Old New England

As mentioned in my last post, we visited New England last month and spent a few days in Rhode Island. Looked at the famous mansions of Newport, poked around Providence, admired the ocean cliffs, etc.

But you know what I find myself thinking about? The Newport Creamery.

We ate there twice. We also ate at several other restaurants — the trendy TSK, Belle’s Cafe, Scampi up in Portsmouth, and so on — but it’s the Newport Creamery I remember.

You know why? Nostalgia.

I grew up in New England — in Massachusetts, in Billerica and Bedford. Naturally, like any kid, I thought that what I grew up with was normal; it wasn’t until I moved away that I began to realize what was standard American, and what was specifically New Englander fare. It took even longer before I began to miss the New England stuff.

And some of it I still didn’t necessarily realize was New England specific; I thought it was just old-fashioned.

But eating at the Newport Creamery brought back a lot of memories, and a realization that some of that stuff is unique to New England.

When I was a kid, we used to eat at Friendly Ice Cream sometimes. That’s the chain that later became Friendly’s, but in my youth it was Friendly Ice Cream, no apostrophe S, and it was still pretty local — they didn’t get outside New England at all, and were mostly just in Massachusetts. For 95 cents you could get a cheeseburger and a frappe — that’s the New England name for what most of the country calls a milk shake; it’s one syllable, “frap,” not the same as the whipped-fruit thing called a “frappé.” And the cheeseburger would be on butter-grilled toast, not a bun.

But then the chain started expanding, they changed the name to “Friendly’s” and updated the menu, and the burgers were on buns…

Getting sandwiches on butter-grilled toast — that wasn’t just Friendly. There were a lot of places that did that when I was a kid.

Turns out there still are — in New England. It’s not so much old-fashioned as regional.

And the Newport Creamery of today has almost exactly the same menu that Friendly had fifty years ago. Not at the same prices, of course, but wow, everything tasted just the way I remembered the food at Friendly.

So for the past month I’ve been thinking about that food, and wishing there was some way to get it here in Maryland.

A Little Chit-Chat: Two Topics

First: Writing

I’ve been working seriously on five different novels lately — Ishta’s Companion (an Ethshar novel that’s been in the works under various titles for more than twenty years), The Innkeeper’s Daughter (a fantasy with romantic elements I started on a whim last year), On A Field Sable (third in the Bound Lands series, after A Young Man Without Magic and Above His Proper Station), Stone Unturned (a big complicated Ethshar story), and Graveyard Girl (a young adult novel about a girl with a specialized psychic power). That’s not counting assorted revisions, proofs, editing, etc. People have asked me how I can do that, work on five at once — how can I keep them all straight? Why don’t I focus on one?

The answer is, I don’t know how I do it, or even really why. I learned to work on two novels at once back in the late 1980s, so if I hit a slow patch on one I could switch to the other for awhile and refresh myself; I did that fairly often, though not all the time. Typically one would be Ethshar, and one would be something else. I once tried working on three simultaneously, and back then it didn’t work, I’d lose track of things and get confused — so why is it working now? I dunno. Practice, maybe. I know that not only am I now able to juggle five, I could actually handle more — I deliberately cut the number down to five awhile back because I was working on so many at once that none of them was making much headway. I counted eighteen at one point that were nominally active works in progress, though I wasn’t actually getting much of anywhere on several of them.

How can I do that? No idea. It just happens. Sometimes when I switch from one to the next I need to re-read a little to remind myself where I was, but the voice and storyline are all there in my head, ready to go.

