What Do You Do After Your Replacement Hero Has Been Replaced?

With Falcon and the Winter Soldier coming out on Disney+, Amazon Prime Reading had a bunch of the comics featuring those characters for free, so I wound up reading them.  That was the inspiration for the question in the title:  what do you do with a replacement hero once they've been replaced--by the original hero, usually.

After the Civil War event around 2007, Steve Rogers was shot and killed by an assassin.  His former sidekick Bucky Barnes, most recently the assassin known as the Winter Soldier, took over as Captain America for a little while.  Until Steve of course came back--for a few years.

Then around 2013 or so, a villain sucked the super-soldier serum out of Steve's body so he got old and weak.  This time Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon, took over for him for a couple of years.  Then Steve came back and there were two Captain Americas.  But that Steve was an evil double created by a Cosmic Cube or something.  A second, good Steve, came back in the Secret Empire event of 2017 or so, during which Sam stepped down as Captain America.

So what became of Bucky after his turn as Captain America?

In a series immediately after that, he and Black Widow go after some former Soviet agents who were involved in the Winter Soldier program.  I read the first volume and it was pretty good.  More in that down-to-earth thriller vein of the Disney+ show.

That series ended after a couple years.  Then in the Original Sin event (about the same time Sam Wilson was taking over as Cap) it's revealed that Nick Fury has for decades been secretly protecting Earth from threats in space and whatnot.  When he dies, Bucky takes up the mantle.

I read the first volume of the new series with Bucky and Maria Hill out in space.  It was obviously a lot less down-to-earth and the art was the cruder type I don't really like.  So overall I didn't think much of it.  And neither did most people because I think it had only two volumes or about 12 issues before it ended.

The last one I read was from 2018 or so.  Bucky has returned to Earth and with Sharon Carter set up shop in Indiana as kind of an independent Witness Protection Agency.  It's kind of like the Schwarzenegger movie Eraser from the mid-90s where his job was to rescue witnesses in distress and get them set up with new identities. Trying to save one guy, Bucky meets a kid who has been trained to be an assassin from a young age and so Bucky takes him under his wing as sort of a sidekick.  It was better than the space series but not really as good as the first one and I don't think it lasted all that long.  Again, probably about 12 issues.

What about Sam Wilson, the Falcon?

I read the 8-issue 2017 series after he stopped being Captain America.  It was pretty underwhelming.  At the start Sam and a teenage SHIELD agent calling himself Patriot go to Chicago to stop gang violence.  So this is going to try to be a down-to-earth, socially relevant series?  Um, no.  The mayor of the city is actually Blackheart, the son of Mephisto, the devil of the Marvel universe.  Blackheart gives one of the gang leaders some magic to set off violence all through the city, which Sam and Patriot have to try to stop.  This involves Sam actually going to Hell before he can escape.

The last three issues go back to New York, where Mephisto sics vampires on Sam, Patriot, and Misty Knight.  With Blade's help they're able to stop them.  Hooray!  There's a really rushed, unsatisfying romantic plot with Sam and Misty.

This series is really what made me think about this subject because it seemed like the author was struggling to find something for Sam to do.  That is pretty much always a problem for these characters.  After you've had them be a big-time hero like Captain America, Batman, or Superman, where do you go from there?  It's a tough act to follow.

In the 90s DC replaced both Batman and Superman for a little while.  After Superman "died" there were four replacement heroes:  Steel, Superboy, Eradicator, and Cyborg Superman.  The first two remained heroes wile the Eradicator pretty much disappeared and the Cyborg Superman became a villain.  Steel had his own comic for a little while and a crappy Shaquille O'Neal movie.  That Superboy stuck around for a little while too but was eventually replaced by the more popular Connor Kent version in Young Justice and the Titans TV show.  Steel still shows up in Superman and other DC titles and I think is in that Superman and Lois show on the CW though I don't think he's a hero yet.

In 1993-1994 during the "Knightfall" event Jean-Paul Valley, aka Azrael, took over for Bruce Wayne after Bane broke him.  Exposure to Scarecrow fear gas made Jean-Paul crazy, paranoid, and brutal and eventually Bruce took back the mantle.  After that Azrael had his own series of 100 issues before he was killed off.  Having read that series, it was obvious author Denny O'Neil was struggling to establish a new identity for Azrael.  Sometimes he was traveling the globe.  Sometimes he was in Gotham.  A few issues he was in a smaller city.  He went through a few costume changes too.  Nothing really worked.  The character was brought back in the post-Rebirth Detective Comics but really just as a minor part of the "Bat Family."  He's also shown up mostly as a bad guy in the Gotham TV show and the limited series Curse of the White Knight.

Besides Superman and Batman, DC also had replacements for the Flash and Green Lantern through most of the 90s.  Wally West took over for Barry Allen after the Crisis on Infinite Earths event in the mid-80s and remained as the only Flash until Geoff Johns brought Barry back about 2009.  After the Flashpoint event a couple of years later, Wally disappeared, much to the chagrin of many fans.  He was brought back in the Rebirth event and was part of the Titans for a little while before in the limited series Heroes in Crisis he murdered a bunch of people, again to the chagrin of many fans.  But just recently he was brought back to again be the main Flash in Infinite Frontier or whatever.

Meanwhile, after Coast City was destroyed by Doomsday, Hal Jordan went nuts and killed pretty much the entire Green Lantern Corps.  A single ring survived to go to an artist named Kyle Rayner.  For most of the 90s then Rayner was the main Green Lantern, until about 2004 when Geoff Johns brought Hal Jordan back.  In the Blackest Night event, Kyle became the White Lantern, with power of all the various colors.  He was a big part of the 12-issue Omega Men series but after that has pretty much just been a minor character in various Green Lantern and DC titles.  He hasn't really shown up in any movies or TV shows to my knowledge.

What happened to Steel and Kyle Rayner is mostly what seems to happen.  The replacement hero might have a spotlight series for a little while, but after it folds they just wind up as bit players.  Maybe then it was for the best that Jane Foster's turn as Thor ended with her dying so no one at Marvel had to worry about what to do with her--though I'm sure she'll be back.  Or maybe she already is; I haven't read a lot of Marvel comics lately.

Obviously there are more characters who could be added to this.  It is kind of sad these characters get the spotlight for a little bit and then most get cast aside to be supporting characters again.  It's like a "one-hit wonder" in music or someone who gets "15 minutes of fame" for going viral or whatever.  Their star burns brightly but a short time and then afterwards it just glows dimly but can't ever get back to that point again.

Amazon Decoded, Decoded

 I've never been a big fan of how-to books, especially how-to marketing books.  I have read a few and they mostly seem like a lot of empty vamping that can usually be summarized into a blog post--which is what I do after I read them.  But I have read some of David Gaughran's stuff on Facebook, especially involving scammers and the like, so when it was on sale, I got a copy of his Amazon Decoded book for how-to market in the Kindle store.

And it was pretty typical.  A lot of vamping and extraneous stuff.  Most every section included an entreaty to go to his website for more, to the point I thought, "Why did I bother buying a book when I could have found everything on the website?"

I suppose there are some newbs who would enjoy hearing the entire history of the Kindle store or maybe even the entire history of Amazon itself, but I'd prefer to just get down to brass tacks.  What should I do and how should I do it?

In the end a lot of it is:  use Amazon Ads, Facebook Ads, and BookBub Ads.  The latter two more than Amazon.  Except that for someone like me who's into a super-tight niche, Amazon Ads would probably be better because you can narrow the focus more.  People in more traditional markets would get more bang for their buck with the other two.  But of course you have to have some bucks, which I really don't, so that part of the book doesn't have tons of relevance for me.

