Cosplay Friday: Morrigan and Lilith

I've featured Kassandra Leigh's Morrigan before on Cosplay Friday, but she does some equally impressive work here with Nana Valtiel as her little sister Lilith! Double the Darkstalkers delights for everyone!

As always, you can check out a lot more great Cosplay pictures over on the Tumblr. And while you are admiring some great cosplay here, don’t forget to check out some of the other great stuff on Super Powered Fiction this week!

The 10 authors Super Powered Fiction writers should read

Everyone loves Top 10 lists, right? And as I slowly reveal the Top 10 Wrestlers of 2015 over at The Wrestling Weekday, I thought it would be fun to pull out an old list I wrote. It was over a year ago that I spent some time brainstorming the ten authors I thought writers of super powered fiction should read, but the list still holds strong for me as 2016 dawns.

Not everyone on the list regularly writes super powered beings, but don’t let that scare you away from some great fiction. Some are just great at simple things like dialogue or the combination of amazing wonder with a real world setting. All of them can be great inspirations for any writer of super powered fiction and come with the highest recommendation from this author. Here they are presented in no particular order.

1. Madeline L’Engle – L’Engle had an amazing ability to ground the most insane idea in reality. A Wrinkle in Time is built around crazy ideas presented with an air of the normal.
2. Adam Troy Castro – His Sinister Six novels that came at the end of the 90s Marvel novels showed how to juggle a ton of characters in super powered prose, a trait shared by…
3. Van Allen Plexico – Van’s Sentinels series juggles a huge cast in compelling tales about a unit somewhere between the Avengers and the Defenders. One of the first true independent creators of super powered fiction, Van in many ways built the archetype for how to create a super powered prose universe and I learn from his work every time I read it. 
4. Stephen King – Several of King’s earliest works very much fall into the super powered fiction category: Carrie, Firestarter, The Dead Zone, etc.
5. Robert Parker – No one does dialogue as well as Parker. Anyone can learn from reading his stories.
6. Orson Scott Card – Card has an ability to build big ideas around human stories, both in his solid Ender series and his far stronger Alvin Maker fantasy tales.. I argue it is a tact he learned from…
7. Robert Heinlein – Heinlein is a master of the art of interweaving his ideas into a human narrative, even if it is one of the future. He’s also great for challenging social contracts decades before the present day.
8. Diane Duane – Duane’s Spider-Man and Venom trilogy taught me that a superhero like Spider-Man could be a compelling lead in prose at a time when such things weren’t really done. Her trilogy also shows exactly how to use Mary Jane as Peter’s wife and make her compelling, something Marvel Comics writers and editors found so hard they used a demon to end their marriage.
9. George R. R. Martin & the Wild Card Trust – For obvious reasons, the creatives behind the Wild Cards series all deserve every ounce of praise they receive. Some of the best minds in super powered prose ever.
10. Octavia Butler – Butler deserves to be on the top of this list for Wild Seed alone, but every novel she wrote is a master class on short, tight narrative. Wild Seed is a major inspiration for the historical metahuman stories still developing in the Quadrant Universe while its sequels build an interesting narrative of secret super powered beings among us.

I still routinely pull out books by all these writers when I need a bit of inspiration. I highly recommend any lovers of great fiction to do the same. 

Disruption is the key! (Kickstart the Week 65)

I usually try to keep the Kickstart the Week feature at least tangentially related to superheroes in some way, but this time I'm moving off into a more meta-aspect of things. For years, Glenn Fleischman presented a hugely influential podcast to yours truly called the New Disruptors. On it, he interviewed people that somehow disrupted the "natural order" of whatever field they were in. He covered everything from tech to music to comics to video games to pretty much every field you can imagine. It's the only show I can think of that featured everyone from Roman Mars to Greg Pak to Sir Mix-a-Lot. Anthony Conte talked about Patreon on the show when it was still just a fledgling few people ever heard of before. It was widely listened to and ultimately influential to a number of great creators over the years, myself included.


Now Glenn is funding a new season of the show on Kickstarter. And with just days to go, it still needs a lot of help. So go out and listen to the archives and realize what you've missed. Or just trust me that you're supporting a truly great piece of podcasting history. Whatever the case, go back the return of The New Disruptors already!

Great art: Amethyst by Jill Thompson & P. Craig Russell

The fine purveyors of the Fire & Water Podcast Network have long focused their attention on previous iterations of Who's Who. But this feature is most excited about their current project: the 1990-1992 super-pin up-friendly loose leaf edition. Today's art comes from the first issue. Jill Thompson and P. Craig Russell make a stupendous team as they bring the Princess of Gemworld to life. By this time, her history was probably too complicated for her to ever truly be a great character again (at least in that continuity) but the young Thompson and the always skilled Russell really knocked it out of the park on this piece.

As always, you can check out a lot more Great Art over on the Tumblr. And after you're done admiring some great art here, don’t forget to check out some of the other great stuff on the site this week!

How I suddenly realized I'm really dang deep in this self publishing game

A couple weeks back I was invited to sit down and talk self-publishing with a group of writers at a local venue for that sort of thing, The Cottage. It's a superb little venue ran by a writing friend of some years, Robyn Groth. She and I have talked writing quite a bit over the years, albeit it in a general sense. My interests turn to superheroes and self-publishing, while she's on a far more literary track than yours truly. But with her regular writing groups, she frequently received tons of questions about self-publishing, ones she couldn't answer. That's where I came in. Turns out that over the last seven or eight years I've picked up a bunch of knowledge on publishing with my delve into the Quadrant Universe and Metahuman Press over nearly a decade now.

