Blue Beetle, BOOM! and Genius

MINOR SPOILERS

While I wait for my script co-ordinator to process the new draft, some quick comic business. OH, and I'll be totally abusing the Amazon links, because I'm learning how they work.

BLUE BEETLE #29 with MATT STURGESS

... is a goddam home run.

Don't get me wrong, Will Pfiefer did an excellent job, and I'm always a fan of Baldeon's work. But damn, Matt Sturgess has written the book I dreamed of doing once we finished the origin story.

The strength of the book has always been the nuts and bolts of superheroing. Matt's now exploring what it's like to be a 16 year old Hispanic superhero with a secret identity in El Paso. He's managed to pull in the Minutemen, illegals, and the media all in a non-preachy way. Characters have specific viewpoints, but they're not always what you expect, and all very credible. Matt's seemlessly taken over the book, but improved it with his mad plotting/structure skills.

Not to mention, he brings the funny. I'm kind of giddy that I get to watch the Paco/Brenda train wreck from the outside now, like a fanboy. He gets all the characters, their voices, their tone. I can't wait to see what he does with La Dama.

I cannot accentuate this enough -- I read BB #29 three times in a row.

An interview here has Matt discussing his plans for his run, which I hope is at least as long as mine. Rafael is continuing on the book, of course, and somehow manages to top himself every issue.

BLUE BEETLE POST-GAME

I would have loved to do a proper wrap-up when issue #25 dropped. But, you know -- dead-zone. You want to write the long article, the whole "running a TV show" thing gets in the way -- and you realize a short note was probably smarter in the first place.

Kieth taught me ten years of comic writing in one. Cully's character design is iconic, and that includes all the non-costumed side characters. Rafael made me look better than I am (Issue #17, kids). Joan Hilty talked me out of three bad ideas and into two good ones, for a net +5 on the Editing Score and therefore a big win.

We wanted to establish a new superhero for younger readers, and add a different viewpoint to the DCU. Something you could give your 12 year old nephew to read without first forcing him to complete a degree in DC Continuity.

A lot of people hated us, then some of them liked us, and then some of them loved us ... while a lot of people still hated us. Those people can go pound sand and collect Final Crisis variant covers. The BB fans were supportive, enthusiastic, and it felt good to see all the positive reviews roll in by the middle of the run. And I genuinely like the BB fans. They are the good-natured, "Comics Should Be Fun" folks. (Hell, even the Goons liked it by the end of the run.)

Special thanks to the Comicbloc humans for a safe forum haven.

End of day, Jaime Reyes is going to be every young kid's Blue Beetle, much like the Green Lantern of my nephew is John Stewart. And Jaime's a damn fine Blue Beetle to have.




BOOM! goes online

Although the Farscape news is pretty great -- yeah, yeah, I was on that train pretty hard -- what's fascinating right now is that BOOM! has put a bunch of their back-issue anthologies online for free reading. They're uploading a page a day. They all have RSS feeds, too, very progressive, even if still bound to the hated portrait layout. I've got stories in most of these, somewhere ...

Ninja Tales, "Desert Sun" starts here.
Zombie Tales, "Memento Mori" is here.

GENIUS

I wrote a blurb for Marc Bernardin's Monster Attack Network, and have always been a fan.



Well, he's stepped up with a new book that's... fine, I'm not going to do it justice. Here's the one-liner:

"What if the greatest military mind of our generation was born an angry 17-year-old girl in South Central L.A.? And what if she decided to secede a few blocks of her 'hood...through force?"

This earns the best possible compliment one writer can give another.

Fuck you, Marc.

Shocking, adult, conflicted, and all off an inspired high concept. Read about it here, read the amazing reviews, and go vote for the damn thing so I don't have to finance it myself so I can read the entire arc.

All right, time to proof some dialogue. Product links below, if you're interested, for the whole 25-issue BB arc

Oof

So, this whole "simultaneously prepping one movie, shooting another and editing a third for 16 weeks in a row" thing is precisely as life-eating as previously described. Aces. The entire goddam point of my career was to avoid a day job ...

Not dead, and now that I've written my second ep of the season, fairly caught up. Blogging to resume normally this weekend, if only because the American Carol stuff has gotten so idiotic I can no longer ignore it.

Readability Test

BB 17 part(2) - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: BB 17 part(2)

It Takes a Thief

It Takes a Thief is up on Hulu. Go, drink in the splendor of the glory days of TV, when shows could be summed up with one elegantcatchphrase ("I'm not asking to to spy, I'm just asking you to steal.") and characters didn't muck about with all this emo shit, but stuck to the job of driving the damn plot where we writers needed it to go. Tasty!

