So last time, we discussed the fact that Richard Donner was not credited as director of the sequel, that credit going to Richard Lester instead. However, that does not mean that there are no Donner-directed scenes in the film.
For instance, all of the Gene Hackman scenes were filmed during the production of the first Superman and directed by Donner. Like this one. Continue reading
Cross-posting this to Hero Go Home as well, because a lot of what I’m talking about applies there.
I’m starting off the year feeling pretty energized about things. Things are coming to a head in Hero Go Home, the novel. They are about to kick into high gear in just a few weeks, and when I say high gear, I mean you haven’t seen anything yet. That alien invasion back in Chapter 11? Small potatoes. Our heroes are about to get tested in a very big way, and after that… well, after that, look to Chapter 1 for a clue.
The current novel is a little over halfway done, I’m thinking, which means that it should be finished sometime in May, maybe. Since the donation model hasn’t been working, I’m thinking of different ways to generate revenue. But that’s contingent on getting people to actually read the story and be interested in how it turns out, which doesn’t seem to be happening much. I’m getting more visitors, but not a lot of hits on the actual novel pages.
Still not sure what’s to be done about that, although I may go back and revise the earlier chapters. Some chapters combine several unrelated scenes, because I wanted to provide a minimum level of content each week. I may break those down into shorter, punchier chapters. I’ll also do some smoothing, because as the plot has adapted, and as I’ve run into deadline crunches, some chapters were rushed and are not as good as I’d like them to be.
When it’s all done, though, in the second half of the year, there will be a Kindle edition with everything included, plus some extras, as well as the option of an actual dead tree edition. And I’ll be starting another Digger novel, which will probably be the prose version of the aborted webcomic story from a couple of years ago. I’m hoping to actually not bog down on the damn car trip to the hotel this time. There was some funny stuff you never got to see, and some characters I really want you to meet.
And in the meantime, sometime within the first three months of the year, I’m going to be adding something new to the site. I’m not going to say what it is just yet, but it’s darker than Hero Go Home and will not be serialized in the same way. Ideas are still being firmed up.
Weekly Extras are going away. I still have some Extras in the works, but trying to come up with one every week in addition to all my other obligations has resulted in some less-than-satisfactory work, in my opinion. So the Extras are to be more sporadic, but better quality.
Out of the Vault and Super Movie Monday will continue like before, though, and this year, I’m getting a little more organized and planning further ahead in the hopes of both avoiding a crunch and putting together some really special things for Halloween and Christmas. There will also be an occasional non-super movie featured on They Stole Frazier’s Brain.
And that’s basically it, for now. Is that a lot? It seems like a lot. And I haven’t even mentioned my whole other Secret Project. Whew.
In 1993, Malibu Comics launched an ambitious new project called the Ultraverse. Â This was basically an attempt to hit the ground running with the type of dense, detailed interwoven world that had taken years to evolve at Marvel and DC. As originally set up by a who’s who of comic book writers, along with SF author Larry Niven, the Ultraverse didn’t feel like a shoddy rip-off of an established universe, but actually set its own tone pretty well.
And although the Ultraverse enthusiastically jumped into the worst excesses of the 90’s with both feet–company-wide crossover events, variant covers (including embossed foil covers), Â zero issues, double-issue flip books, puzzle covers–the books themselves were well written and decently drawn. Ultraverse didn’t have the artistic star power of Marvel or Image, but their books were solid and reasonably successful.
One of those books was Firearm. The main character was Alec Swan, a British former Special Ops soldier turned hard-boiled private eye in Pasadena, California. And as his code name suggests, he didn’t have a superpower. He was just good with guns. He was also good with things like computer keyboards.
In the first issue, he’s hired by a woman named Claire Brody to find her fiancee, who has disappeared. The clues lead him to… well, the clues don’t really lead him anywhere. This is one of those “mysteries” where the detective doesn’t solve shit. He just wanders around asking questions until the bad guys decide to attack him and then explain everything to him, after which he kills them and claims he has “solved” the case.
In this case, it was a group of super-rich, super-arrogant, super-A-holes who like to replay “The Most Dangerous Game” with ex-military guys, because the thrill of the hunt is so much better when the game can fight back. But they also choose really fat ex-military guys, because BTW they’re also cannibals and you don’t want meat that’s too stringy.
So yeah, despite the hard-boiled tone, it was as silly as any comic book story, pretty much, but it was told with flair and I remember enjoying it. The series eventually ran for 18 issues and I have them all.
One thing I remember about the Ultraverse was their early attempts at digital coloring, which I remember being impressed by at the time, although it looks a little cheesier now.
