In the 1950s, the S on Superman's Chest Stood for 'Sociopath'

On Facebook I often get ads for Comixology because I buy comics from there on occasion.  Their ads usually show various comics, often tied to something I'd bought or looked up.

For some reason one of the comics it showed was issue 10 of Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane from back in the 50s.  On the cover Lois has turned into a baby and Lana Lang is trying to convince Superman to adopt her.

Since I've written literally hundreds of age regression stories, I finally got curious to see how a "professional" did it.  Or if maybe this was one of those fake-out covers where it shows something that doesn't really happen in the story.  And since it was old, it didn't really cost much to satisfy my curiosity--though the Comixology price was probably about 20x what it originally sold for.

This turned out not to be a fake-out cover, as what is shown on the cover does actually happen.  Lois and Superman go to some scientist's office and since Lois has seen a few wrinkles lately, she decides to use the professor's "youth ray" to make herself a little younger despite Superman's warning not to mess around with the thing.

The ray works, but it works too well as she turns into a teenager and then keeps getting younger until she's a baby.  Supposedly the only way to change back before she can regress into nothing is a burst of Superman's "X-ray vision."  What was confusing to me is that the writer seems to use "X-ray vision" to mean both the kind that sees through walls and stuff and the "heat vision" that can melt stuff.  Lois dresses as a teen and then a Girl Scout and then a little kid to try to get Superman to use his "X-ray vision" but he doesn't and she turns into a baby and he takes her to Lana Lang to care for the baby until he can find the baby's parents--because he supposedly doesn't know the baby is Lois.

Then there's an M Night-style twist.  Superman reveals that he's known all along what Lois was doing but he wanted to teach her a lesson for being impetuous.  He let her regress into a baby just to teach her a lesson about defying his warning and playing around with the machine.  And all along he's had some formula that can change her back--though it would work overnight.  And just to top off the creepy sundae, he threatens to spank her if she doesn't drink the formula.

Yeah, so Superman is basically a sociopath.  I mean, how else could he let it go that far without doing something?  Wouldn't her turning into a teenager or a little girl be enough of a "lesson?"  He has to let her go all the way back to a baby?  

We tend to think superheroes being fucked up started back in the 70s or 80s when stories got all grim and gritty, but what was considered "normal" back in the 50s was pretty fucked up already.  I think I read something in Comic Book Resources or one of those clickbait sites that the kind of story I read was pretty typical.  Back then, Superman was kind of a dick to Lois and Jimmy Olsen with "pranks" like the one above.

The two other stories in that comic basically have Superman stalking Lois to bail her out of jams.  In one she goes to Italy and meets some con artist and falls madly in love with him.  Superman follows them around to try to find out what the guy is up to.  Eventually the con artist tries the scam with another woman and Superman stops him.  

The last story had Lois pretending to be a medium to capture some bank robbers and Superman secretly helps her to pull it off and winds up busting some mob guys.  It was slightly less creepy and sexist than the other two.

It's another example of how the "good old days" weren't really that good.

But as is common, it did give me an idea for a gender swap story.  If Amazon still let me do age regression stories I'd do it that way, but instead I'm doing it a different way.  The story tentatively called The Exclusive, is about a reporter who used to be a big time network anchor until a scandal got him fired.  He's doing a story about some scientist's machine to reverse the aging process and when he triggers the machine, it turns the reporter into a hot young woman who soon gets a new lease on her career but has to deal with sexism and other stuff in the process.  And then things take a turn for the worse...

So provided I finish the story and release it, I should make back what I spent on this comic book--and then some.  That way I can call it a business expense, right?

Shrunken Heads and the Importance of Consistency

 Look, I get that while I fracking love Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax movies, the people who occasionally read my blog don't.  I mean, Tony Laplume even took a shot at it in one review, saying, "I am not a fan of schlock cinema. I don’t make a point even to watch it if it’s the subject of sarcastic commentary."  Which I find amusing because he hates "schlock cinema" but likes schlocky pseudosports like the WWE.  To each his own schlock I guess.

