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From Friday’s The Oklahoman: 

By Matthew Price
Assistant Features Editor

WORD BALLOONS

Unusual superheroes populate “Who Can Save Us Now?,” a superhero prose anthology from 22 writers, including Will Clarke, Jennifer Weiner and Sam Weller.

The anthology was edited by Owen King (“We’re All in This Together”) and John McNally (“America’s Report Card”).

Heroes include the creepy Silverfish, the cuddly-but-deadly Meerkat and dozens more.

“The idea was that superheroes mean really different things to different people,” King said. “And what we hoped, and we’re very happy with the way it turned out, is that would be reflected in the narratives.”

King’s character in the anthology is the Meerkat, a television producer who gains the powers and abilities of a meerkat.

“I was on the treadmill one day, trying to think about anything other than running,” King said. The show ‘Meerkat Manor,’ which he had been watching regularly, popped into his head.

“All of a sudden I had this idea that it would be funny, and it would also present an interesting conflict, to give a character the powers of a meerkat,” he said. “Because they’re cute and cuddly looking, but if you watch the show, they’re really brutal cold-blooded killers.”

He imagined a character with meerkat abilities who would be associated with a cute animal, and wondered what that would do to the hero’s self-esteem.

“I thought it would be interesting to put a character with self-esteem issues into a city that I thought had some self-esteem issues, which was Cleveland,” he said.

King’s co-editor John McNally created the creepy hero Silverfish for the anthology.

“My interest in superheroes was limited mostly to TV as opposed to comic books, so it wasn’t a genre I felt like I knew intimately,” McNally said, adding that he read “The Dark Knight Returns” and “a few other things in the Frank Miller mode” in college.

“Place is always really important to me in my own fiction, and the first thing I thought was I write a lot about the southwest side of Chicago, which is a very blue-collar place,” McNally said. “And I thought, what if we have a superhero who’s living in kind of a small bungalow on the southwest side of Chicago?”

McNally tells the story of the Silverfish — a hero who takes his namesake seriously, going so far as to survive on hair, glue and other silverfish food. McNally’s tale is told from the point of view of the Silverfish’s butler.

“I have this butler who’s living in small quarters on the southwest side of Chicago with the Silverfish, who’s been called the ‘creepiest superhero,” McNally said. “The title, ‘The Remains of the Night,’ is a play on ‘The Remains of the Day,’ the novel by (Kazuo) Ishiguro from the point of view of the butler.”

Other stories take different points of view, as well: “Girl Reporter” by Stephanie Harrell features the point of view of the “Lois Lane” type character, while other stories feature a sidekick or fan of the superhero of the story.

Both McNally and King (son of writer Stephen King) would like for “Who Can Save Us Now?” to lead to more superhero stories.

“It’s piqued my interest in terms of wanting to do something more,” McNally said. “I felt like there was a certain freedom to that story, that I found myself just having a lot more fun with it.”

King agreed.

“My fondest dream is that this will make enough of an impression that we could do it again,” he said. “I can easily think of another set of writers that I’d love to ask, ‘What’s your superhero?’”

Miss out on Titan Books at Comic-Con? The publisher has some cool titles coming out, including “Watching the Watchmen” by Dave Gibbons, “The Watchmen Film Companion,” “The Spirit: The Movie Visual Companion,” and more. Get the highlights at http://comiccon.titanbooks.com/.

– Matt Price

From Friday’s The Oklahoman: 

By Matthew Price
Assistant Features Editor

WORD BALLOONS

The alien takeover of earth in the hit 1983 TV miniseries “V” spurred comic books, video games and other ancillary spinoffs. Creator Kenneth Johnson returned to the world of “V” this year with his sequel novel “V: The Second Generation.”

“The Second Generation” is being developed as a possible TV movie or miniseries.

The original miniseries, a story of America under occupation seen by 80 million people, was inspired by Sinclair Lewis’ book, “It Can’t Happen Here.”