Why am I doing it? Well, mostly, I think, because I don’t have a reliable major market at present. For most of my thirty-five years of writing novels professionally, I’ve had books under contract to a publisher, so I worked on those. When I didn’t actually have a contract, I still knew more or less what the market wanted. After Tor cut me loose by rejecting On A Field Sable, though, I didn’t know what would or wouldn’t sell, so I’ve been trying lots of different things, and so far most of them haven’t worked. No major publisher was interested in One-Eyed Jack or Vika’s Avenger. Tom Derringer and the Aluminum Airship is still out there, but the prospects don’t look good. My agent had ideas about what he could sell for me, but they mostly didn’t mesh with what I wanted to write. (Graveyard Girl is the exception, but I’ve been working on that for three years now and it still isn’t finished because I ran into plot problems and it’s hard for a guy in his fifties to write from the point of view of a contemporary fifteen-year-old girl, especially when the story’s all about coming to terms with death.)

So I’ve been jumping around, looking for something that would reconnect with the market. Why I haven’t focused on one project at a time I couldn’t really tell you.

At this point, I’d really like to get some of these done, and off the list — partly so I can get back to others I put aside when I cut the list from eighteen to five. I’d like to work on The Dragon’s Price, for example, or Earthright, but am resisting until I finish one of the five.

Second: Travel

On a whim, we spent last weekend in Rhode Island — mostly Newport, looking at the “summer cottages” of the rich and famous of a century ago, but with a couple of stops in Providence, as well. Toured five mansions in Newport — the Elms, the Breakers, Chateau-sur-Mer, Rosecliff, and Marble House.

The variety was interesting. Rosecliff was designed entirely to throw lavish parties in — the whole house is built around the magnificent ballroom. The “marble” facade is fake — it’s terra cotta. There have been some major movies that used Rosecliff when they needed a lush 1920s ballroom. The original owner, a silver heiress named Theresa Fair Oelrichs, intended to establish herself in high society simply by throwing the best parties, and seems to have succeeded — though when the Gilded Age passed and such entertainments were no longer the thing, she went a bit dotty and died relatively young.

Marble House was built entirely to show off — the people who grew up in it hated it and found it depressing, because it wasn’t really meant to be lived in, it was meant to impress people. Each room was a recreation of a particular era in French design, all of them overblown. Alva Vanderbilt, who built Marble House, may have been important in the women’s suffrage movement, but she was apparently a pretty horrible person.

The other three were all actual homes; yes, they were meant to impress people, but they were also meant to be comfortable places to live in and raise kids. The Breakers, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, is the best of them. The people who grew up summering there, or at the Elms, remember them very fondly.

Chateau-sur-Mer, the oldest of them, was the only one meant for year-round living; the others were just for the summer.

It was an entertaining trip — and since I’m currently writing scenes set in huge upper-class estates in On A Field Sable, the whole thing is legitimate research and therefore tax deductible!

A Certain Age

I’m fifty-eight. This is an age when a lot of my contemporaries are worrying about caring for their elderly parents or other relatives. Many of them, understandably, post about their concerns in various online venues I frequent.

Which makes me feel a bit odd. The last of my ancestors died more than twenty years ago. I have exactly four living blood relatives older than I am, so far as I know — two siblings, and two first cousins once removed. (There may be some other distant cousins, but none of them live in the U.S. and I lost track of all of them long ago. One of the living first cousins once removed lives in England, come to that.) My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles are all long gone.

My wife’s parents and grandparents are all gone, too, though she still has some aunts and uncles.

While I can see that caring for aging parents must be stressful, it’s a problem I sort of wish I had. But only sort of. I miss my parents very much, but I’m relieved I’ll never need to worry about them.

So every time I see some article talking about how sooner or later we all go from being cared for by them to being caretakers for our parents, I have a rush of mixed emotions as I say, “Not all of us, damn you.”

Writers’ Folly

There’s something beginning writers do — especially, but by no means only, self-published ones — that I don’t understand.  Beginning writers do a lot of stupid and counter-productive things, of course, but I have in mind one particular one that I find baffling.

Or maybe, now that I think about it, not all that baffling. Consider: There you are, Joe Author, and your new book Carbuncles of Mars is now available on Amazon, and you are simultaneously swollen with pride at your accomplishment, and terrified that nobody will buy it or review it or read it or acknowledge your existence in any way. You want to prove that you’re a Real Writer, and you want to sell your book.