Anyway, like the Tool Time segments in Home Improvement, I think seeing things done wrong can often be instructive in telling you how to do things right.  Watching the recent Rifftrax of the 1994 movie Shrunken Heads provided a good illustration of how important it is to be consistent because this movie is not consistent in anything--except how bad it is. 

Shrunken Heads was made by Full Moon Studios, who also made the far better (but obviously still not great) sci-fi Westerns Oblivion and Oblivion 2:  Backlash.  It even stars Meg Foster, who was in both of those movies.  And it was directed by composer Danny Elfman's brother with Danny Elfman contributing the title theme to the soundtrack.  As far as pedigrees go it's not great, but it's not exactly amateur hour either.

The problem is as I said:  consistency.  The movie is supposed to take place in the present day of 1994 in New York or Baltimore or somewhere like that.  But the street gangs and shopkeepers in the movie are ripped right from West Side Story, which leads the riffers of the movie to describe it as the "Fifties-Nineties."  

The main characters of the movie are three young teenagers (15 or so) who mostly sit around reading DC comics, debating whether Green Lantern is better than Krypto the Dog.  I mean, that seems like a pretty obvious argument to me, but whatever.  Those relatively harmless teens record one of the street gangs chopping up an old lady's car and give the tape to the police.  And then the teens are brutally murdered and turned into shrunken heads by the Haitian newsstand owner to take revenge on the gangs.  Wait, what?

The lead teen has a crush on a girl who was going out with one of the gang members.  After he's turned into a shrunken head, the teen visits the girl in the cemetery and finally expresses his love...by flying up her shirt to suckle from her breast.  Um...what?

The Haitian shopkeeper seems like a wise old sage, but he repeatedly brags about being a member of the Tonton Macoute.  Who were they?  "The Tonton Macoute or simply the Macoute was a special operations unit within the Haitian paramilitary force created in 1959 by dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier."  In other words, they were a death squad akin to the Nazi SS.  Imagine if one of the "heroes" of your story bragged about being a former SS officer...yikes.  He should probably have been in prison for crimes against humanity.  And on top of that, this guy who's so nice to the teens steals them from the funeral home, saws off their heads, and then spends a year training them to be killing machines.  It's all pretty macabre.

Remember what I said earlier about Danny Elfman contributing the title theme?  The problem is he ONLY did the title theme.  The rest of the music then is some awful public domain Muzak shit.  It's a real one-eighty bouncing from a professional soundtrack to cheap, generic crap.

So pretty much at every level you have inconsistency, from the music to the setting to the characters to the story itself.  I mean did this want to be a brutal revenge story like Robocop, Darkman, The Crow, or Chance of a Lifetime?  Or did it want to be more of a Goonies or Stand By Me story with the relatively innocent and harmless teen main characters?

Like a movie, a book needs to stay consistent in its genre and tone.  You can't go bouncing from harmless YA stuff to grim and gritty neo-noir stuff and back again.  It will confuse the readers and it makes it harder to find readers who will actually like the book because some will expect one thing and some another thing and in the end neither will be happy when the book isn't delivering.  Unless maybe the whole point of the story is someone changing from a hard-bitten old detective to a cute young lady like in Chance of a Lifetime.  Most readers didn't really seem to mind that.

Anyway, maybe now you learned something.  Or not.  

Hi

 Coming Soon...

It Turns Out Invincible is Better on TV

 A couple of months ago I watched Invincible on Amazon Prime Video.  It's an adaptation of the comic by Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame.  Amazon Prime had the first three volumes of the comics, or issues 1-13, for free through Prime Reading so I checked them out and finally got around to reading them last month.

And as the title says, it turns out that the TV show is better.  The TV show and comics have a lot of the same elements, but the storytelling in the TV show is a lot more focused and paced better.