Firearm was also notable for having a zero issue which tied in to a live-action video. I’ve never seen the video, but I have seen the two TV series the Ultraverse would eventually spawn: the animated series Ultraforce and the live-action syndicated series Night Man. A pretty impressive track record for a comic universe that lasted less than two years.
So if it was doing so well, why did the Ultraverse disappear so soon? What happened?
Marvel happened. Marvel bought Malibu, and then completely changed the editorial direction of the comics. There was a really half-assed effort to bring some of the titles into the Marvel universe, then they were just allowed to fade away. Opinions vary on whether Marvel deliberately destroyed a competitor, or whether they just screwed up what could have been a good acquisition. Either way, the Ultraverse was pretty much gone for good.
Next week: another Ultraverse title, one of my favorites and one of the inspirations for Rev. Be here for Prime.
Coming in a little late in the day with the original character background written for Rev. Some explanation is in order:
Several years ago, I discovered that there was a new edition of the Hero System roleplaying game out (the fifth edition–now there’s a sixth), so I picked it up with the intention of perhaps starting a Champions game. Continue reading
Okay, I was wrong last time. It didn’t take two years to get the sequel out. It took three, coming out in June 1981.
Which was frustrating if you were a fan, because there had been much publicity during the production of the first film that they were actually filming both movies simultaneously. So just what was taking so long? Continue reading
Yes, I know, it’s late in the day to finally be posting this, but I had to dig through a lot of comics before finally finding a Christmas-themed story worth posting (I have some better ones, but they are still in the Vault, so maybe next year).
So from February 1993 (remember that comics tend to come out a couple of months earlier than the cover date), please enjoy The Flash in “Dashing Through the Snow.” Sorry, that’s only the cover copy. The actual title is “One Perfect Gift,” written by Mark Waid and drawn by Greg Larocque and Roy Richardson.
So Wally West, the Flash, is with his girlfriend celebrating Christmas at the home of Jay Garrick, the Flash (retired). Wally is impatient and keyed-up over Christmas, so Jay takes him out of the house so the women can cook and decorate in peace.
However, it being Christmas, there’s not a lot of crime going on, so the two Flashes go on patrol volunteering at a soup kitchen and saving presents from hitting the ground.
Wally saves a delirious girl from being hit by a car, and the two heroes learn two startling things. One, the girl, Maria, is in labor, and two, her husband Joey, works at a department store which he is going to help some crooks rob. So Jay solves the baby dilemma by bringing some doctors at super speed…
While Wally heads to the store to find Joey. He checks all the clerks there, but no Joey. Then he realizes, he never checked the store Santa. And sure enough, at that moment, Santa Joey is breaking into the office to steal a huge pile of cash. As he’s making his getaway into the alley behind the store, a kid has tracked him down to ask him to make his mother happy, because she’s so sad that Daddy is in jail.
Santa Joey has an attack of conscience and turns around to return the money. But then the thugs show up and decide to kill Joey and take the money for themselves.
Flash sends Joey two blocks over, where he finds…
Yeah, that’s right. Maria and Joey-seph have a baby on Christmas Day, heralded by a star. Â I picture Waid with this huge hammer over his desk, something like this*…
labelled “Symbolism Mallet,” and he hit this page with it about fifty times.
What do you want to bet they named the kid Chris or Hay-sooss or something?
Anyway, Wally and Jay go back home, where they are happily winding down their Christmas celebration, when there’s a knock at the door. Wally is just saying that he can’t imagine a better Christmas present than he has already gotten when he answers the door. Who should it be outside?
Why, Barry Allen, of course. The second Flash, the one Wally inherited the mantle from and who famously died in Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Of course, it all turns out wrong in later issues. Barry turns out to be an imposter, and there is much hurt feeling.
But that’s later. For now, Merry Christmas!
*the pic is from Asobi ni Iku Yo HT: otakuako.com
It’s Christmas week, so there’s no Extra today (in case you couldn’t tell already). There will also be no chapter on Friday, though there may be a Christmas surprise. We’ll see.
This is it, the conclusion to our titanic three part-recap of Superman, the 1978 film that started the modern boom in superhero movies. Continue reading
In honor of the climax of Superman: The Movie, here’s an issue of Action Comics just one year before the movie opened. The issue is Action Comics #472, June 1977. If you notice, the cover is now calling it Superman’s Action Comics, just in case you couldn’t tell whose face was getting kicked on the cover there. In the six years since last week’s issue, the price (which had temporarily dropped to 20 cents in between) has now risen to 35 cents.
And I know, the steady diet of Action from the 70’s is getting a little tiresome. I wish I also had my box of old Superman issues from the Vault as well, but they will have to wait. There’s some freaky stuff in those old Superman issues.