So you join writers’ groups wherever you can find them, to prove you’re a real writer — I get that. But what I don’t get is then posting ads in them, rather than talking about, you know, writing.

I suppose it comes from forgetting that proving you’re a real writer, and selling your book, aren’t the same thing.

But you know what happens when you post ads to writers’ groups? The real writers leave. Because we aren’t looking for more stuff to read; we always have more than we can possibly keep up with. We want places where we can talk about writing, but we won’t wade through ads to do it.

I just saw this happen over on Facebook, where C.J. Cherryh left a writers’ group because it was overrun with ads. She took the trouble to say she was leaving, and why; I suspect that most of the name writers there didn’t bother, they just vanished. I’m not 100% sure why I haven’t left that particular group yet; I’ve certainly dropped out of plenty of others over the years when the ads from beginners overwhelmed the discussion.

And that’s the thing — this always happens. Every. Single. Time. Any time anyone creates a writers’ group that doesn’t have either steep membership requirements or ferocious moderation, the newbies pile in, eager to be accepted, but instead of talking about the craft or business of writing, they always, always start posting about their own latest literary accomplishments, trying to coax everyone to check out Carbuncles from Mars.

Always.

Sometimes there’s actually a substantive discussion for awhile, but it always fades out, smothered under a thousand variations of, “Lookit me! I wrote a book!”

Which is stupid. Writers aren’t your market; writers have no time or money to waste on semi-pro work from unknowns. We have enough trouble keeping up with the big names in our field. You don’t want to advertise to writers, you want to advertise to readers. Not the same group.

A few years back I was managing editor of a webzine called Helix, which pissed off a lot of beginning writers because we did not look at unsolicited submissions. We did that because our acquiring editor was a cranky guy who did not want to read slush, and we expected it to annoy our would-be contributors, but what amazed us was their argument against it: “No one will read your magazine if you don’t let us submit stories!”

Good heavens, do they really think only would-be writers read short fiction? Because if so, that’s pitiful. We were aiming at readers, not writers.

Other writers are not your audience. Really. Other writers are, in fact, a very hard sell, because we know enough about how it’s done to see everything you did wrong.

So, all you beginners, newbies, would-be writers and wannabes, stop it. Oh, join writers’ groups if you want, but don’t advertise in them. All it does is chase people away.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

To Kickstart or Not to Kickstart?

I have an unpublished novel, Vika’s Avenger, sitting around unsold. It’s a science-fantasy story with detective elements and a revenge motive. Two different editors have been interested in buying it, but were overruled by higher-ups who couldn’t figure out how to market it; a third editor turned it down but had some useful comments about it. While it may have other failings, the largest problem seems to be that it doesn’t fit any current known market niches.

I thought about self-publishing it, but my track record there is less than stellar. I thought about sending it to a smaller publisher, such as Wildside. I thought about serializing it online, as I’ve done with recent Ethshar novels. I haven’t ruled any of these out, but none of these options has me wildly enthused.

And I’ve also thought about trying to launch it on Kickstarter.

If I do that, I’ll have some interesting options. For one thing, if it makes the basic amount I set (which would probably be $10,000), I could then set stretch goals that would include such things as commissioning a David Mattingly cover painting. I’d probably rewrite it — some of the creative choices I made when writing it were based on my perception of the market at the time, and obviously didn’t help sell it, and that third editor’s comments, along with some other events, have me thinking of ways it could be improved.

But if it doesn’t make the nut, that could be embarrassing. Not to mention that running the Kickstarter and then publishing the book would be a significant amount of work. And that $10,000 would need to cover producing and distributing the various incentives, so my net proceeds wouldn’t be all that much.

So I’m waffling. Do I try to Kickstart it, or not?

Before Watchmen

So DC is doing this big project, “Before Watchmen,” where they’re publishing mini-series prequels about all the major characters in Alan Moore’s Watchmen. They’re doing this against Moore’s wishes, which is tacky, but they do own the rights, so they’re doing it.