Since this came out in 2019 some of it is outdated, like the stuff about series and how important it is to have all the same name and stuff.  You no longer really have to worry about that with the series managing tool KDP added last year.  Now you can put books into a series even if they weren't really intended that way, like how I put all of my holiday-themed gender swap stories into one series.

The section on metadata was disappointing.  It all boiled down to:  either spend $97 on a program called KDP Rocket or just brute force it by searching keywords to see what comes up and if that would apply to your book.  The former is too expensive and the latter too time-consuming.  Probably the only helpful part of that was the reminder that your keywords don't have to be just one word.  I don't usually use more than two or three words in a keyword but you can use a bunch of words if you want.

There was one really interesting and potentially useful thing, though.  You know how fast food places sometimes have a "secret menu" of things not on the menu but available if you ask for them?  I think it's In-n-Out Burger out west that's especially famous for that but even McDonald's and Taco Bell in certain places will have stuff available if you know to ask them.   Anyway, KDP has a sorta secret menu item.  It's not exactly secret, but you have to know where to look.

When you set up your book, Amazon only lets you put in 2 categories (unlike B&N or Draft2Digital that give you 5 or Smashwords I think had more than that) but there are over 13,000 sub-categories on Amazon.  It turns out you can expand your categories up to 10--if you know how to ask.

You can just send a help email to KDP, but the better way is to go to your Author Central page and find the "Contact Us" link down at the bottom.  Then you can find the link where it will give you a sort of template on how to ask to add additional categories for your book.

This is what my email looked like for my book Swapnado:

I would like to add some categories to Swapnado by Eric Filler, ASIN B097SR4X84

Categories to be added (list each category as a separate line item):

1. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Romance>LGBTQ+>Bisexual Romance

2. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Romance>LGBTQ+>Gay Romance

3. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Romance>LGBTQ+>Lesbian Romance

4. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Romance>LGBTQ+>Transgender Romance

5. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Genre Fiction>LGBTQ+

6. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Genre Fiction>Psychological

7. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Horror>Dark Fantasy

8. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Horror>LGBTQ+

9. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Genre Fiction>LGBTQ+>Lesbian Fiction

10. B097SR4X84, .com, Kindle, Kindle Store>Kindle eBooks>Literature & Fiction>Genre Fiction>LGBTQ+>Transgender Fiction

The only problem with it was I didn't do my math correctly.  You get up to 10 TOTAL, so you can only add 8.  The person at Amazon sent me back an email saying they would only add enough to make it 10 total.  But otherwise it worked the way it was supposed to.

The obvious problem is you have to do this for each and every book, so for me I'd have to send like 200 emails, which I think would really piss them off.  But if you just have a couple of books, it's a good idea.  The caveat is you have to know which categories exactly that you want and they won't give you a list.  So the best idea is to go to other books, like ones it suggests you buy if you bought your own book or what people looked at after reading yours, and see what categories those are in and then copy and paste those into your email.

To get the full category I clicked the link on the book's page to take me to the chart and on the left side you see where it has the complete tree for that chart.  That's where I got a couple of my categories from; under the Genre LGBTQ+ I saw Lesbian and Transgender and so decided to add it to both along with the regular LGBTQ+.

You'd think Amazon could just make this part of the process when you're loading your book instead of making authors bother their low-paid minions in India about this.  But it's just part of what I've said all along:  Amazon is your frenemy.  They really don't want to make it too easy for small authors to succeed.  That would interfere with their plans for world domination.  But those plans need money, so they're happy yet to take a cut of our sales to fund their machine.  If you start taking sales away from their books, though, you might wind up floating upside-down in the Ganges.  (How much of that was tongue-in-cheek?  Hurm...)

There's also another thing sorta hidden, which is the chart of Most Popular books, which is different from Bestselling.  For most of us this won't really matter a lot because we're never going to be on that list.  It's really more for big traditionally-published authors.  Still, it's good to understand some of the different types of information Amazon uses.

Another good piece of advice is that when you're advertising your book, it's best not to have friends, family, and a bunch of random people buy it and/or review it.  The reason is that if those people don't traditionally read or buy in that category, it can throw off Amazon's marketing algorithms, so it would be telling people who don't read books like yours to buy your book and then they won't like it and give you a bad review.  

There's some other stuff, but really that was what jumped out at me as important.  As you can see, it didn't take that long to go through it.  That's why how-to books are usually so irritating.  Really unless you can get it free I'd say to just go to the guy's website and check out the stuff there and save yourself 200 pages of vamping.

Stories Are Better When They're Local

 Recently I finally finished and released the Eric Filler gender swap story Swapnado.  After a couple of tries, the story I ran with focuses on a pair of storm chasers who get changed when an experimental chemical is sucked into a tornado.  That was my third attempt at a story but it wasn't the third idea.  I had other potential ways of doing it.

One of those ways was to have a swapnado hit some small town--or maybe even a big town.  But I resisted this idea.  Why?  Because it would have gotten too big.  If you have a whole town affected by it then you've got a lot of people and you have all these excess issues to deal with.  Like what happens to women who get hit with the swapnado?  What happens to children?  And before you know it, you have a bunch of different storylines and it would wind up the size of a Stephen King novel.

This was to some extent the problem when I did the Gender Swap Outbreak trilogy in 2019.  I created a disease that would cause people to swap but then that brought up the issue:  if it changes a man into a woman, what happens to a woman?  Does she change into a man?  What happens to kids who get it?  So I had to come up with answers for that.

It was kind of the same problem in 2013 with the third Girl Power novel, League of Evil, where a feminizing weapon is used on the whole world.  Because it was literally the whole world, there was a lot of stuff to cover about how people were affected and the damage caused and so on.  In the end I think I only skimmed the surface of it for the sake of the narrative.

To me the same thing is true with "the blip" in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  There's so much stuff brought up by simply vaporizing 3-4 billion people and then having those same 3-4 billion people return 5 years later.  They hardly skimmed the surface of all the issues this would create.  It's something that could have its own anthology series--for a few seasons.  That's one of many reasons I thought that was pretty lame.

So when I was conceiving Swapnado, I never wanted anything that would create a ton of additional issues.  I wanted to keep the focus small--and thus the story smaller.  It still wound 85,000 words, but it could have been 10 times that if I'd made it a much larger phenomenon.

At least to me, I always think it's better to keep stories as small as possible.  Even the Sharknado movies on which that was based do that for the most part by focusing on just a small group of people.  In movies and TV (or TV movies) that's practical as you can't hire millions of actors to do a ton of different stories.  It's easier to do with books because you don't have to hire people, but stories with a lot of characters are usually long and confusing.

So that's why I'm saying, keep your threats on a local level and it makes the story a lot easier to deal with.

Separation Anxiety: Clarifying the Previous Post

From the comments on my previous post, The End of Imagination, it seemed that my meaning was not entirely clear.  So I wanted to clarify the post.

In my thinking, the post wasn't about an end to imagination as in writer's block.  It wasn't even so much an emotional or psychological ending.  After reading Lawrence Block's story "The Burglar's Future," wherein the author laments how old age means he can't write any more stories in the series, it got me thinking about how inevitably all authors have to let go of their characters.  In cases like Block's or his friend and sometimes co-author Donald Westlake's it was a physical reason.  They got old and in Westlake's case, he died, and thus could no longer continue their series.  I probably should also have mentioned Terry Pratchett, who had to stop writing the Discworld series when his Alzheimer's got too bad and shortly after that he passed away, leaving the Discworld at an end.

