Thursday Review #5: Top 10 Superhero Movies

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed "The Avengers" which I thought was OK but not great.  Which naturally got me thinking of what are the best superhero movies in my opinion.  My opinion doesn't matter much, but I'm going to do it anyway.  Here's the list:

1. The Dark Knight
2. Watchmen
3. Iron Man
4. Spider-Man
5. Captain America
6. Spider-Man 2
7. X-Men
8. Batman Begins
9. Batman (1989)
10. Darkman

Except for the top 2, the rest aren't necessarily in order.  There's not much difference in my mind between picking something 6th and picking something 7th.  So whatever.  I think probably the only surprise on there is "Darkman" at #10.  I'll acknowledge it's not a well-executed movie but I love the idea behind it and some of the cheesiness is fun too.  And you might say, "How can you put THAT in your Top 10 and not "The Avengers"?  I just can.  It's my list.

You'll notice there are 3 Batman movies on there, so I guess it's obvious which hero I like.  Or at least he has the best movies.  (Maybe I'd have to add a fourth after July 20.)  A lot of people would put "Superman" or "Superman II" on there but I thought those movies sucked.  No disrespect to the memory of Christopher Reeve but they were dumb, especially the whole "turning the Earth backwards really fast to go back in time" thing.  How lame.  If you're going to go back in time you need someone who has a magic eye that lets her see the past.  [You probably don't know what that refers to...yet.]  But I will admit "Superman" has the best theme song.  You can't beat John Williams.

Just for the heck of it I think I'll do the Bottom 10 next week. Stay tuned Tuesday for another Two-Fer...

Wild Card Wednesday: Scarlet Knight Vs...

The Internet loves debating that age-old question of "who would win in a fight".  So I thought I'd have my hero toss her helmet into the ring.

But first it'd probably help to know what powers the Scarlet Knight possesses.  Quite a few really because they've had 4,000 years roughly to add all sorts of bells and whistles--not literally.

• The red armor is resistant to anything except magical (or holy) weapons.
• The armor also augments her strength and speed, not to the level of Superman or anything, but much more than a normal person.
• The cape lets her turn invisible except to cameras or those who are "pure of heart" which is mostly small children.
• The boots let her jump long distances, though she can't leap tall buildings in a single bound.
• When she jumps the cape can be used as a parachute to slow her descent.
• The Sword of Justice she carries can cut through any material from this planet and this dimension.
• She can also throw the Sword of Justice and guide it with her mind.
• The helmet's visor allows her to see in the dark.
• The gloves allow her to climb up walls or other things without falling.
• And though it's not really important in combat, the gloves allow her to open any normal lock, but not laser or computerized ones.

As if that's enough, she's also super-smart all on her own.  But she can't fly.  I mean we've got to draw the line somewhere.  I think that makes a pretty formidable package, don't you think?

Here's some superhero match-ups then:

Scarlet Knight vs. Wonder Woman:
Wonder Woman has a magic lasso, but my hero has a magic sword.  And really look at that costume.  What's going to protect her from a sword, those giant boobs?  Well, maybe.  But my hero has a set of armor that protects her from rope burn, so there.

Scarlet Knight vs. Batman:
OK, look at that list up there and see all the cool stuff my hero can do.  What's Batman got?  Batarangs?  Shark repellent?  And he may be smart, but she's smarter.  She's a certified genius, not some millionaire playboy.  I think it's pretty obvious who would win then.  You can substitute any other non-powered heroes and it'd be the same.  I mean Iron Man or any of that, what do they have?  Not much.

Scarlet Knight vs. Spider-Man:
They're both good at climbing, though I imagine Spidey would be a little better.  And he can swing by webs which she can't.  So he's got the edge in agility.  Still, though, webs against a sword?  They might be sticky, but eventually she could cut through them.

Scarlet Knight vs. Thor:
This is a good match-up since Thor's hammer is magical and thus could hurt her.  I think she might have an edge in agility, though.  It's too close to call.

Scarlet Knight vs. Wolverine:
Adamantium claws are nifty, but I'm pretty sure they don't qualify as magical or holy.  So maybe they'd scratch her paint a little.  Now maybe if he got them blessed by a priest.  The only hitch would be that he can regenerate.  So can she with the armor on, though probably not at the same rate.  So maybe she'd have to chop him into itty bitty pieces and see if he could regenerate then.

Scarlet Knight vs. the Hulk
The Hulk is really strong, so he could definitely throw our hero around and give her some nasty bruises.  Still, her sword can cut through anything from this planet and I'm pretty sure the Hulk is from this planet.  See where I'm going with that?

Scarlet Knight vs. Superman
The problem for my hero in this case is that Superman is an alien.  Which means he's not from this planet and thus the Sword of Justice would be pretty useless.  And since he's stronger and faster, a fistfight would be pretty one-sided.  So he's got the edge there.