“With ‘V,’ it was very interesting, because my initial concept for ‘V’ had nothing to do whatsoever with aliens,” Johnson said. “I had been going through the works of Sinclair Lewis, who wrote ‘Elmer Gantry’ and ‘Main Street’ and a bunch of great novels. A lesser known novel of his is called ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’”

“It Can’t Happen Here” details an America overrun by fascism.

“What an interesting idea, to turn America into a state that was run by a tyranny and operated by fascists,” Johnson said, who was inspired to write a screenplay about a grassroots fascistic movement taking hold in the United States.

Brandon Tartikoff, then the head of NBC, read it, and wasn’t sure Americans would get fascism. He proposed that America would instead be under occupation by the Russians, or Chinese. Johnson said he wasn’t sure it was believable that the Chinese or Russians could sustain an occupation. Then, Johnson said, someone suggested aliens.

“Here I go again,” Johnson said. As the creator of “The Bionic Woman” and the developer of “The Incredible Hulk” for television, he was wary of being pigeonholed in science fiction. However, after considering the idea further, he changed his mind.

“The more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a great opportunity, because not only could I tell the story that I wanted to tell, about how ordinary people are changed or corrupted or become heroic because of extraordinary circumstances, but I could do it in a way where I had all this wonderful visual eye candy that would attract everyone’s attention,” he said.

This allowed Johnson to tell his story, which was “not about aliens or reptilian races or spacecraft, but a story in which the theme was power,” he said. “People who had power and abused it … and ultimately the heroes, who say, ‘This power is being abused and I have to fight against it.’”

Power returns as a theme in “Second Generation,” as does another theme, which Johnson said wasn’t originally intended, but sort of “bubbled up” as he was writing it.

“Virtually all of the principal characters in the Second Generation have at one point or another a crisis of conscience about loyalty,” Johnson said. “And loyalty is a theme that ruminates entirely through the ‘Second Generation.’”

From Friday’s The Oklahoman: 

By Matthew Price
Assistant Features Editor

WORD BALLOONS

Many people thinking of comics from the 1940s would think of muscled supercharacters such as Superman and Batman. But writer Ron Goulart follows another trend, that’s continued from the early days of comic books until today.

“Good Girl Art,” the latest book by comics historian Goulart, traces the popularity of drawing pretty, often scantily-clad female characters back to the Phantom Lady, Torchy, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.

Comics originally were reprints of comic strips from newspapers. But after the success of Superman in “Action Comics,” more and more publishers began requesting original material.

By 1941, “some of the more crafty publishers realized it wasn’t just kids (reading comics), it was teenage boys, it was young men,” Goulart said in a phone interview.

“The thing about GIs in the Second World War, they were kids, 18 or so,” Goulart said.

Rather than look solely at Superman, these teens and young men “might want to see somebody in a bikini, like Sheena,” he said.

Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, is described by Goulart as a “blonde, female Tarzan,” and was published in “Jumbo Comics,” from the shop of Jerry Iger and Will Eisner.

“What distinguished her from Tarzan, Ka-Zar and the other comic book jungle characters was that a great many readers found her a bit more interesting to look at,” Goulart writes in “Good Girl Art.”

“Her core audience was added to appreciably during World War II, when thousands of pin-up happy GIs joined the ‘Jumbo’ readership.”

The Good Girl style of art took a bit of a beating in the 1950s, as Dr. Frederic Wertham, senior psychiatrist of the New York Department of Hospitals, led a crusade against comics that caused the adoption of the Comics Code. This voluntary code slowed down Good Girl Art, but it came back in the 1960s and 1970s.

“By the 1970s, you have a college audience and an older audience,” Goulart said, that was drawn to characters like Vampirella and a revived Black Canary.

“Good Girl Art” also follows the career of Dave Stevens in the 1980s.