Sometimes a publisher will try to continue a series with another author.  Some like the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew it works better because the original author was working under another name and so it was probably hard to tell when the torch might have been passed--or  how many times.  Others like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy you wish they hadn't bothered.

I probably muddied the waters in my last post by talking about my series that ended.  It is my blog, so I usually feel like I should chime in with my personal perspective.  The end of my series were not really a physical issue.  I mean, I didn't quit because I was old or sick or dead.  I stopped the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series and the Chances Are series because I felt I had everything at a satisfactory end.  That was an emotional reason instead of a physical one.  And certainly you couldn't say I ran out of imagination or I had writer's block, because I have thought of ways to continue those; I just never feel any real need to do so.

Besides the physical reasons or the emotional reasons there's also another reason to quit a series:  the retail reason.  Some books like Justice for All or Army of the Damned or The Lipstick Lesbian Elixir just didn't sell enough copies for me to spend time and energy on a sequel.  If I so chose I could probably think of something, but who would buy it?  You see that a lot more in comic books or movies (and comic book movies) where a series gets cancelled because of low sales.

I likened this phenomenon to a couple of songs about how a child grows up and leaves his imaginary friends behind.  This is I suppose both a physical and emotional reason.  The child grows up physically and (hopefully) matures emotionally and breaks contact with his imaginary friends.  So maybe that muddied the waters as well.

The point is that at some point all authors inevitably have to say goodbye to their imaginary friends--their characters.  In some cases it's because the author gets old or sick and then dies.  Or in other cases it's simply that the author decides to move on to something else either for emotional reasons--feeling they have taken the story and characters as far as they need to go--or retail reasons--the series isn't selling enough books to remain a profitable venture.

So now, is that clear as mud?

The End of Imagination

 When I heard "Puff the Magic Dragon" by Peter, Paul, and Mary the last verse of the song was always a bummer:

A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys

Painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys

One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more

And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain

Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane

Without his lifelong friend, Puff could not be brave

So Puff, that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave

The idea being that the kid grows up and abandons Puff because he's got grown up stuff to do.  The Loggins & Messina song "House at Pooh Corner" has a similar melancholy vibe about imaginary friends:

As our days disappeared all too soon

But I've wandered much further today than I should

And I can't seem to find my way back to the wood

So help me if you can, I've got to get

Back to the house at Pooh Corner by one

I hadn't really thought about this much for books until I was reading Lawrence Block's collection of Bernie Rhodenbarr short stories.  The final story, "The Burglar's Future" has the author go to Bernie's used bookstore.  There Bernie laments that there are no customers because everyone buys books online these days.  And Bernie can't steal stuff because there are cameras and stuff everywhere.  Worse, unlike Block's other long-running character, Matthew Scudder, Bernie doesn't age in real time, so he's forever about 35, thus he can't retire.  And the author, in his mid-80s now, no longer has the stamina to write any new stories.

Like Puff or the characters at Pooh Corner, Bernie's friend in the real world gets older and no longer can hang out with him.  Like our stuffed animals or other toys, most authors inevitably have to put away their characters too.  Sometimes it's by design and sometimes it's simply that the author dies and thus can no longer continue the series.

That's how it was with another series I finished recently, the Dortmunder series by Donald Westlake.  They were a fun series of 14 books (with an additional volume of short stories) about a criminal mastermind and his associates who usually succeed at some great theft only to somehow get shortchanged.  Westlake died in 2008 so there haven't been any more books since then.

In many cases like with the Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew or James Bond or Jason Bourne they hire someone else to continue the series, but it's usually just a hollow pursuit to try to wring more money from the public.  As much as I like Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr books or Westlake's Dortmunder books, I don't really want to read someone else doing them.  Nor would I want to try to continue them myself.

Really it is a bit comforting to think that Bernie is still in his bookstore with his cat and best friend Caroline.  Or that Dortmunder and his associates are still in the back of the OJ Bar & Grill plotting schemes.  It's much like how we find comfort in the afterlife, thinking that someone is on a cloud playing a harp or whatever you believe.

While I've pitched sequels for the Scarlet Knight or Chances Are stories, I've never really had much interest in doing it.  I left Emma and Stacey and their family, friends, and acquaintances in a good place.  Their universes more or less work in real time, so they're more like Matthew Scudder than Bernie Rhodenbarr.  There really seems no need for me to upset the balance.  It's good that unlike Westlake with Dortmunder, I was able to pick where I wanted to end, just like Lawrence Block basically chose where to end things with Bernie.  Most of us in real life don't get lucky enough to decide that for ourselves.

The titular track of country-folk singer John Prine's final album was called the "Tree of Forgiveness" about what he would do when he got to Heaven.  Then he died in 2020 during the early days of the Covid outbreak.  So maybe now he's able to do all this stuff.  It seems like an appropriate song for this theme:

When I get to heaven
I'm gonna shake God's hand
Thank Him for more blessings than one man can stand
Then I'm gonna get a guitar
And start a rock-n-roll band
Check into a swell hotel
Ain't the afterlife grand?

And then I'm gonna get a cocktail
Vodka and ginger ale
Yeah, I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long
I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl
'Cause this old man is goin' to town

Then as God is my witness
I'm getting back into show business
I'm gonna open up a nightclub called "The Tree of Forgiveness"
And forgive everybody ever done me any harm
Well, I might even invite a few choice critics
Those syph'litic parasitics
Buy 'em a pint of Smithwicks
And smother 'em with my charm

'Cause then I'm gonna get a cocktail
Vodka and ginger ale
Yeah I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long
I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl
Yeah this old man is goin' to town

Yeah when I get to heaven
I'm gonna take that wristwatch off my arm
What are you gonna do with time
After you've bought the farm?
And them I'm gonna go find my mom and dad
And good old brother Doug
Well I bet him and cousin Jackie are still cuttin' up a rug

I wanna see all my mama's sisters
'Cause that's where all the love starts
I miss 'em all like crazy
Bless their little hearts
And I always will remember these words my daddy said
He said, " Buddy, when you're dead, you're a dead pecker-head"
I hope to prove him wrong
That is, when I get to heaven

'Cause then I'm gonna get a cocktail
Vodka and ginger ale
Yeah I'm gonna smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long
I'm gonna kiss that pretty girl on the tilt-a-whirl
Yeah this old man is goin' to town
Yeah this old man is goin' to town

Battlestar Galactica: The Original, Not the Best

Having watched the 1979-1981 Buck Rogers show on Tubi TV, I decided I might as well watch the classic Battlestar Galactica as well.  Galactica actually came first from creator Glen A Larson with a miniseries in 1978 that led to a full season of episodes. 

The miniseries establishes the premise for the series:  in another galaxy (or whatever) twelve tribes of humans have settled twelve planets.  Everything was cool for a while but then a race of robots called the Cylons started attacking the humans.  A war raged for a thousand years but when the show starts, the humans and Cylons are reaching a peace agreement.

Except as Ackbar would say:  it's a trap!  Captain Apollo and his little brother fly their spiffy Viper fighters out into some asteroids or whatever and find a fleet of Cylons waiting to pounce on the human ships.  Their communications jammed, the Vipers have to fly back to their base, the titular Battlestar Galactica to warn everyone.  Apollo's brother is killed but he gets the message back.  Still the human leaders don't want to risk the peace treaty and dither around until it's too late--all except Adama aboard the Galactica.  Apollo is his son and so he puts more stock into the warning.

But then it's too late and most of the human ships are slaughtered.  The human colonies are razed as well, including Adama and Apollo's home of Caprica.  There Adama tells the survivors to get anything they can flying and with the Galactica escorting them, they'll look for the missing "thirteenth tribe" on a planet called Earth.