Obviously there are tons more superheroes out there.  I think by now you can figure out for yourself who'd win those match-ups.  And feel free in the comments to say, "Nuh-uh..." to any of the ones I've listed here.  That's the whole point of the Internet (other than porn and cat stuff) isn't it?

Two Fer Tuesday #5

It's Tuesday, which means another Two Fer Tuesday.  If you're not acquainted with the rules, I use a random number generator to pick a page and paragraph to pluck two sentences from.  Last week was a pretty good one-so let's see what we get this week.

Page Number:  241
Paragraph Number: 4

Here's the Price is Right losing music, because this week is another disappointing one:

“Of course I’m right.”  Becky hefted both of them up.  

You can't win them all, right?

Tomorrow being the fifth Wednesday of the month means a random entry...not even I know what it is yet!  (Actually I've known for weeks but it sounds more fun the other way...)

The Thursday Review: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

I don't think there are any new superhero movies to review this week, so I'm going to go back all the way to 2000 and discuss my all-time favorite superhero-related book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon.

I read this in about December 2000, though I forget why I bought it or how it came to my attention.  Probably from looking around on Amazon or something.  Anyway, this was one of those rare books I just devoured.  I mean it was the kind of book I just sat around reading pretty much all day, stopping only when nature called.  I've read it about a half-dozen times since then and it never fails to amaze me--pun intended.

The story takes place starting at the dawn of the Golden Age of comic books, about 1939.  Young Samuel Clayman is living in Brooklyn with his mom when his Czech cousin Joe Kavalier comes to visit late one night.  Joe has taken a very circuitous journey from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia through the Soviet Union to Japan to America with the help of a magician and a golem.  The rest of Joe's family remains in Prague, though he hopes to buy their freedom.

Sam promises to get Joe a job at the novelty company where he works.  Then he sees how well Joe can draw and the idea comes to him that they should make a comic book, something that has become all the rage with Action Comics thanks to Superman.  Sam and Joe pitch the comic book to Sam's boss, who eventually decides to give it a shot.  There's just one problem:  Sam and Joe need a character.

After a lot of brainstorming and such they create The Escapist, a hero who has the power of being able to escape from things, kind of like Harry Houdini in a union suit and mask.  Since comics back then were really long, they recruit some of Sam's friends to create a stable of other characters.

As you'd expect, the comic book becomes a smash hit.  Sam and Joe get some cash for it, but not as much as they should.  While they're making hundreds of dollars a month, the publisher is making hundreds of thousands and refuses to cut Sam and Joe in on it.  Which is good advice to read the fine print of contracts.

A couple of years later World War II ramps up and like many comics, the Escapist takes on the Nazis and Japanese.  But after a while that isn't enough for Joe, whose family is still in Czechoslovakia, so he decides to join the Navy and winds up in Antarctica.  (Which really didn't make sense to me.  If you want revenge on the Nazis, why not join the Army or Marines?  Or even the Army Air Force.  Why the freaking Navy?)

I really love this first half of the book.  It is a great take on the old concept of the American Dream and all that entails.  It's full of that old-school optimism and nostalgia while not being too sappy or hokey.  Plus as a writer it's really interesting to see how Sam, Joe, and others come up with their characters and stories.

The last third I don't like as much.  It gets more into soap opera-ish territory with a sort of love triangle.  This is one of those books that's an epic saga though, spanning about 15 years, from the Golden Age into the Silver Age of comics.  Even if you don't like comic books or superheroes it's still a great story about dreams and how those can be realized or go unfulfilled.  And did I mention it won the Pulitzer back in 2000?  Yeah, so it's not just my opinion here.  Though be warned that it features gay people and gay sex (gasp!) not to mention bad language and adult situations.  Ooooh, scary.  I know Chabon has written at least one movie script but I don't think it's ever reached production yet.  Which in a way is too bad because I'd love to see a movie of it.

A fun fact is that the character of Emma Earl probably owes a little to this book, particularly the origin story of the Luna Moth character.  In that substory a shy young woman working in an obscure department of the library finds a magic book that allows her to become an ancient superhero known as Luna Moth.  Change the library to a museum and magic book to a case of armor and Luna Moth to Scarlet Knight and there you have it.  Though to be honest Chabon probably took that from other superhero stories.  We're all standing on the shoulders of giants, right?

Have a safe Memorial Day weekend.  Come back Tuesday for another thrilling Two-Fer!

Practical Superheroism #1: What's in a Name?

First, the disclaimer.  I should ask Briane Pagel to write this for me so it sounds all legal and stuff.
  
Anyway, these columns are only meant for entertainment purposes.  You absolutely should not attempt to do any of this yourself because you will end up getting your ass kicked if not outright killed and I don't want you or your relatives suing me because you were so dumb that you took this "advice" seriously.  Got it?  Good.

So let's say you're tired of superheroes being relegated to comic books, movies, and TV and you want to go out there and be a real masked avenger.  How would you go about it?  Well lucky for you I've got it all figured out.

