Crisis Weekly, the tenth.

Crisis Weekly #10.

I don't necessarily have a lot to talk about this time, except to note that Jack Ryder as depicted here is being inspired by Tom Hardy's Eddy Brock in Venom.  Bloodwynd, too, as revealed last installment, is inspired in part by Cormoran Strike, the amputee detective in J.K. Rowling's Robert Gailbraith mysteries (who is himself inspired, I'm sure, by Rowling's own "Mad-Eye" Moody from the Harry Potter books).  And, since we're talking inspiration here, some of Rachel "Bulletproof" Rogerson's arc is inspired by the movie Isle of Dogs, which I love.

So there's that! 

Crisis Weekly, nine installments completed.

I was barely a dozen years old when Superman died.

Nowadays, it's almost difficult to remember, the seismic impact a fictional event like that had, even if there have now been two animated and one live action movie adaptations of the story.  Sure, DC had created a media frenzy over the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd, a few years previous.  But sensational superhero deaths became almost a matter of course in later years.  Captain America died, in the aftermath of the original Civil War comic, and that got some pretty good coverage.  Johnny Storm died, and his passing merited a special black bag edition of Fantastic Four, much like Superman's.  It started to seem that if you wanted the public to pay attention to comic books, you had to kill off a major character.

Because the death of Superman was huge.  It coincided with a massive boom in comic book buying.  Marvel had struck big with comics drawn by artists who somewhat promptly left to start Image.  A whole speculator market flooded the medium, and of course the bubble burst, and really, comics are still struggling to emerge from the fallout.

The story everyone remembers, though, from that time is the death of Superman.  Like I said, I was a kid at the time.  I can't say that I was emotionally affected, but it was a powerful formative experience, a touchstone event right there near the beginning of my reading life.  It's impossible for me not to think of it in relation to Superman and comics in general.  The story itself quickly segued into another grand adventure, four impostor Supermen appearing only to make room for Superman himself, returning from the dead.  Lots of people now like to believe it happened at all as a crass publicity stunt, but the creators insist it was a way to delay the wedding of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, since the TV show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was about to launch, and the comics had only just got around to letting the silly lovebirds approach a happy ending to their decades-long romance, and they didn't want to get there before the show could.  So they threw a crisis at Superman, the biggest imaginable.

The comic book creator most synonymous with the whole thing is the guy who wrote and drew the pivotal issue, Superman #75, Dan Jurgens, and he's freely returned to the story whenever he's had the opportunity over the years.  But I figured there was still room to play around with it.  So this edition of Crisis Weekly begins to make clear how this particular story dives into that one.

Crisis Weekly, eight weeks completed!

Wow.  So I've just posted Crisis Weekly #8.

I say "wow" for a couple reasons.  The first is that this week's script is double the length of previous ones, sixteen script pages as opposed to eight.  This is because I'm hedging my bets about how next week will turn out.  I've been writing these scripts on Saturday, but next Saturday I'll be participating in a mini family reunion, so if I don't get a chance to write something before then, I'll at least know I've got the script numbers where they should be (old NaNo habit). 

The second is that I finally got around to something I've been itching to write since I started this thing, which is to say the first of two spotlights on Bloodwynd's origins.  This week is the origin itself, which I've revised.  It was previously detailed in the pages of DC's '90s Showcase comics.  I decided that it would be interesting, given the confusion some fans still have about this, to have Martian Manhunter help explain it, because these fans think Martian Manhunter is Bloodwynd, which I again reference in the script.  Probably won't get around to actually exploring that, although I certainly have ideas.  Likewise, I obliquely reference Firehawk's origins, but probably won't be getting back into that, either, but it's nice to mention, something I remember from DC's '90s trading cards, where I first learned about Firehawk at all.

And for once, action fills the story, and that felt nice, too, a change of pace, and getting into the thick of the White Martian plot, which will continue to ramp up in the weeks to come.