The miniseries introduces us to the other main characters:  Starbuck, who like Yossarian or Hawkeye Pierce is a noble coward, a talented fighter pilot who doesn't really want to be in the military; Colonel Tigh, Adama's executive officer, who's often the bad cop to Adama's good cop; Cassiopeia, a nurse/babysitter/Starbuck's sometimes girlfriend; Boxey, a kid displaced by the Cylons whose mother marries Apollo and then dies shortly after; Boomer, who is Apollo and Starbuck's black friend and wingman; and Jolly, the chubby pilot, aka the Porkins of the group--though he lives a lot longer.

While there are some comic moments (like the goofy robot-dog thing an engineer makes for Boxey to replace his dead dog thing) most of the first few episodes are pretty serious as the ragtag fleet struggles to find fuel and food and evade the Cylons.  It's kind of like Macross (later the first series of Robotech) where they're dogged by an enemy that probably could destroy them if they really pressed but instead comes at them with just enough so the good guys can survive.  If the Vipers could transform that would actually have been really awesome.

There are a couple of cornier episodes where they go to other planets, like one where Apollo crashes on a planet that's like the Old West only it's run by some Boss Hogg-type guy who uses a reprogrammed Cylon robot as his enforcer, Redeye--because the Cyclons have a red dot that goes back and forth through their visor.  Another one they have to make peace between settlers and some pig guys so they can get seed to grow crops.

About halfway through the first season the Cylons pretty much drop out as the Galactica gets far enough away from them to leave their territory.  An Earth-like planet called "Terra" and its various colonies called Luna 1-7 are introduced.  A sort of Nazi-ish group called the "Eastern Alliance" patrols the area with neat, sorta Gundam-looking destroyers.  There's also a mysterious group of advanced aliens who abduct most of the Galactica's main pilots and later try to guide them to helping Terra.

The Cylons return in the final episode of the season and--mostly because it was the end of the season and they needed something big--the Galactica makes a plan to destroy them.  It involves a captured Cylon fighter with Apollo and Starbuck inside to sabotage the Cylon mother ship.  In the end of course the heroes prevail and go on with their journey.  Unbeknownst to them, but knownst to us, they receive a signal of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.

Like Buck Rogers, season 2 changes concepts--for the worse.  It's supposed to be 25-30 years later (I guess) and the Galactica is near Earth.  Adama is the only regular cast member who is back full time, though Boomer and Starbuck get guest spots.  Like the Dukes of Hazzard it focuses on two new dudes who are supposed to be like the old guys, in this case Dillon and Troy stand in for Apollo and Starbuck.

Since Tubi TV has the second season out of order, the first few episodes are really confusing.  Because it just throws all these new people at you with no explanation.  Near the end of the second episode, Adama calls Troy "Boxey," and he calls Adama "Grandfather" so I guess Boxey grew up and became a warrior?  And who the hell is the reporter on Earth who already seems acquainted with the Galactica?  And who's "Xaviar?"

It turned out that the last three episodes listed under season 2 were actually the first three that set up the new season.  The Galactica wants help from Earth but clearly Earth isn't ready so they send teams of warriors down to talk to scientists to offer technology to help speed up Earth's development.  Troy and Dillon go to find a scientist in Los Angeles (played by Robert Reed, the former Mike Brady) but wind up getting in all kinds of trouble and revealing who they are to a female reporter.

Meanwhile this Xaviar guy is a commander who wants to go back in time to give technology to Earth in the past to speed up its development in the present.  Because apparently they can go back in time now.  Um...wait a sec, if you can go back in time, why not go back to stop the Cylons?  Then you wouldn't need Earth at all!  But whatever.  Eventually Xaviar goes back to 1944 to work on the V2 rocket with the Nazis.  Dillon, Troy, and the reporter go back to stop him.  Then he escapes in the present so they have to track him down.

After those first three episodes, the basic premise of the second season is that mostly to save money, Dillon, Troy, and a group of kids land on present day (1980) Earth.  Like the security officers in The Orville, the people from the Galactica have super strength and super jumping and stuff because their gravity was higher than Earth's, which seems kind of silly.  Really it seems like it should be like The Expanse where people who grow up in space are weaker in gravity.

Anyway, Dillon, Troy, and the kids go around with the reporter's help trying to find somewhere to hide out while being pursued by an Air Force guy.  A message at the end of each episode says that the Air Force stopped investigating UFOs and found nothing, because I guess the Air Force must have been cheesed off about the show implying they were still doing that.  The time travel thing was never brought up again after those first 3 episodes.

In the 7th episode (which apparently was the last one) they finally say what happened with Starbuck.  He crashed on a planet and war marooned with a Cylon and a mysterious woman named Angela who shows up...somehow and is pregnant.  Starbuck is able to get her baby off the planet and the baby is eventually found by the Galactica and the kid becomes "Dr. Z," some kind of child super-genius.  Meanwhile I guess Starbuck is still on that planet.  As for what became of Apollo...?  They don't really say but the implication is that he's dead.

It was really a chore to get through the second season because it was so lame with changing the premise and most of the characters.  One episode where they help a Latino farmer would have been better as an A-Team or Knight Rider episode.  Not surprisingly after 10 episodes the show was cancelled until the reboot about 25 years later.

Fun Facts:  The first miniseries featured Jane Seymour as Boxey's mom, whom Apollo marries.  And then of course she's killed.  Also in that miniseries, 80s heart throb Rick Springfield plays Apollo's little brother, who gets killed by the Cylons.  Ed Begley Jr. appeared a few times in the first half of the first season as a Viper pilot named "Ensign Greenbean."  Seriously.  Greenbean.  In a 2-part episode, Lloyd Bridges guest stars as the commander of another Battlestar, the Pegasus.  He and the ship are never seen again but his fighter pilot daughter Sheba joins the cast for the rest of the first season.  One episode where they go to a planet to trade for seeds features Brett Sommers of Match Game fame as a former flame of Adama's.  I couldn't help thinking she was a precursor to Troi's mother in Star Trek TNG and DS9 with her royal bearing and throwing herself at the commander, who had no interest in her advances.

The episode "Experiment in Terra" has two fun facts.  First, the show was produced and sometimes written by Donald Bellisario who created Magnum PI, JAG, and Quantum Leap.  The Galactica episode is kind of a prototype of Quantum Leap.  The advanced aliens mentioned previously send Apollo to Terra, where they surround him with an "aura" that causes the people there to see him as a colonel from that planet.  One of the aliens stays with Apollo to help guide him, but only Apollo (and later Starbuck) can see or hear him--just like how Sam was the only one who could hear or see Al.  It just needed Apollo to say "Oh boy" to complete the comparison.  When Starbuck's Viper lands on the planet he encounters a patrol led by John deLancie, Q from TNG, DS9, and Voyager.  You can't see his face because he has a helmet on but I heard his voice and thought, "Hey, that sounds like John deLancie."  And, yup, his name was in the credits.

In the second season, Lieutenant Dillon was played by Barry Van Dyke, the son of legendary comedian Dick Van Dyke.  In the 90s they worked together on the mystery series Diagnosis Murder.

Wikipedia mentioned a lot of the Galactica sets were later used for Buck Rogers and in a two-part episode you can clearly see shots of an "alien city" that were later used as Buck's home of New Chicago.  Some of the actors were in both shows like the old guy who played Dr. Goodfellow in season two of Buck Rogers was a council member in the first few episodes of Galactica.  A couple of other actors also appeared in both.

