Random Thoughts on Ranking Luthors

I read this article on the Geek Twins the other day comparing the various TV/movie Lex Luthors.  I had a lot of thoughts on it so I decided to write a blog entry instead of just a comment on the site.

First off, I think any sane person would agree with the Geek Twins' assessment that Jesse Eisenberg was the worst Luthor ever.  I mean come on, what a shit character he was.  Was he supposed to be autistic or something?  Eisenberg seemed to think he was playing Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory combined with his Zuckerberg in The Social Network.  Ugh.  Really brought down the movie.  And his plan was so dumb.  I'm going to piss off Bruce Wayne and then hopefully he'll want to kill Superman, who I'll blackmail into fighting him while I finish my Doomsday monster who'll rampage around destroying stuff for...reasons.  Then I'll contact Steppenwolf to tell him Earth is ripe for the taking.  And...what was the endgame?  Did he have any control of Doomsday or any way to stop him?  And what was the point of talking to Steppenwolf?  (Which we see in the Ultimate version or deleted scenes--or both.)  I hate this alien Superman so I'll serve up Earth on a silver platter to a brutal alien warlord.  Um...what?

And that stupid thing with getting his hair cut in prison.  It's prison, not the army!  They don't give prisoners haircuts unless you have lice or maybe if you have a nasty word carved in your hair or something.  I've spent a lot of time on this already but really, his character just sucked.

The next picks were from the old Superboy TV show in the late 80s.  I remember seeing that show on like Saturday afternoons or whenever.  And I remember how they switched actors.  It was pretty weird.  I mean typically if you replace actors (like they did with Superboy) you want to get someone pretty similar, not 20 years older.

I haven't seen the old Atom Man vs Superman movie or the 90s Lois and Clark show so I really have no comment on those.  I thought Kevin Spacey's Luthor was pretty good, but it would have been better if they'd made him more like Michael Rosenbaum's Smallville version that was based on the 80s comic reboot.  Trying to recreate the campy Gene Hackman version (only actually bald this time) was pretty lame.

Which really I hated Hackman's Luthor.  It probably wasn't as bad when I first saw it as a kid, but it doesn't age real well.  Rewatching Superman II a couple of months ago didn't really dissuade me in that thinking at all.  It's so campy and there's the fact he's not even bald, which was a central thing about the character.  I mean it'd be like if an actor says, "I'll play Captain Hook but not with a hook hand."  Or like having Dr. Doom without the armor in most of the Fantastic Four movies.  Why don't you have Dr. Octopus with only 2 arms or the Vulture with no wings?

I really liked the Smallville version.  At least the first few seasons there wasn't any cartoonish supervillainery.  He wasn't even a bad guy, just a rich guy with a troubled family history and a freak accident that caused him to lose his hair.  His dad left him in the rinky-dink town of Smallville basically to keep him out of the way and there was always his dad's shadow looming over him.  I remember in one episode they flashed back to one childhood birthday party and there was all this food and balloons and stuff and no one showed up because losing his hair and being super rich in the small town made him an outsider.  He was a complex character, unlike most of the other versions.  The Eisenberg version tried to incorporate a little of the conflict with his dad in his ramblings about that painting, but it didn't work nearly as well.

Looking at the list, it occurred to me that all of the actors were white.  and then I thought, Why not a black guy?  Sure the "SJW" crowd would complain like they always do, but black guys look so much better bald than white guys.  And since I'm a bald white guy I think I'm an authority.  I mean just looking at that list most of the actors either didn't go bald or it looked fake.  There aren't many white guys who can pull it off.  Patrick Stewart is one.  Jason Statham.  Bruce Willis, I guess.  There are a lot more badass bald black guys:  Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury, Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix movies, Michael Clarke Duncan in Daredevil, Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley in Space Jam, Shaq in Steel.  It's no contest!

That's the direction they should go the next time they're looking for a movie Luthor.  Idris Elba would be great but then I think he'd be great in most anything:  James Bond, Batman, Luthor, whatever.  He's awesome.  Samuel L Jackson or Laurence Fishburne would be good too.  Will Smith, Don Cheadle, Denzel Washington, Forest Whitaker, they're all good proven actors.  If you want to go younger you could get someone like Mahershala Ali, Jamie Foxx, Michael B Jordan, Donald Glover, or Daniel Kaluuya.  Any of them would be great and I doubt they'd put up much fuss about going bald either.  And they'd look cool, not fake.  I'm just saying.

But if you insist on a white guy my pick would be Corey Stoll.  He already played an evil businessman/scientist in Ant-Man and he's naturally bald.  So there.

Tomorrow I'm going to share not one but two potential Luthor movie ideas.

Future Past Imperfect

One of the annoying things when I watch Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville is all the 20th Century references.  Like the Kermit the Frog on his desk.  Or in one episode when he and a girlfriend watch The King and I (the Yul Brynar version) and later listened to Billy Joel.  In one episode he tells the first officer’s boyfriend that her favorite band is Journey.  In another episode they watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and in another Singing in the Rain.  The first officer designed a whole simulation on the holodeck to look like 1940s America.

Before you pile on, it’s not just The Orville.  The Star Trek shows have done that plenty.  In the original series they went to a Nazi planet, a gangster planet, a Roman planet, and back in time to the “present” of the 1960s.  And of course the famous “City on the Edge of Forever” where they went back to the 1930s.  In Next Generation Picard had his noir detective character Dixon Hill.  Data played Sherlock Holmes.  The crew played poker against Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, etc.  In DS9 Sisko had a baseball on his desk.  In Voyager they went back to the “present” of the 1990s at one point.  And of course there was Star Trek IV, a whole movie set around going back in time to 1980s San Francisco.

It happens in books too.  There was one book I really hated and part of it was it’s the 25th Century and on this planet a gateway to Hell was opened and all these evil people were coming out to possess people.  Among them were Nazis.  I have no love for Nazis, but that would be like 500 years in the past; maybe the author could have focused on more current villains?

In a Tweet MacFarlane defended the Billy Joel in the show by saying that most attempts to make “future” music suck.  Which is probably true.  And if you think about it even music like the cantina band in Star Wars (yes I know it’s a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, but shut up) was based on Earth music.  The music in Jabba’s Palace in Return of the Jedi even more so.

There is of course a practical element to this.  To invent new instruments and such would be time-consuming and costly.  Licensing some Billy Joel or showtunes is a lot more cost-effective.  Making video clips of “future” movies or TV shows would likewise be costly and time-consuming.  It’s much cheaper to just license an old movie.  It’s the same reason that in most movies and TV shows if they’re watching TV it’s some really ancient cartoon no self-respecting kid would be watching in real life because that shit is pretty much public domain so you can pick up a DVD at a dollar store and plug in a clip.

