My latest comic book, "iCthulhu," is now on sale!

Grayhaven Comics' latest anthology issue, The Gathering: Sci-Fi Volume 3 is now on sale, and features a short sci-fi action comic by me and my good friend Dave Ganjamie!

Dave and I were bouncing ideas around when he made the intentionally-absurd suggestion of doing a "Futuristic Lovecraftian steampunk horror story." I decided to take this challenge literally...and thus, iCthulhu was born!

Our story is just one part of a 48-page anthology featuring tons of great creators, and the whole thing will only cost you $3.50, so what are you waiting for? Buy it before it becomes a rare and valuable collector's item!

A little sneak peek at Dave's awesome artwork...

REVIEW: King Dork by "Doctor" Frank Portman

I gave this 4 stars on GoodReads but it's really a 3.5. I'm generously rounding up because it reminded me of my excitement when I got to open up for Dr. Frank's band, the Mr T Experience, in high school.

Overall, I really enjoyed King Dork. Tom was a funny narrator in his anti-Holden-Caulfield-but-still-so-Holden-Caulfield way, and as a former aspiring punk rock star myself, I definitely saw a lot of me and my high school friends in the story. That being said, I was disappointed with the exposition-y ending. As a writer myself, I was somewhat bothered the whole time through with how much of the story was told in summary exposition, but I was willing to give it a pass because it makes sense diagetically with the narrator that this is how he would convey this story (similar to Holden Caulfield in that way). But Tom's main two journeys -- Fiona, and the relationship with his dead father -- were literally summed up and resolved without any effort on his part (even his hospitalization, though it certainly made sense that he wouldn't have a good memory of the specific events leading up to it, was so blasé: "and then I was hospitalized for a month because I got beat up NBD.").

All that being said: it's probably a good book to help get adolescents into classic books and help with their vocabularies (and the glossary was *hilarious*).

Also, the women in the book left...much to be desired. In some ways (again, diagetically, that is, within the world of the story), I got it, because it was absolutely how a 14 year old King Dork would probably talk about and depict women. It certainly sounded like some of my friends at 14, anyway. But as an adult feminist male, it was a little, well, exactly the kind of subtle misogyny that people are finally and rightfully paying attention to, and I wish had been approached with a more deft hand.

Anyway, here's the MTX song "King Dork," which actually has very little to do with the book (which I assume was named more for brand recognition than anything else, as this is generally seen as one of Dr. Frank's "hits," if you will).

REVIEW: The Manhattan Projects, Vol. 1: Science Bad by Jonathan Hickman & Nick Pitarra

I'm just going to say it: Jonathan Hickman pisses me off. Everything he writes uses the exact same pseudoscience and cryptic philosophical posturing, with cipher characters defined by one Irresistibly Charming Quirk or Twist whose actions are motivated entirely by Hickman's Next Cool Plot Twist rather than, ya know, actual human desires or anything.

And yet...he does all of that REALLY well. So well, in fact, that you hardly notice unless you are specifically aiming to scrutinize (such as I am). It probably helps that he's also a tremendous art director who gets paired with talented artists and that his books demonstrate such impeccable design sense. But in the process of reading his stories, you get so wrapped up in the big ideas and crazy twists that you don't notice how soulless it is.

The Manhattan Projects is certainly no exception to this. When you break it down, you're like "WTF? This is how a sociopath imitates storytelling." But when you're reading it, you're absolutely carried away and enamored by the strange, surreal, and epic world he's created (with tremendous assistance from Nick Pitarra's creepy-weird artwork).

Damn you, Hickman.

REVIEW: Alex + Ada Vol. 1, by Jonathan Luna & Sarah Vaughn

It's hard to break new ground on the "artificial intelligence turns sentient" story. And yet, Alex + Ada somehow manages to feel fresh even while treading somewhat common tropes. It could be the crisp, clean artwork, or the simple, straightforward dialogue that still strikes a chord in your heart, or maybe the way that the technology feels more like jailbreaking an iPhone than awakening humanity within a person, but that similarity still draws some interesting connections in your mind. Either way, this was a delightful read, and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Buy My Poetry In This Month's Issue of ASIMOV'S Science Fiction Magazine!