The next script, whenever I get around to it, will continue Bloodwynd's origins, and I'm very much looking forward to writing that one...

Crisis Weekly, seven down!

That's Sparx!  She makes her Crisis Weekly debut this week.  Donna Carol "D.C." Force debuted in the '90s, during an attempted new wave of superheroes, most of whom drifted comfortably into immediate obscurity, some of whom stuck around for a while.  Sparx stuck around for a while.  She ended up as a featured character in Superboy and the Ravers, one of the less-heralded of the many teenage superhero books that were in publication that decade (including Generation X, Gen 13, Young Justice, and of course several iterations of Teen Titans and Legion of Super-Heroes).

My favorite was Superboy and the Ravers.  This was a team composed of damaged individuals like Half-Life, half of whose body was literally exposed skeleton covered in ectoplasmic goo.  Take that, X-Men!  This was a dude oozing with angst!  There was also Hero, a rare gay superhero who also happened to have possession of a power vest and later the H-Dial (as in "Dial 'H' for Hero").  Then there was the Qwardian warrior Kaliber, who had a near breakout moment during the Genesis crossover event.  And Aura.  And Rex the Wonder Dog.  And the Flying Buttress! 

But mainly, I loved seeing Sparx get a chance, because she was a fun character, and unlike the rest of the Bloodlines generation, she seemed packaged for greatness, part of a whole family of superheroes but powerless until alien parasites attack her.  There was always a ton of potential in her, and so yeah, of course I was going to have to include Sparx, too, in this crazy adventure, even if she isn't immediately a featured player (time and space will tell).

Crisis Weekly, the sixth week!

Just posted Crisis Weekly #6.

The whole concept of a DC crisis has rich history.  The original, 1985's Crisis on Infinite Earths, remains a huge watershed moment.  It was originally designed to collapse the multiverse back into a coherent, single DC continuity, so that every superhero operated in the same world.  This was a problem since DC had inadvertently created the concept of the multiverse based on how its publishing fortunes had developed since Superman's debut in 1938.  Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman have always been DC's three most important creations, but they originally existed at the same time as the Justice Society of America, several members of which were famously reinvented at the start of the Silver Age, the second wave of DC superheroes in the 1950s.  One of them, the second Flash, met his predecessor in the famous "Flash of Two Worlds" issue, which in effect ushered in the era of the multiverse.  Eventually, the Justice Society was placed in a second continuity, Earth 2, and there were regularly team-ups between the Society and the more famous Justice League.  In Earth 2 continuity, Batman and Catwoman really did officially get married, and their daughter was Huntress, and eventually, Batman was even permanently killed off!

Anyway, so DC got fed up with competing continuities, and so Crisis on Infinite Earths happened.  But then DC decided that the multiverse was a good idea, and so Infinite Crisis happened in 2006, and later Final Crisis in 2008. 

Infinite Crisis was a story predicated on the notion that the grim nature of superhero comics that had developed roughly since Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen twenty years earlier had become toxic.  In it, the characters are fully aware that they're no longer seen in their best light.  Wonder Woman had been forced, like Superman in the real world controversy in 2013's Man of Steel where he snaps the neck of General Zod and audiences watched in horror, to murder a diabolical schemer named Maxwell Lord, and that was used as the main focal point.  DC used the opportunity to also reflect on Superman's periodic relative unpopularity, as well as the massive success of the "Doomsday" arc in which he became the most famous murdered fictional character since Sherlock Holmes. 

And Batman offers this choice observation:

Ouch!

So anyway, this week's Crisis Weekly is very much in the spirit of that particular moment.  There's a brutal verbal takedown, in this case reflecting once again the real world, where confidence in the US seems to be at an all-time low.  Fiction ought to reflect reality, comment on reality, otherwise it's mere escapism.

