Tyler Marsh's tale continues in a new installment of Arc!

Tyler Marsh's prose adventure continues this week over at Arc! Be sure to come check it and the previous forty-five pages of web comics from little ol' me and the amazing Jay Rainford-Nash!

Space-sharing with the Examiner

Here’s the dealio, blogosphere fans. In order for this blogging thing to actually be meaningful for me, I need to be able to occasionally work towards making a few pennies off of it. Everyone that clicks on a google link on here or MHP or anyone of my sites helps, but in order to make a real go of it, I need to also be able to pull in a few cents for posting as well. Otherwise, Metahuman Press, Pulp Empire, Arc, and The Dead Walk Again may eventually disappear in to the netherverse of the internet.

With that in mind, I have recently signed up to try my hand at being an Examiner. For those unfamiliar with it, Examiner is basically an attempt to make a massive multi-national internet newspaper. It’s success is somewhat limited on the local level, but it is a sure-fire way to make a bit of money. So while you will see some regular columns and reviews continue here (such as Thor’s Day, some of my blog posts will just be short introductions that lead over to Examiner pages. Please, please, please follow those links and enjoy all the quality commentary you love at this site plus a little extra (like more wrestling content) over at the Examiner.

And thanks for reading!

...and we're back!

Oh yes we are.

And we should be back to semi-regular updates starting tomorrow. I am still working on monetizing this site more to keep it functional as a whole, but for the time being I will be running it like it has been running. For the time being, if you’re reading this, please go down a bit and click on one of those Google links. Every button press makes us a few extra bucks. It’s those impressions that are currently paying to keep the Metahuman Press family of sites alive so they are kind of important.

Now for the news from around the MHP family.

Metahuman Press

The old warhorse has debuted two new stories in the last few weeks with David Perlmutter’s offbeat The Pups and ShoaKi Girl by Charlie Thrun. Today we debuted David Kachel’s follow-up to Legacy, entitled Diary of a Genius. And the best news is that it will be running weakly. Five chapters over the five weeks of December!

Pulp Empire

Pulp Empire continues to chug along nicely. New stories have went up every Thursday. Right now we are running a 15% off sale on the first two books at the Pulp Empire store, so be sure to go pick those up. The sale will continue for the next few days, so get them while they’re hot. And need I mention they make a great gift?

Arc

Arc will update throughout December with the continuation of Tyler Marsh’s prose adventures. Stay tuned as things start to get a little crazy next week.

The Dead Walk Again

We need submissions! If you like zombies, please, please, please! send us your zombie stories for our little online journal. I would like to have an inventory before it launches in a few months.

A Few Tweaks....

I am going to come out of blogular silence for a bit with a few updates.

The Metahuman Press site has been updated with a few new visual tweaks, mostly thanks to updates on both WordPress and the ArrasTheme. It may need a few more before I'm fully appreciative of the new look, but everything should be accessible as of now.

No new Arc this week, folks. I've been a bit under the weather as has the family, so I just didn't have time to layout and edit the Tyler Marsh chapter I had planned. Tyler will be back next week, I promise.

Pulp Empire volume three should be available to purchase near the beginning of the month. Right now the first stories, "An Incident in a Small Town" by Travis Heermann and "The Other Fellow's Shoes" by G. Lloyd Helm have gone up, so you can check them out at the site.

A new partner site, The Dead Walk Again is now accepting story submissions. We are looking to launch it full time beginning next Spring, but we really need to get some content up and running. So if you like zombies, please be sure to check it out, and maybe even submit something!

This blog will remain mostly quiet for the next few weeks as I participate once again in Nanowrimo. Once November has passed, I will be back to blogging (semi-)full time, so stay tuned for more updates. For more regular updates, you can also follow me on Twitter.

A Metahuman Press family update

So the last couple weeks have been rough for Metahuman Press and its sister sites. From a terrible, unresponsive host company we moved to a new host. That took nearly a week, but things were up and running well. Then the ol’ internet vanished from existence for a few days. And a few other family issues and computer problems have made content additions a little hard to come by.

That will change next week as we introduce a new schedule that will see publications Monday through Friday on we bring new contact from across the MHP family of sites. Check out our new schedule below:

• Monday: Tales of the Living Legends (new page)
• Tuesday: Arc (new page, starting with exclusive content that bridges issue 1 & 2)
• Wednesday: Metahuman Press (at least one new story every week!)
• Thursday: Pulp Empire (new updates including preview content & classic pulp stories until the site goes fully live on April 1, 2010!)
• Friday: Tales of the Living Legends (new page)

Plus we will continue to update here with semi-regular reviews, opinion pieces, and the like, some of which will be cross-posted to the other sites. So stay tuned for March 15, as things explode for MHP and its family!

