New Heroics 1: a look at new super powered fiction!

I've been quietly whiling away with my own works for years now, but with my focus on the Quadrant Universe, I've lost a lot of the places where I crossover with the other creators out there with superheroes in their fiction. To remedy that, I introduce New Heroics, a recurring column where I look at books coming in the wide world of stories out there. These are not meant as an endorsement of any writer's work, but a way to share new stuff from compatriots in the writing trenches.

Knightwatch: Invictus X is the first book in veteran scribe Mark Ellis's new superhero fiction series. With characters culled from the public domain, he uses the DC generational concept to form his own takes on several characters with familiar names. This one is actually on my Kindle right now and I can vouch that the adventures of Scarab, Magno, Lynx, Samson and Kismet get better with each page.

Friend of the site and all around swell guy Jeff Deischer is a writing machine. His latest novel is New World Order: Hero U.N.I.O.N. which focuses on a United Nations program to develop superhuman agents. With fifty years of history behind it, this looks like an interesting take on the classic THUNDER Agents concept, one which always needs more love.

I've known David Kachel for years, as the man helped me make the classic Metahuman Press site in the mid-aughts. He's since honed his craft and has released a collected edition of his Legacy: The Tale of the American Eagle. I can vouch for the quality of this one, so be sure to get out there and check it out.

Derek Borne is a name I've not yet read but he's been quickly releasing new works in his Ultimate Agent series over the last couple years. He's released a couple of shorts over the last few months featuring the Agent on the hunt for cryptids. His most recent is The Mothman Files, where if you haven't guessed, the Agent goes up against the legendary mothman.

Borne has been at it a couple years, but Yuri Jean-Baptiste just debuted his first book in January. He's got the right style down for modern publishing though, as five months later he's already got a prequel and a second book out in his Metamorphs series. The latest is the prequel, Legion's Gambit. The pull quote is a bit light on details but looks like it might set up the story of superhero students in the first volume of the series. It is free however, so anyone interested in checking out Yuri's work have no excuse not to do so.

The third book in the Chronicles of Fid series and David Reiss continues his story of the supervillain Doctor Fid in Starfall. Villains going to the light has been used as a story trope for years, but it remains a highly untapped concept for a long term superhero story. It should be interesting to see how Reiss plays it out in his series.

Michael C. Bailey is a name I've seen on the superhero fiction pages for years on Facebook. His Action Figures series has become a strong seller over the years. The eight book in the series shares a title with a fantastic Doom Patrol collection: Crawling From the Wreckage. The story picks up with our lead Carrie Hauser returning from eight months in space to find her life... a wreck. She's got to rebuild her purpose from the ground up. But two opposing teams of super-villains will make it a lot less easy in what sounds like an action packed continuance of this series!

That wraps up the first installment of New Heroics! If you're a superhero fiction writer that wants your book featured here drop me a line at nick{at}superpoweredfiction{dot}com with your new work and it just might appear in our next column!

Take a deep dive with Deischer!

Jeff Deischer is one of the most prolific writers of super powered fiction I know. So it's no surprise when I chose him for my next Medium interview, we dove deep into his writing, superheroes and the creative process. You can read the whole thing at Medium. Here's some highlights:

Your love of golden age and public domain heroes seems apparent in your work. What drew you to those classic figures?

I actually don’t have a great love of “public domain characters” — superheroes, I mean. I have a great love for certain characters or groups of characters, and superheroes in general. The golden age superheroes I used in my The Golden Age series, I chose for specific practical reasons, not for any particular love of them. I do have a great affection of classical public domain characters. I think this is due to their fame in some cases, and otherwise because of my fondness for them from my childhood. This would include the Invisible Man and Frankenstein, for example, but not Captain Nemo or Sherlock Holmes, both of whom I discovered later, in my late teens. How can you read a series like John Carter (and love it) and not want to write a Carter novel? The stories and characters are so inspirational. The same is true of certain superheroes, public domain or not. What is there sparks ideas that were not used for these characters, unlike pantheons I create wholly from my own imagination. These obviously take more work to develop, although there’s greater satisfaction, I think, in those types of projects.

If it wasn’t love, what was your motivation for choosing the characters in The Golden Age?