But this installment also bursts into "mere escapism" by finally unveiling Man-Bat, long teased, as one of the main antagonists of the narrative, thereby plunging a lot of heavy real world issues back into fiction, and as promised, beginning a full-throttle dive into more traditional superhero storytelling.  It's the first big culmination point, equal parts summary of what has come before and an illustration of what it's all meant.

And it's really just getting started...!

Crisis Weekly, five weeks in!

Did I say last week that I was done introducing the real world crises?  Ah!  Because this one features Mexican migrants...!

Crisis Weekly #5 also features obscure superhero El Dorado!

El Dorado is best known as one of the ethnic creations from Super Friends, all of whom were later dismissed as bad stereotypes.  But well before I had ever heard of the teleporting mutant Nightcrawler, and certainly before I'd ever seen X2: X-Men United, in which Nightcrawler so memorably invades the White House, I was fascinated by El Dorado's wonderful cape, which he used to transport himself wherever he pleased.

But to everyone else, El Dorado more or less never existed at all.  He's made a handful of appearances since, even made a cameo in the comics, but certainly never starred in his own series or been featured as a member of the Justice League (which, as we all know, the "Super Friends" was all along).

So of course if I was ever going to write comic book scripts, I was going to rectify that. 

In Crisis Weekly, not only does El Dorado exist, he's helping migrants cross the borders, and in his civilian identity (a name taken from his appearance in the Young Justice cartoon, because he never got one in Super Friends) even serves as Vice President of Mexico!  (Before you say so, officially that office hasn't existed for a hundred years.) 

Vindication!  Viva El Dorado!

Crisis Weekly, four weeks down!

I just posted Crisis Weekly #4.

Four weeks and four different crises, all of them ripped from the real world (a scandal, a presidential assassination, a school shooting), with the latest being...a black man is pulled over unjustifiably by a white cop. 

The only way this would've been more relevant is if the black man had been shot dead.  But the black man in this instance is one-time Justice Leaguer Bloodwynd, and the cop is Guy Gardner.  The unprovoked pullover is itself an all-too common occurrence.  The black community views it as residual institutional racism, and it's been one of the things that has contributed to the heated nature of our times.  Guy Gardner has never been portrayed as racist.  I've been playing a little fast and loose with him in Crisis Weekly.  He has been known, for most of his appearances, as brash.  What I've been doing with him isn't so much out of character as implied as highly possible if he existed in the real world.  Even if he doesn't mean to come off as racist, he's the kind of guy (heh) who could very easily appear to be, and might even be, even if just a little.  Racism in its benign form is prejudice, the inability to look beyond one's own perspective.  To be, in other words, a fairly rude individual, when confronted with strangers.  Guy doesn't care who he offends.

The other benefit of this unfortunate encounter is that it unites Guy and Bloodwynd from their experiences in the first and second installments of Crisis Weekly, begins to move along the narrative of the White Martian crisis, the fictional construct that grounds the otherwise real world problems in a familiar superhero context.  And for the third time in four weeks, there are also bats, of which we are getting closer to finding out about, too.  Much sooner than the White Martians, actually.

And this rounds out the first month of Crisis Weekly!  Wow!

Crisis Weekly...week three!

The third installment of Crisis Weekly is up. Find it here.

This week was a little bit of a departure narratively.  It's the story of a school shooting.  No bats, no mention of White Martians.  As school shootings go, I figured it was worth introducing the topic on its own.

Obviously these things have been happening.  The first time I remember one was back in 1999 with Columbine.  We talked about it at track practice.  The Matrix had opened, and people wanted to blame Neo and company for looking all swank while they shot up buildings.  But we know school shootings don't happen because of The Matrix.  The Matrix isn't cool anymore, and yet the shootings keep happening.

So I decided to include it in this story.  Yes, it's also the third crisis in a row in a series with "crisis" in the name, and a DC story, where "crisis" tends to be the operative word.  But this one seems like one of the worst crises of the modern era, and everyone has an explanation, even today, for why they keep happening.

