Crack For Kids

Several years ago, someone interviewed Joe Quesada, then Editor-In-Chief of Marvel Comics, and asked him about the appeal of the medium.  He (somewhat infamously) said, "Comics are so addictive.  Put bluntly, they're crack for kids."*

And yeah, I know of which he speaks.  I was absolutely ADDICTED to comic books in the late eighties and the start of the Nineties, and kept having singing lessons my Junior and Senior year of high school (despite never being a good student) just so I could borrow my mom's car to go to the lesson, and sneak over to the comic store afterward.  Every spare dime I had went toward comics, and I still only got about half of what I wanted.**

Anyway, cut to today, when I went to the local comic book shop for the first time in ages (I assumed it had been since 2019 or '20, but the cashier said I'd last made a purchase in 2016).  I really just wanted to talk to the employee about comics and collections and his advice about what to do with my old books and hear his stories of widows or grandchildren bringing in their dead loved ones' books and finding out they had something of a goldmine on their hands.  I love those kinds of stories (and not to get off on another tangent, I spent an hour listening to a comic seller at a con tell me moving stories of people blindly discovering a book they had would pay off their house and the like, as inspiring as any church sermon).

But the guy had none, and frankly, wanted to do anything other than talk to me.  I tried changing the subject to something he MIGHT be more interested in, like old Magic The Gathering cards I had from the Nineties, but he simply didn't need any new friends.  I know comic shop proprietors have a reputation of being jag-offs, but this guy wasn't that, he just wanted to be left alone to do his internet searches or look at his phone, and I get that.***

While I was talking to him, a kid (around twelve, I'd say, but prepubescent, so he could have been ten or younger) asked me, "Are you interested in buying comic books?"  My initial thought was, "No, I'm here for the filet mignon," but I couldn't say that because I knew I wouldn't be able to spell it in this post.  Instead, I said, "Well, yeah.  How about you?"  I thought maybe the kid would tell me about his favorite characters and the semi-valuable issues he owned, then I could blow him away with having bought the first appearances of Venom, Deadpool, Silver Sable, Jubilee, Bishop, Cable, and the living black Spider-man suit when they were new. 

But no, he opened his backpack and said, "I've got some comic books here.  Do you want to buy them?"  Immediately, the dude behind the counter called over, "Hey, you can't sell stuff in here, you know that." 

I told the kid I would look at what he had to offer if he wanted to step out to the sidewalk--and yes, having typed it out, I now realize why the police were called on me.  Whoops.****

Anyway, the boy went away, having been chastened by the Comic Book Guy™, and crossed over to the role playing game side of the store, where he started talking to the Mormon missionaries that were playing Magic The Gathering there, about Pokemon cards.  This is NOT a lie, and is sort of important to the point of writing this blogpost, okay?

He--the boy--had his eye on some Pokemon cards and while I asked the cashier how much a back issue of Dazzler was (it was early enough that Rogue was still a villain--an era I'm almost completely ignorant of), I could hear him ranking the cards in order of how much he wanted them.

Well, the back issue was surprisingly cheap, and it turns out nobody EVER buys old comics from them, to the point where the Comic Book Guy™ said that if somebody brought in an issue of Fantastic Four #1 to sell to the store, he would tell them to take it elsewhere.  (again, he really told me this)  

The child was still darting around, hanging close to the rare card case, as though he'd had nothing but sugar packets that day.  I asked the cashier, "Is he the son of someone who works here?" and she said, "No, he's just a boy who comes in and buys cards sometimes."  No idea why he wasn't in school, but hey, I didn't have a good excuse for not being at work, or why I would be in a comic book store four decades outside of my childhood, so I'm not one to judge.

I paid for my comic and as soon as I stepped away, the boy ran up to me and said, "Did you want to see my comics?"  I said, "Sure, but I don't want you to get in trouble."  He said, "I don't care; I need money for cards," and took out a stack that ranged from the Eighties to the 2010s.  One of them was Web of Spider-man 29 which, believe it or not, I was never able to afford when I was a kid.  I said to him, as softly as I could, "Would you take twenty bucks for that one?"*****

He said, "I need money for Pokemon cards.  Would you give me thirty for the whole stack?"