So far, most of them (that I’ve read; I’m a couple of weeks behind) have been pretty good. But today I read Rorschach #1.

I’m okay with the plot. The art is entirely adequate. But the writer does not have Rorschach’s voice right.

I’m surprised. The writer is Brian Azzarello, who is generally a very good writer with a good ear for dialogue, and Rorschach’s voice in Watchmen, both the original comics and the movie, is distinctive and not that hard to imitate, so why did Azzarello screw it up so badly?

Rorschach doesn’t normally use unnecessary words. He drops pronouns and articles unless they’re essential. Azzarello’s narration gets this wrong. The only time the “real” Rorschach uses words he doesn’t need is when he’s ranting about the moral degeneracy of the world he lives in.

Also, Rorschach doesn’t ordinarily use profanity; that’s part of his attempt to rise above what he sees as the filth around him. Azzarello has him calling drugs “shit,” which he would only do when berating a criminal, and only if the criminal had used the word first.

So as one example, Azzarello’s “I’ve spent days wading through garbage looking for shit” should be, “Spent days in garbage, looking for poison.” Azzarello’s version just isn’t Moore’s character’s voice.

Which is too bad.

Meanwhile, I thought J. Michael Straczynski pretty much nailed Dr. Manhattan in Dr. Manhattan #1.

Cats and Dogs Living Together!

I watch a lot of TV competitions, especially singing, dancing, and cooking shows. I watch other TV, too, of course. (No, I am not one of those pseudo-intellectuals who boasts about not owning a TV; I prefer to stay connected to my native culture.) Two of my favorites are Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance (hereafter SYTYCD).

I was watching SYTYCD last night, when they introduced this year’s Top Twenty, the ones who survived the audition process and now move on to the live shows where viewers vote on who stays. This year they had three ballroom dancers make the cut, a man and two women, and when they were introduced they danced a trio. I made some remark to my wife about ballroom dancers not generally having much experience in trios, but then I remembered that on the season recently completed, Dancing with the Stars did ballroom trios one night. Maybe this is the coming thing?

And if so, what does this mean?

I’ll tell you what it means — it means that all those people saying that legalizing gay marriage means that soon we’ll be bringing back polygamy were right! Yes, the evil masterminds who have been running Hollywood’s propaganda campaigns foresee inevitable victory in their drive for same-sex marriage, and are starting on the next step in destroying all that’s right and pure in American marriage.

After all, we all know that Hollywood has been pushing the homosexual agenda ever since they introduced a gay neighbor on The Jeffersons and presented him as a regular person rather than a disgusting pervert. That was back in 1975; they think long-term, those evil masterminds. They’ve kept up a steady pressure ever since, indoctrinating young viewers, which has finally paid off in half a dozen states. Now that they’ve got a foothold there, they assume that in time the rest of the country will come around, and it’s time to start gearing up the next phase.

What better place than dance shows? SYTYCD has already been doing same-sex couples for a few seasons now, so now they can advance beyond that. Add that to cable shows like Big Love, and prominent Mormons like Mitt Romney and the Osmonds, and it becomes obvious where this is going.

Thirty years from now, polygamy will be back, you can bet on it.

And then — well, then, just as the right wing warned us, it’ll be time to remove the laws limiting us to marrying within our own species. I think we can expect to see Hollywood presenting us with images of people dancing with all sorts of things, rather than just other people.

Oh, wait — they already have!

Distractions

You would think that, since I don’t have a day job or kids at home, I’d be able to get lots of writing done, wouldn’t you? Yet here I am, turning out maybe fifteen-twenty pages in a good week. So what do I do with my time?

Well, eating, sleeping, housekeeping, web-surfing — all the obvious stuff. But I manage to find some more eccentric ways to put off work, as well.

Right now, for example, I’m in the middle of carefully editing a digital transfer of the Moody Blues’ “Seventh Sojourn” from LP to iTunes. This is an album I haven’t played in four or five years, but it suddenly seemed urgent to get it archived on my computer.

