Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Short Fiction about Superheroes: An anthology by another name...

A while back I wrote this post about “With Great Power”, a superhero short fiction anthology edited by Lou Anders. It features stories from the keyboards of Gail Simone, Peter David, Mike Carey and other comic book writers.

Well, while I was being a bad blogger (and had my back turned on the superhero comics / prose worlds), Spider-man’s owners did what they do best and said: “Hey, that’s what Uncle Ben told Peter...Well, half of it at least...Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, Mister Anders, you can’t name your anthology that...Everybody knows that Marvel owns those three words in that order. Bottom-line: You are hereby instructed to rename your anthology something else and preferably nothing starting with the uppercase letter “X” as Marvel owns that as well. Have a nice day.”

Peter and his Uncle Ben uttering copyrighted...um...utterances

Anyway, the anthology is now entitled “Masked”. Here’s a short article about it, which doubles as a great teaser (stories like “Cleansed and set in Gold” and “A to Z in the Ultimate Big Superhero Universe (Villains Too)” sound even more intriguing to me having read this write-up). I also found the comments to the article spot on with regard to the benefits / risks to superhero prose (especially those proffered by commenters 214w, Tina Sena, Lou Anders himself, and Powerful Lamp).

Monday, July 12, 2010

Random Research Question: Cool runnings from a bad blogger...

Yes. I've been a woeful blogger of late, but I have an excuse...I've been saving the world. Kind of.

Anyhoo, I thought I'd pop a trademarked 1truegl comic-related Random Research Question to the one or two UBER-PATIENT readers of this blog.

Question:
Was freerunning (which is a form of urban acrobatics in which participants, known as free runners, use the city and rural landscape to perform movements through its structures, according to Wikipedia) inspired by what is sometimes known as roof-running (as practiced by Batman and the Bat family as well as several non-powered heroes across many comic book universes)?