One of the major differences is the murder of the Justice League-type team in the TV show takes place at the end of the first episode.  In the comics it doesn't happen until about issue #7.  It's actually a lot better more towards the beginning because that gives more time to turn it into a mystery.  In the comics the Guardians of the Globe are killed by Mark's superhero father and 2-3 issues later he confesses everything.  The demon detective investigating the case doesn't find anything and Mark's mom doesn't get suspicious of anything either.

It's a lot better in the TV show where it's more drawn out.  Even though we know Mark's father did it, it's better wondering if the other characters will figure it out versus it just being solved almost right away.

Quite a few other things were just glossed over in the comics that were explored more in the TV show.  The most prominent is Mark has a crush on a girl at school named Amber.  He starts going out with her and has to juggle being with her and school and being a superhero.  In the comics we see her passing him a note to call her and then it's just mentioned in dialogue that they're going out.  But we never actually see them interacting at all.

In the TV show Mark, Amber, and William go to Upstate College and are attacked by robo-zombies.  In the comics it's just Mark and William and William spends more time bitching about people not wanting to call him by his full first name than they spend being accosted by robo-zombies.  There's a brief fight and then the robo-zombie vanishes; we never find out who built them or why.  In one episode of the TV show Mark and the "Teen Team" (their version of the Teen Titans) fight an alien invasion.  The aliens come from another universe where time runs differently so the first time they end up dying of old age after a short time.  In the TV show they come back a couple more times, each time having developed better weapons.  In the comics there's just one battle and it's Mark and his dad.  In both his dad winds up going through a portal to the alien dimension.  In the comics he comes back later and says he led a revolt and a couple of scientists helped him get home.  In the TV show he brutally slaughters pretty much their entire world, demonstrating that the murder of the Guardians of the Globe was not an isolated event.

The battle between Mark and his father is more drawn out in the TV show.  Before they fight, the government sics conventional weapons, nukes, robo-zombies, and a kaiju on Mark's father.  In the comics it's just Mark and his dad.  There's more of an emotional moment in the TV show when Mark's father thinks back to cheering his son in Little League and then disappears.  In the comics he just stops and disappears.

There are a lot of subplots in the TV show that weren't in the first three volumes of comics.  They might have come up later--or not.  I'm not sure and don't feel like spending a bunch of money to find out.  For instance in one episode Mark helps a villain take down a gangster, only for the villain to take over the gangster's rackets.  Over the course of a few episodes, Robot, the leader of the Teen Team, develops an attraction to Monster Girl, a young girl who turns into a Hulk-type creature, though when she does she gets 1 week younger.  Robot blackmails a couple of alien clones into making a human body for him so he and Monster Girl can be together.  None of that has happened--yet.  Over a few episodes Atom Eve, a member of the Teen Team who also goes to school with Mark, leaves the team when she finds her boyfriend cheating on her with another member of the team.  Then she goes off on her own to help people on her own terms.  In the comics she catches her boyfriend cheating but the rest of the stuff doesn't happen--at least not yet.  In one episode Mark goes to Mars with a space shuttle flight and inadvertently unleashes an apocalypse there.  But that hasn't happened yet in the comics either.

The TV show also does better with representation.  In the comics Mark and his mom are Asian but other than that there aren't any other minority main characters.  Female characters are portrayed a little better in the TV show.  As I said, Mark's girlfriend Amber is barely shown in the comics while in the TV show she's a main character--and black instead of white.  In the TV show his mom is a realtor while in the comics she's just a housewife sitting around all day waiting for her husband and son to come home from saving the world.  I'm not sure either version passes the Bechdel test but the TV show is much closer.  In the TV show Mark's friend William is gay, which becomes especially clear when they go to the college and he's going out with some dude there.  Such does not appear to be the case in the comics and there are no other gay characters.  When Mark takes William up into the air he even says, "This is so gay," using it as a slur.