Scarlet Knight: much better than Pink Bunny

First, what you need is a name.  A good name that can inspire fear in your enemies.  A crummy hero name will make it tough for people to take you seriously.  Say you beat up a purse-snatcher in an alley and then hiss, "I'm the Pink Bunny" how ridiculous you'd sound.  The criminals would probably laugh you right off the street.  I remember reading a book where one of the superheroes was called "The Science Pirate" and I thought, "That's just a terrible name."  It doesn't really strike fear into me, nor I'm sure anyone else.  The pirate part is OK, but science doesn't really strike fear into the hearts of people except the GOP.  And as much as I love Watchmen, most of the heroic names in that are pretty lame.

So find yourself a good name.  Of course in the comics and such the name isn't always the first thing that comes along.  Some heroes like Superman don't really name themselves.  Some like Green Lantern or the Scarlet Knight get theirs by becoming part of a secret society.  Others like Spider-Man take their name from their special powers.

But unless you've been bitten by a radioactive spider recently, chances are you don't have any actual superpowers.  Which would make you like Batman.  When Bruce Wayne decided he wanted to fight crime, he realized he needed a name.  Not just any old name, but something that would inspire fear and terror in his enemies.  Then conveniently a bat flew into the room and the rest is history.

Fear the Grumpy Bulldog

So first you might want to look around and see if there are any scary animals in the immediate vicinity.  Probably not.  Most of the cool animals have already been taken in any case.  Though you could always go by The Grumpy Bulldog.  That has a certain ring to it.

If you don't have any scary animals handy, then look at the sports page.  You'll see a lot of animals but also other things like Warriors, Trojans, and of course Knights.  You might even notice that Rutgers is home of the Scarlet Knights, something that played zero part in my character's name.  (I didn't even know Rutgers was a school until I did a Web search of my potential character name.)  There are also a lot of animals:  Lions, Tigers, and Bears, oh my!  Including wimpy animals like Jayhawks or Cardinals.  And some really dumb ones like Boilermakers, Bluejackets, Cornhuskers, or Chemics.  (My high school's team name was the Chemics and my college's team name the Cardinals, so I didn't get very lucky there.)

If that doesn't spark anything, you might want to check out some articles on mythology on Wikipedia.  Look up some ancient heroes, demigods, and gods.  Or goddesses if you're a woman.  (It's probably important to note if you are a woman you shouldn't name yourself after a man or it might be kind of confusing to people.)  You can start with the Greek/Roman or Norse ones and then maybe move on to other cultures and see if any of them have a good ring to it.  Try to find one that isn't too long though.

As a last resort, get out your thesaurus (or find one online) and look up heroic words like "hero" or "warrior" or "avenger" and maybe you can find something.

If you still don't have anything, don't feel bad.  Maybe you just need to figure out your skill set first.  If you do have an awesome name then before you go any farther, check it out online and make sure no one else is using it.  After all, you don't want to get sued, right?

Two Fer Tuesday #4

It's Tuesday, which means another Two Fer Tuesday.  If you're not acquainted with the rules, I use a random number generator to pick a page and paragraph to pluck two sentences from.  Let's see what we get this week.

Page Number:  203
Paragraph Number: 6

The random number generator's been working pretty well the last couple of weeks.


Tears finally leaked out of Becky’s eyes as she thought of Emma alone on the dark streets.  There were so many bad people out there, people like the ones in the alley. 

Hmmm, what's Becky crying about?  Who were the people in the alley?  Wouldn't you like to know.

Tomorrow is the fourth Wednesday, which means the first edition of Practical Superheroics...don't try this at home!!!

Behind The Female Protagonist: Guest Post by Melissa Foster

Today I'm hosting Melissa Foster, bestselling author of Megan's Way, Chasing Amanda, and Come Back to Me, as part of her blog tour.  About all Melissa's books and mine have in common is featuring a female lead character, so that's what she's going to talk about today.

Behind The Female Protagonist, by Melissa Foster

Everyone loves a strong heroine. A woman who can take down the bad guy and look sexy while she’s doing it is even better. Add a sprinkle of vulnerability and a few layers of complexity, and there you have the perfect female protagonist.  As writers, we have the privilege of making our characters anything we want them to be. This is exciting, but also a big responsibility. Below are a few ideas for creating strong female protagonists.

• START SOFT

All characters need to evolve as the story progresses. Allow your readers to bond with the softer side of your heroine, let them see her vulnerabilities, let them buy into her weaknesses so they can root for her strength later in the story.

• GAIN MOMENTUM

Give your heroine plenty of stumbling blocks. Something as challenging as a specific weakness that she needs to overcome in order to build her strength enough to conquer the enemy is a powerful writer’s tool.  Build slowly, finish hard.