All I knew is that I had to write about it.  I processed Katrina like that, in the unpublished manuscript In the Land of Pangaea.  And I'll probably process the recent Hurricane Michael.  I have friends who were personally impacted by that one, and I have experience in the area affected by it, and it's still weird to think about that.  Writers process by writing.  It's what we do. 

This will probably be the toughest week to read.

Crisis Weekly, Week Two!

The second installment of Crisis Weekly has been posted!  Find it here.

When I conceived of this project, I thought it would be relatively simple to execute.  The only thing I didn't count on was...finding time to actually, y'know, write.

This is thanks to having a regular job on top of spending time with my niece, with whom I'm currently living.  The job hours tend to be erratic.  This week was a full one, and as I said, my day doesn't end when I get home.  I'm not complaining.  The thing is, I used to have the rest of the day free.  When I was writing book-length manuscripts in 2009-2014, or even the NaNo efforts in 2004-2006, even if the hours were somewhat equally erratic, I could always count on having the time to just write, not worrying about other commitments.  Or feeling truly exhausted, whether from the demands of work (these days I work in a child development center as a teaching assistant; no cracks, Pat) or giving my niece the attention she deserves.  I often don't feel like I have the extra energy to tackle something more.  It's enough to just try and unwind without falling asleep before doing anything at all for myself.

And yet...I had to do this thing.  Even if it doesn't get me anywhere closer to my ultimate goal, I had to do it. 

The idea is to produce a new script every week, even if it's just eight pages of comic book material.  Sounds easy enough, but as I've suggested, it seems like a lot more when piled on top of everything else.  And this is only the second week!  I set out with cockamamie schemes of having scripts out at roughly the same time, the same day, every week.  Yeah, that didn't happen even for the second week!  But here we are, second script down, second week.  Hopefully good enough.

And the delay (relatively speaking) was fruitful.  I came up with a new character who wouldn't have existed at all if in the original scheme I had already written the script, a spy who came in very late from the cold, and I think the story will be richer for it.

And I gave myself permission for the first time in the story to play with one of my personal favorite toys in the DC sandbox, a relatively obscure Justice Leaguer named Bloodwynd, and I addressed right away one of the common misconceptions about him, that he was always just Martian Manhunter in disguise.  But he wasn't.  And I'm not nearly done showing my hand with my intentions for him. 

All this is to say, I'm having fun.

Crisis Weekly begins

I've just posted the first installment of Crisis Weekly (here).  This is going to be a series of comic book scripts, eight pages each, in which I play with various DC superheroes (and some new creations).  I've developed some parallel plans for a Marvel story and an entirely original one.  All this is to help demonstrate that I have the chops, and the speed, to be a comic book writer.  And to write a long project again.

I'll keep you posted.

Crisis Weekly...somewhat delayed

Last time I checked in I mentioned a project called Crisis Weekly.  The next time I checked in I really ought to have already started it.  But then computer issues, yo.  I'm still working on resolving them, and hopefully that will happen soon, and I can begin writing Crisis Weekly, and hopefully also the Christmas 2018 poem, Did You...Go the Heart of an Active Volcano?, too.

Long story short about Crisis Weekly: it's going to be a series of weekly (wow!) comic book scripts.

Slightly longer story about the 2018 Christmas poem: I've been writing a Christmas poem every year for a number of years.  At first they were written for my parents, but after my mom passed away I started doing them with the whole family in mind, although increasingly with my niece in mind.  This will be the second year she'll have provided the inspiration for one, although technically I'm the one who came up with it, based on an actual question I used to ask her about what she was doing at daycare.  (Yeah.  I'm a little nutty.)

IWSG September 2018

What publishing path are you considering/did you take, and why?