On shows like Star Trek it is much more cost-effective to shoot on a backlot made up like the 20s or 30s or 40s than to create a whole new futuristic city.  Chances are that already existed so all you had to do was rent the space for a few days.  It saves a lot of money.

Also another part of it is that most people know what Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or The King and I or Singing in the Rain or Billy Joel are.  If you created some new show or movie or music, the audience wouldn’t know what it was.  There would be no emotional connection to it.

And yet I can’t help thinking a big part of it is also a lack of imagination.  It’s hard enough to imagine one future society without trying to imagine all the incremental changes to get to that point.  If I were to imagine life in 2100 I’d probably be spectacularly wrong, as wrong as someone in 1900 trying to imagine 2019.  (Where are our jetpacks and moon colonies?!)  It’d be much harder to imagine 2030, 2040, 2050, 2060, 2070, 2080, and 2090 to feed into that.  Plenty of awful movies and TV shows got the future wrong (you should see 1980-ish’s The Apple’s depiction of “1994” and be very glad it never happened) but even good shows like Star Trek and The Twilight Zone often got it wrong.  I think by now we’re pretty much living in the same time as The Jetsons but no flying cars or cities in the sky.  I suppose some people can have robots to clean and stuff.

This is why prequels like the Star Wars ones or Star Trek Enterprise/Discovery have problems with how everything looks better than it does in the original.  It’s almost impossible from the 21st Century to design a “past” that would dovetail smoothly with sets from the 60s and 70s.  In the case of Star Trek, sets and costumes that were made on the cheap back in 1966.  (Especially the Klingons.)  It would look utterly ridiculous to have that same 1960s look in 2019.  It’s not just the technology but the costumes, hairstyles, and so on.  It’s really hard to be living in 2019 and try to work backwards from what someone did in 1966 or 1977.  It’s far easier to design it around what you have available in the present.

Writers have it a little easier in that we don’t have to actually create sets, costumes, etc.  We can just make shit up.  Yet it’s still hard for sci-fi writers to not work in references to the 20th Century or earlier because as I said earlier it’s something the audience will know and be able to connect with.  Despite that it’s ludicrous and more than a little arrogant to think people will give a shit about 20th Century American culture in the 23rd or 24th Century.  I mean how much do you care about the 17th or 18th Century culture?  Sure there are things that survive like Shakespeare, Mozart, and Beethoven but unless you’re going to a costume party you’re not going to wear one of those big puffy Elizabethan collars or powdered wigs or shit like that.  You probably aren’t going to listen to harpsichord music or the drinking songs of the time.  Most of that shit gets forgotten except by a few historians or anthropologists.  Just like most of our culture will probably be forgotten in time.

That includes all of my books, I’m sure.  So there’s no need for me to write for the 23rd Century when I barely have a 21st Century audience.

A to Z Challenge Theme Reveal

I'm pretty sure I already revealed the theme months and months ago.  In 2017 I did Transformers and in 2018 I did GI JOE, so I figured in 2019, why not do another of my favorite cartoon shows with toys:  Robotech.

I first saw the show on the local UHF station that in a year or so would become home to an experimental new network:  Fox.  They showed it at like 6am or so, which was about the only good thing about having to get up early for the bus to school.

The interesting thing about the series is it was actually 3 Japanese series that American producers redubbed and strung together into an epic saga.

The first part was called Super Dimensional Fortress Macross in Japan.  The second part was called Southern Cross or something.  And the third part was called Genesis Climber Mospeada.

While I watched the show when I was a kid, it was reading the books in the 90s that really rekindled my interest in it.  The books, originally published by Del Rey starting in the late 80s, aren't written all that great but when you're 14-15 that doesn't really matter all that much.

The good things about the books are first they can fill in gaps in the TV series.  Since it was spliced from 3 different shows the transitions aren't all that smooth.  The books help to knit everything together and to add some shading to what is on the screen.  A whole series of books (The Sentinels) was supposed to be a follow-up TV show but was never made so the books (and maybe comics) are the only way you can experience those.  Since the shows were dubbed from the Japanese versions, the dialogue in the books can sound a little more natural than it does on the screen where sometimes the delivery might sound too fast or slow or forced to replace the Japanese words.

So a lot of what I'm going to talk about in the A to Z entries comes from the books, not the TV shows.

Since you haven't read those books or probably watched the TV shows in a long time, if ever, let me start by breaking down the basic story line for you.

First Generation (Super Dimensional Fortress Macross)  Books 1-6, 19:

A long time ago, in this galaxy, an alien scientist named Zor discovered a powerful energy called Protoculture.  He took it back home to Tirol, where the leaders there used it to gain ultimate power.  They soon started to called themselves the Robotech Masters.

The Masters used Protoculture for the creation of ships and battle machines (mecha) operated by an army of giant clones called the Zentraedi.  They conquered a bunch of planets and were seemingly unbeatable.

Except the residents of the planet where Zor discovered Protoculture--slug-like creatures called the Invid--didn't take kindly to having their planet exploited.  They raised their own fleet and army of mecha to fight the Zentraedi.

Aghast at what he'd wrought, Zor loaded the one-of-a-kind Protoculture matrix on his super-dimensional fortress.  Guided by a vision, he sent the ship to a placid blue planet:  Earth.

In the year 1999, Earth was in a constant state of war.  It was called the Global Civil War, though basically it was World War III.  Things were pretty bleak, with nuclear war seeming inevitable.  Then the giant spaceship crashes on a tiny Pacific island called Macross.

A team explores the ship to find the corpses of giant aliens and a warning about them and the Invid.  So Earth unites under a new world government and begins refurbishing the ship.  Earth scientists also start building new mecha to fight the alien menace.

But no aliens show up for 10 years.  On the day the fortress, christened Super Dimensional Fortress 1 (SDF-1), is ready to go online, the Zentraedi war fleet arrives near the moon.  They begin sending down forces to capture the SDF-1.  There's a battle and the captain of the SDF-1 decides to "fold" away from Earth.

The fold goes wrong and the ship jumps all the way to Pluto, which was a planet at the time of the show and books. The ship begins making its way back to Earth but it doesn't take the Zentraedi long to catch up and attack them.