• CUT LOOSE but BE WARY

Some worry that a woman shouldn’t be stronger than a male would be in the same role. While I don’t buy into that, I do believe that even while your heroine is beating the heck out of the bad guy, she needs to still be feminine. Be careful not to make her so strong that she becomes male in the reader’s eye. She needs to remain female in the descriptions of fights, chases, or emotionally draining experiences. Women have different body shapes and types then men, they get injured in ways men do not. Keep that in mind so your heroine remains female in the reader’s mind.

Female heroines are all the rave—we women want to live in a fantasy world when we read. We experience real life, we live with fear of rapists and getting into circumstances that challenge our safety. Let us live through your powerful yet sexy heroine. We can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, we can see a bad guy and kick them in their can!

What do you find is the most critical issue when developing a strong female protagonist? As a reader, what is most compelling about female protagonists?

---

Melissa Foster is the award-winning author of three International bestselling novels, Megan's Way, Chasing Amanda, and Come Back to Me. She has also been published in Indie Chicks, an anthology. Melissa is on the advisory board for the Alliance of Independent Authors and is a touchstone in the indie publishing arena. When she’s not writing, Melissa teaches authors how to navigate the book marketing world, build their platforms, and leverage the power of social media, through her author-training programs on Fostering Success. Melissa is the founder of the World Literary Café, Fostering Success, and the Women’s Nest. She has been published in Calgary’s Child Magazine, the Huffington Post, and Women Business Owners magazine. Melissa is currently collaborating on the film adaption of Megan’s Way.

Melissa hosts an annual Aspiring Authors contest for children, she's written for Calgary's Child Magazine and Women Business Owners Magazine, and has painted and donated several murals to The Hospital for Sick Children in Washington, DC. Melissa lives in Maryland with her family. Melissa's interests include her family, reading, writing, painting, friends, helping women see the positive side of life, and visiting Cape Cod.

Website: http://www.MelissaFoster.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Melissa-Foster/240064542695303

Twitter: @Melissa_Foster

The Women’s Nest, women’s social network: http://www.TheWomensNest.com

World Literary Café: http://www.worldliterarycafe.com

Fostering Success: htto://www.fostering-success.com

Facebook Melissa Foster: http://www.facebook.com/MelissaFosterAuthor (Fanpage)

Goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3023973.Melissa_Foster

Find her books on Amazon:

MEGAN'S WAY

CHASING AMANDA

COME BACK TO ME

Thanks to Melissa for including me on her blog tour!  Don't forget tomorrow is another exciting Two-Fer Tuesday!

Thursday Review #3: The Avengers

I'm a little tardy to the party on this review.  Given how much it made in the first week in the US (and a week before that overseas) I'm probably one of the last people who went to see "The Avengers."  You'd think given the subject matter of this blog I'd be first in line, but I really wasn't that excited.  Just from reading professional and non-professional reviews, I think I could have reviewed the movie without having bothering to see it.  Because as former Arizona Cardinals coach Dennis Green once said, "They are who we thought they were!"

I figured this would be a movie that's fun to watch and that's about it.  And I wasn't wrong.  It's a fun thrill ride but if you want any kind of message, about all I can figure is that it was a  2-hour-plus seminar on the importance of teamwork.  It would probably be a lot more fun for employees to watch than most of those seminars.

Actually the movie paid even less lip service than I thought it would to issues brought up in previous movies like:  how's Thor going to get back to Earth? how's Captain America coping with being frozen for about 70 years? what's going on with Tony Stark and Pepper Potts?  The latter is probably dealt with a bit more than the former two.

If you don't know, the plot involves Loki, the god of mischief from Norse mythology who is Thor's brother.  After being banished, he makes contacts with some aliens somewhere.  The aliens need this magic cube (whose name I forget) in order to open a wormhole so the aliens can invade.  Loki materializes at the headquarters of SHIELD (a Men in Black type agency) and makes off with the cube, a top scientist, and SHIELD agent Clint "Hawkeye" Barton.

With that threat, Earth's Mightiest Heroes are assembled, starting with Captain America and Iron Man.  Dr. Bruce Banner, aka the Incredible Hulk, is lured into joining as well.  Thor shows up later even though the Bifrost bridge was destroyed in his movie.  Apparently dark energy magic or something can bring him over, which seems odd with how concerned they were in "Thor" at the end about him not being able to see his girlfriend again.

Anyway, our heroes manage to capture Loki, squabble among themselves, let Loki escape, and end up fending off an invasion in New York City.  Through it all, I think the most emotionally-charged moment was when Agent Coulson dies.  If you don't remember he was the first SHIELD agent in "Iron Man" back in 2008 and had a cameo in all the Marvel superhero movies leading up to this.  I guess I found it hard to feel all that concerned for our heroes when I already know they're all budgeted for a sequel of their respective movies plus "The Avengers 2."  It's like Peter Griffin quipped in the "Family Guy" parody of "The Empire Strikes Back":  We have four of the five main characters on this ship so I think we'll be fine.