Galactica has a really weird credit sequence in most of the first season.  The opening titles only introduce Apollo, Starbuck, and Adama.  But then there's a follow-up sequence that goes through other characters like Tigh, Boomer, Jolly, etc. before going on to guest stars.  It seemed really inefficient and the second season uses more conventional credits.  But the funny thing with the second season credits is they use footage from the first season but make sure that you never clearly see characters besides Adama so you just see Apollo from the back or the side or from a distance.

In the second season of Buck Rogers, they mention a couple of times that their mission is to search for lost tribes of humanity.  The Galactica's mission was likewise to search for the "lost 13th tribe" that went to Earth.  So conceivably the two shows could have crossed over--if you disregarded season 2 of Galactica.  A crossover movie might have been neat, especially seeing Vipers tangling with the ships from Buck Rogers and then joining forces to fight Cylons and Draconians or whatever.

For fans of MST3K and Rifftrax, shots of the ships and battles from the original Galactica miniseries were shamelessly reused in the completely awful movie, Space Mutiny.  Veteran actor Cameron Mitchell sports a beard and robe to look like a really discount Adama.  After Galactica, Richard Hatch (Apollo) appeared in the lame, tonally inconsistent fantasy Prisoners of the Lost Universe.  Roy Tiennes, the star of a pilot called Code Name Diamond Head featured on MST3K guest starred in a Galactica episode as part of a sort of Suicide Squad who have to destroy a Cylon weapon.

Language Lesson:  Like the later series, the show uses "frack" as an expletive that means shit/fuck, like, "Oh frack!"  There's also "felgelcarb" which means shit in the other sense as a noun like, "What a piece of felgelcarb."  There are words for time too, which gets confusing.  "Yahrens" are years and then there's one like "centon" that I think is hours.  I'd rather they just used Earth measurements so you'd know if they're talking about hours, minutes, or seconds for something to happen.

BTW, I have started watching the reboot series on Tubi TV and in most ways it's better.  But there is one thing I like in the old series:  the uniforms the warriors wear.  The brown jackets are really cool.  I'm not sure if they're leather or suede or just fabric but they look neat.  The padded tunics underneath less so but the brown pants with the gun holster are also nice.  The blue uniforms the bridge crew wears in the reboot series are better than the uniforms on the original series though, so clothing wise it ends up as a push.

1 Job, 2 Perspectives

 A month ago Al Sirois posted this job listing from freelancer site UpWork on Facebook:

Wanted: Short story in 9 parts in fantasy and speculative fiction. This will be a serialized fictional tale that should be engaging and includes well-crafted visual and other sensory details.

The plot is up to you but should involve multiple pantheons of Gods interacting in the real world as we know it. Whether they get along or not is up to you, along with setting and anything you want. I will be available for brainstorming, questions, anything you need.

I need this project completed within four to five business days. It’s likely more orders will be made, but the first 9 stories should complete a satisfying arc while still leaving the reader wishing there was more.

Each story should be between 900 to 1500 words and formatting as an ebook.

This is a ghostwriting position and may require signing an NDA acknowledging the transfer of rights to the content.

The post didn't mention it, but he said that the author was paying a flat fee of $80 for the job.  As a professional ghostwriter, he thought that was utter bullshit.  And most of his friends then made fun of how stupid this was.

For the record, I don't think it's a great deal.  Still, I did the math on this.  9 stories of 900-1,500 words is 8,100-13,500 words.  For someone like me, I figure I could bang that out in about 2 days once I knew what I was doing.  Basically I could do it over a weekend and make $80.  That's a week of groceries or a couple of tanks of gas or something.

It'd be a better deal than the two rounds of flash fiction I wrote for December House Publishing.  I spent weeks on the first 23 stories I wrote (and then I think had to write 2 more).  The second batch of 7 stories I wrote pretty much in one afternoon at the crappy old Arby's in Roseville.  Which is how I know I could pretty much do this in one weekend if I had my druthers on.  How much did I make for those flash fiction stories?  $0.  I barely even got "exposure" because the publisher went out of business.  I've probably sold a few copies of Last Dance and Other Stories and Mortal Sins on Amazon, but not $80--or $160 since it was two projects.

The difference in perspective is Al is a professional writer while I have a regular job.  For me it's just a side hustle to do on the weekend, so $80 is not as much of an insult.  It's like the difference between a taxi driver who does it full time and an Uber driver who does it only occasionally; if someone said, "Drive me from New York City to Vermont for $80" the professional driver isn't going to do that, but an Uber driver might not be as picky because they might just be squeezing it in in their spare time.  $80 for one day isn't as bad because it's not their sole source of income.

For me the real problem is that the person on UpWork wants me to come up with most of the idea and send them a proposal.  I mean all they give you is some vague idea that they want it to be like American Gods or something similar.  Banging out a few flash fiction stories is one thing but when you want me to come up with pretty much this whole idea too, then that's more work.

So, what do you think of this deal?

Kindle Vella: First Impressions

I mentioned a while back I got offered contracts from a couple of places like Webnovel and Ringdom that specialize in serialized stories for people to read on their phones.  This is I guess a big thing, especially in Asia, so it was inevitable that Amazon would join the fray.  I mean why let all these small operators get all that money?

Amazon's entry into the serial market is called Kindle Vella.  The idea is that instead of just dropping a whole novel or short story on there, you drop parts of 500-1500 words or so.  They call them "episodes" so you could either do chapters of a story or maybe just different flash fiction stories that all tie into some anthology.

I wanted to try it, but I was busy and didn't want to actually write anything new. So I took the first part of Mortal Sins, a flash fiction anthology I wrote for December House Publishing back in 2013 or so and published on Amazon after they went out of business.

There were a few hitches in the process if you've been using KDP for a while.  The pasting from Word did not work all that great.  I had to go in and redo a lot of paragraph breaks and such.  It would work better if you typed it out on their site.

Instead of a traditional cover you're supposed to just use a picture without title or author name because those will be shown separately.  So I just used a portion of the Tales of the Scarlet Knight cover Rusty Webb made back in 2012.

You can see in my screen capture that it says "Blocked."  Why?  Because I had previously published it on KDP.  So I couldn't actually go through and get it online, but this did give me an idea of what is involved.

I would like to do an Eric Filler story on this just to see what the response would be, but I haven't really gotten around to coming up with an idea yet.  As you can see, it is a little different from the regular KDP platform, so if you want to try it, be aware of that.  And make sure you don't try to load something you've already published through Amazon.

If you've tried it, share your thoughts in the comments.

The Hierarchy of Badness

 As someone who watches way too many Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax movies, I've seen lots and lots of bad movies.  But the thing is, there are bad movies and there are really bad movies.  There is a hierarchy of bad.

Apocalyptically Bad:  Movies like Plan 9 From Outer Space, Birdemic, Star Games, Suburban Sasquatch, Fungicide, Lycan Colony, Feeders, Manos the Hands of Fate, Eegah, and The Creeping Terror are just bad on every possible level.  The stories are pretty much nonsensical.  The acting is sub-elementary school holiday pageant level.  The effects are completely lame and unconvincing.  That is also what makes them so hilarious; they're mostly "so bad they're good."

Patchwork Bad:  This is kind of a special category for a particular sort of bad movie mostly from the 50s and 60s.  Movies like Monster-A-Go-Go, Rocket Attack USA, The Starfighters, Invasion of the Animal People, or Santa Claus & the Ice Cream Bunny can barely even be labeled movies because they're mostly a lot of stock footage or a different movie with a few poorly-acted scenes patched in between to give the vaguest hint of a story.  In the case of  Invasion of the Animal People it's mostly a Norwegian movie redubbed and with a lot of narration thrown in to explain what's going on.  In Santa Claus & the Ice Cream Bunny 60% of the movie is an entirely different movie! (Thumbelina or Jack & the Beanstalk depending on which version you watch.)  These patchwork efforts are more movie loafs than real movies.