“We have two pieces of his work, the one where he did the Betty Page-type character for the Rocketeer, and then he did an unpublished Phantom Lady, which is one of the last ones in the book,” Goulart said. “He was one of the, in his period … one of the most popular guys doing that kind of thing. He certainly helped the revival of interest in Betty Page, as well. Betty Page also influenced the return of Phantom Lady in the ’40s.”

And Good Girl art continues to this day, with artists like Frank Cho, who provided the cover to “Good Girl Art,” and Adam Hughes.

But one thing that’s changed is the role the women play.

“In the old days, like the ’40s … when you saw women on comic book covers, about half of them would be victims,” Goulart said. “Now when there’s women on the cover of a comic book, I would say 95 (percent) or 99 percent of them are heroes. You don’t see the woman being saved anymore, you see the woman saving someone else.”

Goulart says comic books often reflect what’s going on in the world and in society.

“In the Second World War you had Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth and you had pin-up girls. This was what was going on. Comics were aimed mostly … (at) males. So they’re going to put pictures of pretty women,” he said. “I didn’t invent that, and I’m not justifying it, but that’s the way it is. You could say, well, this is a very sexist thing, but … the good girl art, for the most part (is) incredibly tame considering what you can see in the men’s magazines, or certainly on the Internet now. It’s a very sedate kind of sexiness.”

On the Media talks to author David Hadju about his book “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America.”

Hadju says:

There were very few things in the 1940s and 1950s that were produced, marketed and priced specifically for young people to buy. And a great many comic book artists in the 1930s and ’40s were kids themselves, just in their teens or maybe their early ’20s. If they’re not young people, a great many of them were outsiders of other sorts.

A great, great many of them were members of minority groups – Jews, Italians, Asian-Americans – African-Americans, many more than people realize – and a great many women. They thought of comics as a place where they were welcome, and in comic books they expressed their pride in their outsider status. And comics were free and wild. Anything did go in comics, and they went too far.

More in the link.

Fantagraphics has announced a biography of pioneering artist Joe Kubert, slated for June release.  “Man of Rock,” written by Bill Schelly, will examine the life and career of the popular “Sgt. Rock” and “Hawkman” cartoonist, who founded the Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art.

From Fantagraphics:

Joe Kubert’s extraordinary career spans the history of the comic book in America: he began drawing comics in 1938, just as Superman made his debut in Action Comics #1, and continues to be one of the most vital cartoonists working today, writing and drawing both mainstream comic book characters as well as, more recently, graphic novels of his own conception.

MAN OF ROCK: A BIOGRAPHY OF JOE KUBERT provides a unique, behind-the-scenes look at the career of one of the most distinctive, dynamic artists in the history of comics. Bill Schelly’s insightful book covers all facets of Kubert’s creative life: artist, writer, innovator, entrepreneur, and educator. It abounds in heretofore unknown details about Kubert’s life and work, and is rich in colorful anecdotes drawn from numerous interviews the author conducted with Kubert’s colleagues, family and friends. MAN OF ROCK: A BIOGRAPHY OF JOE KUBERT is a full-bodied biography intended to be read and enjoyed by anyone interested in the history of American popular culture.

 – Matt Price

Tor Books brought the Wild Cards universe of George R. R. Martin back this month with “Inside Straight.”  Now, go deeper into the world of the novel with the American Hero Web site, exploring the reality show that provides much of the plot for the novel.

From Tor Books:

Tor Books is proud to present “American Heroes,” the Wild Cards website spin-off blog featuring the characters from Inside Straight, the newest Wild Cards mosaic novel. One of the longest-running series in the shared worlds and fantasy genre, Wild Cards has the superheroes in its latest installment competing in a top reality TV show called “American Heroes.”
 
Now, in addition to the brand new Wild Cards website that launched in December, George R. R. Martin and the authors of Inside Straight have contributed all original narrative and scintillating “behind the scenes” material to a new “American Heroes” blog. Each week, the narrative follows the characters of Inside Straight as they compete–some surviving for another round and others getting voted off the show.
 