The Cottage looks absolutely nothing like this, but I needed a good comic
house to feature here. DC Comics' House of Mystery by Bernie Wrightson.

You can read the entire notes on the event at the Cottage's website.

I realized after the invite and even more so in the experience that all the time I spent teaching myself design, enough to call myself talented enough. I've mastered the art of the self-proofread, an important tool even with the help of hired proofreaders or editors. I can format a document like the best of them and my knowledge of my far out of date Adobe suite is pretty solid.

I maybe won't ever be the best writer in my field or the greatest editor or the greatest publisher or any of those things. But I damn well have the knowledge to talk about these things.

And on the hardest days I have, it feels good to know that I will always have at least that.

A comic villain come to life: Vader

Image from Marvel's WCW: The Comic.

Big Van Vader died today. If you're not a wrestling fan, you may not know about the alter ego of Leon White. But he was basically the Juggernaut in early 90s professional wrestling. He was a big mean villain of superhuman proportions, the kind of guy that literally plowed through the competition. He appealed to the comic fan in me.

I wrote a lot more about him over at the Wrestling Deep End for anyone interested.

Great art: Mister Miracle and Big Barda by Ian Gibson

Before the critically acclaimed current Tom King / Mitch Gerads Mister Miracle series, another series came out in the late 80s that received its own acclaim. Written by J.M. DeMatteis and drawn by Ian Gibson, the piece here by Gibson was the ad for the series. Nothing seemed quite so fitting for art here this week than a parody of American Gothic (originally by Cedar Rapids own Grant Wood) featuring New Gods.

As always, you can check out a lot more Great Art over on the Tumblr. And after you're done admiring some great art here, don’t forget to check out some of the other great stuff on the site this week!

The late report with WIP Wednesday

Image by Paul Pope. Characters owned by
Glen Brunswick & Dan McDaid.

It seems like the only time I find to get these WIP posts up is late in the evening on Wednesdays. It's been a busy couple of months at the day job and that's really eaten up my time for blogging on top of the regular writing.

Of course, I did get the next installment of Newer Gods up earlier to day. It's yet another strange journey into the Earth-Haney and Brave and the Bold.

I've got two projects floating right now, both still under codenames: INDEPENDENCE and JUGGERNAUT. INDEPENDENCE was previously mentioned by yours truly as a superhero tale for the fine folks at Pro Se Press based on an existing comic property.

This is the first time I've mentioned JUGGERNAUT on the blog (though newsletter subscribers already heard about it.) My plan for next year is a relaunch of Lightweight, Quadrant and this new project as alternating month-by-month narratives. The new book will be my first work heavily set in a real world city, my own city of Cedar Rapids. I wanted to play around with the idea of cosmic forces converging on a smaller scale city in Iowa and what that might mean as a new hero emerges. I think this should prove an interesting experiment for the months ahead.

The new project will again take the shared Quadrant Universe in a different direction than the other books, one I hope will be both familiar and unique. But that's one to talk more about in the future!

Today's image is a Paul Pope cover to the gone far too soon Image book Jersey Gods, created by Glen Brunswick and Dan McDaid. That book was in my research list for JUGGERNAUT, and I rarely seem to have an excuse to share Pope's art here on the blog. If you like it, I highly recommend checking out the series in trade paperback.

And if you're interested in more tidbits from my world of writing, be sure to subscribe to the aforementioned newsletter. A new edition will be shipping out in the next 48 hours or so!

Cosplay Friday: Big Barda

This week has been all about the debut of Newer Gods, so why not celebrate it here with a cosplay of Big Barda herself, specifically the DC Bombshells version of the character. Golden Lasso Girl outdid herself with this one, folks!

As always, you can check out a lot more great Cosplay pictures over on the Tumblr. And while you are admiring some great cosplay here, don’t forget to check out some of the other great stuff on Super Powered Fiction this week!

The Newer Gods have arrived!

I promised it a few weeks back. Now my newest blog endeavor has arrived!

Newer Gods covers the history of the New Gods after the 18th issue of Mister Miracle, Jack Kirby's final comic in his original run with the characters. It will cover every appearance by the characters from random team-ups to all the many revival attempts over the years!

Things kick off with the characters above as they crossover into Batman's side of the DCU in Brave and the Bold 112 by Bob Haney and Jim Aparo! Check it out and make sure you bookmark Newer Gods as it brings two more entries this week and a new weekly entry after that!

Great Art: Justice League by Michel Fiffe

Michel Fiffe is one of the most talented creators currently working in comics bar none. Creator of Copra and the upcoming Bloodstrike: Brutalists, he's not just an incredibly skilled writer / artist, but an unrepentant fan of 80s and 90s comics. After not getting in an answer to a Fire & Water Podcast question about dream Justice League Detroit line-ups, he penciled, inked and colored it instead. This is an impressive oddball Justice League assortment. (Stalker!) Be sure to check out his website for more on his work!

As always, you can check out a lot more Great Art over on the Tumblr. And after you're done admiring some great art here, don’t forget to check out some of the other great stuff on the site this week!