Famously Bad:  The apocalyptically bad movies are usually made by amateurs who really don't know what they're doing.  Then you get other movies that are made by professionals and star big names and maybe even are written by people who have previously done something pretty good.  And yet somehow all of these elements come together to make something really, really bad.  Like Batman & Robin, The Spirit, Super Mario Bros, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Gigli, or The Last Jedi.  The problem with these movies is for the most part they're not even "so bad they're good" so much as just plain old bad.

Vanity Bad:  Some movies are bad because they're designed basically as over-long commercials for someone or something.  Movies like Viva Knievel or Cool as Ice feature some decent talent but the star is a flash-in-the-pan who has no acting chops and the scripts are ham-fisted attempts to make the main character look good.  You could put a lot of the Elvis movies in this category too as well as From Justin to Kelly and garbage like that.  The Wizard is an example of a movie made to advertise a product (Nintendo) rather than a person but still it's basically a poorly-written 90-minute commercial wasting moderately-talented actors like Beau Bridges and Christian Slater--and a very young Tobey Maguire in an uncredited background role.

Knockoff Bad:  When I did my A to Z last year on MST3K/Rifftrax movies, I noted a few times how a success will breed imitators.  Like an imitation "Gucci" or "Rolex" you might get from guy on the street, the quality is usually going to be lacking because these things are generally thrown together in a hurry to capitalize on whatever just made a ton of money at the box office.  Movies like The Last Shark, Grizzly, and Day of the Animals tried to capitalize on Jaws.  Movies like The Pumaman and Supersonic Man tried to capitalize on Superman.  And movies like Secret Agent Superdragon, Danger Death Ray, Girl From Rio, and Operation Kid Brother tried to capitalize on James Bond--the latter even using Sean Connery's brother!  There are movies like Death Promise and Kill or Be Killed trying to capitalize on Bruce Lee and other kung-fu movies but are really lame.  Movies like Guy From Harlem and Velvet Smooth try to capitalize on Blaxploitation but do it really, really badly.

Dated Bad:  A lot of the MST3K movies especially fall into this category because they come from the 50s or 60s.  Movies like Beginning of the End with its lame "giant" grasshoppers or Gamera with a guy dressed like a giant flying turtle monster are largely bad because they're old and thus the effects are not nearly as good as something from more modern times.  It doesn't mean they're "classics" like a rusty old car on blocks in someone's front yard isn't a "classic," but they are probably not as bad as some people would think.

Almost Competent Bad:  A lot of the newer MST3K and Rifftrax movies fall into this category where they generally have professional-ish production values and the actors are at least off-off-Broadway level (with the occasional person you might have heard of, or in the case of say Chad McQueen or Chris Lemmon they're at least related to someone you might have heard of) but they're just not quite up to snuff like in Sisters of Death where you can clearly see the boom mike several times or in A Talking Cat!? where you can clearly see a laser pointer guiding the cat or where a woman reaches into a hot oven with her bare hands and suffers no ill-effects.  If you want to be condescending you could say, "Bless their hearts.  They try so hard."  (But they still suck.)

Mostly Competent But Still Bad:  There are plenty of Rifftrax movies from small studios like Full Moon (Oblivion & Oblivion 2), Edgewood (Icebreaker, Radical Jack, Pressure Point), and Peaksviewing (Fairy King of Ar, The Little Unicorn, Merlin: The Return, The Sorcerer's Apprentice) that have good production values, not-laughably-bad special effects, and some actors who have done better work like Stacy Keach, Malcolm MacDowell, Sean Astin, Bruce Campbell, David Warner, Tia Carrere, Corbin Bersen, George Takei, Julie Newmar, Larry Linville, and probably some others.  But they still don't have quite the quality of big studio movies.  A lot of these movies could almost be good if they had a little more money and talent behind the cameras.  Some like Oblivion, Oblivion 2, and Icebreaker are good enough that I'd watch them without riffing.

Over-Underrated Bad:  Some big movies like Joss Whedon's Justice League or Josh Trank's Fantastic 4 or Ron Howard's Solo get so much hate even before people have seen them that it's hard to shake the perception that they're bad.  In reality none of them is a great movie but they're not Apocalyptically Bad or Famously Bad.  They're just misunderstood.

The parallels to the writing world should be obvious.  There is a hierarchy of badness for books as well.  Some books it's obvious the "author" has taken no time to edit because there are tons of typos or formatting errors.  Or there just might be plot holes or things that just don't make sense.  Or it might just be a knockoff of a more popular book.  Or like me it might be mostly competent but probably not quite good enough to actually be good. [sob]

If you're a writer, where do you put yourself on the Hierarchy of Badness?

What If?: Girl Power

"What If" series are pretty popular in comics.  Marvel has done lots of them.  DC has also done its fair share.  Other publishers of properties like Transformers have done it.  Star Trek has an entire mirror universe that's it's own "what if" thing.  Even Star Wars did some "What if" issues.

Looking at the premises of some of DC's "Tales From the Dark Multiverse," I got to thinking about doing some What ifs of my superhero series.

For the first book, Girl Power, Robin (the Batman/Batgirl character)'s nerdy friend Melvin--who becomes Melody--stops the evil Major Dalton from using an alien weapon to turn most of the world's population into women.  But what if he didn't?

Major Dalton is successful and creates her New Amazonia, where most everyone is female--except a few men to function as servants and breeding stock.  About 15 years later, Jenny Bassett is going about her normal day when she suddenly develops super-speed!  She manages to get home and ask her mom, who tells her she's the daughter of Velocity Man/Gal and so the ability must have passed down to her--which was the subject of a short story.

Jenny then becomes a superhero like her dad.  She learns her new powers--basically like The Flash--and stops crimes and all that.  Then one day she's met on the street by a homeless-looking woman.  It's Robin!  She knows who Jenny really is and recruits Jenny to break into a secret lab.  There Dalton's scientists have our heroes locked up to study what makes them tick.  Jenny finds her father--who's a woman now--and is able to free her, Mermaid, and Apex Girl.  The latter they have to expose to sunlight so she can regain her powers.

Then with Jenny sort of as her father's sidekick, our heroes destroy Dalton's feminizing machine and start the slow process of returning the world to normal while Jenny is glad not only to be a hero, but to have her family back together.

In Book 2, The Impostors, the military (unwittingly guided by Major Dalton) introduce a group of male clones of the Super Squad to supplant the feminized versions.  These clones were all destroyed (except the one of Robin), but...what if they weren't?  What if the male clones had managed to supplant the female Super Squad?

Some time later, Apex Man rules the surface world with an iron fist with Velocity Man and Midnight Spectre as his lieutenants.  Underwater in Pacifica, King Neptune plots to take over the surface world.  As war becomes ever closer, the assassin for hire Hitter is recruited to lead a Suicide Squad of other villains.  They're tasked with taking down the male Super Squad.

They start by taking out Velocity Man in probably some horrible, gory way in the style of The Boys. Then they capture Midnight Spectre to get intel on how to destroy Apex Man.  The only way is to go to the arctic to his Fortress of Solitude and create a special drug that will make Apex man lose his powers.  It is of course a dangerous mission and as Hitter and company are getting the materials for the shot, Apex Man shows up and there's a terrible battle, but Hitter is able to hit him with the shot and take him out.