With millions of ships the Zentraedi could easily overwhelm the humans but they want the ship intact so they don't press the advantage.  There are a few minor engagements before the SDF-1 gets back to Earth.  But Earth doesn't want them around since the Zentraedi have no interest in the planet.  The SDF-1 goes back into space for a little while, but ultimately they return to Earth and this time land in the ocean.

When the Robotech Masters created the Zentraedi, they made them without a lot of basic emotions like love.  The Zentraedi didn't have families or children or any of that.  Males and females had little contact with each other.  So it turns out humans have a secret weapon:  music, movies, and kissing!  As the Zentraedi soak in human culture, they start to defect to the SDF-1.

Ultimately the Zentraedi leader, Dolza, decides to bring his massive flagship and war fleet to destroy the Zentraedi who have had contact with humans.  Those Zentraedi join with the SDF-1 to fight Dolza.  But first, Dolza's fleet razes most of Earth.

With a little trickery, the humans and their Zentraedi allies get into the enemy flagship and blow it up, taking out most of the enemy.  Then the badly damaged SDF-1 returns to Earth for good.

Earth is badly scarred from the "Rain of Death" with most major cities being wiped out and crashed Zentraedi ships all over.  Besides the humans in the SDF-1, there are also the surviving Zentraedi now living on the planet.

But for most Zentraedi adjusting to a human life is all but impossible since they were bred for war.  One of the former Zentraedi leaders, Khyron the Backstabber, recruits disaffected Zentraedi to fight the humans.  After his plans are thwarted, Khyron crashes his ship into the SDF-1 and its sister SDF-2, destroying both.

Construction of an SDF-3 soon begins.  The ship is to undertake a mission to Tirol to offer an olive branch to the Robotech Masters.  But things are still unsettled on Earth.  A new, xenophobic government called the Army of the Southern Cross is rising while the Zentraedi launch terrorist attacks on human targets.  The Zentraedi are soon put down and the SDF-3 leaves for its mission with pretty much all the main characters from this series to explain why they aren't in the second series.

Second Generation (The Masters Saga):  Books 20, 7-9, 21:

With the SDF-3 gone, the Army of the Southern Cross is soon in charge of Earth.  About 15 years
later, the Robotech Masters show up with ships and mecha of their own to look for the lost Protoculture matrix.

There's fighting in space and on the ground, with things not going great for Earth.  But the Masters are running out of Protoculture and getting increasingly desperate.  Inside the ruins of the SDF-1, the Protoculture matrix begins letting out spores that start growing into the Flower of Life.

The Masters have lost the Protoculture matrix and soon are all dead.  Hooray, right?  Nope.  The growth of the Flowers calls out to the Invid, drawing them to Earth.

In the meantime, a human ship shows up over Earth claiming to be from the Robotech Expeditionary Force, which was the name for the SDF-3 mission.  Dana Sterling and her platoon steal the ship to go to Tirol and find her parents.

The Sentinels:  Books 13-17

While Earth is reorganizing under the Army of the Southern Cross, the SDF-3 appears at Tirol 10 years after the Robotech Masters have left for Earth.  The SDF-3 is damaged, its fold engines useless to leave the Robotech Expeditionary Force stranded.  They set up camp on Tirol to get their bearings after driving off the Invid there.  Soon they're hailed by a group of aliens calling itself the Sentinels that are fighting the Invid, who have enslaved their planets.

Some of the REF, led by Admiral Rick Hunter, go to help the Sentinels take back their worlds.  The fight goes across four planets before they get to the Invid homeworld of Optera and finally defeat the Invid--or half the Invid.

Third Generation (New Generation): Books 10-12

Earth is licking its wound after the Robotech Masters when the Invid regis and her army shows up.  The Invid easily defeat the remnants of the Southern Cross and begin setting up hives to grow and harvest the Flowers of Life.

Meanwhile, having defeated the Invid on the other side of the galaxy, the Robotech Expeditionary Force turns its attention to defeating the Invid on Earth.  Scott Bernard is part of the first armada sent to retake the planet.  But the invasion is a debacle and Scott finds himself marooned in South America.

Undaunted, he gathers a ragtag group of freedom fighters to head north to "Reflex Point," which is about where Indianapolis used to be. After a long journey, the irregulars make it to Reflex Point about the same time as a second wave of the REF shows up.

The Invid regis is convinced to leave Earth.  She gathers up all the Invid in a symphony of light that destroys the REF fleet as it leaves.

At last Earth is free!  But there's still one last loose end...

The End of the Circle, Book 18:

The SDF-3 has disappeared!  It folded with the rest of the REF fleet but instead of going to Earth it wound up stranded in another dimension.  Pretty much all the main characters from all three series are brought together to explore this dimension and find a way out.  Which they do with help from the Invid regis and the thought-to-be-lost fold engines of the SDF-1.

The SDF-3 returns to Earth to find the planet healing and having moved on from Protoculture.  And so everyone can go on with their lives.  Hooray!

The first series is probably the most popular of the three.  It's the longest and most iconic in terms of books, comics, video games, and other merchandising.  The second series gets kind of short shrift as it has to follow up the iconic first series and set up the third series.  A lot of it doesn't make all that much sense on its own, so the Japanese version is probably better.  The third series is good in that it doesn't have to insert a bunch of blather about a Protoculture Matrix, so in a way it might be the purest of the three.  And except for the beginning and end it's mostly focused on smaller fight scenes, not massive space battles.

The A to Z entries in April will fill in more of the story--mostly the characters and equipment.  So strap in and get ready!

Al Bundy, Patron Saint of MAGA Hatters

The other day I talked about King of the Hill and the Republican Party.  Also recently Hulu added all 11 seasons of Married With Children.  That was a show that in the mid-80s blazed the trail for Roseanne, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and right up to Modern Family, which also stars Ed O’Neill.

Married With Children focused on the low-income, dysfunctional Bundy family.  Patriarch Al Bundy was a former high school football star (he scored four touchdowns in a single game!) who married his high school “sweetheart” Peg and they had two kids:  the blonde bimbo Kelly and the perverted loser Bud.  What the show did was take the old All in the Family formula and amp up the bickering and bantering and add a lot of crass potty humor.  It was the first real hit for the upstart Fox network and is still probably their longest-running live action scripted show.  Honestly, I can't think of another Fox live-action scripted show that had 11 seasons consecutively.  I mean I think they recently added a season to the X-Files so it might have technically gotten there, but I don't consider it really the same.  What other ones might have gone that long:  90210 or Melrose Place?  (And I said live action and scripted so not The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Idol, Cops, or America's Most Wanted.)