And I just wrote a letter to a bank to let them know that the guy they’re looking for at this address hasn’t lived here for at least five years. Anyone sensible would have just tossed their letter, instead of answering it.

Earlier I spent some time identifying a coverless old book I inherited, which turns out to be A.D. 2000, by Lieutenant Alvarado M. Fuller, published in 1890 — while I knew the title, the author’s name does not appear anywhere after the title page, which is missing from my copy. Now I’ve not only identified it, but was able to print out scans of the pages I was missing. Which was entertaining, but not very useful.

I also sorted a bunch of old manuscripts as part of an ongoing effort to tidy my office. This had me happily contemplating questions such as, “Do comic book scripts go with novels or short stories?” “Do I need to keep all the drafts of short stories?” “Did I really do that many rewrites of my scripts for Tekno*Comix? Well, at least they’re all dated, and therefore easy to sort.”

And of course, I’m writing this blog entry, instead of something that might make money.

So now you know why I’m still only a paragraph into Chapter Seven of The Sorcerer’s Widow.

52 Pick-Up

As any comic book readers out there already know, last September DC Comics relaunched their entire superhero line as “the New 52,” starting classics like Action Comics over at #1, relaunching several canceled titles (e.g., Swamp Thing), and adding assorted new titles, such as Justice League Dark.

They’ve done big relaunches before — Crisis in 1986 was the first, then Zero Hour, and 52, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some.  This time, though, they wanted to not just clean up continuity, but to make real changes to several long-established characters, and according to their pitch at the San Diego Comic-Con, to try to get back to what had made the characters appealing in the first place.  They didn’t want everyone to just yawn and say, “Oh, look, they’re doing it again.”

So they cancelled every DC superhero title and started an entire new line, fifty-two titles launching with new #1 issues, some the same, some new.  The theory was that they would all start off fresh, so new readers could pick them up and not be lost in a maze of accumulated continuity.

It didn’t really work out that way, but that was the theory.

So the new Justice League #1, the alleged flagship, was the only DC title shipped the last Wednesday in August of 2011, and the other fifty-one all premiered in September of 2011.

Naturally, not all of the fifty-two succeeded; in fact, they recently announced the first round of cancellations, six of them.  They’ll be replaced with six new titles.  That prompted me to look at what I was reading, and whether I wanted to continue, and whether I wanted to pick up any of the six new ones.

I used to read a lot of DC and Marvel superhero titles, but in recent years I had dropped them all.  I didn’t like the big crossover events that the publishers staged more or less annually, so I made it a firm policy to drop any title where the regular ongoing storyline got mucked up by a big crossover event I wasn’t reading.

This meant that by the end of 2010 I was no longer reading a single Marvel title — I’m still not — and my DC reading was down to a handful of Vertigo titles and short-run oddities.

I figured this relaunch was a good place to jump back in, and see whether maybe they’d gotten it right this time.

Initially, I was pretty excited about the whole thing.  Oh, I wasn’t about to buy all fifty-two — I really hated some of the characters they were including — but I did pick fourteen of the fifty-two — more than a quarter of the total — and bought those.  I’ve also now read several of the other titles that friends had subscribed to, but this was my own list:

Action Comics
Detective Comics
Superman
Batman
Superboy
Supergirl
Batwoman
Catwoman
Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.
Blackhawks
Demon Knights
OMAC
Voodoo
Wonder Woman

OMAC and Blackhawks are among the six canceled titles that will end with #8.

Looking at the six new titles, I won’t be replacing them — none of the new six interest me at all.  In fact, rather than adding any, I’ll be dropping some others.  Haven’t decided on the exact list yet, but Superboy, Supergirl, Voodoo, Frankenstein, Demon Knights, and Catwoman are all at risk.  And I was considering dropping OMAC and Blackhawks anyway, though the decision has been taken out of my hands.