Website Transfer

I am in the process of transferring all the files and databases from one server to the other. This will probably result in some downtime (no more than a day or two I would guess, although if my old server continues to vanish it may be longer). Unfortunately, we made some errors in the first attempt and have to switch nameservers back around which adds several hours.

I hope to have the sites back up and running by Friday.

Again all my apologies to our fans. We will have the problem remedied ASAP.

Thank you.

Another quick note on the websites I run

Yeah, they are down again. It should be fixed within a week as I am currently researching other hosting services. I’m sorry for the inconvenience. It sucks as much (if not more) for me too.

A Quick Note on Metahuman Press, Evolution Comics, and Arc

Currently all my sites are down for unknown reasons. I am trying to get in touch with the server company but as yet have been unsuccessful. Hopefully we will be back online soon.

Evolution Comics returns!

As you (hopefully) know, Jay Rainford-Nash and I have been producing a page a week of our super-powered webcomic Arc. We are fast approaching the end of our first issue with the next well underway.

But elsewhere on the comics front, my other comic work, Tales of the Living Legends returns with “The Many Lives of Sally Lincoln!” in just one week. The gear-up is well underway and unlike volume one that just told adventures of our heroes and villains from the prose story Living Legends, this one will reveal new details about the mystery of Sally Lincoln’s strange identity.

I highly recommend fans of Arc and Living Legends head over and check out the announcement. Or you can catch up with the first volume of Tales, past chapters of Living Legends and all of Arc! Just read and be sure to let us know what you think!

The Rise of the Fan Pages

Just a quick note to say that yesterday’s Shadowdragon post was the three hundredth blog entry on Take the Helm presents!

Today, we are going to take a moment to introduce you to the two awesome new fan pages for Take the Helm’s sister sites Metahuman Press and Arc the Comic. Both have exclusive content: The MHP Fan page has information on our new series The Wicked. The Arc Fan Page has never before seen development art from Arc! Click on the links on the fan page badges below to join!

Nick Ahlhelm is a fan of

Metahuman Press Fan Page

Create your Fan Badge

Nick Ahlhelm is a fan of

Arc Fan Page

Create your Fan Badge

And once you have joined both awesome groups, you can create your own fan badges for all your websites and the like by visiting the Facebook fan badge maker. And thanks for supporting our sites!

My new web comics series ARC starts today!

Click the banner to go to the comic!

After nearly two years in production, Arc now hits the screen with its first page posted today. I worked my butt off to get this in production and artist Jay Rainford-Nash has worked even harder to bring it to life.

We start out a little slow with a four page prologue, but in return we are printing those four pages two a week! After that, starting on October 20, we will go to a one page a week format.

You can expect a healthy helping of strong characters, awesome action, and thought prevoking story as we work to bring you the best comic we can make! And thanks again for reading!

All Apologies

As you may have noticed, Super-Powered Fiction Files has been down for a few days. No worries. I am working on several projects: getting caught up on my current serials at Metahuman Press, putting some letters on pages for the upcoming Arc comic project, working on the last few pages of the current (and next) Tales of the Living Legends strip.

Hopefully, we will be back up and running with new updates next week!

For now, ponder this:

see more Fail Blog

Arc... It's Gettling Closer

Long time readers of this blog know that I’ve been working for some time with the fine British comic artist AJ Rainford-Nash on our first comic project Arc. I have thrown a few image previews your way here and there, but I can officially announce that we finally have the first few finished (scripted, penciled, inked, and lettered) pages queuing up in preparation for a launch later this year.

We should have the first pieces of merchandise available soon, so be sure to keep your eyes open here for that. Here’s a little preview image of the first planned t-shirt design:



Good stuff, right? Stay tuned for more information on Arc, coming soon!

Evolving

Quick Arc Update

We’re still progressing slowly on issue one of Arc. Jay’s finishing up pencils and inks now, and from there I will start lettering (hopefully). We want to be able to have a finished product ready to go to various publishers in the hopes of selling the title to the likes of Boom, Shadowline, Arcana, or one of the other small press houses.

Thanks again to all those who have taken an interest in the project. I hope to be able to post more on it soon. And maybe another Evolution Comics project as well...

Vacation countdown

I am finally getting a little further back in to the swing of writing while I am at work. Having the internet readily available at all times proves a little distracting, but I have finally finished Timeline for next month, started back on Living Legends, and plan on getting a little more Arc done before the end of the work week.

And it’s a short work week, as the wife, the kid, and I are on our way to Springfield, Illinois, to visit her family over a long weekend. This will be our only family vacation for the year as we save up for a Disney World vacation next year. Should be interesting to see the old haunts again; I haven’t been back in Illinois for a couple years now.

Moving Past the Flood

So the recovery process is slowly taking shape in the Cedar Rapids area and with it I’ve decided to try and move on to other things myself. Which means I am going to have to try to avoid the distraction of free use internet at the temporary call center at Mt. Mercy. Time to get back down to writing.

