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.

Wrestling Wednesday: The Rise of CHIKARA!

CHRIS HERO

Independent wrestling offers many great things to the common wrestling fan. Accessibility, talent, and often a much higher workrate than you see from top WWE or TNA stars. But it often fails on other levels. Monthly or semi-monthly booking means less storytelling potential. Workers that set their own gimmick as they work a half dozen different promotions (or more) a month often end up rather generic as well. Ninety percent of indy wrestlers have a character best described as “edgy athlete dedicated to beat the best opponents” or “shady weirdo willing to take the win at any expense”. Some wrestlers have excelled at the first (Bryan Danielson, Low-Ki), others have excelled at the second (Jimmy Jacobs, Austin Aries), and a few do both with amazing credibility (Chris Hero, Nigel McGuiness).

It often leads to great wrestling, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of solid storytelling pre- and post-match outside of the “I don’t like you” and “I want my revenge”. Both key features to wrestling storytelling, but not the only features to wrestling storytelling.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to the promotion I want to talk about today: CHIKARA.

MIKE QUACKENBUSH

Founded in 2002 by independent wrestling stand-out Mike Quackenbush (a good example of the “edgy athlete” gimmick back in the day) and the soon-to-step-aside “Reckless Youth” Tom Carter, the promotion slowly built a fan following around the Pennsylvania area. Eight years later it has expanded operations to much of the northeast, from Michigan to New York.

Built around the talents coming out of the CHIKARA Wrestling Factory as well as Quackenbush’s friends, the promotion brought elements of Lucha Libre in to the United States full-time for the first time. With the Mexican element of pro wrestling came a lot of high-flying maneuvers, innovative rules changes, and masks, a lot of them.

And with those masks came characters and comedy. Some of the earliest masked wrestlers were comedy gimmicks at best, but over the years the company proved to be able to make its fans take even silly gimmicks seriously.

THE OSIRIAN PORTAL

Some of the top technicos (faces) in the promotion include the team of the Osirian Portal (the serpentine Ophidian and the dancing “Funky Pharoah ” Amasis), old school baseball player Dasher Hatfield, and the ever-growing ant team of the Colony.

Tag teams and trios also play a major part of CHIKARA wrestling which adds another layer of action to an already solid format.

The levels of storytelling have varied over the promotion’s history but over the last two or so years a lot of effor has went in to forming a coherent ongoing narrative for the program.

The driving force behind this narrative, a new group known as Der Bruderschaft Des Kreuzes. More on them in a future column.

CHIKARA DVDs (over 145 of them) are available from their distributor Smartmark Video, including several best of DVDs. But the fine folks at CHIKARA won’t make you buy a DVD without ever seeing anything about their promotion. Every week they bring an episode of their Podcast-A-Go-Go, a ten minute show focused on what’s happening in CHIKARA today. It is available free through ITunes, on Youtube, or through the CHIKARA Podcast-A-Go-Go website.

If you are a wrestling or comic fan, I highly recommend you check them out.

Super-Powered Comics: Batwoman Elegy

I wanted to like Batwoman: Elegy. I really did. I loved 52 and thought, conceptually, that the new Kate Kane Batwoman could be a star in her own title. Years later, it finally happened, and I am left feeling less than impressed.

Don’t get me wrong. J.H. Williams III’s art is every bit as spectacular as the hype its given. He received Eisners for both interior and cover work for this book and it’s plain to see why. He pours his heart and soul in to every page, jumping from style to style, page design to page design, all with a fluid ease that never leaves the reader feeling lost. Dave Stewart’s colors ooze off the page and help to bring it all together in a near perfect package.

It’s the story and the characterization of Kate Kane and the people around her that really irk me. Her relationship with her father is fine, her initial arc with the villain Alice successfully sets up the character as her own woman apart from the rest of Bat-continuity. But when we go in to the flashback issues, I feel all believability and credibility of the story is lost.

First, her father is an army colonel, but one whose daughter was kidnapped and never found years before. Yet we are still supposed to believe that the United States Army would trust a military base responsible for holding destructive chemicals to a man whose security clearance could be so easily compromised. The Army is many things, but it isn’t blatantly stupid.

But the insanity of the book’s storytelling gets worse as we move forward to Kate’s time at West Point. He’s name checked both in the issue and the introduction by Rachel Maddow, so the story of Lt. Daniel Choi clearly has a play in this story. His coming out was a calculated move to challenge the wisdom of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. Kate’s coming out is either an act of sheer idiocy or self-destructiveness.

Here’s the setup: while studying at West Point, Kate has a liaison with another female student. A report is filed to the school’s commander and she admits to him she’s gay (and apparently gets immediately discharged). It might come off as a powerful piece of story-telling to some, but in reality it makes very little sense. She repeats in the issue more than once that her only dream is to graduate from West Point and serve the country like her father does. It’s her only desire in life (to the point that she becomes reckless and verifiably self-destructive in the aftermath). Now anyone familiar with the military and the terms of joining the service will be very aware of how Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell works. It’s been in place for well over a decade and is explained to any potential recruit multiple times. It’s made quite clear that the military has no problem with you being gay as long as you keep it away from the base and don’t talk about it. How are we supposed to believe that a lesbian woman, daughter of an army colonel, could enlist in the military without knowing straight up that she would have to lie should she ever be brought up on disciplinary action for such behavior? She clearly made that compromise with herself just to be at West Point, so why when confronted with the situation would she do anything but continue the fiction? The only viable explanation in my mind (and a rather preposterous one) is that she didn’t realize she was gay until West Point, despite her homosexuality being hinted at in just the previous chapter.