Practicality. I felt there would be a built-in audience for public domain superheroes. The response to my first superhero book (The Overman Paradigm, written under the Kim Williamson pen name) was discouraging (though those who read it liked it, it didn’t sell many copies), so I wanted to give my next superhero book the best chance I could. That meant using characters that readers already knew. I chose Standard/Better/Nedor — not knowing that Alan Moore had done the same for his Terra Obscura — because there were so many characters to use. There was something like 22 in the first book in the series (also named The Golden Age), all the SBN characters who were superheroes, and a few who weren’t.

Your take on the characters is decidedly different than the one by Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse and Yanick Paquette. Did you ever read Terra Obscura after writing your novel to see how it compares? What did you think of it?

No. Once I learned of it while I was more than halfway through with writing The Golden Age, I glanced at a timeline of it I found online to make sure my ideas weren’t close to Moore’s, but I never read any of it.

What comics do you regularly read then? You said nothing too modern, but are there runs you love to read again and again?

I stopped collecting comics years ago. The last series I collected — I couldn’t tell you what it was — was 2007, probably, and there were only a handful of titles. Comic books went off the rails in the ’90s when it became about money and changing things for the sake of change rather than character and continuity. All I read these days are old comics. My favorites, the ones that I re-read over and over are Stan Lee and Steve Englehart comics. I re-read other comics sometimes, I have favorite series like Haywire, Marshall Law, and Watchmen (to name just three) that I go back to every so often, but when I’m in a comic mood, it’s usually Stan and Romita’s Spider-Man, Stan and Jack’s Fantastic Four, or Steve’s Captain America or The Avengers. Those are my standbys.

Haywire is an interesting pick. Not a lot of people know the series as it came and went in under two years at DC, an out of continuity (maybe) superhero book about a guy in a giant suit of armor with some questions about his actual identity. Can you give a brief rundown of the series and tell what draws you back to it after all these years?

I bought it new at the comics shop every month. The series is about a loser who has blackouts, and this giant armored being who fights the Combine (mob). It’s unclear for most of the series what’s going on. Who is the armored guy? Why is he fighting the mob? Why doesn’t he talk? Why is the loser the main character? Lots and lots of interesting questions. Okay, so SPOILER ALERT. It turns out that the main character is able to summon a sophisticated suit of armor, subconsciously, and become this unstoppable juggernaut. He doesn’t know that he’s able to do this. He has these blackouts — during which he’s the armored character, it turns out — that he goes to a therapist to find understanding. Eventually pieces start falling into place. I’ll resist revealing the loser’s actual identity and his motives for fighting the mob. The story would make a great movie if they could keep the tone of the series, and not Hollywoodize it. What I like about the series is the not “polished” superhero art, the intriguing characters, and the mystery of what’s going on. It was so well wrapped up that I didn’t realize it was supposed to be an ongoing series until much later. It seemed like a limited series to me.

We talk about a whole lot more, from role-playing to "pantsing" to the merits of DC's Millennium. Read it all over at Medium.

Gallur Gallery Challenge 1 Results

Image copyright Rafael Gallur.

Last week, I shared the following picture of El Hijo Del Santo in battle and challenged the intrepid readers of this blog to write a paragraph summarizing the vents that caused this scene to occur. I had several fun and amusing responses to this challenge on social media, but sadly only one person followed the rules and posted to the site itself, one Mr. Jeff Deischer. I have read some of Jeff's fiction and he is no slouch at the writing game, so it is no surprise he gave such a great response:

The Son of the Saint, using his God-given ability to sense evil, arrives just in time to prevent the vampire lord Nocturno from killing a trespasser, the beautiful and buxom Misty Callahan, an amateur spelunker from north of the border who stumbled upon the sinister being’s lair while in search of a good cave.

Quick, simple and to the point with the action. I went a slightly different route, but you can see the crosslines in each of our tales, I suspect.

The masked criminal madman Dr. Furioso used his evil genius to kidnap students of the University of Mexico for his mad experiments in human genetic engineering. His actions do not go unnoticed as the heroic protector of the city, El Hijo Del Santo, uses his masterful detective and lucha skills to track down the mad criminal, but not before he kidnaps another young couple from the university. Isabel can only watch as her lover Marcelo is transformed by the mad doctor into a subhuman creature at the beck and call of only Furioso. Isabel tries to escape, but Marcelo is sent to catch her, only for the Son of the Saint to rush to the rescue!

If you want to get in on the next Gallery Challenge, stay tuned as we will launch another one near the end of the month.