If it sounds like I didn't like the movie that's not true.  I got my $4.50 out of it.  I'd probably even buy it later (on sale or used) because it's the kind of mindless action movie I usually watch when I'm on vacation.  I just can't say it's great as a film because it's not.  It's less mindless than the "Transformers" franchise or the upcoming "Battleship" but that ain't saying a lot.

On a philosophical point, I don't really like the whole concept of superheroes battling an alien invasion.  I think superheroes work better on a smaller canvas.  Like Batman vs. the Joker or Spider-Man vs. the Green Goblin.  Wars between nations or worlds should really be fought by armies.  Or if there is going to be an army like in the Star Wars movies for instance, it helps if you have a focal point to bring it down to more of an individual level, like Luke vs. Vader.  In this case Loki didn't make for much of a focal point because as the Hulk said he's a "puny god."  Unfortunately they'd killed off all the other villains along the way so I guess he was the best they could do.

On another philosophical point, I think this was the best appearance yet for the Hulk.  Maybe his comic book has been going for 50 years almost but it seems on the big screen he works best in small doses.  I suppose it's because at least on the big screen his schtick has been pretty limited:  Hulk smash and...yeah that's it.

Overall I'd give it 2.5/4 stars.  It's fun and will tide you over until the next thrill ride.

That is all.

Monday is a guest post by bestselling author Melissa Foster...

Two Fer Tuesday #3

It's Tuesday, which means another Two Fer Tuesday.  If you're not acquainted with the rules, I use a random number generator to pick a page and paragraph to pluck two sentences from.  Last week was a pretty tasty one--the start of the epilogue--so let's see what we get this week.

Page Number:  300
Paragraph Number:  3

This is another good one, though maybe it won't seem that way to you.  If you read the post about Dan Dreyfus and the post about Karlak II during the A to Z challenge then you'll know what this refers to:

She opened the door to Dan’s Karlak II exhibit.  For a moment she looked around in awe at the completed exhibit, which looked almost exactly like an Egyptian tomb, except for the signs and video screens put up for the visitors.  

What's she doing in the exhibit?  You'll have to find out!


Tomorrow, being the third Wednesday, is about a real-life hero somewhere, though perhaps closer than you might think...

The Thursday Review #2: Flex Mentallo

First, old business.  The winners from yesterday's trivia contest are:
Grand Prize for answering the question correctly:  Andrew Leon, who knew Deadpool was the "Merc With a Mouth"

And the participation award of $1 to Amazon goes to Tony Laplume, Scouring Monk.

In case you're wondering how I determine the participant award, I counted that besides Andrew and I (both disqualified from winning the $1) there were 7 other commenters.  Tony was #1, as he was the first commenter after Andrew.  That just happened to be the number Random.org chose.   In part I'm mentioning this to say that the number of times you comment has no bearing on your chances of winning.  I think it's more fair that way because otherwise someone could comment 100 times to increase their chances.

OK, now on to new business.

It's a little ironic that I wrote a superhero story and yet know almost nothing about comic books.  I didn't grow up reading them, except for the Transformers comic in the 80s-early 90s.  Which is probably just as well because by the 1980s I guess most comics had become too adult for kids.  Most of my knowledge about comics comes from watching the History Channel's documentary "Superheroes Unmasked" from 2003, which is to date the only History Channel show I ever bought on DVD.  That taught me a little about the Golden Age, the post-war Silver Age, the reinvention of comics starting in the 70s, and so forth.

Not mentioned in that special was a 4-part series from the early 90s called Flex Mentallo.  I had never heard of this character until I opened my Amazon Vine newsletter and they had the newly-released hardcover reprint of those comics.  Since it was free and there was nothing else that week I wanted, I decided to get it.  What the hell.

I rarely ever do any homework on something before I read it so I didn't do any research on this until after I'd read it and wrote my review.  I'm just lazy like that.  It was only later I read a couple of more knowledgeable reviews, one of which declared this to be the "Citizen Kane of Comics."

Apparently there's also a sordid little history behind these comics.  The character of Flex Mentallo was created by writer Grant Morrison as a parody of Charles Atlas bodybuilding models from the 1930s, when you could send money in and get a pamphlet or whatever to become a strongman like Charles Atlas.  (I do know this was also parodied in "Watchmen" where Ozymandias had a similar system that he sold among other superhero-related products.)  Flex's "power" is that when he flexes his muscles, different stuff happens like earthquakes and a graphic saying, "Hero of the Beach" appears over him.  He first appeared in The Doom Patrol series and was then spun off for a 4-part series of his own.  The Charles Atlas company was not amused by this and actually sued DC Comics over it.  The case was settled so that while DC wouldn't give Atlas anything for what they'd already printed, they would pay royalties to Atlas on any future uses of the character.  This meant that the Flex Mentallo titles were never reprinted and thus became collector's items.  At least until now.