My time travel love poem "I Loved You More Last Time" is now available in the February 2015 issue of ASIMOV'S Science Fiction Magazine (along with a poem by my Clarion classmate and recent winner of Apex Magazine's Story Of The Year, Marie Vibbert). 

As far as I can tell, Asimov's is erm, not very good at making online purchases easy for anyone. But you can pick up the current issue or subscribe on Kindle, Nook, and iTunes Newsstand (unfortunately, I don't know the exact cut-off date for when the current issue ceases to be "current," and I can't figure out how buy specific back issues either). I'll also have a small stash of hard copies available for direct purchase (more info to come).

My ARISIA Convention Schedule

I'll be at the Arisia sci-fi / fantasy convention in Boston this coming weekend, speaking on a few panels and generally hanging around. I've never been to Arisia before, nor have I ever been on any convention panels, so I'm doubly excited (and very much hoping that I don't say anything too stupid).

Anyway, here's where you can find me. Come say hi!

• Neurodiversity in SF/F
  Saturday, 11:30am-12:45pm in Marina 2 (2E)
  How are autistic and other neurodiverse characters presented in SF/F? What works handle this subject well, and which do not? Who are some neurodiverse authors whom we should all be reading? And how, as a genre, do we move beyond stories only focused on a “cure”?
  —with Don Sakers, David G. Shaw, and JoSelle Vanderhooft
   

• DC Comics on the Small Screen: 2015 Edition
  Saturday, 5:30-6:45pm in Marina 2 (2E)
  For all of DC’s much-disdained recent lack of creative success on the big screen, they’ve put together a string of received cartoons going back over twenty years ranging from episodic (Batman) to serialized (Young Justice) to goofy (Teen Titans Go). They’ve also launched multiple TV series, including Arrow, The Flash, and Constantine, even as their actual comics have become a pit of creative despair. We’ll discuss DC’s success (and occasional flop) over the years on television.
  —with Nomi S. Burstein, George Claxton, Jaime Garmendia, Dan Toland
   

• Behind the Bristol Board: Comics as a Profession
  Saturday, 7-8:15pm in Marina 4 (2E)
  If you’re a comics fan, odds are you’ve thought about what it’s like to actually work in the comics industry. This panel will feature working professionals explaining the ins-and-outs of everything from writing and drawing, to editing and publishing. It’s everything you ever wanted to know about being a comics pro, but were afraid to ask.
  —with Ken Gale, Bettina Kurkoski, Alisa Kwitney Sheckley, Mercy E Van Vlack
   

• Superman and Religion
  Sunday, 11:30am-12:45pm in Burroughs (3E)
  Superman remains an enigmatic figure in American mythology. Created by two Jewish kids from Cleveland, perhaps as a metaphor for Jewish assimilation, Superman also represents a Christlike figure in many stories, and the screenwriter of Man of Steel consulted, among other sources, the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. Does the wide cast of Superman’s religious influences render him a defender-of-all-faiths? Can any religion claim him as one of their own? Come explore this thorny issue with Arisia 2015.
  —with Michael A. Burstein, Ken Gale, Alex Jarvis, Daniel Miller
   

• Story Autopsy
  Sunday, 2:30-3:45pm in Alcott (3W)
  Our group of panelists takes a few well-known works of genre fiction and picks them apart to show you how they work, why they work, and in some cases point out the parts that don’t work at all. If you don’t like spoilers this is probably not the panel for you.
  —with M. L. Brennan, James L. Cambias, John P. Murphy, Ian Randal Strock
   

• The Medium and the Message
  Sunday, 5:30-6:45pm in Hale (3W)
  A story can be told in a multitude of formats. Anything from short stories and epic poems to graphic novels and screenplays can be used to convey a narrative. How do the various formats compare? Do certain genres work well in one but not another? What about translations from one medium to another? How can you tell which works best for your story?
  —with Heather Albano, Alexander Feinman, John G. McDaid
   