I said, "Yes, but I don't have thirty.  You can have what I do have, though."  He said, as though I had argued with him, "Would you give me twenty-five?"  And it was weird, he glanced back, not to see if he was being observed making a n in-store transaction and breaking the rules, but to see if the Pokemon cards were still there.  "Sure," I said, and gave him twenty-six dollars, which was all I had.  He greedily snatched it away from me, handed over the books (there were about fifteen in all, probably none of them valuable, but I'm certain he could have gotten five or six apiece for half of them), and turned and ran--RAN--to buy those cards, not at all unlike a junkie on the street.

So, though I am loath to contradict Mr. Quesada, I have to argue that while comic books may be crack for kids, there's something out there that's even worse.

R.B.O.

*To be fair, this quote may be apocryphal.  I did do a search on it, and nothing immediately came up. But cards on the table . . . it was a Yahoo! search.

**Now, with hindsight, I wish I had bought extras of the books that became invaluable afterward, but of course, nobody knew which books those would be, hence the risk of speculation.

***Right now, I want no one to approach me asking about where to find something in the library, just long enough to finish my blog post.

****That bit is a joke, but not the kind you can freely tell nowadays (I think I blogged about working on a TV show a decade back when a little kid and his mom pulled into the lot at the same time and later, when we were checking in, the boy exclaimed, "Hey, you're that guy from the parking lot!"  The assistant director said, "Say what?" and I kid you not, the child actor said, "He asked if I wanted to get in his van."  This is not a made up story, and I'm sure I blogged about it, all those years ago.

*****Not to keep annoying you with these footnotes, but I have no idea what that comic is worth (and I don't even care, really), but I was never able to read that issue as a lad, and the boy was a hustler, which I was also never able to be, then or now.  So I either took pity on him, or with three mediocre to fair income streams, I felt like I could toss a bit of cash his way.  Also, it was my turn to buy lunch today, but Jeff arrived before me and paid for my meal anyway, so I was streets ahead. 
P.S. I did look it up, and the book is utterly worthless.  Whoops.

Rish Outcast 293: You're In Good Hands 2

Due to car problems, Rish shares the second segment of his "Lara & The Witch" story.

Is Holcomb acting strangely, or is Lara's pendant not working? And if it isn't, what does that mean?

If you'd like to download the episode, Right-Click HERE.

If you would like to support me on Patreon, click HERE.

Logo by Gino "In Good Pants" Moretto.

The Dead Walk!

Okay, I know I get repetitive in these security guard posts, and if I don't get fired from this job (fat chance, going by history), I'll have a heck of a lot of these stories to share.  So, there's a wedding going on (or soon to be) on the third floor, and I happened to glance at the security cameras pointed at the stairs right below . . . and darned if this doesn't look like a melon-farming ghost.

The Dead Walk!

No, no, I'm aware it's just a wedding guest, and a perfectly harmless one (despite her propensity for texting while driving and cruelly unscrewing the lids  on salt shakers at restaurants) . . . but look at this photo again, will ya?  Does it not look like she's got a skull for a face?  Or at least two empty eye sockets instead of a pair of baby blues?

No?  Perfectly normal, perfectly innocent, and I'm a piece of crap for insinuating that your sweet, ordinary drive-texter might be a creature of the night?  I guess we see what we want to see.

Marshal & I Review a Notorious Film

For our recent Outfield Excursions, Marshal and I sat down to watch Alfred Hitchcock's 1946 film, NOTORIOUS, starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman.  Oh, and Claude Raines.*

Check it out HERE.

*Dunno how I missed him in the cast; it was like he was invisible or something.

Rish Outcast 292: You're In Good Hands 1

Just in time for something, Rish presents the first segment of his Lara & The Witch story, "You're In Good Hands."

Here's the link to the Lara & The Witch: Volume 1 collection: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DP7JZYVM

Here's a link to the first L&TW story, "Like A Good Neighbor:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbkHKDgjdxo

To download the episode, Right-Click HERE.

To support my vain efforts on Patreon, click HERE.

Logo by Gino "Urine Good Hands" Moretto.

New Year, New Book

So, I finally achieved at least one of my New Year goals.  I finally published "Balms & Sears," the longest novel I've written.