Featuring all original artwork by Mike Miller, the “American Heroes” site shows visual profiles of each character and “confessionals” from the individual superheroes.

Today, Tor Books relaunches the popular “Wild Cards” series with “Inside Straight.”  Edited by George R. R. Martin, “Wild Cards” were a series of shared-universe anthology novels that examined a world where superheroes were real.  An alien virus was released on Earth in 1946, killing 9 of every 10 exposed to it. Most of those who survive become deformed, but one in 100 is gifted with amazing powers.  These “jokers” and “aces” are at the heart of the “Wild Cards” series.  This was a favorite for me when they debuted in 1987, and I’m glad, 20 years later, to see the series return.  

Info from Tor:  

Launched in 1987, WILD CARDS is the longest-running series in the shared worlds and fantasy genre. A contemporary world of smart, complicated, and incredibly diverse superheroes is brilliantly re-imagined by this group of acclaimed fantasy writers.

Tor Books is proud to present the re-launch of this landmark series with its eighteenth volume, Inside Straight (A Tor hardcover; $24.95; January 22, 2008). Headed up by #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin, a top-notch cast of authors introduce a new generation of young, hip, and messed-up superheroes in an interconnected storyline that spans from Egypt to Hollywood.

Meet the girl whose stuffed dragon becomes a fifty-foot, fire-breathing version of itself (and she has a whole bag full of other little stuffies …), the six-armed drummer man most likely to appear on a Rolling Stones cover, and the fox-tailed Japanese guy who uses mythology to create optical illusions.

It is 2007, and the highest rated show on television is American Hero. Earth Witch, Pop Tart, Curveball, Bugsy, and twenty-four other young superheroes—aka “aces”—battle one other in a series of tasks and stunts. On this reality show like no other, alliances form and rivalries explode, as the aces race to make it to the final showdown.

Many years ago, a DNA-altering alien virus was accidentally unleashed, killing 90 percent of those infected. Nine percent of the survivors mutated into “jokers,” tragically deformed creatures—while the other one percent, the “aces,” found themselves transformed with superpowers.

Others still carried the “wild card” within them, never knowing the day when their card would turn . . .

Now a new generation has come of age, a generation born into the world of the wild card. Computer geeks, hip-hop freaks, rock stars, and Bohemian slackers—these are the new aces for the millennium. They don’t really understand what the first generation went through—but they know that the world still needs saving and that their parents didn’t quite do the job.

As intrigue boils on and off the set of the American Hero reality show—with a few surprises, tricksters, and old friends shaking up the act—an incident in the Middle East escalates a worldwide event that will involve all the superheroes . . . no matter which side they’re on.

With cameo appearances by the first generation “aces,” INSIDE STRAIGHT is action-packed dangerous fun with an unforgettable and unpredictable cast of characters. This is only the beginning of a projected triad of volumes—so let the games begin.

In addition, Dabel is prepping a comic-book series for April.  From the release:

“Wild Cards is one of those series in science fiction that many comic book fans have read, because it’s really a sci-fi take on superheroes,” explained Ernst Dabel, President of Dabel Brothers Publishing. “And that’s excellent news, because this story feels right at home in the format. It’s a great way for old fans to enjoy the story in a new way, and it’s also a wonderful introduction to the world of Wild Cards for those who’ve never had a chance to read the books before.”

– Matt Price

Many of you have probably seen this, but Tor announced last month that Brandon Sanderson (”Mistborn”) has been selected to complete the final book in Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series.   The final book, “A Memory of Light,” is slated for a fall 2009 release, based on Jordan’s notes for the completion of the series.  Jordan died in September.

I got really into these books in high school and early college, but then I got frustrated with waiting for them to come out.  I always figured I’d go back to them when they were finished.   Since Jordan’s death, I’ve been interested in going back and reading them.  Maybe if I got started now, I’d finish by 2009.