-up variations on my character’s costume and binding key macros so with one click, I could say a catch phrase and power-up into a different look.And I loved just flying free and exploring the city.
But at some point, fatigue and other time demands set in, and I stopped City of Heroes for a while. What brought me back was the fact that there was an entire game’s worth of new content that I could play with the same subscription price when Cryptic and NC Soft released a sequel.
City of Villains, next week.
A few years ago in March, I tried an experiment on one of my blogs to write an entry every single day for a month. It was difficult, given the length and amount of work required on my usual blog entries and the fact that I was working full-time. But it paid off in a big spike of traffic when one of those posts got some big attention.
I’ve been trying to think of ways to increase readership here, and thought about trying another month-long experiment like that previous time. But I’m not announcing anything like that here. There’s just too much work and not enough time.
But even if March doesn’t come complete with a full 31 posts, it’s still going to be a big month here. The novel wraps up the big second act climax on Friday, and we’ll be wrapping up our epic months-long odyssey through the Superman films (which started over on They Stole Frazier’s Brain in September of last year here). Meanwhile, Out of the Vault will be doing some backtracking from this past Saturday’s Spider-Man post for at least two weeks, maybe more. And in the days between, expect some surprises from the world of books and computer games, and maybe even a basketball-themed post or two to make March Madness complete.
And do please remember, if you like Hero Go Home and want it to continue, that Donate button is always there. I wish I could promise you extra goodies for donating, but I have my hands full trying to keep the regular content flowing. About the only way I could come up with premium content for subscribers would be if I were making enough from the blog to quit my job, which so far is not happening.
Beginning a three-part recap of the latest and final (so far) appearance of Superman on the big screen.
Last week, we finished talking about Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. In the intervening years, Superman continued to be a fixture in popular culture. His popularity was eclipsed by Batman’s due to the overwhelming success of Tim Burton’s 1988 Batman and Bruce Timm’s Batman: the Animated Series. But he carried on, featured in TV series like Superboy, Lois and Clark, and later, Smallville. He also had his own well-received animated series in the wake of Batman’s success, and went on to feature prominently in the Justice League animated series as well. Continue reading
So over the past couple of weeks, I’ve discussed how Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was partly just an extended series of callbacks to better movies in the series. This is one of the inherent dangers of sequels, and it doesn’t just happen in movies.
For instance, The Amazing Spider-Man #230, from 1982, featured one of the coolest Spider-Man stories of the era, written by Roger Stern, and drawn by John Romita Jr. and Jim Mooney. In the previous issue, the Juggernaut had been sent to kidnap Madame Web, a psychic. Spider-Man had tried to stop him, but failed, and Madame Web had been injured, perhaps fatally. So as issue 230 opened, Spider-Man was determined to halt the Juggernaut’s escape and bring him to justice.
There followed a series of escalating attacks as Spider-Man hit the Juggernaut with bigger and bigger things to try to slow him down. For instance, Spider-Man hits the Juggernaut with a girder from a building being demolished, then the Juggernaut tears the facade off the building Spider-Man is perched on.
So Spider-Man hits Juggernaut with a wrecking ball, and Juggernaut knocks a whole building down, trapping both himself and Spider-Man under the wreckage. But Juggernaut just walks out from under the tumbled bricks, unfazed. So Spider-Man finds a gasoline tanker.
Nuthin’.
So Spider-Man decides in desperation to tear off Juggernaut’s helmet (his only demonstrated weakness), only to learn that Juggernaut had welded his helmet on. So an even more desperate Spider-Man covers his eye holes.
Yes, they’re sinking. The fight is occurring at a construction site, and the Juggernaut has stumbled out into the wet cement poured for the building’s foundation–a foundation 40 feet deep. Spider-Man leaps free and Juggernaut disappears under the cement (no, it didn’t stop him, but it made a cool ending for this issue).
The story was cool, with lots of action and destruction, Spider-Man as usual totally outmatched by a more powerful foe but fighting on anyway and finally, if not overcoming, at least breaking even. The issue was so popular, it was adapted into an episode of the TV series Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, with the X-Men as guest stars in one of their first TV appearances.
But in the next couple of years, the powers that be at Marvel decided Spider-Man needed to be more impressive, so in 1984, they introduced Spider-Man with a new black costume as a result of the Secret Wars. Secret Wars also gave Spider-Man a defining moment of cool when Spidey took on Titania, an incredibly powerful super-villainess who had been giving all the more powerful heroes fits, one-on-one and totally dominated her.
Which leads us to The Amazing Spider-Man #269 and #270 from late 1985, a two-part story which tries to call back to the coolness of the Juggernaut story combined with Spider-Man’s defining moment of cool from Secret Wars, and ends up defining just how awful Marvel was during this period.