So in the end I think the first season of the TV show was a lot better.  The pacing was better and there was a lot more depth than in the comics.  From reading some of the notes in the comics, part of it might have been that they weren't really sure if the comic book would be able to get much past 12 issues.  Besides sales the original artist who worked on it got busy and they had to change.  With the TV show they already had an order for 8 45-minute-ish episodes so there wasn't as much pressure to rush things along, allowing them to develop characters and situations more.

Anyway, it's definitely better on TV and for most people I suppose that would be easier too.  It's a win-win!

Is It Better to Not Be Connected?

 Recently I finally got around to reading Tom King's Superman series, Up in the Sky.  The 12-issue series was originally published as part of these "Walmart Giants" where they reprinted a bunch of old comics but also included a little new material and then sold them exclusively at Walmart.  And maybe just for fun they had the writers of Batman and Superman swap series so that King, who was writing Batman at the time, did a Superman series and Brian Michael Bendis, who'd recently taken over Superman, wrote a Batman series.  Inevitably they reprinted the new material on its own.

I enjoyed King's series like I enjoyed most of his work to date that I've read.  Like his other work, King is able to really humanize an iconic comic book character and even make the Man of Steel seem vulnerable.  The story revolves around a little girl who's kidnapped from Earth and taken into space, so Superman leaves Earth to find her.  Over the 12 issues he goes to a variety of planets and faces a variety of challenges.  On one planet he fights a mercenary in a boxing match to obtain information; the mercenary has Superman-like invulnerability and stamina so it's a pretty equal fight.  Another time he's injured and picked up by a ship where the alien doctor gives his life to save Superman's.  At another point he crashes on a planet and is split into Kryptonian and human halves that eventually have to reunite.  There was a "controversial" issue where he's at an alien call center to try to contact Lois and keeps imagining horrible ways she could be dying while he's out in space.  Idiots thought she was actually dying or something stupid and DC had to actually pause the series for a little bit.  Eventually he goes to New Genesis to make a devil's bargain with Darkseid and finds the girl and saves the day.

What I got to thinking is that most of King's work for DC isn't really connected to much else in the DC universe.  Even his run on Batman didn't really connect to other stuff going on in the DC Universe.  The two "Night of the Monster Men" crossover issues early on were written by someone else.  It wasn't like with previous writers where they had story arcs running through every Batman title or even every DC title.  King's Batman run was for the most part its own self-contained universe where the stuff going on in Detective Comics, Batgirl, Nightwing, or Justice League didn't really affect it.  This was also the case for Up in the Sky, Mr. Miracle, Omega Men, and I'm pretty sure also for Strange Adventures, Rorschach, and the upcoming Human Target.

Is that a bad thing?  I don't think it really is.  And then it got me thinking that a lot of the really good stories in comics were not really connected.  Iconic stories like The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Arkham Asylum, All-Star Superman, or Superman: Red Son were not part of the main DC Universe.  I'm not sure about some others like The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, The Long Halloween, or Hush; they might have started off as not really in the continuity and then became part of the continuity later on.

I'm less familiar with Marvel but there are also good non-continuity stories like Spider-Man: Life Story or Marvels.  And then of course you have thousands of small publisher or independent graphic novels.

Anyway, the point is that I think when something doesn't have to be in continuity it's able to tell its own story.  In most cases that means smaller, more meaningful stories rather than big events.  In superhero comics, big events almost inevitably will end up as slugfests that might be entertaining but don't have much meaning.  Authors like Tom King, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, or Neil Gaiman are much better when they're able to create on their own terms rather than having to incorporate the work of lesser authors.

Think of it this way:  would you get a better story from Stephen King by himself or Stephen King if he had to incorporate chapters from EL James, Stephanie Meyer, and Eric Filler?  [Or whatever other hacks you want to throw in there.]  Collaboration can be fun but groups tend to water down ideas to reach consensus.