Tonight however I was far too exhausted to even put together a quality sentence let alone a paragraph or longer. So my plan now is to get back on track and finish the next Timeline tomorrow and Thursday if need be, and then go to work on some more Arc. We will see how far I can get in both this week. Hopefully a good day’s sleep will be able to help with both.

I will be taking down the Mean Streets blogspot page in the near future. My plan now is to integrate a revised version of the story on to the proper Metahuman Press. The blog format just was not working for me. I may experiment with it more later. We will see how that plays out.

Otherwise, it is the usual fun and games. I will continue to try and update this blog on a regular basis. I think with the access at the call center I should do a lot better.

That’s all for now. Later days all.

Some character sketches for Arc

I promised them so here they are:


This bloke will be the villain for issue one. He’s a piece of work called Flamethrow. He will be our first havoc-raiser but we will see a lot more by issue five (and the conclusion of our first arc).


This lovely young woman is Bev Nikkels and she will be the thorn in Shania and Arc's side. A stuck-up pretty girl, she most definitely has it out for our heroines.

I’ll be back with posts featuring the lovely Arc and her alter ego Ed as well as the first looks at Shania in the next week or two. As always, enjoy!

Evolutionary and other Evolution Comics updates

So, I have begun work on what I hope will be my second comic project, this one a web-project I hope to self-publish in trade format as time goes on. Evolutionary will be something totally different from me as I am going to try my hand at a slice-of-life type story. The first book will be focused around a band called The Evolutionairies, but I see the book as being able to expand outward from there with subsequent tales. I am already having fun playing with my core group of 10 or so characters in the plotting process, and they are already developing in to a strong bunch. I am seriously loving the vibe I am getting from this one, so I am sure you will be hearing more from me on this one soon enough.

Arc is moving along briskly. I am slowly making my way through the script for issue three now, making some revisions on issue two (mostly for a "story within the story" that I don’t want to tell you anymore about). I will be posting a couple more pics of some of the characters you will see in the book fairly soon.

Where's Freedom Patton?

So in case no one noticed Freedom Patton did not appear again today. The reason is quite simple: I have decided to put the series on hiatus for the forseeable future.

The Letters From Libertad sequence I am currently working on is just not coming together the way I want it, and the Freedom and Justice arc I had planned after it just isn’t gelling at all.

So Freedom Patton is now on hold. I know I will bring it back whenever I complete Letters From Libertad. I am two and a half chapters in to it (which is half way) so I really see it being done with the next six months or so. I just need to find a way to reenergize the characters as they just feel like they are treading water to me right now.

In the mean time I plan on starting (and finishing) my current projects. I am well under way on Champion City volume 2. I just hit the 100 page mark the other day. I don’t plan on posting it until I actually finish the entire story though, so it will probably be some time mid-year before it starts to post. Epsilon will reach its first climax with chapter 13, then I will start the build for the big battle in chapter 25. I have a rough plan for the series well past 30, so don’t expect it to go anywhere anytime soon.

I have two new projects which I want to get under the way entitled Crimelords and Living Legends. I am still debating which to start first, although I am currently leaning towards Living Legends as it strangely falls in sync with December debuting projects from Dynamite, Marvel, and Image. I started to develop Living Legends as a comic project over two years ago, but my attempts at bringing it to fruition in 2006 pretty much fell flat on their face. Finding an artist willing to work on a project with 18 leads proved to be a bit harder than I thought it would be. So I can at least say I came up with the idea first. My plans are for it to be an ongoing as well so I probably will try to get at least a few chapters done before I make a firm decision.

Crimelords is a concept that has been floating around my head for well over a decade. It dates back to at least 94-95 when I was creating characters hand over first in high school. I still have notebooks sitting around the house with hundreds of issues worth of one to three line plots for years worth of comics. In fact, just about every character in Epsilon takes their name from those old plots. Trust me when I say that I won’t run out to character names anytime soon! But I digress....

Crimelords is a hodge podge of a few different story ideas from those days, and would focus on the bad guys of a new locale in the quadrant universe: the city of Valhalla. Valhalla has a rich history already developed and Crimelords will cover only about a year worth of it. This one would run about a year or so by my calculations.

I am also working on how I want to continue My Name Is Charon. I have the basic plot ideas of where I want it to go all formulated, but I still am not sure how I want to lay it down on paper. More Charon will be on its way though, rest assured.

And this doesn’t even take in to account my three planned comic projects: Arc which has issue one current in the art stages and issues 2 through 5 in various stages of writing; Out For Vengeance, a fun little piece of meta-fiction reintroducing the first hero in an eighty year legacy to the world; and Bombshells which will mix my love of pro wrestling, attractive women, and superheroics. Expect to see more on Arc sometime soon with Bombshells and Out For Vengeance following quickly behind.

All that and I am brainstorming the return of Pulp Empire as well. More on that as it progresses, so stay tuned right here for more on that.