Written by Tom DeFalco and pencilled by Ron Frenz with inks by Josef Rubenstein (#269) and Bob McLeod (#270), the story opens with Firelord, former herald of Galactus, wandering randomly through the universe when he is attacked by a giant meteor “the size of a small planet.” He destroys it easily (just to show us how powerful he is) then realizes the neighborhood looks familiar. Turns out, he’s near Earth. So he decides to get a pizza. Seriously.
But as he’s threatening to destroy Tony’s business if his “savage desire” isn’t sated, a construction worker sneaks out and gets a bunch of his buddies together to do a little mutie-bashing, because yes, anti-mutant hysteria was a big deal in the X-Men books at the time, and they decided it wouldn’t be tiresome at all to make us read about that shit in Spider-Man, too. So the construction guys hose Firelord down, which doesn’t really work so well on him because he wields the Power Cosmic and all. But it does piss him off.
Meanwhile, Spider-Man just happens to be nearby and gets a big spike from his spider-sense, making him think the Beyonder might be nearby (because this story is also happening during the execrable Secret Wars II, in which… no, I’m going to save that one for next week). Spider-Man saves one of the construction workers and then attacks Firelord, not realizing just how cosmically powerful this guy is. Firelord then gets pissed at Spider-Man and chases him all over Queens, until Spider-Man realizes he’s outclassed and runs away to fetch the Fantastic Four to help.
Problem is, the Fantastic Four have disappeared, so Spider-Man decides he can’t just run away from the problem. He has to try to take Firelord down on his own.
Cue the next issue, #270, as Spider-Man begins his assault. And if you’ve read that previous issue with the Juggernaut, a lot of this will seem eerily familiar. First Spider-Man lures Firelord into an office building, hoping to have an advantage if Firelord’s movements are constrained by tight spaces.
Doesn’t help. So Spider-Man leads Firelord into a subway tunnel, hoping that the train will take him out. No such luck.
So next Spider-Man leads Firelord to, guess what, a building slated for implosion, and tells the guys to blow the building once he and Firelord are inside.
But dropping a building on Firelord doesn’t stop him, so next Spider-Man leads him to a gas station, where Firelord is caught in a huge explosion.
But that doesn’t stop him either, and just as I’m wondering how Spider-Man is going to trap Firelord in some concrete or something, Spider-Man gets pissed instead and decides to just punch him out.
Remember, Firelord was the former herald of Galactus, which puts him on a level with the Silver Surfer, which if you’ve seen the Fantastic Four sequel, you’ll know the Surfer is one seriously powerful dude, and not somebody you simply punch out. But apparently, Firelord has a glass jaw, because Spider-Man–not the Hulk, not Thor, not the Avengers or the X-Men, but your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man–puts him down for the count. And not even alien-symbiote-costume-boosted Spider-Man, but just plain old human Spider-Man (yes, he’s wearing a black costume, but for some reason, he was switching back-and-forth between his old red-and-blue and a cloth copy of the black alien costume, don’t ask me why).
This was obviously intended to be a bigger, better, louder version of the previous Juggernaut story, but it was just a total misfire on every level. Like Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, the callbacks just reminded you that it had been done better three years ago.
For everyone who has been interested in Death Wave, but did not buy because you don’t have a Kindle, you now have other options. Death Wave is now available on Smashwords.
That means that for the same price, $2.99, you can download it in a number of formats for virtually any computer or device, including PDF, RTF, Palm Doc and Epub. If you want the mobi formatted version, it is only available through Amazon.
If you only like to read with paper between your fingers, I’m looking into options for printing as well. The problem is that without a lot of demand, it would need to be print-on-demand, which makes the books more expensive. But I’m also considering throwing in a special bonus with the printed edition, so we’ll see how that develops. If you’re interested in such a thing, let me know through the e-mail link at the top of the page.
In the coming weeks, I’ll also be putting out an anthology of the Digger stories, along with other superhero stories I’ve written. I’ve got a bit of rewriting and editing to do before that becomes available, however. Â And after Hero Go Home finishes in a few months, it will be available in a total package as well, also with some bonus material that hasn’t appeared on-line.
And please remember, if you enjoy what you’ve read, please think about donating. If you can’t donate, then tell your friends, put it on your blog or Facebook or any one of the other fine social network options out there. Thank you.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Still. Okay, where were we? Oh yeah, this guy…
Nuclear Man, cloned from Superman’s DNA which was attached to a nuclear warhead thrown into the sun to give him some extra oomph! He heads for Earth. Continue reading
Order Death Wave for Kindle! Other formats available at Smashwords!