Watching it in modern times you can see the similarities between Al and the stereotypical MAGA hat wearing guy.  He’s a poor blue-collar slob but thinks he’s superior to most everyone.  Doesn’t like foreigners.  Doesn’t really like gays.  Doesn’t like women unless they’ve got big hooters and are showing them off.  Especially doesn’t like “political correctness” espoused by his yuppie neighbor Marcy.  And he’s got a big mouth that’s not afraid to say all those things.  It’s not hard to imagine him wearing a MAGA hat and shouting about building a wall.

The only real differences are that Al didn’t have a bunch of guns and like Dale of King of the Hill he wasn’t really openly racist.  Misogynist, hell yes.  Xenophobic, definitely.  But not racist.  In fact in the last few seasons they added a black co-worker for him to be friends with.  I guess in the 80s/90s it was OK to hate women, foreigners, and gays but not people of color.  Make of that what you will.

You might wonder then why I even watch the show.  Why not?  I used to watch The Simpsons and Family Guy all the time and this is basically a live action cartoon.  And I’m poor and my luck usually seems on par with the Bundys.  I think the “Bundy Curse” is pretty much a real thing for people like me:  if you have any good luck, you’ll get an even greater amount of bad luck to cancel it out.  So if something good happens, watch out!  But I’m probably more like Bud than Al, the slightly more evolved caveman. Lol

Anyway, if your MAGA hat friends have streaming, tell them to watch this show because they’ll probably enjoy it.

A fun thing about watching this show now is there were a lot of people with bit parts who went on to do better things.  If you watch you’ll see actors like Paulie Shore, Tiffany Amber-Thiesen, Joey Lauren Adams, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jane Lynch, Jerry Springer, Bill Maher, Armin Shimmerman (Quark of DS9), Casper van Dien, and even Homer Simpson himself Dan Castellaneta.  (There are more I can’t remember.)  Though perhaps the most interesting one was they actually had one of those tacky episodes to set up a spinoff that would have starred Matt LeBlanc.  It’s funny to think had that spinoff been greenlit and lasted a couple of seasons, someone else probably would have been saying, “How you doin’?” to women on Friends.  Maybe we'd have been spared Joey.

A while back when I had basic cable I watched one of those E! True Hollywood Stories about this show and I’m pretty sure it said originally the role of Peg was supposed to go to Roseanne Barr but then she wound up with her own show on ABC instead.  Another Fun Fact is there was one episode “The Period Show” Fox wouldn’t air because it dealt with Peg, Kelly, and Marcy all getting their period at the same time while they were with their husbands and Bud in a cabin in the woods.  For all the crude humor and that’s where they drew the line?  It’s weird.  But you can watch it now on streaming.

(Sorry, this was kind of a thin premise for an entry.)

King of the Hill Illustrates the Fall of the GOP

I was excited last fall when Hulu finally added Fox’s King of the Hill to their service.  Except for a few episodes on Adult Swim, I hadn’t seen that show pretty much since it ended in 2010.  I always liked it, especially when it came after The Simpsons because it was a good complement to that show because unlike Family Guy it wasn’t the same show with slightly different animation and a lot of asides.

The show centered around Hank Hill, who lived in the small Texas city of Arlen with his wife Peggy and 12/13-year-old son Bobby.  (He started as 12 and then eventually he was 13.)  Unlike Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, Hank wasn’t a blundering oaf; he was a fairly normal blue-collar guy who sold propane and propane accessories.  He was obsessive about propane, grilling, and caring for his lawn.  Most of the time (starting in the credits) he’d be drinking beer in an alley with his friends Bill, Dale, and Boomhauer.

Hank was basically the Republican ideal:  patriotic, hard-working, middle-class, white, conservative, Christian, male.  He has a pick-up truck and a hunting rifle but not a bunch of guns.  But the things he wasn’t:  racist, homophobic, and fear-mongering.  Not that he had a lot of black or gay friends (when a Laotian family moves in, he and his friends ask the patriarch of the family:  are you Chinese or Japanese?) but he wasn’t burning crosses in their yards or petitioning the government to drive them out of town.  Casual racism/homophobia at most. 

Contrast that with his friend Dale who isn’t racist or homophobic but is a big time conspiracy nut and gun nut.  And he loves wearing hats to cover his baldness.  If you added some racism and homophobia, Dale could trade that orange hat in for a MAGA hat.

Watching the show in 2018, you can see a Before-and-After of the Republican Party.  Hank is what the GOP was until Rush, Newt, Fox “News,” Karl Rove, Bush/Cheney, Sarah Palin, and ultimately Donald Trump drove it ever farther right.  The GOP in 2019 looks a lot more like Dale than Hank.  Which is sad because when King of the Hill aired Dale was supposed to be a nut, a doofus who never even figured out his wife had been cheating on him for about 15 years (even getting knocked up by the Native American guy) and now he’s mainstream.  He’s the one at the Trump rallies chanting “Build the Wall!” and threatening journalists.

Doubly sad because Hank’s Republican Party wasn’t all that bad.  It disagreed with the liberals but it was at least sane and mostly reasonable.  It was willing to find compromise.  We could have differences and still be friends at the end of the day.  Back in those days you actually had the feeling of a real choice.

But then it all changed when W Bush lied us into a costly war and everything became win at any cost, no matter how you have to lie and cheat to get there.  The environment that caused the most recent government shutdown and Trump’s bogus “national emergency” is a product of that.

A problem I think is a lot of people still think the GOP candidates they’re voting for are part of that Hank Hill version of the party.  They haven’t realized yet that the Dales are running the show now and that 30% is bringing the rest of us along for the ride.  By the time they do wake up to reality, it’ll probably be too late.

Shock and Awful Storytelling

It's TV Week!  All the entries this week have something to do with TV shows.  You've been warned.

TV shows, especially network shows, typically bring out the big guns in November, February, and May for “sweeps.”  That’s when ratings are measured or whatever to determine whether a show will be picked up or cancelled. 

Having missed November, it’s no surprise that Fox’s The Orville had to pull some literal big guns out in February.  The science officer Isaac was a cybernetic being from a mysterious advanced race known as the Kaylon.  He was supposedly on the ship to determine whether the Kaylons would join the Federation, er, Union.

A couple of the best episodes of the series had the unemotional “robot” bonding with the doctor and her two young sons.  In the first episode the four of them are stranded on a remote planet and have to work together to survive.  In another Isaac and Dr. Finn embark upon a relationship, which included Isaac taking on a human body in the holodeck thing so they could have sex.