Apex Man's rule is ended and after he recovers enough, Hitter goes to Pacifica to take out King Neptune, allowing someone less militant to rule.  Hooray!

In Book 3, League of Evil, the feminizing weapon pretty much turned the whole world into females and threw everything into chaos.  The Super Squad and a Suicide Squad of feminized villains united to stop a planet-killing entity known as Omega before it could destroy Earth. But...what if they didn't?  What if Omega was successful?

Years later, Lieutenant Kila of the Galactic Peacekeepers (basically the Green Lanterns), receives a signal from the dead planet known as Earth.  She investigates and finds Robin--or the femininized clone of Robin--who was instrumental in selling out Earth and as a "reward" was left to rule the barren wastelands.  Robin has been working to get back at Omega and devised a way to kill it, but she needs Kila's help to get into space.

Kila, regretting that she allowed Apex Girl to be executed for a crime she didn't commit, agrees.  But as she and Robin get into space, they're discovered by other Peacekeepers who don't want to risk a war with Omega that they might lose.  Kila and Robin manage to escape and track down Omega out in space somewhere.  Robin sacrifices herself heroically to allow Kila to use whatever weapon to destroy Omega.

Kila has saved the universe from this dangerous threat but now begins the possibly more dangerous task of ferreting out the traitors in the Galactic Peacekeepers who set up Apex Girl (and others) to appease the monster.  She also goes back to Earth with some colonists to repopulate the dead planet.

Sort of a bittersweet ending.

What If?: The Scarlet Knight

"What If" series are pretty popular in comics.  Marvel has done lots of them.  DC has also done its fair share.  Other publishers of properties like Transformers have done it.  Star Trek has an entire mirror universe that's it's own "what if" thing.  Even Star Wars did some "What if" issues.

Looking at the premises of some of DC's "Tales From the Dark Multiverse," I got to thinking about doing some What ifs of my superhero series.

The Tales of the Scarlet Knight series you could do a whole bunch of them since there are 8 books.

In book 1, Emma survives her first encounter with the Black Dragoon mostly by a stroke of luck.  (Check out the comic book on Amazon or the moving comic version on YouTube.)  But...what if she didn't?  What if the Black Dragoon killed Emma on her first mission as the Scarlet Knight and the former Scarlet Knight Percival Graves?

The red armor seeks a new host and calls upon Emma's friend Becky Beech, who has motivation to stop the Dragoon with Emma being murdered.  If you read book 4, you'd know Becky is a harsher kind of Scarlet Knight, more like the Frank Miller version.  Where Emma would try not to hurt people, Becky really had no qualms about beating the shit out of bad guys--or even killing them.

So Becky gets the armor and defeats the Black Dragoon in a violent, bloody fight.  Where Emma did not kill Ian MacGregor--who killed himself instead--Becky dispatches him.  And then she sets to work on the rest of Rampart City, terrorizing Don Vendetta and her goons and the various gangs and common street criminals.

Ultimately she starts to go too far, beating the shit out of common purse snatchers or jaywalkers or petty criminals like that.  The witches Agnes and Sylvia decide they need to intervene and try to stop Becky's reign of terror.  But Sylvia is badly wounded by Becky and the witches barely escape.

Agnes winds up turning to Marie Marsh for help.  Marie has a strange ability that lets her see people's memories and even to travel in time.  Agnes works with Marie to hone her ability, but when they're about to send Marie back to save Emma, Becky appears.  Agnes holds her off and Marie goes back to that first battle with Emma and the Dragoon, saving Emma so she continues being the Scarlet Knight and everything goes on as it was.

Book 2:  Speaking of Marie Marsh, in book 2 she helped usher in an invasion of demons, until she joined with Emma and the witches to stop it.  But...what if she didn't?

Years later, the world is mostly a wasteland overrun with hellspawn.  There is no Scarlet Knight left to battle the evil.  Marie is an outcast who spends most of her time trying to find a way to undo what she did.  She's finally able to go back in time to stop herself from helping the demons.  Some of the demons try to stop her, but with Emma's help she puts right what once went wrong.

Book 3 & Book 8 you could have the same scenario:  What if Isis won and defeated the Scarlet Knight?  In both cases Emma would likely be dead and the armor would again have to go to someone else.  In a world where Isis reigns supreme and the whole world is her plaything, the new Scarlet Knight (Tim Cooper?  Louise Earl?  Jim Rizzard?  Whoever.) would have to rally people together and find a way to defeat Isis--or not.

Book 5:  An arms dealer sets off an antimatter reactor that's going to blow up the city (and possibly much more) when Sylvia sacrifices herself by vanishing into space with the reactor.  But...what if she died before she could do that and the reactor exploded?

Fast-forward a few years and a scarred, bitter Emma, having survived the explosion thanks to the magic armor, is living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland that used to be Rampart City.  She's hung up the cape, no longer believing she can make a difference.  To make things worse, Isis has come of age and regained her power.  

Then in her dreams Emma is met by a girl named Joanne who looks much like her when she was young.  Joanne convinces Emma to strap on the armor and in Old Man Logan style go back out there for one last fight against Isis.  But is she up to the task?  Maybe.

Books 6-7 already end unhappily so any "What If" would either be happy or else a lateral move.

A Tale From the Dark Multiverse

 "What If" series are pretty popular in comics.  Marvel has done lots of them.  DC has also done its fair share.  Other publishers of properties like Transformers have done it.  Star Trek has an entire mirror universe that's its own "what if" thing.  Even Star Wars did some "What if" issues.

DC's "Tales From the Dark Multiverse" is a series that spun out of the stupid Metal event starting in 2019.  I read the first one on its own last year.  The stated premise was one that would intrigue me:  what if Azrael had defeated Bruce Wayne in Knightfall to remain Batman?  But then I was really disappointed because the story wound up being a Bruce Wayne story and not an Azrael story.  I felt the author, Scott Snyder, cheated by having Azrael keep Bruce alive instead of killing him, which of course allowed Bruce to defeat Azrael later on.

I bought the collected volume with 4 more stories that mostly deal with DC events from the last 30 years:  Death of Superman, Blackest Night, and Infinite Crisis.  The only older one is the last one that deals with the Teen Titans Judas Contract story.

The Death of Superman story was probably the one I liked the most.  After Superman and Doomsday kill each other, Lois Lane is bitter and angry about how he died fighting alone and how the world basically went back to being shitty after he was gone.  When she's given the chance to merge with "The Eradicator," she does so and basically gets Superman-type powers herself.  Then she starts killing bad guys like Lex Luthor and the Joker and even some heroes like Batman.  But then Cyborg Superman shows up--as does a revived Kal-El.  The Cyborg Superman kills Kal-El and Lois is bummed a second time and...it just kinda ends at that point.  What was she going to do next to "fix" the world?  I'm not really sure.  This one definitely could have used to be longer.

The Blackest Night one works under the premise that Sinestro forged the white ring of life and didn't share it with others so the Black Rings (zombies!) won.  Three weeks later, Dove (of Hawk & Dove) is the only non-zombified human on Earth because of something that makes her immune to the Black Rings.  Lobo the bounty hunter is also immune because of his Wolverine/Deadpool-type healing and is sent to get Dove.  They meet with Mr. Miracle (Scott Free version) who has a plan to use the "Source Wall" to channel the creation energy of the universe to defeat the Black Lanterns.  But when Mr. Miracle finds out that this would mean killing his wife, Big Barda, he turns and kills Dove.  Sinestro goes through with the plan, using Lobo to channel the creation energy, which kills the Black Lanterns but in its wake creates a whole universe like Lobo, which is not something you'd want.  D'OH!  It was OK but not really great.

