March Sweeps - Day 404

So, I finished editing my story "Waffle Iron Man."  The plan has always been to run it on the podcast, but to have Gino Moretto on from the future, since he was there for the inception of the idea (when it was about Siren Head), and was interested in telling me about a Kiwi urban legend.  I'll make it a goal to get that episode (or episodes, probably two, since the story is more than an hour) recorded by April.

Push-ups Today: 60
Push-ups In March: 1082

I wanted to remind you to go HERE to support me on Patreon.  They get the occasional exclusive episode, and the other episodes they get early.  For example, the episode that drops for you on Sunday was put out for Patreon supporters on December 6th. 

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In March: 1118

Back on Tuesday night, my cousin and I watched the first episode of the new Superman series on the CW, called "Superman and Lois."  It was pretty good.  

After the show, I talked his ear off about the Man of Steel, and it turns out I'm much more passionate about Superman than even I would've guessed. 

At one point, I said, there needs to be a rule set at DC and Warner Brothers, where they ask anybody who is in the running to write, direct, star in, or produce a Superman movie, cartoon, TV series, or comic book, "Do you think Superman is boring?"  And if they say yes, as SO many comic fans and creative people seem to believe, you shake their hand and thank them for their time, letting them know your secretary can validate their parking on the way out.

Superman is only boring to the most limited of people, those who could pigeonhole other superheroes to their most basic, myopic one word descriptions that miss the point completely, like "Spider-man is a geek, Daredevil is a lawyer, Wolverine is short, Black Widow is Russian, Spawn is a black guy, Captain America is old, Batman is crazy, Deadpool talks a lot, Wonder Woman is tall."  While all of those things may be true, they hardly encapsulate the characters they describe.  

Superman is many things.  He's a hero, a symbol, an example, a policeman, an unknown, a savior, an alien, a soldier, a leader, an immigrant, an All-American, a sex symbol, a loner, a Boy Scout, a threat, a philosophy, a god.  He's also Clark Kent, and all that entails (journalist, husband, thinker, bumbler, investigator, coward, everyman, friend).  There's a dozen different angles a writer can look at him, a dozen different ways he can be portrayed.

Yes, he's unbelievably overpowered, but any one of those powers can be interesting if well told.  But also, he's not omnipotent, and how does he deal with the knowledge that eighteen climbers in Tibet plummeted to their death because he was in Missouri putting out an oil fire?*  And there's always that thing of, what happens if the bullet bounces off of Superman and hits Perry White, or what happens if Jimmy Olsen boasts that Superman's his best pal in front of the wrong person?

Gosh, I could blog all day about Superman, how while he's not my favorite superhero, he's the greatest, most recognizable of them all, and he deserves to have his stories told by people who respect the character.  By people who love him.

I wonder if my cousin would even want to keep watching "Superman & Lois," if it means I stretch every episode out to two-plus hours.

Words Today: 1028
Words In March: 10,106

*My cousin often told me about a "Justice League" episode where Batman is incapacitated, so Kal-El volunteers to put on the Batman costume and patrol the streets of Gotham City in his place, and this lit up my imagination with the thought of: for one night out of the year, there were no murders in Batman's hometown, no rapes, no muggings, no drug overdoses, no domestic abuse cases, no one got hit by a car or fell from a fire escape or was run over by a subway car.  How glorious, no?
BUT Superman then considers that eleven people died in Albuquerque, nine in Baton Rouge, nineteen in Saskatoon, thirty-eight in Chongking, seventy-three in Anuradhapura . . . and three back home in Metropolis, because Superman was spending all his time in Gotham.  And he feels guilty about it, just as he always does any time someone suffers because Superman can't be in all places at once. 
That's what heroes do, apparently.