So that's all the backstory I knew nothing about when I wrote my review for Amazon Vine:

I had no idea who Flex Mentallo was. I mean he doesn't have any big budget movies of him starring someone you've never heard of or some washed-up actor. I guess he's some muscle guy in a leopard print loincloth who flexes his muscles and something happens. It's not really important to know what his powers are because he doesn't really DO much except walk around with a trench coat over his loincloth most of the time.

Most of the story is more of a meditation on how comics have changed since the 1930s or "Golden Age" when perhaps the original Flex was invented. (Or not. I'm not looking it up on Wikipedia to find out. Call me lazy.) Flex gets looking for someone known as "the Fact" while it seems the world is ending. In a parallel story there's a rock star (or is he?) who has taken lots of pills and is on the verge of death. Apparently he created Flex as a child in a homemade comic and somehow Flex came to life. Just the look of the guy not to mention his occupation made me think of Neil Gaiman. Maybe that was intentional.

Much of it then is pretty much a fever dream with all sorts of crazy stuff happening. It would take too long to go through it all. One particularly interesting part involves Flex visiting an "adult" club for superheroes and a school for sidekicks.

I suspect this would be more interesting for real comic geeks who would get all the references. I found it an interesting look at creation and the relationship between creator and creation. I also tend to agree with the dying Neil Gaiman-looking guy that a lot of comic book heroes probably originated from nerds who wanted to feel powerful.

The artwork seemed fine to me. Better than some I've seen, though I'm no expert. Anyway, I read this in less than an hour, so it doesn't involve tons of effort and if you're a big comic book fan it could be fun.

That is all. 

This just goes to show the importance of doing your research before sounding off on something, which few Amazon reviewers ever do.  As I said in the review, I thought this was a pretty interesting book even if I didn't GET all the references.  If you're a writer, even if you don't read comics and never did, it might be taking a look at now that you can without paying hundreds of dollars to some sleaze on EBay.


That will have to tide you over until the next Two-Fer Tuesday!

Today's Superhero Trivia Challenge Question

 

It's the second Wednesday of the month and so today is the superhero trivia question.  I'm taking these from 1001 Comic Book Trivia Questions by Rich Meyer.  I'm not sure how great it is, but it was cheap and available for my Kindle.  Anyway, if you have a problem with the question or answer, it's his fault.

Without further adieu, here's the question:


"What fan-favorite character has the nickname 'the Merc with the Mouth'?"

Answer in the comments.  First one to get it right gets a $5 gift card to Amazon in their email or Facebook.  (Again, I'm not mailing a $5 gift card.  I'm not sure Amazon would even let you do that.)

If you aren't first, never fear!  One respondent will be selected by random number generator to receive a $1 gift card.  Yes, you can give $1 gift cards.  Buy yourself a cheap eBook or MP3 or use it to get a dollar off something else.  The winner for this will be announced tomorrow.  The same person cannot win both gift cards because while that would be more convenient for me it wouldn't really be fair for everyone else.

Also I've decided on what I call the "Andrew Leon Rule" where the same person cannot win the trivia question each month.  So if you win this month you won't be eligible to win the $5 for another 3 months (until August).  But you can still win the $1 participation prize.

Good luck!!!

Two-Fer Tuesday #2

OK, so I promise this Two-Fer Tuesday will be far better than the last one.  If you don't know, Two-Fer Tuesday is when I randomly select two sentences of my novel A Hero's Journey and post it for you to read.

Here are the page/paragraph selections from Random.org:
Page number:  306
Paragraph number:  1

Guess what, it's the Epilogue!  So, spoiler alert!  And here we go:

Epilogue

The armor sped the healing of Emma’s shoulder so that by the next Monday she no longer needed to have it in a sling.  She had taken the rest of that week off as much so she wouldn’t see Dan as to recover from her shoulder wound. 

Well, now you know that our hero lives.  And that her shoulder is wounded.  Exciting things are happening, people.  Exciting things! 


If that wasn't exciting enough, tomorrow is the first-ever Superhero Trivia Challenge, where you can win $5, $1 or nothing!  (Probably nothing.)

Wednesday Superhero Trivia: Fabulous Prizes At Stake!!!

For the second Wednesday of the month I'm ripping off Briane Pagel's Star Wars Trivia Challenge idea, which I can do, at least until he files an injunction to stop me--being a lawyer he can do stuff like that.  Anyway, my rules are much simpler.  Wednesday morning at noon EST I'll post a trivia question that somehow relates to superhero lore because that's what my book deals with in case you haven't realized by now.  Will noon (EST) work for everyone or should it be sooner/later?

• The first person to answer correctly wins a $5 gift card from Amazon.*
• For everyone else, I will select one person using a random number generator to win a $1 gift card from Amazon.*

Cutoff for entering is 11:59pm EST on Wednesday.  Results will be announced Thursday.

*In order to receive the gift card you must have a valid Email or Facebook account to send it to.  I'm not mailing you a card for $5 or $1, OK? 

Now go spread the word.  Or don't if you want better odds of winning.