I've talked about it one hell of a lot (and for that, I'm sorry*), but B&S tells the story of Alec Ewell, who moves into a new Colorado town with his grandfather, and starts at a new high school.  Alec tries to be a normal student, a normal kid, but he's not normal . . . Alec is a Balm, a person with the ability to heal what he touches.  And that ability has gotten more and more powerful over the years, but it's also gotten him in trouble, because it's supposed to be a secret.  And every time Alec uses the Balm, and is discovered, his grandfather decides it's time to move to a new city, get a new last name, and see if this time, he can get it right.  Because Alec just can't help himself, and there are people in pain no matter where he goes.

So that's the premise, and it could have been just a short story, or at least a novella, but it got away from me, new characters came in, and new subplots lifted their heads, until it was double the length of my first novel, "Into the Furnace."  I don't know how to write a novel, so maybe this would've worked better as a series of short stories, ala Dead & Breakfast and Lara & The Witch (both of which I have written, but not published, novels for).  

It took years to finish this book, so it's only fair that it took years for me to get it published.  But hey, now that this is out of my system, I can start looking for something new to work on.

Check it out HERE.

*Gosh, if only I could talk about it now that it's done, hyping it up on Facebook and Twitter, pushing it to whoever will listen, in attempts to get them to buy it.  Because that's what you have to do in independent publishing, in order to be successful.

No Problem

So, I did sit down and rework my previously-mentioned problem chapter of "Balms & Sears."  There were two moments in there that I felt went too far, and I felt it improved the ending of the book if I nipped them in the bud. 

The thing is, in real life, good people occasionally do bad things, and there are at least a few bad people out there that sometimes do something good (harder to quantify, I know).  But in fiction, because these characters (for good or ill) are all me, I can change my mind, and make things blacker and whiter.  Ultimately, I had this niggling feeling that it was a problem, and I feel better making that change.

Part of the problem is, I've never written a book this big before (unlikely that I will again), and I don't know what I'm doing.  Even now, I worry that it's not all that good, but hey, I've worked harder on "Balms & Sears" than I have on any previous work, so I'm going to finish it and put it out there.  And then you can be the ultimate judge.

I asked A.I. to create me the image of Superman lifting up a schoolbus, and I got this.

Rish Outcast 294: The Baleful

In lieu of a Christmas story this year, Rish shares his holiday-adjacent story "The Baleful." No apologies, though.

As always, you can download the file by Right-Clicking HERE.

And of course, you can support my Patreon by clicking HERE.  They're three shows ahead!

Logo by Gino "The Toenailful" Moretto.

Problematic

A saying you hear often in screenwriting lectures is "Kill your darlings," a bit of advice I've heard over the years.  Now, in case you're confused, that's not a reference to what George R.R. Martin does in his novels (where he takes a character you've learned to love and he brutally cuts their throat) or what that lady in your building did when she drowned her kids in the tub that afternoon last February (after all, she caught the oldest whistling the theme to Harry Potter, and that . . . was . . . it).  No, "Kill your darlings" refers to editing your manuscript, revising your work-in-progress, and cutting scenes that you love and/or worked crazy-hard on.*

Sometimes a scene--no matter how proud you are of it--slows the pace, or confuses the narrative, or raises questions that are never answered, and they've got to go, for the good of the project as a whole.  And it can be painful, even heartbreaking, to lose those scenes, hence the Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Murder your darlings")/William Faulkner ("Kill all your darlings") phrase I'm bringing up.

I mention this because, in the home stretch of my novel "Balms & Sears," I recorded a chapter last night that seems to have been intended for the very end of the book (it refers to the climax, which I haven't gotten to yet, and as I was narrating it, I discovered, aside from it being out of place, that it is somewhat (or more than somewhat) problematic.

I don't know either.  But I like it.

Now, "problematic" is a term that has been kicked around so much recently that Big Anklevich and I have grown to despise it, because it can refer to whatever you (or a potential viewer/reader) don't or might not like.  A lot of the times, it's used to mean that something may or may not include sexist, racist, homophobic, bigoted, or closed-minded attitudes from the past, but also can just mean what it started out meaning: something causes a problem in the viewer, reader, or writer.