And when comic book authors aren't dealing with continuity and whatnot they also don't have as much pressure from the editors and publisher to do something big and flashy to drive sales.  There's the room then to work ideas on a smaller, quieter level.

That's not to disrespect Golden Age writers like Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel & Joe Schuster, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, and so on.  They created the continuity in the first place.  But back then comics were mostly aimed at children and the storytelling tends to reflect that.  Writers from the 70s and on were allowed to be more grown up and explore more adult themes.

Or maybe I'm just talking out my own ass--it wouldn't be the first time. 

The Big Fat Truth

 On Facebook a few weeks ago there was a clickbait article on my feed saying that Brendan Fraser should be having a career renaissance after his work in some movie.  Feeling a bit naughty, I decided to drop a truth bomb:  he'd be getting more work if he got back into shape instead of looking like he ate his younger self.

The reaction was predictable:  you're a bully!  Body shaming!  Troll!  You can say that and use all the stupid memes you want, but it doesn't change the truth.  And sorry, but it is the truth.

One person said, "There are parts for people of all sizes!"  Yeah, that's great, but that's what you tell little kids.  Adults should know better.

It's really simple:  the world is shallow and superficial and nowhere is that more obvious than in Hollywood.  When Brendan Fraser was buff and young and had hair, he could get leading roles.  Now that he's middle-aged, fat, and balding, it's not going to happen.  He can get supporting roles and voice work like in Doom Patrol, but no one is going to cast him as the lead in anything major.  Career-wise that can work out fine for steady work.  Guys like Ned Beatty, Charles Durning, and Ernest Borgnine did that for decades.  But no, he's not going to be headlining big action movies like The Mummy anymore.  It's just a fact.  Deal with it.

Since it's I think Insecure Writer's Support Group Wednesday, it seemed appropriate to air this little insecurity.  And of course it's not this way just in Hollyweird; it's that way everywhere.  I'm sure I'd have a much better job and thus be living a lot better if I were thin and had a full head of hair and two good eyes and good teeth.  If I did I'd have a lot more confidence and thus I'd be able to do a lot better in interviews.  And interviewers wouldn't shut down the moment they see me.  

Seriously, that's happened.  Like one time a lady from a temp agency calls me and is breathlessly telling me about all these jobs she has open for me.  I drive 40 miles to her office the next day and suddenly no jobs are available.  Hurm...what changed?  Or other times I show up for the interview and they bail out after one or two questions so the interview is pretty much over in five minutes.  Or a couple of times when they sent me a form rejection email about an hour after the interview.  I mean,  how much consideration could they really have given it?

We tend to think about prejudice as just applying to skin color or religion or age, but there are a lot of other factors too.  And despite all the TV shows and books and movies telling kids to be themselves and tolerate people who are different, that's not how the world works.  You can call me a bully or troll or give me your SJW hippie-dippy politically correct bullshit, but it won't change anything.  It won't change reality.

Is that insecure enough for you?

Here's an appropriate song, John Prine's "Big Fat Love" played by some guy on YouTube.

Loki Was Good Even Though Loki Didn't Really Matter

Like the other two Disney+ Marvel series, I didn't rush to watch Loki.  I waited until all the episodes were up and then binged it.  I planned to spread it out over a few days like Captain America Falcon and the Winter Soldier but I wound up doing it all in one night instead.  In part because I was bored but also because the show was really intriguing.

The thing is, I'm not really a big fan of Loki, not like my sister, who even named a cat after him.  I will say he's the best villain in the MCU if only because Marvel sucks at creating villains with any depth, mostly because they get bumped off after one movie.  By default Thanos is the second-best villain because he didn't get killed right away.  It just annoys me that like with Magneto in the Fox Marvelverse, they're always trying to make Loki seem like a good guy despite that he's killed thousands or maybe even millions of people by now.  I don't need villains to be mustache-twirling clichés but it sucks when they're wishy-washy.