• Writing and Racial Identity 
  Monday, 1-2:15pm in Hale (3W)
  What does your race have to do with what you write? Depending on your race, are certain topics forbidden to you? Obligatory? None of the above? If your race matters, how do you know what it is? By what people see when they look at you, or by what you know of your genetic background? By your cultural upbringing? By what you write?
  —with John Chu, Mark Oshiro, Victor Raymond

"The World Is, Generally and On Balance, A Better Place To Live This Year Than It Was Last Year"

...according to this uplifting article by Ramez Naan, anyway, but also according to Spider Jerusalem, my favorite fictional anti-authoritarian druggie bastard liberal journalist of all time, whose voice and opinion are clearly superior to any non-fictional persons real or dead (other than Warren Ellis or Hunter S. Thompson).

So before you pop that bottle of bubbly, here's one of my favorite short comic book stories of all time—about winters, futures, and totally sweet snowblaster guns. Happy new year!

Legal-y things: Transmetropolitan was written by Warren Ellis with art by Darick Robertson. I did a quick & simple Google search for these page images, but it was originally published by in "Vertigo: Winter's Edge #3" and later re-printed in Transmetropolitan Vol. 4: "The New Scum". And you really need to read Transmet if you haven't yet.

Also, thanks to Jenna Scherer for reminding me of my own annual posting of this delightful message.

JRR Tolkien's Top 10 Tips For Writers

I feel like I'm supposed to make a snarky comment about Peter Jackson* in order to contextualize this, but the truth is, I haven't even seen The Desolation of Smaug or Battle of the Five Armies yet, because I found An Unexpected Journey to be little more than an overlong cut-scene from a corny Tolkien-themed Disney ride. But anyway, this is still fun!

*For the record, I was even skeptical when Jackson was first announced as the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, because he was one of my favorite go-to directors for my frequent Horrible & Horribly Offensive B-Movie nights back in high school. Don't get me wrong, Beautiful Dreamers and The Frighteners are both pretty fantastic — but Meet the Feebles? Dead-Alive? Bad Taste? Let's just say that he's better telling someone else's story than his own.

Although, he did give us this:

Performances, Publications, Panels, and More!

There's lots going on at Camp Thom Dunn (is there ever not?); and so, I interrupt your regularly scheduled weird nerd pop culture discoveries & progressive political rantings to, ya know, talk about myself for a minute.

• As previously mentioned, my play True Believers is now available for purchase through Indie Theater Now, and you should totally go buy it, because it only costs $1.29, so why the hell not? (I'm also considering making the script available through Amazon's self-publishing portal, if there's demand for it, even though I do have some ethical issues with Amazon as a company. But dammit if they're not cheap and convenient)
   
• I will be returning to rock the Mortified Boston Christmas show on Friday, December 19 at Oberon in Harvard Square. Tickets are $15 and they're going fast, so hurry up if you want to see me play some really, really, really bad and embarrassing songs I wrote in high school! Which obviously you do.
   
• My words will grace the stage for the third consecutive year in the Boston One-Minute Play Festival (#OMPF). The festival is the brainchild of Dominic D'Andrea, who produces these little bursts in most major cities across the country. It's a fun night — as writers, we're not really given any prompts other than "60 seconds, one page, MAX," so it's neat to see what kind of thematic patterns emerge through that. It's a neat way to gauge the temperature of a city, and the topics that consume its collective consciousness. My two scripts will be directed by Stephanie LeBolt and Hatem Adell, and they'll be performed on Monday and Tuesday, January 5 & 6, at Boston Playwrights Theater.
   