And since I'm being so generous today, I'm also giving away four FREE eBooks!  I won four eBooks in the Star Wars Trivia Challenge but I pretty much have all of the ones listed, so I'm letting four lucky people claim my prize.  Just go to this post to see the list of eBooks and let Mr. Pagel know which one you want.  It's super-easy and did I mention FREE?  And no strings attached.  Plus you'll be doing me a favor as then Mr. Pagel won't have to keep reminding me.  So that's like win-win-win.

Tomorrow is another Two-Fer Tuesday that I guarantee to be 1000000% more interesting than last week's.

The Thursday Review: Drive + GI Joe

Today I'll first be reviewing the Ryan Gosling film "Drive" which was in theaters last fall but which I haven't gotten around to seeing on DVD until mid-April.  For a while I'd forgotten it even existed and then there was a "short wait" at Blockbuster and it wasn't on Netflix yet, so it took a while to get.

Welcome to the first-ever Thursday Review where I review something:  a book, movie, TV show, comic book, or whatever.  I do lots of customer reviews on Amazon, some of which I've archived on my book reviews site and my movie reviews site.


Anyway, I think this is another of those movies that some people won't like because they have a false expectation of it.  They might think from the overall premise that it's like those "Transporter" movies or "The Fast and the Furious" or some such thing that's pretty much wall-to-wall action with little in terms of character development or anything.

Instead, "Drive" is a slower-paced movie that spends a lot of time establishing the Driver--he doesn't get an actual name, like the main characters in "Layer Cake" or "The Ghost Writer" for instance.  It starts by showing his secret job of driving the getaway vehicle for some guys robbing someplace.  He has a very particular method in that he gives the criminals exactly five minutes, he doesn't go in with them, and he doesn't carry a gun.  In that way he hopes to eliminate the possibility of getting caught and if he does then he might get an easier sentence for not carrying a weapon or being all that involved.

Later we see him at one of his day jobs, driving a stunt car for some movie.  After that at the grocery store he sees one of his neighbors, Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her kid.  Their car breaks down in the parking lot, so he fixes it for them.  Later she invites him to her apartment and the next day brings her car to the garage where he works as his other day job.  Since her car is going to be in the shop for a while, he gives her a ride back to her apartment, though they take a little detour along the way as he drives her along one of the aqueducts you might remember from "Terminator 2" or "Grease" and other movies and then to a lake or something.  It seems like they're going to fall madly in love and all that.  There's just one problem...her husband is being released from jail.

You might think the husband is going to be an abusive jerk or something, but he's actually a pretty good guy.  And besides being an ex-con he's got a much bigger problem in some gangsters wanting money from him.  So now the Driver finds himself in the last place he wanted to be, getting involved in someone else's personal problems, which in turn creates a lot of problems for him.

I thought it was a good movie, despite that for a film called "Drive" there's not tons of driving in it.  Though I've never liked car chases all that much.  I think in large part it's because there's so little for the actors to do during those scenes so all you get are shots of them looking kind of bored as they're driving.  And these days with computers, cars can do all sorts of things they never could in real life so it feels a little phony.

I thought the movie did a good job of not falling into all the old cliches.  In a lot of these kind of movies the criminal (usually an assassin) starts developing a conscience and then has to do one last job before being out of the business.  The Driver may have developed a conscience to some extent but I don't think he really wanted out of the business.  I think he would prefer to go on driving.

Anyway, I think it kind of ties into what I said on Wednesday about expectations.  If you had the expectation this would be "Transporter 4" or "Fast and Furious 6" then you're probably not going to like it as much.  I didn't have such expectations so I enjoyed it.

Now let's talk about how expectations change when nostalgia enters into the equation.

That's the cue to segue into talking about GI Joe cartoons from the '80s.  If you followed the Grumpy Bulldog Blog, you might remember my misguided quest to buy the entire series that was nearly stymied by an idiot seller on EBay.  I finally got the DVDs from Amazon in late March.  It took a while to watch them all because there are 105 episodes of the series if you count the first two miniseries.

I found that just like when I recently watched "Superfriends" and "Transformers" on DVD I didn't hate the show even though I knew it was completely idiotic.  Also the animation is OK, but there are quite a few slip-ups if you're watching closely like someone being miscolored or someone in the background who shouldn't be there, like in one episode where Scarlett was supposed to be taken hostage aboard a space station but in a background shot at GI Joe headquarters on Earth there she is! (Which was something I intentionally did in this version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" my sisters and I made using action figures for my youngest sister's Spanish class.  I put a miniature Quasimodo in the crowd, along with Darth Vader, Tigatron, and a couple other weird toys who should not have been in 18th Century France.)  Perhaps the best two episodes were written by a guy I had a brief Twitter feud with (or at least he had the same name) that involved a few Joes going to a parallel universe where Cobra ruled the world and at the end three extraneous characters (Steeler, Grunt, and Clutch) stay behind to help the Baroness (who wasn't evil in that universe) to rebuild GI Joe.