This show is the latest attempt to redeem Loki.  During Endgame, a Loki from 2012 (during the first Avengers movie) escapes, but he's quickly apprehended by the mysterious Time Variance Authority or TVA.  While most "variants" like him are "pruned" (ie beamed to a desolate wasteland at the end of the universe) he's recruited to help find another variant Loki in sort of a Silence of the Lambs arrangement.

Soon Loki finds out that this other Loki is hiding in natural disasters throughout time and they're able to find her.  Yes, her.  It's a lady Loki who calls herself Sylvie.  The TVA tried to prune her when she was a child but she escaped and has been killing TVA agents and stealing their "reset" bombs to get to the "Time Keepers" who supposedly control all time.

The 2012 Loki and Sylvie wind up stranded on a planet about to be destroyed by a rogue moon but when they're about to get romantic it creates enough of a variance or whatever that they can be rescued.  Soon Loki and Sylvie uncover that the Time Keepers aren't real and there's a man behind the curtain who's called "He Who Remains" but comic fans would know better as Kang the Conqueror, a villain from the future who repeatedly tries to take over the universe and is repeatedly stopped by the Avengers.

Anyway, he offers Loki and Sylvie the choice of death or taking over the TVA to carry on his work.  Loki would gladly take over the TVA to use it as a stepping stone to ultimate power but Sylvie would rather just kill Kang, which she does.  Loki ends up back at the TVA base but now no one remembers him and instead of the "Time Keepers" there's one Kang in charge of everything.

To Be Continued...[ominous music]

I already knew some of the stuff that would happen just from people's spoilers, but it still drew me in to see what exactly was going to happen.  In that sense it was a success.  What really keeps bugging me though is that Loki--the Tom Hiddleston version--is one of the least important characters in a show named for him.  Sylvie is the one who really stirs the drink here.  Her and Kang are the two most important characters to the plot as the central conflict really revolves around them.  The Loki we're familiar with finds Sylvie and then accompanies her but the show could easily have been the same without him.  The only real reason he's there is they needed a familiar face to sell the show to the public.

In that sense it's appropriate because Loki is the god of mischief and lies, so why shouldn't his show be one big convoluted lie or misdirection?  There were a few moments where Loki was allowed to shine, like when he finds out what happened to his original self and the destruction of Asgard and death of his adopted mother and his sorta creepy relationship with Sylvie.  There's not enough to where I'd say this is a great show, but it was decent and it helps set up all the multiverse crap that's going to happen with Dr. Strange 2, Spider-Man 3, and Ant-Man 3, the latter featuring Kang as a villain.  It probably could have been even better if it had tried a little harder to focus on its main character and give him a real character arc instead of making him a sidekick in his own series.

For comics fans there were plenty of Easter eggs, especially in the 5th episode when they go to the TVA's dump for all the shit that got "pruned."  There are other variant Lokis like the classic one (I have an action figure of that one), a child one, a black one, an alligator one, and another Tom Hiddleston one who was running for mayor or something.  At one point you can also see the infamous frog Thor and there's a helicopter with "Thanos" written on it from some ridiculous old comic book story.  And probably more shit I wouldn't know about because I haven't read that many Thor/Loki comics.  

Other than Lady Sif appearing in a cameo there aren't really any other MCU guest stars except in footage of previous movies.

Much was made about Loki being DB Cooper but it was kind of a fake-out that didn't make much sense.  Apparently it was just a prank Loki pulled.  He came to Earth and somehow flawlessly impersonated a normal human to hijack a plane and steal a bunch of money and then jump out and get beamed up by the Bifrost?  It didn't really make any sense and contributed nothing to the plot.  Really if Asgardians were hanging around Earth or "Midgard" back in the 70s why didn't Thor know much about our customs in the first movie?

Anyway, this show didn't really make me want another season about Loki so much as it made me want a series focusing on Sylvie.  Which is good in a way but also not good if your title character is less interesting than someone else.

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.