Metahuman Press Goes Print!

All right, folks! It is big announcement time! Today, Metahuman Press kicks off the New Year a day early with the debut of its first print edition! Over the next few months, we will release a few more print versions of our story. These join the print editions of T. Mike McCurley’s Firedrake and Robin Reed’s Power vs Power already available.

So what is our first release? Well, it’s the very first story ever to be published on Metahuman Press!



I have brought Freedom Patton back online with the print edition of his first adventure, now subtitled “A Dangerous Place to Live”. The initial chapter has been revised and expanded and the entire story has been re-formatted for the printed page. All behind a snazzy cover and available through the fine, print-on-demand folks at Lulu for only $13.95! As economic times tighten, we encourage all our fans to start purchasing both our new print editions and the merchandise store. Help us continue to bring your favorite serialized fiction to the web by showing your support for the finest super-powered fiction on the web!

Timeline 20: The Rise of Rulah Notes

I am going to be straight up with everyone here. I love Tarzan. It doesn’t even matter how many terrible reinventions or terrible actors play him, I love him. The entire concept of the jungle hero is something I truly love. And it’s not just Tarzan. I absolutely love the new Sheena material from Devil’s Due. I still miss Bruce Jones, Mark Waid, and Priest on Ka-Zar. I go to newspaper websites well out of my area just to read Phantom strips online. Heck, I love Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire for its jungle hero Atlanteans. So it should come as no surprise after I say all that, that I wanted my own jungle hero. Generally, I try to use literary characters wherever I can to avoid pastiches. I didn’t want Torzo, Jungle King, or anything equally preposterous.

So, what should I see, while cruising Toonepedia. for info on more golden age heroes for Tales of the Living Legends, but Rulah, Jungle Goddess. A quick surf of my favorite public domain download site quickly found her first and subsequent appearances. All with art by the amazing Golden Age artist Matt Baker!


So my jungle hero choice was made clear, Rulah was the one for me.

My plans are to continue irregularly writing new Rulah stories for the foreseeable future, but I will cover more on that at another time. Before I could really start making original stories, I thought it would be best to adapt her origin story from the horrendously title Zoot Comics #7. I updated a few bits and tried to clean up the dialogue. I also took the time to explain why all these African tribemen spoke perfect English. And finally I inserted Tembo, a character that will play an important role in my stories for the next few years.

As to the means for Rulah’s new stories to appear. I will just say that an old sister site, dating all the way back to MHP’s days as a subsite, will be making its return in a big way come 2010.

Super-Powered Comics: The DC heroes battle the Supernatural Big Two!

Thanks to the fine folks at my local library I have been able to read a copy of the preposterously long titled Superman & Batman vs. Vampires and Werewolves. The premise is as simple as the name sounds, but the carry-through is far more convoluted.

Written by former Valiant mainstay Kevin VanHook and drawn by veteran penciler Tom Mandrake, the book strangely doesn’t feature Superman for the first couple issues. When he finally does arrive he does pay an essential role, although I could argue that characters like Green Arrow and the Demon are just as important. Oh, did I mention the bland werewolf and vampire heroes added to fight the threat? Or the appearances by Nightwing, Wonder Woman, and Man-Bat? More oten than not, this series really feels like “lets throw this against the wall and see if it sticks”. It’s main problem, is it rarely does.

Mandrake is an able artist, although his style is definitely more fitting to Batman’s world than Superman’s. He evokes Gene Colan quite often, specifically Colan’s work on Tomb of Dracula and Night Force. But the style seems a little off-putting when it is used to draw four-color heroes.

The story seems less an attempt to introduce vampires and werewolves to the DC universe as a whole and more a back door pilot for the vampire hero Dimeter. Unfortunately, he seems like a bland attempt to make a white Blade (the movie version). Never does he feel like a real attempt at even developing a new idea, let alone a character worthy of his own book.

I think the main thing this book seems to be missing though is fun. A title like Superman & Batman vs. Vampires and Werewolves doesn’t exactly evoke images of serious supernatural fiction of the past. It more makes me think of silly B-movie schlock. But no, this seems to be an attempt to bring the Marv Wolfman-style horror of the seventies back, but with superheroes. And it just doesn’t work.

I wanted to like this book, but it just needed to have more there. But if you are the kind of reader who just loves vampire fiction and superheroes, maybe you will find something to love. As for me, it’s Not Recommended.

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

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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!

Obscure Heroes: Shadowdragon

Shadowdragon is a true exercise in obscurity. Primarily a Superman supporting cast member of the mid-nineties, he was essentially a high tech ninja. He remained something of a mystery throughout his supporting cast appearances in the four Superman titles at the time. I didn’t buy most of these as my Super-comics buying had faded by 1995. I was intrigued by Shadowdragon, don’t get me wrong, but his appearances in those books were usually relegated to 2 to 3 pages an issue. He managed to meander through seven issues of the main title and a team-up with Lady Shiva in Showcase. In between those appearances, he managed to get an annual, despite never appearing in a comic of his own.

Shadowdragon Annual 1 gets right to the point, as his co-creators Brett Breeding and David Michelinie (along with layout artist Dick Giordano) give the definitive origin of Shadowdragon.

He is in fact Savitar Bandu, prince of a tiny Asian nation of Bhutran (not to be confused with Bhutan, one would expect). Neighbored by Chi-Lann, the two countries have been at war for quite some time. As they meet for peace summits, Savitar learns that the people of Chi-Lann may not be on the up and up. He sneaks across their border and visits a weapon research facility. He finds several advanced suits of armor. Donning his Shadowdragon armor for the first time, he uses the advanced abilities and his own martial arts skill to defeat the other super-suits and escape back to Bhutran.

And that is pretty much all there is to the annual. We get a brief recap explaining some of the modifications and additions made to the suit, but otherwise the character doesn’t go much past that origin story. Unfortunately, any further stories were not to be. After that one final appearance I mentioned before in Showcase ’96, Shadowdragon faded in to obscurity forevermore. It’s too bad, as he has some cool visuals and at least limited potential as a standalone character. Instead, one can only suppose he will someday be revived for one of DC’s inter-company crossovers and promptly slain. Here’s hoping, he gets better than that.