Anyway, so nostalgia can be pretty powerful.  Contrast that to when I bought the Series 2 GI Joe DVDs from 1989.  I hadn't even heard of these until I was looking around on Amazon and I thought, "What the hell."  Not having the benefit of nostalgia, these episodes were pretty lame.  Plus the animation was even worse because they'd switched studios after GI Joe:  The Movie flopped.  And you didn't have any sexual tension at all, except in the first episode when Destro dumps the Baroness for Zarana.


Something that I really noticed in that show was how characters kept coming and going.  The first five episodes of that series feature mostly the "Slaughter's Marauders" and "Python Patrol" toys from 1989.  But then after that they introduce a whole new group of characters from the 1990 toys.  And then to make it more confusing, like halfway through the season they throw in some 1991 toys!

Which actually got me spending hours on this site, Yo Joe.com where there's a pretty complete archive of not only the old toys, but also the comics, TV episodes, and even toy commercials.  Now here's a fun fact for you authors out there:  Stephen King designed one of the worst GI Joe toys ever!  He designed the Cobra guy named Crystal Ball, whose main weapon was a big shield-type thing that would hypnotize people.  I remember when my brother and I went to the toy store there'd always be plenty of Crystal Ball and of course eventually he wound up rotting on the clearance rack.  Bravo, Mr. King!  A bonus fun fact is that the character of Sneak Peek, who had this big periscope thing, was modeled on King's son, who was a big fan of the toys.  Now you know...and knowing is half the battle!

Anyway, it always kind of bugged me when in GI Joe and Transformers they would just have characters show up at random and often shove older characters aside.  A few would get an origin story but most would simply appear out of nowhere.  In the first episode of Season 2 of GI Joe there's basically a whole new crop of characters who are brought in with no explanation.  It's like something from 1984:  we have always been at war with Eurasia; these characters have always been around.  What was pretty obvious was that most of the new characters did pretty much the same things as the old characters.  Like before you had Snow Job as the arctic warfare guy, then you have Iceberg who's an arctic warfare guy, so they pretty much do the same thing.  Or you had Gung Ho who was the Marine guy and then you have Leatherneck who is also a Marine guy.  Or you had Torpedo who was a diver and then you have Wet Suit who's also a diver.  Or you had Scarlett who was an intelligence chick and then you have Lady Jaye who's an intelligence chick.  There are plenty more examples:  Breaker vs. Dial Tone, Doc vs. Lifeline, Flash vs. Sci-Fi, Wild Bill vs. Lift Ticket, Ace vs. Slipstream, Duke vs. General Hawk.  So it was kind of like Hasbro ran out of ideas by 1985 and then just kept repeating them only dressing the new character up a bit differently.  Though by the late 80s they sometimes didn't even bother with that and just recolored an existing figure or vehicle.

If you want to take a point out of all that rambling, what happens a lot in a series is that you get low on new ideas so you basically start rehashing old ones.  I'm sure you can think of some examples of your own.  It does happen even in my Scarlet Knight series to some extent.  But hey, there are only so many ideas, right?

Since I mentioned it, here were in my opinion some of the most worthless GI Joe characters:

1. Crystal Ball (already talked about him)
2. Road Pig:  he was a big fat guy whose weapon was a cinder-block on a stick.  Awesome.
3. Chuckles:  he was a guy in a Hawaiian shirt who came with a pistol.  Oooh.  In the 1987 GI Joe movie they showed him but didn't bother giving him lines.
4. Gung Ho (in dress blues):  He was a Marine in dress blue uniform who came with a ceremonial sword.  The hell am I gonna do with that?
5. The Fridge:  Remember former Chicago Bears player William "The Refrigerator" Perry?  They made an action figure of him.  Why?  I don't know.  They also made a figure of WWF wrestler Sergeant Slaughter but at least he had a tank to drive.

Tomorrow is the first-ever guest post from Briane Pagel of The Best of Everything!

Two-Fer Tuesday #1

The A to Z Challenge is finally over, which means the new blogging schedule is in effect!  So welcome to the first-ever Two-Fer Tuesday!  This is based on the "Teaser Tuesday" some other blogs use where you go to a random page of what you're reading and post something.

The rules for Two-Fer Tuesday are a bit different.  Using a random number generator I'm picking a page from my forthcoming novel A Hero's Journey and then selecting a paragraph to pick two sentences from.  (Or if it lands on a one-sentence paragraph like dialog I'll just post that sentence and the next one.)


Today the random page number is: 207
And the random paragraph number is: 6

Without further ado, here are your two sentences! 
           
           “Take me home.  Now!”

Thinking of her husband and two children, Early nodded. 

Well, not very much to that one.  Technically it was three sentences but the one was so short I gave you a bonus one.  I'll let you speculate on who is talking and what's going on.  Anyway, better luck next week, I hope.


Tomorrow, being the first Wednesday of the month will be an Insecure Writer's Support Group post.