The one I ended up taking was self-publishing, because I wasn't getting anywhere with traditional publishing, but truthfully...I first self-published with the first book-length manuscript I wrote.  The second one, I did take to various traditional publishing avenues, and didn't find any takers, and eventually self-published that.  I had a starter publisher who was going to handle a book I wrote before that, but they collapsed before releasing the book.  I even had an earlier starter publisher agree to release a new edition of the first book I self-published, but they collapsed, too.  I know, I know, that's what happens to small publishers.  I get that now.  So anyway, I just kept self-publishing.  I gave up looking for traditional publishers.

Earlier this year I started looking again, and I've decided that I will continue doing that.  I'm also making a renewed effort at breaking into comics.  I'll be talking more about that later, but suffice to say, I hope to be talking about Crisis Weekly again soon, and maybe that will lead to something.  We'll see. 

Exemplar!

I'll be headed to the Tampa Comic Con tomorrow, my first full-sized con visit.  If I'd had my kit together, I might have tried to get a table there.  I'll still try to make connections. 

BOLO!  That's one of those trendy acronyms (be on the lookout).  But it's also the name I decided on for the Big Foot comic I previously talked about as Dirty Animals.  I'm talking about it again because it's something I can hopefully circle back around to soon.  All I need is lettering done and I have eight sample pages to shop around.  I had the art completed earlier this year, and then things went kind of screwy and I had to put the project in a holding pattern. 

Obviously I had another existential crisis recently, but then I wrote a different comic book script earlier this week, a MillarWorld writing prompt challenge involving a Superman analog named Exemplar.  I think it turned out well.  Anyway, it's a full-length script that can easily be used as a writing sample, too.  Between that and BOLO, I'm starting to feel a tad bit of confidence about the future again.

We'll see...

Rejection blues...

Well, the short story I wrote as a kind of pilot for Montague in the Leviathan was rejected by a literary journal.  It was one of those rejections that tried to make it sound as positive as possible, leading off with "we loved it!" and finishing with "but it wasn't really right for us."  Which meant they didn't love it.  Who do they think they're kidding? 

So I once again have the rejection blues.  I'm really tired of being a miserable, pathetic failure.  What's the point?  They say to have goals and to have steps to reach them, and you'll do it!  But realistically, everyone can't succeed at everything.  Some of us really are just miserable, pathetic failures. 

And other people get to succeed.

Monkey Flip, Reading Biblically released

 

  

Released a couple of books recently!

The first was actually Reading Biblically, which I mentioned previously.  This is a compilation of a blog I wrote a few years back, based on thoughts I had reading the Bible all the way through for the first time.  It's not deeply religiously reverential.  In fact I hope it makes approaching the Bible more approachable. Anyway, check out the results here.

The second was Monkey Flip, the results of having a look at what might be possible from a narrative standpoint from the crazy wrestling stories I've talked about previously here.  It's another novella.  Theoretically there's a sequel waiting to happen in the future!  Anyway, you can check out the results here.

These might be the last self-published releases I do for at least the foreseeable future.

Updates 5/21/18

• Submitted a kind of proof of concept for Montague in the Leviathan.  I'm proud of the story.  Hope it finds sympathetic readers. 
• Started writing A Theory of Balance over at Wattpad.  That was actually a few weeks ago, but it's nice to have a start.
• Also submitted to a contest over at Wattpad.  It's rare I come across an open contest there, so I jumped at the chance.
• My next projects I actively work on will probably be for Swoon Reads.  Actually, I might take Theory of Balance over there, besides Youths of a Nation.  Trying to find an audience remains a priority with these projects.
• Toying with a concept I'm working on under the umbrella Annex Edition. 
• Generated more ideas recently.  Nailed what could be pretty good stories for Superman and Batman, if I ever got a chance to write comics, much less for DC.  Besides those there's also what they call "creator-owned," Young Club.  Ironically or not, the characters in it are not young. 
• I Have an Abacus at Home, could be a short story.  Probably.  Haven't really written a ton of material for Sigild V lately.
• Will probably publish Monkey Flip soon.  I'd tell Pat not to read it, but he probably will anyway.
• He's probably more apt to stay away from Reading Biblically, which is a book version of a blog I did a few years back.  First bit of nonfiction I've self-published.