This issue is actually the continuation of an issue I don’t have, which is as close as DC came at the time to emulating the Marvel style. Instead of doing a continuous soap opera-style storyline, DC opted for self-contained single-issue stories so that readers could drop in at any time and not feel lost. But they would occasionally stretch a story over two or three issues to give a feeling of greater continuity.
So in the previous issue, Superman faced a super-criminal who had apparently escaped from the Phantom Zone. This issue’s story, “The Phantom Touch of Death,” is written by Cary Bates and, as usual, drawn by Curt Swan and… Tex Blaisdell? Was Murphy Anderson sick, or just taking a break to work on another project? I don’t know, but his polished inks are sorely missed.
A brief word about the Phantom Zone. It was introduced in the comics in 1961, and it works like this: criminals are exposed to a special ray, which causes them to dematerialize and exist in a separate dimension, able only to observe our world as phantoms without substance. Sounds an awful lot like the Empty Doom from the Atom Man serial, doesn’t it?
Superman is searching through the computer database at the Fortress of Solitude to figure who the escapee is, and comes up with a computer punch card with the information that she is Faora Hu-ul of Alezar.
Hard to tell if Bates in 1977 meant “man-hater” as code for lesbian or simply a women’s libber. The 14 year old me definitely understood it to be more on the women’s lib side, since the Equal Rights Amendment had been a big deal in the news during the past several years.
Superman can’t figure out how Faora has escaped, but can’t dwell on it, since he has some unspecified work to do in his day job as a TV news personality. Meanwhile, as he’s flying back to Metropolis, we see his next door neighbor, widower Jackson Porter, speaking to the ghost of his late wife, Katie. At Katie’s request, Jackson has stolen a special statue from Kent’s apartment, and we learn that “Katie” is actually the phantom form of Faora.
As Clark Kent is discovering that his statue is missing, Katie asks Jackson to rub the statue and wish her back into existence, which he does. She then yells a super-loud challenge to Superman. When Superman flies out to meet her, he gets an unpleasant surprise.
While the idea of a martial art that causes specific reflex actions from hitting specific pressure points is a neat idea, I wonder if it isn’t used here in part due to editorial pressure. After all, Superman by this time was such an idealized icon that he certainly couldn’t be shown to be screaming from, you know, pain. And especially not from being hit by a woman.
Superman uses his heat vision to vaporize the shards of glass before they can hit the street, which I’m sure is a great comfort to all the people inside the building who got a face-full of glass shrapnel. But as he’s otherwise occupied, Faora hits him in the ass-dimple, which causes his legs to vibrate out of control, and he burrows into the ground.
When he emerges again, Faora hits him in the ribs, which causes him to double up and float in the upside-down fetal position, which looks a lot like the helpless pose he assumed against Terra Man, the space cowboy, in 1972 (I really need to dig those old Superman issues out of the Vault). While he’s helpless, Faora gloats about how she was able to use her phantom telepathy to read Jackson’s mind and imitate his wife, so that he would bring her out of the Phantom Zone with the power of his love and a special power source made of the rare space element Paskorium (a reference to Marty Pasko, who had just taken over as the regular writer on Superman in April 1977).
And now that Superman’s helpless, she readies her ultimate attack, the Kryptonian version of Dim Mak, the “death touch.”
I like how she has to “load” her hand to get ready to deliver the blow. Â Also how she plans to deliver a “pinpoint” strike with “precise” pressure using the broad, blunt, cushioned side of her palm, which would not seem conducive to either.
Anyway, by the time she finally moves in to deliver the blow, all her yackety-yak has allowed Superman to recover from the paralysis of her previous blow, and he kicks her away. Then while she’s distracted, he flies away.
Faora isn’t worried. She’s got a master plan for Earth that not even Superman can hide from, she thinks. Ah, but that’s where she’s wrong. She has kicked Superman’s butt so thoroughly that decides not to hide out on Earth at all. In fact, he decides to flee the entire universe by projecting himself into the Phantom Zone!
“Brave, brave Sir Superman, he bravely ran away…” To be continued next issue (which I don’t have, so you’ll never find out how the story ends, although I’ll bet Superman wins somehow).
There’s also a short back-up story in which Clark Kent’s boorish co-worker, sportscaster Steve Lombard (who?), is visited by his doppelganger, a mirror image who claims to be his conscience and whom no one else can see. Turns out it was just an April Fool’s Day gag Clark set up with his co-workers, with Batman(!) playing the part of the other Steve. That Superman! What a card!
(ETA: Now that I think of it, this would have worked a lot better next week, when the film would actually feature Phantom Zone escapees–oh well…)
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