About two weeks after that episode, Isaac abruptly deactivates.  The crew takes him back to his homeworld for repairs.  While there they uncover billions of corpses under the planet and learn the dirty secret of the Kaylon:  they overthrew the biological organisms who constructed them and then slaughtered every living thing on the planet. 

(As an aside, why would the corpses still be there centuries later?  Obviously the Kaylon have the technology to incinerate the bodies entirely.  You could say that they want to keep them there as a reminder, but they’re robots, they don’t forget shit!  Every Kaylon has the memory of all that stuff so why would they need tangible proof?  It’s so damned convenient they left that stuff for the Orville crew to find.)

Isaac’s true mission then was to determine whether the Kaylon should kill all humans.  To which the answer is yes.  So they capture the crew and commandeer the ship to head to Earth with a dozen huge space gun things in tow that looked like enlarged versions of the reactor Iron Man used to power his armor.

This first episode really annoyed me because it undid all the character building of those other episodes.  None of that meant anything, apparently, because now he’s a bad guy and it was all an act.  And even if it wasn’t, how do you come back after your people killed like a dozen innocent crewmembers?

Up to that point I’d watched all the episodes on Hulu but I decided that next week to watch it live on Fox.  It was...meh.  There was a big space battle that was pretty cool.  Other than that, it wasn’t great.  Isaac turns on his people in the most cliched way possible:  the head bad guy takes Dr. Finn’s youngest son captive and tells Isaac to kill him.  This is so pathetically cliche that cartoons like Transformers and GI Joe did it back in the 80s.  Of course Isaac isn’t going to kill the kid!  Instead he kills all his people on the ship.  As I Tweeted, what’s next, having a bad guy incriminate himself by talking into a hot mic?  I mean while we’re using up age-old cliches.

The battle against the Kaylon is turned when the enemy Krill show up with a fleet.  Which would have been great if they hadn’t telegraphed that so far in advance.  Two officers from the Orville snuck away to meet with the Krill and were followed by a Kaylon gun thing that attacked the Krill and thus obviously the Krill were going to help fight the Kaylon then.  Duh.  It wasn’t exactly Han Solo coming back to shoot Darth Vader’s TIE fighter so Luke could blow up the Death Star.

At the end Isaac is abandoned by his people but is given refuge on the Orville.  Which is something Deep Space Nine did like 20+ years ago.  Odo, the shapeshifting head of security, found out his people had a beef against the “solids” and were going to use their clone army and fleet to kill and enslave all the solids.  At one point when Odo refused to join them he was banished and made solid for a time.

Which the issue with this show for me is that when it does character-driven episodes it’s pretty good, but when it tries to do bigger episodes it winds up regurgitating Star Trek scripts.  Not just these episodes but there was one at the beginning of the year where they make first contact with a planet governed by astrology and so locks up a couple of the crew because they were born under a bad sign.  (Why lock them up and not simply banish them?  Oh, right, because that would be a very short episode.)  The first contact gone wrong thing had probably been done 50 times on the various Trek series over the last 50+ years.  At that point the show feels like a really expensive cosplay, which is annoying.

Anyway, because they needed a big shock story for an attempted ratings grab they basically fucked up the evolution of Isaac’s character.  But in the end they just fell back to cliches and warmed-over Star Trek material.  If you’re going to ruin one of your better stories at least do it in the service of a decent story.  I’m just saying.

Comics Small & Big

First off, for a few months Tony Laplume has been doing his own DC-inspired comics series:  Crisis Weekly.  The concept is sort of like in the mid-2000s when DC did the weekly series 52 that focused on a year without the Big Three:  Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.

In this case each week Tony has a new 8-page(ish) script posted on one of his blogs.  The story involves Man-Bats (lots of Man-Bats) and White Martians and of course Batman because he’s everywhere.  While there is eventually Batman most of it focuses on lesser known characters like Bloodwynd, Firehawk, and El Dorado, whom you might remember from Superfriends when they added some diversity to the lineup with El Dorado, Samurai, and Black Vulcan.  Better known characters like Martian Manhunter, Guy Gardner, and did I mention Batman(?) also show up.  And there are some new characters too.  And Man-Bats.  Lots of Man-Bats.

Most of what I liked is the focus on those lesser characters.  It reminded me of why I liked the Transformers More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light series in that it gave a chance for forgotten or seemingly insignificant characters to shine.

Speaking of, I enjoy reading Arion’s blog that largely focuses on comics, though other times movies too.  Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed because he reads and talks about all these indie series while I mostly stick to the mainstream titles.

There were a lot of sales at the end/beginning of the year so I decided to get a couple of the indie comics Arion recommended to broaden my horizons a little.

Highest House:  In a fantasy kingdom I guess based on the 16th Century Balkans from what Goodreads says, a boy named Moth is sold into slavery by his mom.  She tries to sell his sister but she's going blind so they won't buy her.  

Moth is taken to "Highest House" the colossal palace of one of the major houses in the kingdom.  It's kind of like King's Landing in Game of Thrones.  Moth is chosen to help a woman work on the many roofs of the place.  But soon in his dreams he starts hearing the voice of a mysterious being known as Obsidian that wants to make a bargain with Moth:  it'll give him whatever he wants if he helps to free it.  Eventually Moth agrees on the condition that Obsidian give him knowledge, heal his sister's eyes, and free the slaves.  But Obsidian can't do all of that directly.

Moth eventually meets the daughter of the lord of the house and instantly gets a crush on her.  When he saves her life, he's offered freedom, but refuses it because then he'd have to leave Obsidian before he could get what he wants.  The daughter has a secret that when Moth discovers it, she agrees to help him learn to read so he won't spill the beans.

The end of the first six issues has Moth going back to his home as the lord wants his help as a guide.  They seek out someone making something unheard of:  paper money!  The paper money could take away the lord's power with his control of steel that's used as currency so he wants to get rid of it, but Moth convinces him that controlling the paper money would be more useful.

Writer Mike Carey creates a fascinating world that has its own history and rules.  While most of it is medieval like GOT there is also magic, though not many people know how to use it anymore.  Moth is a really well-developed character.  He's not a flawless hero; he does save the lord's daughter and later the whole household, but he's not above making the bargain with Obsidian to get what he wants, even after he knows Obsidian is probably not a benevolent entity.  He gains freedom for the roofer but only because he wants to stay so Obsidian can fulfill the bargain.

Obsidian is often sarcastic and funny so it's kind of easy to forget that he's probably a monster.  Most of the other main characters all have flaws and quirks to keep them from being cliches or archetypes.  Whenever Part 2 comes out I'll have to read it to find out what's next for Moth and Obsidian.