Juggling more projects???

Just in case you wondered if I'm working on anything...

In addition to everything I talked about last time, here're more ideas that're threestooging themselves through my creative doors:

• Montague in the Leviathan - Big book project, wrote a short story related to it a couple weeks ago.  Inspired by a number of real events...
• The Hired Gun - A sequel/prequel to The Whole Bloody Affair, something I've been working toward since that one...
• Bandit - An even older project!  A comic book I conceived way back in the '90s but began to refine in 2004...
• Youths of a Nation - Like The Whole Bloody Affair (but not necessarily Hired Gun), a young adult project...
• Exemplar - Another comic book project...
• A Theory of Balance - A sequel to Sapo Saga...Likely to end up serialized on Wattpad, where I'm currently resurrecting 101 Star Wars Variations...
• An Affirming Flame - A wizard story...

Juggling projects

I know I just wrote about goals for the year, but here's another look at projects:

• The Write Off - This is from the Millarworld forums.  I've been participating in these for a couple years now, ever since I first visited the forums for the Millarworld Annual contests.  I graduated to hosting the Write Offs several rounds ago, and while participation has certainly slowed from its peak, I'm still proud of keeping them going.  Technically there're two rounds open at the moment, one involving Mark Millar's DC/Marvel work and another based off of The Last Jedi.  I tend to participate as well as host.  Last week I wrote a draft of a script for the Star Wars one, and hopefully will finish one for the other this week.
• Cloak of Shrouded Men - This was my first book, which I self-published through iUniverse, before free self-publishing became a much more convenient thing.  I delisted it from them a while back in the interest of finally getting a revised edit available through CreateSpace.  I just got a copy of Tom King's A Once Crowded Sky, which gave me another idea of what I could do with it.  Maybe I'll make this a priority.
• In Greater Fear - This is a new book idea that came to me last week.  Could be very, very interesting.
• Dirty Animals - This is the comic book project I was talking about last time.  No real updates to report, but it still fascinates me that I'm finally taking an active role in trying to break into the medium.  In hindsight really should've done something like this sooner.
• poetry - I put out a collection way back in 2012, when I launched this blog, but never got around to putting out further ones, even though the material was prepared years ago.  And I have more material since then that can be prepped, too.  Last week I bought some poetry at a thrift store, and that got me thinking about poems again.  It's not so much the writing but the collections I've really let slip, as I haven't thought of myself as a poet (even while writing quite a bit of it) since college.  Weird.
• Sapo Saga sequel - Still have this on the docket, but it seems to have been bumped by any number of the above projects.  Would be great to have a publishing contract!

Goals 2018

Looking ahead at the new year, I'm hoping to get a few things I have control over accomplished.

The first of them is a project I'm currently calling Dirty Animals.  It's a comic book, and it's the first time I'm taking an active stance at breaking into the medium.  I've currently got an artist working on the sample eight pages I'll need to potentially interest publishers, and once they're complete I'll hopefully find someone to letter them.  And we'll see from there.  I don't want to go on and on about it at this point, but there it is, first time I mention it here.

The second is writing the sequel to Sapo Saga, which is something I've been working on in notes for a while.  That's my preferred method to working on a new story, working on notes, just seeing how far the development can get.  As far as I'm concerned, if you haven't put in the time with your version of notes, it'll show, and it's the worst literary crime a writer can do, because it always shows, when a writer hasn't thought their story out, aside from whether or not they actually have the technical skills to write a competent story.  It's the thing fans think they're on top of, when discussing movies, the hottest topic of discussion in Western culture, but again, it always shows how little they've actually thought any of it through.  There's a huge difference between an emotional and an intellectual reaction. 

So anyway, that's the two things I intend to work on.  And I'm sure there will be other things.