In my chapter's case, despite me making alterations so it takes place before the climax . . . it features a character doing something that, well, just might be too much.  I don't know, really.  I know that I wrote it around the time that, when I came to the library, I encountered a crazy person that called me "Lizardface" and freaked me out to the point where I thought . . . well, not exactly me at my most charitable.  So, I put it in the story.  The problem is, the scene makes one of the characters--a piece of work, sure--nasty in a potentially irredeemable way.  Since it's my book and I'm close to it, I can't say whether a reader would be alienated or irretrievably lost with that scene, but it's definitely possible.**

I remember a moment in the TV show "Angel" where a character did something that made me decide, "You know, this isn't something I can look past," and it really did taint the series (and character) for me until the end of time.  For thousands (if not millions) of people, when Luke Skywalker tossed away his father's lightsaber and/or milked a sea cow and drank its blue milk raw was an absolutely deal-breaking moment.  I recall people saying that, in comics, the moment where Hank Pym backhanded Janet, or the moment when Peter Parker traded his wife to the Devil to save Aunt May, or the moment when Cyclops left his wife and infant child because Jean was alive again (and then later cheated on Jean with Emma Frost) were irredeemable moments.  For me, there was a page in The Ultimates that not only made me despise Captain America . . . but never read an Ultimate Universe comic again.  And Alan Moore apparently meant what the Joker did in his Batman story "The Killing Joke" to be so egregious that the Dark Knight ends up killing the Joker.*** 

In "Balms & Sears," I wrote a character that (I think) is complicated, and presumably hard to like.  But I fear I may have gone too far, making a character that was meant to be anti-heroic into an absolutely loathe-able villain.  Not really my intention.

So, I guess I'm going to cut that bit out, despite me being absolutely loath to do so (my rewrites almost always include adding things, never subtracting things), and put it away, despite having already recorded it.  I'll have to rewrite a bit, unless I just cut the whole chapter out, but if it helps make the (potential) readers like the characters, then it's worth it.

Okay, on with the countdown (seven chapters to go).

*Or in my case, don't even remember writing, but by gum, they must be important because I spent time creating.

**I had a conversation--a truly vexing one--with a friend of mine recently, regarding the ending to a Lara & The Witch story, where he felt it was excessive or in poor taste.  I disagreed, but what he said stuck with me long enough that I did rewrite the ending, and I think the new ending is almost definitely better.

***It's told in such an oblique way, however, that DC simply let it go, as part of comic continuity, not realizing that that's what happened on that final page of the book.  Heck, I read it myself three times before ever hearing that interpretation . . . and between you and me, despite Brian Bolland's fantastic artwork, it's literally not there.

Seeing Things Running Through Your Head

I've mentioned that I work at the library now, right?  And I've surely mentioned that it's reputed to be haunted, no?

Well, in case I haven't, I do and it is.

I, however, have not any brushes with the supernatural (unless you count that foul odor that I encountered one evening, but couldn't figure out where it was coming from), though I've talked to a few folks that have (one patron, name o' Roger, said he's never gone up into the attic, because "that's where the ghost is").  I have had plenty of opportunity, in the short time I've worked here, because I'm often alone, and I have walked through the library after hours, when no one else is in the building.  

The closest I have come (other than The Phantom Stench, that is) happened on a Friday night, when I was sitting at my security desk, and I happened to glance at the monitors, which show a bank of twenty images throughout the building.  On one of them was what appeared to be a faceless grey form standing on one of the staircases.  I froze when I saw it, because it looked SO MUCH like a human form, even though I knew there would have to be another explanation.  And then it moved, ever so slightly.

A second later, it turned, and I realized that it was a little girl, wearing a gray winter coat, facing away from the camera, with the hood up over her head.  Once she turned and went back up the stairs, it was clear what I was looking at* . . . but I gotta admit, for a second, I thought it had finally happened to me.

I went back and got a screengrab, so you could share in my brush with The Other Side.  What do you think?

*Also, if you zero in on that particular angle, the details become much clearer that they initially appear in a tiny lo-res rectangle.

Rish Outcast 291: Job Description

Rish talks about trying to get a job as a security guard.

Yes, that Rish.

If you'd like to download the episode, Right-Click HERE.

If you would like to support me on Patreon, click HERE.

Logo by Gino "Knob Description" Moretto.