The Infinite Crisis one revolves around Blue Beetle (Ted Kord version) who in this story kills Maxwell Lord and takes over a secret organization known as Checkmate.  And then really it just becomes the Future's End event as Ted and Brother Eye or OMAC or whatever it's called assimilates all the heroes to take over the world.  I think you'd really have to be a comic book nerd to actually give a shit about this.  Just too obscure, really.

The Judas Contract one really reaches for its premise.  Robin (Dick Grayson version) is giving up the Robin costume and this somehow convinces Terra Markova to kill Deathstroke, who had her join the Teen Titans as a mole.  She then uses some super soldier formula Deathstroke took to up her earth-controlling powers.  She kills the Teen Titans and when Superman tries to stop her she summons a bunch of Kryptonite to kill him.  And then kills most of the world, leaving only scattered survivors to worship her as the goddess Gaia.  Like I said, it felt like it was really reaching to make this fairly local story into a global catastrophe, but it wasn't too terrible.

Recently I thought of my own Tale of the Dark Multiverse story that would spin out of the Batman: Vampire graphic novels from Doug Moench and Kelley Jones.  In the first one, Red Rain, Dracula comes to Gotham and Batman struggles to find a way to destroy the growing legion of vampires.  Ultimately he becomes a vampire and destroys Dracula.  In book 2: Bloodstorm, Batman struggles to control his growing blood lust by drinking synthetic blood.  Then he meets Selina Kyle, who's become a were-cat, and they fall in love, but when the Joker kills Selina, Batman finally snaps and kills the Joker and becomes a full vampire.  At his request, Alfred and Commissioner Gordon drive a stake through his heart.  But they didn't cut off his head, so in book 3:  Crimson Mist, as crime is rising in Gotham, Alfred pulls out the stake and brings Batman back to life.  But being trapped between life and death has driven Batman mad and so he becomes a fiend who slaughters pretty much his entire remaining rogue's gallery and all the inmates at Arkham and Blackgate.  Alfred, Gordon, and Two-Face work together then to kill him by blowing up the Batcave, which causes light to burn him up.

My idea then is...what if they didn't kill him?  What if this terrifying vampire Batman had just gone right on slaughtering people?

The idea then is that Gotham has become a nest of vampires with Batman ruling with an iron fist.  Any normal humans are there only to provide sustenance.  

Scenario 1:  Since I don't think any of the Robins were in the first three books, we can have Dick Grayson be one of the humans who's brought in to feed the vampires.  His parents were already murdered by the vampires and he wants revenge.  (Really you can use any of the other Robins:  Jason Todd, Tim Drake, Carrie whatsherface from Dark Knight Returns...)

Somehow Dick escapes and goes underground in Gotham.  Eventually he meets up with Alfred and/or Gordon, (or some other ally like Lucius Fox, Barbara Gordon, Kate Kane, one of the other Robins...) who help him to get into Batman's lair.  Being a Dark Multiverse story we don't want this to end Happily Ever After, so it turns out to be a trap!  Dick is captured and turned and becomes Batman's vampire sidekick.  If you want to be macabre, you could do a parody of the Batman '66 credits only where they're bloodthirsty fiends.  Bwahahahaha...

Scenario 2:  It's like 25 years later and most of the world's population is turned or dead--including the heroes.  Ra's al Guhl's mountain stronghold is one of the last bastions of normal humans.  There, Damian Wayne has been bred and trained to destroy his father and the vampire hordes.  Damian, Talia, and some others (like maybe Deathstroke or Deadshot or Teen Titans like Raven or Lobo's daughter and DC would probably have to include Harley Quinn just because) go to what's left of Gotham and fight their way to Wayne Manor's ruins, where Bruce is holed up.  Talia is bitten and Damian kills her out of mercy and most of the others are turned or killed.

Damian makes it to his father's chambers and there's a fight, but while Damian gains the upper hand, he can't bring himself to kill the father he never got a chance to know.  And in that moment of hesitation, he's bitten and turned.

If something like this was already done, maybe someone could let me know.

I thought of some more What If scenarios only involving my own stories that I will share on Wednesday and Friday.

More Rebuttals

 I haven't probably gotten many written reviews since I did this last time; mostly I just get annoying "ratings" with no words.  As an author and a reader I don't find that helpful.  I want to know WHY someone liked or didn't like a book.  I mean what if Roger Ebert had just said Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down with no reason for why he liked or didn't like a movie?  It'd be pretty useless.  But I know we'll never be able to make people do that, because the world sucks.  I would definitely rate it 1 star.

Anyway, here was one for Private Dick that is 4 stars:

Dick Larson was a hard boiled detective in 1930s of California was difficult enough, but things happen that is unknown enter Dixie Larson, who took over the the agency for the last few months, a woman who is a bit on androgynous looking girl, she not a ravaging beauty, but girl a who holds secrets. One night a pretty girl wearing oversized men's clothes enter the agency. She claims that she the man heir to oil fortune. Most wouldn't believe it. But Dixie did. Why or how come, strange that the cause that lead to more mystery that what happened.

The issue is mostly this line: a woman who is a bit on androgynous looking girl.  That's not true!  At the start of book 1, Dixie is a super-hot blonde with huge breasts.  The idea was to do a bit of role reversal where the Bogart-esque private eye becomes the bombshell femme fatale.  A couple of times it's mentioned she looks like Greta Garbo--this being about 1938 and all.  There is a twist in that while the visible parts of Dixie look like Greta Garbo, under her panties she's got a pretty big schlong.  But that would make her more a hermaphrodite than "androgynous."  Since this person doesn't seem to have a great grasp of English, maybe she used the wrong word.

I'm not sure where this person got this idea that she's "not a ravaging beauty" unless she's thinking of book 3 where Dixie becomes a plainer woman and then a little girl--which is why book 3 is no longer on Amazon.  

It seemed kind of weird.  I thought, "are you writing your own story now?"  Maybe they are.

One day I was browsing Goodreads and found out someone had written a blog post about my book Derelict that was mostly complimentary, though a few of those compliments were the backhanded sort.  In the comments it was mentioned like The Magic Panties that they didn't think something with a cover like that could actually be a good story.

I get it as the woman on the cover is kind of skanky, but that's what people want.  Mainstream books you can get away with showing just shoes but books like these you have to have some sex appeal.  Looking at this cover in a larger format, I realized I needed to use the Soft Edge filter on the woman because on the right you can see a thin white line that didn't get cropped out.  The tooth of her necklace also needed some white added back, so I copied and pasted in an unformatted version of the tooth.  Not that anyone would notice, but now it's a little better.

Anyway, I liked that this reader actually GOT what the story was, which was mostly like a Twilight Zone episode--specifically that one with Bill Mumy wishing people to the cornfield.  While there is some sex, it's not just a sex romp.  It's nice when someone actually understands what you were trying to do instead of just complaining because it didn't check their imaginary boxes.

This person has Reunion: Gender Swap Warriors on a To-Read shelf, but I don't think he/she has read it yet.

Fun Fact:  While I thought they had merged reviews from all their international sites on the main Amazon.com page, this review is still apparently only on the Canadian page.  I'm not sure why.

File this under "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery":

A filter that can turn you into a girl.  Great idea!  One that I pretty much had at the start of last year, so almost 18 months earlier.  Only mine was an app called Swapp, which I think is cleverer.  Swap + app = Swapp.  Boom!  The cover design is even similar, though I used a computery background and a sexier chick:

So far the other book has 1 2-star review saying it just ended without any resolution.  The Swapp books are rated much better.  So there.  Accept no substitutes!