I know the immediate argument could be, “but how could she live with the lie?” And in response, I will again reiterate that if her repeated professions that being a soldier were her life’s only ambitions, she would have already placed that need to lie in her mind. And a few years later, she certainly doesn’t seem to have a problem lying to friends and family. Or does she just tell anyone that she meets that she’s Batwoman?

I am by no means a perfect writer. I wouldn’t even count myself as anyone near the league of Greg Rucka’s eraser shavings. But how can any writer let such an obvious gap in story logic make it on to the page? How can any editor just ignore the fatal flaw? How can so many readers just ignore it?

As it stands, I think this initial run has inadvertently set up one defining characteristic of the new Batwoman: her own need for self-destruction. Any writer really honest about this character (I’m looking at you, Haden Blackman and J.H.) will embrace that feature in upcoming story arcs. If not, you have successfully created a rather broken character, DC.

Still, for J.H. Williams’ art at its absolute finest, I will give the book a Mildly Recommended. I suggest everyone check it out and share their feelings with me in the comments section.

Super-Powered Pulp Prose: Resurrecting Midnight by Eric Jerome Dickey

This is the fourth in a series of novels by Dickey featuring his character Gideon, an international assassin whose mind has been utterly messed up by years of killing, sex, and living on the wrong side of the law. I have long considered reviewing the previous books in this series as I read the, but never did. I think its time to remedy that.

Eric Jerome Dickey has been writing fiction for fifteen years now, but perhaps more people in superhero circles would know him as the writer of the 2006 retcon miniseries Storm that established a larger back story between Storm and Black Panther leading up to their soon to be totally perfect marriage. I was by no means a fan of that storyline, though I am unsure how much of the mess that was the Black Panther plot can really be put on Dickey. He did what he could with the project he was given, and did an all right job with it.

I bring up Storm simply as a way of pointing out the clear comic book inspiration that Gideon clearly originates from. Though still human, Gideon has become almost a superman over the four books he has appeared. Though beaten, he always perseveres, does what it takes to survive and win the day. Dickey actually acknowledges his comic book influences in the bakc of Resurrecting Midnight, mention crime and superhero writers like Ed Brubaker, Brian Azzarello, Frank Miller, and Garth Ennis. He also shows it in the casual mentions of characters and locations from many of his other novels. The Gideon novels actually extends out of a previous set of character’s from his novel Thieves Paradise so I guess you can say this brings it altogether.

I could also argue Resurrecting Midnight’s pulp influences. Gideon is clearly a descendant of morally ambiguous characters from Arsene Lupin to The Avenger. He seems to want to do the right thing, even when his profession constantly forces him in to a path of murder and destruction. There essentially lies the conflict deep in Gideon’s soul that Dickey has played out over four novels.

This novel takes the character and his extended supporting cast farther down the path tread by the previous three books, even as Gideon is drawn by his old friend and lover Arizona in to a bloodbath in Argentina. In the process, he meets Medianoche, the resurrected Midnight of the title, and learns that the enemy assassin has far closer ties to him than Gideon could ever believe. Gideon ends up once again embroiled in a world of sex and violence, two things Dickey can write better than many other authors.

My praise heaped on already, I will get at the flaws of the novel. I have to limit the plot synopsis to one paragraph for a very important reason: without reading Sleeping With Strangers, Waking With Enemies, and Dying For Revenge any reader would be utterly lost by Resurrecting Midnight. Any details of the plot are just building on previous established character interactions but for the added new enemies in Medianoche and the Four Horsemen. While Dickey created a great character with Gideon, his continuing adventures are anything but new reader friendly. Much like Sleeping With Strangers (a novel designed as a beginning of a duology), Resurrecting Midnight also ends on a far two open ended note, especially when its been a year without a sequel (and his newest book Tempted By Trouble a new standalone). It would be one thing if we were left with a solid place to stop, but instead the reader is pretty much hanging along with all of Gideon’s life.

Still none of that takes away from how good Eric Jerome Dickey is at what he brings to the page here. Very few modern authors can combine sex, violence, action, and dialogue as beautifully as Dickey puts it on the page. Much like Stephen King, I find a lot to study in just the formation of the words he puts on the page.

In case you don’t know it yet, Resurrecting Midnight (and the three novels that come before it) comes Highly Recommended,. Whether a fan of the pulps or the supers, you will find something to love in these pages.

Buy Pulp Empire Volume Two!

It’s been available for a few weeks now and I just wanted to throw out a reminder that you can now buy Pulp Empire Volume Two through our Lulu store! We have thirteen all new stories, and you can preview several of them over at the Pulp Empire website! Go read a couple and be sure to pick up your copy!