Young Protectors:  This was one of those Kickstarter success stories where they wanted $13,000 to make a collected volume of the webcomic and wound up getting 10 times the amount asked for!  Mainstream comics have in the last 15 years or so ushered in a few homosexual characters like Batwoman, Earth 2 Green Lantern, and the X-Men’s Iceman, but it’s still not something widespread.  Even then it’s just kind of a side thing while they’re fighting supervillains and space monsters or whatever.

The main driving force of Young Protectors is the homosexual relationship between a young hero (Red Hot) and a supervillain (Annihilator).  Red Hot in his secret identity ventures into a gay bar only to come out and find Annihilator there to blackmail him into a kiss.  Red Hot finds he likes this kiss and so he and Annihilator see each other again, going on a date in Hong Kong that’s broken up by some vigilantes.  So there’s still some comic book action but the relationship is the main thing as I said.

There are a couple of side issues that were mostly included thanks to the Kickstarter.  One is a good illustration of Rule 34:  if it’s on the Internet there’s porn for it.  Red Hot and his teammates are on the web when they find a bunch of gay porn starring them!  There’s also the secret origin for the mysterious Spooky Jones and Commander, the team’s leader.

For an indie Kickstartered thing the artwork is actually really good.  Probably because it’s drawn by someone who also did work for Marvel and DC on some of their bigger titles.  So you’re not really seeing a drop in quality from the big boys.

While I was searching for indie titles I noticed one written by Bill Corbett called Super Powered Revenge Christmas.  I wondered:  is that the same Bill Corbett who was on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and does the Rifftrax movies I watch obsessively on Pluto TV?

And yes, it is.  This comic was actually adapted from a stage play, though I think this format works better because it’s about a comic.  The framing device is that it’s Christmas Eve and a comics writer and his wife who draws his comics go into a bar and challenge the patrons to decide how their book should end.

The book is like if the story of Christmas were a superhero comic.  All of the characters come from popular culture only with a superhero twist.  The Red Avenger is a warrior from another planet who’s been sent to Earth to find a protect a Chosen One.  He wears red fur and startles enemies with his fearsome battlecry:  Ho, Ho, Ho!  He finds a mutant bipedal deer that shoots lasers from his nose.  More nebulous is a woman with the power to control ice and snow who’s loosely based on Frosty the Snowman.  They meet a superpowered couple named Joe and Mary who are about to have a special baby.  Opposing them are the evil Mr. S(crooge), Mr. P(otter), and Mr. G(rinch).  (Joe, Mary, and Potter are all based loosely on characters from It’s A Wonderful Life, though Joe’s name in that movie was George and he didn’t have superpowers--Obviously.)

Eventually we get to the writer’s ending, which is grim and gritty in the tradition of more recent comics.  Whereas his wife’s ending is far happier.  Guess which one people prefer?

It was a really fun comic to read even in January and there were good messages about comics and creating stories in general.  Basically not everything needs to be “edgy.”  Like Christmas stories.  But isn’t this practicing what it preaches against then?  Error, Error, Paradox, Does Not Compute…

I don’t know if Dynamite is a small enough publisher to include on this part of the list, but what the hell.

Many years ago Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame wrote the series Marvel Zombies.  Wow, what a stretch, right?  It spawned some sequels and such but the Marvel/Dynamite spinoff Marvel Zombies vs Army of Darkness pits the zombie superheroes against their greatest foe:  Bruce Campbell!  Ash from the Evil Dead/Army of Darkness movies is somehow summoned into the Marvel Zombie universe as the infection is spreading.  He teams with little known heroine Dazzler and they escape zombies to get to Dr. Doom in Latveria, where he has a book that might help.  A lot of mayhem ensues.  It’s a fun miniseries that while it has different writers than either original series manages to capture their essence.

Another Dynamite spinoff crossover thing was Darkman vs Army of Darkness.  I’m a huge fan of the Darkman movies so I wanted to read this for a while.  Darkman was a scientist who after being assaulted by gangsters in his lab was badly burned but also lost the ability to feel pain and gained greater physical strength.  He can create masks of people with fake skin that lasts for exactly 99 minutes in the daylight before it melts.

Darkman’s former girlfriend Julie and a colleague find a mysterious book and it possesses Julie and starts creating an army of the dead, including Darkman’s arch-nemesis Robert G Durant.  Julie’s colleague and Darkman inadvertently read a page from the book and it summons Ash.  He teams with Darkman so they can whoop on the zombies while trying not to kill Julie.

Another fun series that I wished was longer than 4 issues.  The art is decent, managing to capture the look of the characters, though Durant maybe doesn’t quite look like Larry Drake.  As a Fun Fact, in the original Darkman movie the “final shemp” or the disguise Darkman wears to escape from Julie into a crowd, was played by Bruce Campbell.  So he technically was both Darkman and Ash.

Neither of these Dynamite series were on Comixology or Kindle so I had to buy them in paper.  The Marvel Zombies one I got in a really nice hardcover while the Darkman one was in paperback.  The seller claimed it was new but the cover of paperback came unglued from the spine before I started reading!  Kind of lame.

Of course I also read plenty of mainstream comics because I’m not some fancy comics connoisseur—I don’t even know how to spell it.

Comixology, where I read most online comics, recently added DC comics to their Unlimited Netflix-ish program.  Some of these comics were also added to Amazon Prime Reading so if you have a Prime account you can read them free.  They were mostly the first volume of Rebirth titles.  I already read the Batman one but there were others.

Superman Rebirth, Vol 1:  There’s a new old Superman in town.  After the New 52 Superman dies, the Superman from the 90s shows up along with his wife Lois and their son Jon.  Their son is starting to get powers and so Superman helps him learn how to use them.  A relatively straightforward training mission to rescue a submarine gets more complicated when they run into the Eradicator (one of the Reign of the Supermen Supermen) who wants to kill Jon to “purify” the Kryptonian bloodline.  Mayhem ensues! (3/5)

Justice League Rebirth, Vol 1:  Yeah, I have no idea what the hell was going on.  A lot of weird monsters from space gathering to sing a song that would destroy existence (or something) and bombs of some sort buried inside the Earth’s mantle that the new old Superman has to destroy.  It made as much sense as Scott Snyder’s idiotic Dark Nights Metal and probably his recent run on the Justice League title. Besides new old Superman, Green Lanterns Simon Baz and Jessica Cruz join the team to replace Hal Jordan’s Green Lantern. (1/5)