Of the titles I’ve read but didn’t subscribe to — Resurrection Man, Animal Man, Grifter, Swamp Thing, Batman and Robin, Justice League, Justice League Dark, etc. — I don’t intend to add any.

So I could be down to six.  Out of fifty-two.  This isn’t very impressive.  So what went wrong?

I really liked several of the first issues I got, but here’s a title-by-title account of what’s gone wrong (or hasn’t):

Action Comics:  The idea here is that this is filling in some backstory on Superman, showing us how he got established in this new version of the story, while Superman is set in “present day” Metropolis, where he’s more of a known quantity.  Eventually, Action is supposed to catch up and they’ll more or less merge.

I loved the first issue, where he’s not called “Superman” yet, he’s wearing blue jeans instead of tights, etc.  Unfortunately, a few issues in the storyline started getting much less linear and became harder to follow.  I’m sticking with it, but I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm.

Detective Comics:  It’s Batman.  They really didn’t change much from what was going on before the relaunch.  It’s dark and violent.  I like it.  It isn’t especially innovative or anything, but it’s good, solid Batman stories, and I like those.

Superman:  Superman is still relatively new in Metropolis here, but he’s accepted as the city’s hero, battling alien menaces, etc.  I’m content with it, not thrilled.

Batman:  Not as good as Detective, but serviceable Batman stories.

Superboy:  This one started out great.  The current version of Superboy, for those of you who haven’t looked at any comics lately, is a partially-successful attempt to clone Superman.  They couldn’t get completely Kryptonian DNA to work, so they used a mix of human and Kryptonian, and the result is something new.

The first issue has him waking up in a big test tube while his creators debate what to do with him.  He’s something of a blank slate.  This is cool.  Lots of things you can do with that.  There’s a subtle inclusion of a character from Gen 13 that I didn’t pick up on at first.  (I hadn’t realized DC now had the rights to Gen 13.)

Unfortunately, the whole thing started downhill with the second issue.  They aren’t doing what I wanted to see.  I realize that’s maybe my problem, not theirs; I also realize that sometimes authors come up with something better than what I wanted or expected.  In this case, though, I don’t think that’s what happened.

As Julie puts it, Superboy has yet to develop a personality.  He does have some (justifiable) feeling of persecution, and he’s a bit whiny, but there’s nothing interesting there.

Also, see Systemic Problems #1 and #2 below.  They both apply here.

Supergirl:  Great set-up — Kara Zor-El remembers getting ready for her high school graduation (or the Kryptonian equivalent), and then next thing she knows she’s waking up in a crashed rocketship in Siberia, on a planet she’s never heard of where the only person who speaks Kryptonian is some guy who claims to be her baby cousin Kal-El all grown up.  Wonderful start.

Unfortunately, since then the story has her flailing about wildly and refusing to listen to explanations or ask sensible questions.  Oddly, one of my complaints here is that Systemic Problem #1 does not really apply — she’s fighting villains while she still has no idea what’s going on.  And there’s Systemic Problem #1a.

This one may still be salvageable, though.

Batwoman:  Beautiful art, pretty good story, but it’s picked up from the old continuity with no changes at all, so it hasn’t always been easy to follow, and a new reader may not get who some of the characters are.  Still, I’m enjoying it so far.

Catwoman:  They introduced a cool new supporting character, then promptly killed her off, and many readers aren’t happy with the depiction of Batman’s relationship with Catwoman, but I’m okay with this.  Not blown away, but it’s not bad.

Frankenstein, Agent of S.H.A.D.E.:  This is apparently picking up continuity from some title I never read.  Frankenstein’s monster is working as an agent for a secret organization called SHADE that battles menaces threatening the world.  Cool.  Some of the other agents he works with are also cool (and apparently from one of the various “Creature Commando” series, none of which I ever read).

Unfortunately, the writer seems to think readers want action, action, action.  I’d much rather get some background on what’s going on, see conflicts develop over time, etc.  Systemic Problem #1a and #2 are both very much in evidence.  (#1, not so much.)