• I'm also excited to announce that I'll be featured on a whole bunch of panels this year at Arisia, Boston's largest and most diverse science fiction & fantasy convention, January 17 — 20 at the Westin Boston Waterfront. Here's where you can find me (when I'm not at the bar or in bed, I mean):
  • Neurodiversity in SF/F — Saturday @ 11:30am in Marina 2
  • DC Comics on the Small Screen — Saturday @ 5:30pm in Marina 2
  • Behind the Bristol boards: Comics as  Profession — Saturday @ 7pm in Marina 4
  • We Know (Philip K.) Dick — Sunday @ 10am in Marina 2
  • Superman & Religion — Sunday @ 11:30am in Burroughs
  • Story Autopsy — Sunday @ 2:30pm in Alcott
  • The Medium & The Message — Sunday @ 5:30pm in Hale
  • Writing & Racial Identity — Monday @ 1pm in Hale
     
• AND SPEAKING OF COMICS! I have 2 more comics coming out through Grayhaven Press — one is a story in their Science Fiction anthology, and the other is a super villain story featured in their "You Are Not Alone" anti-bullying anthology. Both comics will feature art by my buddy Dave Ganjamie, and he and I particularly pumped to actually have some comics going on, after talking about it for the last couple of years. I'm not sure when these comics will actually be published, as I'm currently working on the scripts, but of course, and let you know and link to 'em when they are.

Ladies and gentlemen, Dave Ganjamie

Oh yeah, and then after all that stuff's done, I'm getting married, but ya know, that's a minor event.

THIS BOOK WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE (or, How I Became Invisible)

In other news: my friends at Quirk Books asked me to write a little Thanksgiving post celebrating a book that I'm grateful for. And that's how I ended up standing in my kitchen with a Bluetooth keyboard in my hand, walking in circles drunk on double IPA and writing this wonderful ode to The Invisibles, which turned 20 years old this year.

But seriously. This book will change your life. If it were a food, it would be a Cthurkey.

On Superheroes, Death, and the Cycle of Eternal Return

There was a great piece on NPR the other day where Glen Weldon tried to explain to a curious friend the convoluted insanity of superhero comic book continuity — how the intrinsic nature of the genre's cyclical storytelling patterns is both endlessly frustrating but also part of its charm.

Or, as the saying goes — Comics, Everybody!

This weird cynicism towards death even seeps into the stories themselves. I recall a great issue of X-Factor where Siryn learned about the death of her father, the X-Man Banshee. She just laughed and laughed and laughed, which everyone around her found, well, pretty insensitive. "Come on, you guys," she explained. "We're superheroes! He's dead for now, sure, but he'll be back. I'm not worried about it." It made the rest of the team uncomfortable and concerned for mental well-being, but personally, I thought it was a pretty shockingly accurate depiction of mourning and the different ways that people learn to cope — particularly in a world where no one stays dead (except for Uncle Ben...so far).

There have been some great superhero death stories over the years (Ed Brubaker's Captain America comes to mind), and there have also been some great stories deconstructing the cyclical nature of superhero deaths (Grant Morrison's runs on both Batman and New X-Men...and also Flex Mentallo, and to a certain degree All-Star Superman and...yeah Grant's really into that, huh?). Weldon is correct to use the Asgardian "Ragnarok" to describe this phenomenon, and not just because of Thor. There's a longstanding tradition of death and resurrection in Western storytelling — Jesus being the obvious example, but really, nearly every major epic hero throughout history has had to undergo some kind of death or Underworld trial, and of course, the cycle of death and return also reflects the ever-changing seasons, and the orbit of the Earth, and so on. If we're running on the belief that superheroes are modern (corporate-owned) mythology, well, then the ubiquity of death makes perfect sense. 

That being said, it's a particularly weird thing when it comes to narrative devices — death ups the stakes in any story, but at the same time, the promise of resurrection (no matter how much the company insists that this one will stick) robs the story of those stakes, and it turns death into a rote plot device, just another stage in the story. Death in comics is never "The End," which is either incredibly screwed-up, or a touching perspective on how our loved ones might live on in real life. But when death is just another phase in your story, I think that makes it harder to approach with the appropriate gravitas.

Meanwhile, "Death of [Superhero]" comics continue to sell incredibly well, and as long as people keep buyin' 'em, publishers will keep on killin' 'em and bringin' 'em back. Which, on a meta-reading level, means that comic book readers are trapped in the same endless cycle as the characters they read about, alternating between disillusionment and infatuation with the genre they grew up with. And we're stuck in it just the same.