Aquaman Rebirth, Vol 1:  Aquaman and Mera are trying to create an Atlantean embassy on land to end hostilities between Atlantis and the surface world, but Black Manta of course messes that up.  Aquaman allows himself to be arrested but when his people come to rescue him, he has to break out to stop them.  Meanwhile Black Manta is broken out by a terrorist group and quickly takes it over.  It was good but it's one of those that in the long run probably got overridden. (3/5)

Teen Titans Rebirth, Vol 1:  Damian Wayne (son of the Batman) recruits Starfire, Raven, Beast Boy, and Kid Flash (black Wally West, not white Wally West) to fight his cousin and some teenaged assassins trained by Ra’s al Guhl.  Damian has to learn to play nice and the others have to learn to be a team…until the lineup was changed yet again. (2/5)

Doom Patrol, Vol 1:  Crawling From the Wreckage:  Though they call it a Volume 1 it’s really issues 19-24, the start of Grant Morrison’s run on the title in the late 80s.  A new team of weird heroes is formed to fight some weird villains like “Scissormen” who come from an imaginary world to destroy reality and “God” who previously visited Earth as Jack the Ripper.  It’s a good setup for what gets a lot weirder in future volumes I’m sure.  They probably put this on Amazon Prime because the new TV series is airing on DC Universe.  Anyway, it was interesting that the Scissormen thing was sort of retooled by Morrison in his series The Multiversity in that something fictional was creating havoc and threatening to destroy reality. (2.5/5)

Speaking of…

The Multiversity:  Some evil force is destroying some of the worlds of the Multiverse and so heroes are gathered from the various worlds to stop it.  Or something.  There were a bunch of spin-offs involving some of these worlds.  Pax Americana was sort of if Morrison had written Watchmen.  The Mastermen was about a world where Superman was raised by the Nazis so it’s sort of a Man in the High Castle thing.  Thunderworld Adventures focuses on Shazam (Captain Marvel) and company.  Another one focused on children of superheroes in a world where all crime had been eliminated by Kryptonian technology so mostly the “heroes” are reality TV stars or gather to reminisce about the good old days.  Some of these didn’t seem to matter that much to the end.  But then this whole series didn’t wind up mattering that much in general. (2/5)

Batman, Rebirth, Vol 8:  This was the first volume after the non-wedding between Batman and Catwoman.  Bruce Wayne bribes his way onto a jury deliberating a case involving Mr. Freeze because he thinks that Freeze was set up, someone planting evidence for Batman to find to make it look like Freeze did it.  Later KGBeast targets Nightwing and Batman tracks him down in Siberia.  It was ironic in the first arc Bruce was worried Batman was going too far and losing control and then…he loses control and goes too far against KGBeast.  Lesson learned! (2.5/5)  (It occurred to me recently that what King is doing is pretty much what Grant Morrison did on his run culminating with Batman RIP and to maybe a lesser extent what Scott Snyder did in Batman Eternal:  a bad guy is destroying Batman and Bruce Wayne to break him mentally.  In Morrison's run Bruce was set up with Jezebel Jett, who broke his heart similarly to what Catwoman did in King's run.  I'm just saying.)

Deadpool Kills the Marvel Universe…Again [sigh]:  In the original DKMU, it was pretty straightforward:  Deadpool snapped and killed everyone.  This time around writer Cullen Bunn provides a little more depth to the story.  Like in Old Man Logan where we learn Wolverine killed the X-Men because Mysterio made him think they were bad guys, Deadpool thinks he’s killing bad guys when really he’s killing good guys.  And then he’s turned against the bad guys controlling him:  Red Skull, Dr. Doom, Magneto, etc.  The art has a wide range of styles as what Deadpool thinks he sees is rendered in a variety of different ways, sometimes overly cartoony or in one case it mimics the 80s Hostess ads in Marvel books.  It’s definitely better than the original DKMU, though the problem is there are so many heroes that you can’t really do elaborate kills for most of them in 5 issues or so.  It’s still fun but not as fun as my favorite where Deadpool went around killing all the great characters of literature.

Hawkeye vs Deadpool:  The title is a misnomer as they don't fight each other except for a few pages near the end when Hawkeye is mind-controlled.  It's a fun story where Deadpool, Hawkeye, and Lady Hawkeye (Kate Bishop) team up to stop Black Cat and a rogue scientist from brainwashing people and uncovering SHIELD agents' real identities. (3/5)

JSA Vol 11:  The Signal:  I bought this in paperback at Ollie's pretty much at random, which turned out to be a problem because I had no idea what was happening.  Hal Jordan's cousin Airwave starts going crazy and so they fly off into space and...that was it for that.  Most of it was about a war in the Fifth Dimension which made little sense to me.  The best part was a side issue about Stargirl who this summer will have her own show on DC Universe.  The story is about her relationship with her father and stepfather.  But the art was nice, especially the Alex Ross-ish covers. (2/5)

Spoiled Goods

A few months ago Pluto TV (and Amazon Prime) added the live Rifftrax show from Halloween 2016 featuring an early 60s movie called Carnival of Souls.  The plot is sort of a forerunner to The Sixth Sense:  a dull blonde woman is with her friends and they decide to drag race some guys for no reason.  Their car goes off a bridge and while her two friends die, the dull blonde survives.  Except years later she starts seeing these white-faced ghouls when she’s on her way to Utah to be a church organist.  And sometimes it seems like no one can see or hear her.  Hmmm…

[As an aside she becomes fascinated with this old carnival that was right in Michael Offutt’s backyard on the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Salt Lake City.  The one shown in the movie was destroyed but a third version is still there, though now it’s just a concert venue not a carnival.  It still has the onion-shaped domes like the original.  It was closed when I was in SLC but I got pictures from afar.  Sadly I did not see any pasty white ghouls—just a lot of Mormons.  Same thing.]

Rebuilt concert hall probably free of zombies.  Probably.

At one of these points where no one can see or hear her, she goes to this shrink’s office she visited earlier.  The shrink has his chair turned to face away from her as she’s talking to him.  Ooh, who could be in the chair?  It’d be a great surprise…if we couldn’t clearly see the top of the guy’s head with the white hair and white paint.  As one of the Riffers said, “Um, hey, Dead Guy, we can see you.”

And yet this goes on for like two minutes while we all know what’s going to happen.  Finally he turns and she screams and runs away.  A moment that should have been shocking instead elicits a sigh and, “About fucking time!”

Incidentally the guy in the chair was also the director so maybe he would have noticed the gaffe if he were behind the camera instead of in the chair, but really someone should have noticed.