And if you spot some of these grifts popping up on Leverage, ummm -- homage. Yeah, that's it. Homage.

In the comments, any and all Mannix/Alexander Munday/Girl from UNCLE/Rockford fan fic.

(h/t Lee Goldberg)

"... a thing"

I would argue that as soon as your web-only musical about a supervillain is referenced on a group blog of University professors discussing Disraeli, you have, indeed, won the Internets.

Also, to continue the discussion raised by my staff Friday -- has Felicia Day now officially ascended from being one of the Geek Princesses to Queen of the Geeks?

Add your general chaos and reactions below.

6 AM, on location

The train's a-here, people. Frankly, I don't know how you 22 episode people do it. I'm barely keeping my lunch down as it is, with only 13 and a month's head start.

Also, big congratulations out to THE MIDDLEMAN'S writers' assistant Margaret, who is getting her first produced ep shot this week. And she knows how to set stuff on fire, too.

If We Have to Keep Defining ...

The one solid bit of analysis out of the drunken dinner with the friend who writes on Colbert and my solidly conservative old showrunner?

"Libertarians are Republicans who want to smoke pot."

TEST

Sources

When writing a con/heist show, you're always having your guys impersonate officials. And you always argue about how far you can push things without breaking suspension of disbelief.

Drug Arrests Were Real; the Badge Was Fake

Arrests began. Houses were ransacked. People, in handcuffs on their front lawns, named names. To some, like Mayor Otis Schulte, who considers the county around Gerald, population 1,171, “a meth capital of the United States,” the drug scourge seemed to be fading at last.

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s antidrug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and he is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

The strange adventures of Sergeant Bill have led to the firing of three of the town’s five police officers, left the outcome of a string of drug arrests in doubt, prompted multimillion-dollar federal civil rights lawsuits by at least 17 plaintiffs and stirred up a political battle, including a petition seeking the impeachment of Mr. Schulte, over who is to blame for the mess.

And the questions keep coming. How did Mr. Jakob wander into town and apparently leave the mayor, the aldermen and pretty much everyone else he met thinking that he was a federal agent delivered from Washington to help barrel into peoples’ homes and clean up Gerald’s drug problem? And why would anyone — receiving no pay and with no known connection to little Gerald, 70 miles from St. Louis and not even a county seat — want to carry off such a time-consuming ruse in the first place?

Never a.) underestimate the instinct to respect authority in this culture, and b.) forget that most people in America are good and honest, and assume the person they're talking to is also good and honest.

Last Dance, Last Chance for Loooove

Better people than I are covering, in more detail, the following:

a) General Wesley Clark talked about how much he honored and appreciated Senator McCain's wartime service, but mentioned that getting shot down and taken POW were not automatic qualifications for being, say, President.

b.) The press, all aswoon over McCain's manliness -- many of whom obsess over this because they're still working out their Boomer man-issues -- claimed that General Clark was somehow "attacking" Senator McCain or even more hallucinegenically "swift-boating" him.

c.) Then, even more trippily, McCain's camp actually hauled out one of the Swift Boat guys to run interference, claiming Clark was somehow distorting or attacking Senator McCain's war record. Which he didn't do, either explicitly or implicitly.

Let's make this perfectly clear. The Swift Boaters claimed Senator John Kerry lied about his war record. General Clark pointed out that serving in the military did not mean you were automatically a genius at international relations or national security. A five year old with a head injury could tell the difference between those two statements. Yet the press scurries about, buzzing like binge-puking sophomore girls over how Wesley totally dissed John at lunch hour and how this is totally THE BIGGEST THING EVUH.

This is what you get when you combine massive insecurity, a desperate need for the approval of authority figures (hellllo pretty much everyone working in entertainment/news), and a culture of people generally unfamiliar with those who serve in the military. My grandfather, who I loved dearly, got his ass shot up in the Batle of the Bulge. If you said that somehow made him more eligible to be President than, well anyone, we both would have laughed ourselves silly. But for many Americans, servicemen and women are fetish dolls upon which we project our insecurities and craving for heroism rather than being, say, very nice brave people who need some goddam medical care and maybe a better GI Bill.

If anything highlights that there's a whole segment of modern men in American society seriously fucked up about their identity, it's this knee-jerk reaction to currying favor with the cool jock who's got the testes-cred they feel they lack.

Please, please, in my adult lifetime, could I have a presidential election where Vietnam isn't an issue? Just one where people's service in a war that ended over thirty damn years ago isn't one of the over-riding psychological factors of the election?

Christ, I can't wait until we have the first Boomer Candidate-free election. Not because I don't like Boomers, but I desperately want to at least argue over some different goddam issues.