Blackhawks:  The Blackhawks are a super-high-tech organization based in central Asia fighting various menaces, but Systemic Problem #2 is huge here.

Demon Knights:  All DC’s magical medieval characters team up to battle supernatural menaces.  Cool.  Except that we get absolutely no introduction to any of them; we’re just thrown into the middle of it as they find themselves trying to fight off a huge army besieging a village.  I don’t know who half these people are, or why I should care about them.  After six issues, we’re still in the middle of that first battle.

OMAC:  Someone clearly adores 1970s-vintage Jack Kirby.  Unfortunately, Systemic Problem #1 and #2 undercut the whole thing.

Voodoo:  Voodoo is the stage name of a shape-shifting alien spy working as a stripper.  Five issues in, it’s not yet clear whether she’s the hero of the series, or the villain.  I think she’s supposed to turn into a hero.  She hasn’t yet.

Wonder Woman:  The premise here is that the Greek gods are not the anachronisms we’ve seen them portrayed as in the past.  They’ve kept up to date.  And they’re still the ruthless, petty, vengeful, inhuman bastards they were in Greek myths.  Zeus is still screwing anyone and anything that catches his eye, and Hera is still royally pissed about it.  Diana, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, is caught up in their intrigues.

This mostly works for me — except when the story goes to Paradise Island.  I like some of what the writer’s done with that background (I’m trying not to spoil anything here), but the scenes actually set there just bored or confused me.

So, about those systemic problems…

The first systemic problem:  These are superheroes, right?  Heroes?  People who do good deeds?  Who fight villains, and protect innocents?  That’s the whole underlying concept, isn’t it?

Couldn’t prove it by me, after reading most of these comics.  Oh, Batman is still doing his job, tracking down homicidal freaks, and Wonder Woman is trying to protect innocents, but a lot of these people seem to be fighting themselves or (systemic problem #1a) each other, rather than bad guys.  We have yet to see Superboy or Supergirl do anything that wasn’t based on their own self-interest; OMAC is thrust into battle against his will by Brother Eye, whose motives are unclear.  We’ve seen Superboy fight Supergirl, Frankenstein fight OMAC — why?  Aren’t they all supposed to be good guys?

Maybe I’m hopelessly old-fashioned, but I’d like to see some of these superheroes fighting bank robbers, or saving people from tornadoes, or other such old-time heroics.  Most of these characters have no grounding in anything remotely like the real world, and give us no reason to care about them.

The second systemic problem:  What the heck is it with the DC universe being overrun with super-high-tech clandestine organizations?  There seem to be dozens of them — SHADE, Checkmate, NOWHERE, Blackhawks, Cadmus, etc.  What’s more, they seem to be fighting each other more than they’re combating any obvious evils; the idea that they might all be on the same side doesn’t seem to ever occur to anyone.  When NOWHERE goes up against Checkmate, which side am I supposed to cheer for?  Why would I care?

I loved the original Blackhawks, who were a team of heroic aviators.  The Blackhawks in the title that’s being cancelled aren’t a team, they’re a bureaucracy.

And finally, to sum up:  There’s a depressing sameness to most of these comics.  Nothing stands out as fresh or witty or touching.  Except for Superman and the Batman titles, they seem to exist in a realm where super-powered beings defend themselves from other super-powered beings and ordinary people either don’t exist at all, or are relegated to the distant background.

I don’t care about super-powered beings; I care about people, and there are damned few of those in these stories.

So I’ll be cutting my list, and regretting that DC blew their chance to do this relaunch right.

Days of Future Past

I’ve recently gotten back the rights to some of my older work, and am in the process of putting it back in print, either through Wildside Press or self-published.

The first of these old novels to see print anew is Touched by the Gods, which is now available in e-book form from Smashwords. It should be on Amazon and Barnes & Noble soon, with other outlets following in a week or two. A new trade paperback edition is planned, as well.