Another hilarious non-surprise was in the cyborg cop-free Cyborg Cop 2.  After his partner is killed, the partner's wife gives the main character a lighter and suggests that maybe it'll come in handy.  At the end he has the evil cyborg down and covered in flammable liquids and then, guess what?  He uses the lighter to light it.  The Riffers hilariously deadpan, "Oh, look, the lighter.  They brought it back.  I did not think they would bring that back."  The foreshadowing was so obvious everyone could see it coming!

There’s something similar in an MST3K episode of the late 80s or early 90s movie Werewolf.  At the end it’s dark and the camera is panning up some stairs and stuff and it’s super careful not to show the main character’s girlfriend’s face.  To its credit far more careful than Carnival of Souls.  Still, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen.  Mike and the Bots are like, “Come on, come on, we know she’s a werewolf.”  Guess what?  She is.  Though as they say, she looks more like she’s from a high school version of Cats.

The point being that surprises that aren’t surprises end up annoying the audience not shocking or scaring it.  Movies and books love big plot twists, but if you make the plot twist too obvious then your audience just ends up saying, “About fucking time!”

It’s especially problematic for mysteries because if you tip off people to the killer too quickly, then your audience will be annoyed they have to wait however many pages to reveal what they already know.  Unless it’s like Columbo and you reveal the killer at the start so the audience can watch him figure it out.

I’m sure you can think of a movie or book where you figured out the plot twist long before it was revealed.  If you’re going to do a twist, you have to make sure it’s not too obvious.  That is where I suppose a good beta reader would be helpful, because he/she might let you know if he/she saw the twist coming.  Not that everyone will.  Some people are idiots.

Since I’m talking about plot twists and stuff on Pluto TV, there was an episode of The IT Crowd where one of the guys, Roy, is trying to watch a movie.  A rival calls him and reveals there’s a big plot twist and so Roy spends most of the episode trying to make sure no one tips him off, which includes punching a cop.  At one point he’s going to watch the movie with his boss and his boss starts rattling off all these possible twists:  they’re from the future, they’re from the past, he’s his own brother, he’s a clone, and so on.

As annoying as twists can be if they’re too easy to figure, just knowing there’s one coming can also be annoying.  So when you’re writing your description or writing a review, maybe try not to spoil for people that there is a big plot twist at all.

And now the big plot twist for this blog post…nothing.  Ha ha, made you…not do anything at all.  Suckers!

Pick a Cover, Any Cover

Since this year is the 10th Anniversary of Where You Belong, I thought I'd release an updated version with a new cover.  Here's the old cover:

And here are some other possible covers.  There are watermarks on the images because I haven't bought any yet.  They wouldn't be in the final product.  Tell me which one you like and then I'll buy an image for the final cover.

The first two show a wedding cake with a gay couple on it:

The next few don't have the cake, just gay couple toppers:

Here's one with rings, sort of like the first image I used when I released the book:

This one has an actual gay couple getting married:

And this last one is kind of weird but I thought it was neat:

So there you go.  Which one do you like?  Any?  None?

Upping the Ante

I talked in the last entry about going bigger with each book.  Book 1 of the Gender Swap Outbreak series introduced the plague into a small town.  Book 2 starts to spread it even wider with two versions of the virus.

Type 1 of the virus affects adult males and turns them into women who gradually turn into Barbie-like sluts.  It's spread through bites, scratches, or especially sexual intercourse.

Type 2 of the virus affects everyone, turning them into little girls who crave living flesh and can infect anyone else with a bite or scratch.

Book 3 by me (they're all by me but this one has this me's name on it) has the virus spreading throughout America over the next 18 months, though mostly in the South, including Florida and Texas because it started in Alabama.

The story focuses on a group of Army soldiers who have been combating the infected.  When it starts they're sent into Oklahoma City to scout around.  Things go wrong and they have to evacuate, racing a herd of ghouls to the top of the tallest building to...

They're taken to their headquarters outside Omaha (which is supposed to show how fucked things are when Omaha is a major base of operations) and given a new assignment to break into a facility commandeered by Type 1s under the sway of Bobbi Guin, the main character of the first book.

Except...

The soldiers are infected with a new strain of the virus, a Type 3.  This turns them into grown women who don't become huge sluts.  They're pretty much normal.  But because they're infected, they are basically invisible to the Type 2 ghouls.  (Kind of like in The Walking Dead where the Whisperers and such dress up in zombie flesh and guts to be invisible.)  This will allow them to reach their ultimate goal:  Mobile, Alabama, where it's believed Jo Wallace is hiding but drones can't see her and no one has come back alive.  The idea is to capture her and bring her back for study.  If they fail, then bombers will nuke the city to take Jo out and that way maybe throw the Type 2s into chaos so they can be defeated.

First the soldiers have to adjust to being women.  Then they have to get to Mobile, which takes some Apocalypse Now-type turns.  And there's also some romance.

Since I needed a group of soldiers and last year I did my A to Z Challenge on it, I made a squad based on GI JOE characters.  The head of the squad--and our narrator--is Flint, his second-in-command is Stalker, and then the rest of the unit is Gung Ho, Roadblock, Blowtorch, Doc, and Dial Tone.  A feminized Lifeline is a civilian scientist who serves as a guide.  Later they run into Shipwreck to get a boat for their mission.  Grunt and Iceberg are killed early on in the story.  Scoop is attached to the unit at the beginning as an embedded reporter.  Duke is mentioned as a prior casualty and the general is based on General Hawk.

Since in the TV show Flint and Lady Jaye were somewhat of an item, I thought it would be fun if Flint turns into a chick who looks like Lady Jaye.  Blowtorch turns into sort of Scarlett.  Dial Tone sort of turns into the evil Baroness.  So there you go.

He actually looks more like Leatherneck because I couldn't find a shirtless vest.

Can you believe I couldn't find a sailor hat or even a proper denim shirt on The Sims Resource for Shipwreck?

Unlike the other two parts this is written a lot like Chance of a Lifetime with the first person and less emphasis on sex, though it's in past tense instead of present.  I think that helps to mix it up enough that all the books won't feel the same.

Anyway, all three parts are out now and eventually maybe I'll do an omnibus.  Though I think it's a neat idea some jackass will probably complain about having to buy three parts for the whole story.  Like I invented the whole idea of serial storytelling.  Seriously that happened when I tried connecting 3 stories of my Transformed series; this "Bear Hunter" fucker whined because the whole story wasn't in one book.  Like he's never read a series before?  What an asshat.

Here are the covers I went through from the more traditional to the finished product:

The camouflage is a little hard to see in grayscale.

Go buy all three parts and spread the word!