For Sale: Genuine Soil From Dracula's Castle

Remember those wacky mail order ads for weird pulp fiction products that you used to be able to find in the back of old comic books?

This little gem from 1979 — limited to only 5,000, get yours today while supplies last! — was supposedly an attempt to capitalize on the release of yet-another Dracula movie that same year. I probably shouldn't be so dismissive, that was obviously well-before there were way too many vampire things around, but 1979 was considered by some to be 'The Year of the Dracula,' as Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (which, it should be noted, was not about Dracula) and Love at First Bite were also released that same year. So in that case, I guess that an amulet of "genuine" soil isn't the worst bit of opportunist merchandising possible? (he says, from a strange future world where pretty young vampires all love and sparkle)

If this was 2014, that little necklace would cost you $40 with shipping, all because some shkeevy marketing guy paid some Romanian dude $10 to dump some dirt into a box and ship it off to America. Forty bucks — and it doesn't even grant the wearer any mystical powers! (although if you ask me, that little disclaimer text is a prime example of "Thou doth protest too much"...)

However, it does include a certificate of authenticity, which makes me wonder — who exactly signed that certificate, and what sort of qualifications did that person have? Truly, what makes one an expert in vampire soil? Are there real vampire archaeologists out there who do this stuff? If so, the official Vampire Archaeology Authentication Council should probably review their application process, because "Dracula's Castle" isn't even a real place. Presumably, this soil comes from Bran Castle, which does claim itself to be "Dracula's Castle" as a tourist attraction due its location near the border of Transylvania and Wallachia. Although previously owned by Hungarian kings, the castle was actually repossessed by the city of Brasov in 1533 after Vlad II Dracul failed to pay some other loans he'd taken out — Vlad II Dracul being the father of Vlad III aka Vlad Tepes aka Vlad the Impaler, the supposed inspiration for the fictional character of Dracula, who was never known to have spent any time in or around Bran Castle during his life.

Supposedly, Stoker's inspiration for the physical layout and appearance of Dracula's castle in his novel is based on New Slain Castle in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, according to Clare Haworth-Maden in The Essential Dracula. Despite popular opinion and prevailing cultural imagery, Dracula may have his roots more in Gaelic traditions and history than those of Eastern Europe, especially when you consider that Stoker himself was Irish. Fun fact: while "dracul" in Romanian does indeed translate to "Son of the Dragon," "droch fhola" in Irish Gaelic (pronounced "droc'ola") translates to "bad blood." Curious? Consider then the legend of Abhartach, an Irish warlord with dwarfism (but not one of the Daoine Maithe or Tuatha Dé Danann!) from present-day County Derry who was supposedly immortal and was said to have drank the blood of his enemies. From The Origin and History of Irish Names & Places:

There is a place in the parish of Errigal in Derry, called Slaghtaverty, but it ought to have been called Laghtaverty, the laght or sepulchral monument of the abhartach or dwarf. This dwarf was a magician, and a dreadful tyrant, and after having perpetrated great cruelties on the people he was at last vanquished and slain by a neighbouring chieftain; some say by Fionn Mac Cumhail. He was buried in a standing posture, but the very next day he appeared in his old haunts, more cruel and vigorous than ever. And the chief slew him a second time and buried him as before, but again he escaped from the grave, and spread terror through the whole country. The chief then consulted a druid, and according to his directions, he slew the dwarf a third time, and buried him in the same place, with his head downwards; which subdued his magical power, so that he never again appeared on earth. The laght raised over the dwarf is still there, and you may hear the legend with much detail from the natives of the place, one of whom told it to me.

Regardless of Dracula's origins, or the origins of his alleged soil from Castle Dracula, I suspect that this exclusive offer is no longer available. Fortunately, Darling Pet Munkee, a Boston-based band that just writes songs about ridiculous ads from the backs of old comic books, was kind enough to immortalize this rare necklace in song for our enjoyment: