Author Archives: Steven Howell Wilson

The House Where I Grew Up…

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Is 50 years old today, we’ve decided. That’s based on the day we moved in. We narrowed it down based on my brother’s memory of watching the first game of the 1967 World Series at our temporary home at the Valencia Motel, and subsequent games in our new home. (Amazing what the memory retains!) My sister remembered we moved in on a weekend, and that narrowed it down to Sunday, October 5th, 1967. I was but two, so I had nothing to contribute to the discussion.

Correction: We pulled the wrong day out of Google for 10/5/67. 1967’s calendar was actually identical to 2017’s. So the move-in date was probably October 7th. This is an early announcement, then. The house’s birthday is this Saturday. 

The house is pictured here in early 1969. Note the tar-paper-covered hole where a bay window was planned. It’s still not there. 50 years later, this unfinished house is back on the road to completion.

There’s a story in there somewhere, you say? Actually, there are a lot of them…

A Birthday Letter to my Father

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October 4th, 2017

Dear Daddy—

Today is your 95th birthday. I know you wanted to see it, and more after it. I can’t say that I wish you had seen it, not in the state you were in those last few months. But I wish you have lived as long as you wanted to, and that you could have enjoyed living. I guess that was the problem with those months—you weren’t enjoying them. I don’t think you were enjoying anything.

I took you to the doctor in January, after you’d spent three or four days of Christmas week in the hospital. We knew you had a failing aortal valve in your heart, a condition called aortal stenosis, where the valve becomes to stiff to open and close the way it needs to. We knew you were not a candidate for surgery. We did not know, until that day in the doctor’s office, that you had so little time left.

When your new doctor explained to us that your life expectancy was six to twelve months, I wasn’t sure what I felt. I looked at you. So often in the past I looked at you to give me the answer, to tell me how I should feel, to tell me how we were going to get through this. I knew that, this time, when I looked in your eyes, I wasn’t looking for those answers. I was only looking to see how you felt about being told you were about to die.

And when I saw you, I knew how I felt. I knew my heart was breaking. I had picked you up and driven you here. I had put on your flannel shirt, buttoning the cuffs exactly the way you liked them, tied your shoes, zipped up your coat and placed a step so you could get into the car. It was like getting a toddler ready to go somewhere. It was like bringing an innocent, frightened child to the doctor, to be told he was going to die.

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I Just Finished – Action Comics #987

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The first issue of the much-heralded story, “The Oz Effect.” Who is Mr. Oz? Well, he’s a character who first appeared a couple years back in a middle-numbered issue of the last run of Superman. That was before DC launched “Rebirth,” this… um… lessee… Crisis, Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis (do we count Final Crisis?)… New 52… Sixth? Fifth and a half reboot—well, now, I guess the introduction of the Silver Age Flash and all his JLA kin was also a reboot, so let’s go with six and a half reboots—six or seventh reboot of the DC Universe. Anyway, Mr. Oz is more than one reboot old, which is pretty damn ancient in DC terms, and he’s shown up a few dozen times these past few months, including in the eponymous DC Rebirth one-shot that started all the current shooting.

In this opening tale, the mysterious Mr. Oz declares that the human race does not deserve Superman or his family. Humans are just too selfish and petty, too easily swung toward the wrong choice, too prone to bring chaos. So Mr. Oz decided to give them a little push towards just that, in hopes of showing Kal-El that humanity is just not worth his time.

Right at the end, we learn the true identity of Mr. Oz. No spoilers, and I’m pretty sure it won’t stick; but it guarantees that this is a story I’ll want to read. Of course, so does Dan Jurgens name in the credits, but still…

A well-crafted story that touches on an old (but never-answered) question about being Superman: What the hell does he do when a lot of things go wrong at once? Here a lot of things do go wrong, and it’s enough to drive even the eldest of the super heroes to despair. Kudos to Jurgens for political even-handedness, by the way. There is, predictably, a white supremacist attack on helpless immigrants depicted. It’s the first crime Superman prevents. It’s followed up quickly by a thug spouting Occupy rhetoric as he tries to burn down someone’s house. It’s refreshing to see a piece of mass entertainment remind us that there are extremists on both ends of the spectrum, and they’re all dangerous.

I Just Finished – Marvel’s Inhumans – Episodes 1 & 2

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I’ve heard mixed reviews about this ABC TV series, and largely from people whose opinions I trust. I kept an open mind going into it, however. The Marvel movies have rarely disappointed me. Agents of SHIELD has overall stayed entertaining. I haven’t taken time to watch all of Legion, but, of course, Daredevil on Netflix is amazing. Jessica Jones held my interest, even though I don’t care for the character, and I liked the flavor of life in Harlem that Luke Cage brought to superhero television. I’m still in the middle of Iron Fist, and haven’t even started Defenders. But maybe because reactions to Inhumans were so mixed, I wanted to check it out.

I quite frankly loved it. It has some of the tone of SHIELD, but with more colorful, more recognizable characters. Recognizable for me, anyway, since I was a Fantastic Four reader from childhood, and the Inhumans were introduced in those pages. The show has humor, suspense and admirable heroes. I’m particularly happy with the casting choices for Gorgon, Crystal and Karnak. Those actors especially brought energy to sometimes under-appreciated supporting roles. And seeing Lockjaw, looking like, well, Lockjaw, popping in and out of the scenes, transporting his fellow Inhumans all over the world and the moon, was a treat.

A lot of comments I heard during the publicity phase of the series focused on Medusa’s hair looking fake. Well, I had to agree it looked a little odd, but then it always looked a little odd in the comics. Fortunately, the producers found a way to squeeze a fix for that out of their plot. I’ll avoid spoilers, but it’s just one more way Maximus the Mad parallels Thor’s Loki, if you know your Norse myths.

I’ll be interested to see where this series goes.

I Just Finished – Superman (1939) #202

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I have a great fondness for Giant-Size comics. When I started reading, DC was in its phase of publishing its most popular comics as 100-pagers, with a wealth of reprint material from the 1940s up through the 1960s. It was a great way for a new reader to get immersed in the history of the characters, and, of course, a kid got the equivalent of four comics for little more than the price of two. I have no problems with comics for adults, but I think it’s important to keep them accessible to kids. Childhood is where we really learn to dream and imagine.

Anyway, I grab 80-page and 100-page issues from the past whenever I can. This one doesn’t offer much variety. It contains reprints of Bizarro World stories which had run monthly in Adventure Comics only about five years before this issue was published. They’re a bit repetitive—Bizarro’s obsession with Frankenstein shapes at least two of the stories. But they’re fun, especially when other members of the Superman family guest star. There’s not much depth to 1960s DC stories, at least those published before they shook things up around 1968; but they’re almost always fun.

One thing I find odd, in all the play that Bizarro got as a character in the 1960s, his origin was never represented in the course of my readings. Any time he appeared, we were  just told he was the result of some scientist pointing an imperfect duplication ray at Superman. Although, in one story in this issue, we’re told it was pointed at Superboy instead.  Continue reading →

I Just Finished – The Venus Belt by L. Neil Smith

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Once upon a time, science fiction wasn’t only published to gently massage the psyches of readers who are politically left of center. L. Neil Smith is an unashamedly libertarian author, best-known, sadly, I think, for writing the Lando Calrissian adventure novels back in the early 80s. (Which novels, by the way, I reviewed for SeqArt’s upcoming third volume of Star Wars essays.) Possibly his best-known original work is a novel called The Probability Broach. It’s a tale about alternate universes and traveling between them, and it establishes a world called The American Confederacy, a place where one word made all the difference in what happened to the nation that formed when the colonists revolted and broke away from England in 1776. That word was “unanimous.” In the American Confederacy, government power depends on the unanimous consent of the governed. You can imagine not a lot gets done by government in that America, which is exactly what libertarians are after. The Probability Broach also delightfully offers a solution to the question of nature vs. nurture. Its answer? Free will wins over them both.

This novel, one of several set in the American Confederacy is not as eye-opening as The Probability Broach. That bar was set pretty high. It’s solidly entertaining, though. For me, it’s just so nice to read a story where the villains are named “Hamiltonians.” If you didn’t know that I deplore Alexander Hamilton, you probably don’t know me very well. It offers one of the more creative comeuppances I’ve seen for the vile villains at the end, too. The title derives from the project the heroes undertake in the book—doing a little solar system re-engineering by turning Venus, a not particularly useful planet, into a second asteroid belt which can be mined for resources. Smith’s hero, Detective Win Bear, reflects on the morality of such a drastic change to the environment:

“But, hell, all life has environmental impact, just by nature of its being. Intelligence manipulates its environment, purposefully, instead of the other way around. [Dissenters] to the contrary, to do less is to resign from being sentient. To denounce it is to renounce intelligence.

“Which, I suspect, was their point all along.”

I Just Finished – Generations: Hawkeye

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Marvel Comics once again reaches out to its older fan base—or at least the part of its fan base that thinks fondly of the comics of 40 years ago—with a series of one-shots all built around the premise that their current, young characters meet their namesakes from the Bronze Age: Teenage, time-displaced Jean Grey meets the Phoenix, circa 1979; Amadeus Cho meets a Bruce Banner I don’t know enough about Hulk history to place, but certainly pre-1980. Carol Danvers Captain Marvel meets a pre-cancer Mar-Vell.

 

 

That last one is cheating a bit, since Carol is also a Bronze Agecharacter, and was, in fact, present in Mar-Vell’s book from the get-go. I can take or leave Hawkeye Clint and Hawkeye Kate. I like them both best when they’re on teams. Sort of the way I feel about Wolverine. But, flipping through this issue, I saw it heavily featured Clint’s mentor, the Swordsman. I’ve been fascinated with the Swordsman since I read the opening line of my first-ever issue of The Avengers. That was “The Swordsman is dead!” I was nine years old, and I didn’t really understand what was going on in that issue; but I could see that this was a story about a lot of heroes and villains who had a lot of history together, and I wanted to know more. That’s pretty much how Marvel hooked fans in my day—not with indigestible “Summer events,” but by presenting a complex universe as a sort of a puzzle to solve.

At any rate, a good, character-based story, featuring a Clint Barton Hawkeye who was probably plucked out of time shortly after the Kree-Skrull War (Avengers 97) and about the time of his defection from the Avengers for the Defenders (Avengers 109, if memory serves.) I base this on the fact that he’s in classic costume, which he was not from Avengers 63 until Avengers 109, and the fact that he doesn’t look at the Swordsman and say, “Go away! You’re dead!” which he would have after Avengers #130. Nor would he have called Sword a villain after Avengers #114, when his mentor became a regular member of the team. Okay, geek-out moment over.

Fun story, Good read. Who doesn’t love Hawkeye? Or, um, Hawkette? (Terrible name!)

I Just Finished – Marvel Team-Up (1972) #25

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I have a lot of back issues, mostly bought at quarter and dollar sales. I tend to pick up series I didn’t read when I was actively reading in the 70s, series I just missed because I didn’t read many comics in the 80s, and whatever I can find cheap from the Silver Age. And then they sit there in my “Unread Comics” box… boxes… until I find time to read them. It’s getting to be daunting task. I recently sorted them into groups of 60s, 70s, 80s and “later,” to encourage myself. I have a real fondness for the comics of my childhood, so the 60s and 70s issues at the front, with their delightfully yellowed pages, cheer me.

Ironically, I picked this issue up the night its author, Len Wein, died. It’s a nice little piece of Marveliana. Spidey and Daredevil meet, manage to find a reason to fight each other (Marvel heroes almost always fought each other before realizing they had common cause) and then go to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a powerful man from the clutches of The Unholy Trio, later known as Count Nefaria’s Ani-Men. It’s a completely standalone story. MTU, by virtue of being just an excuse to put Spider-Man on another cover and maybe boost sales of other books by introducing a character casual readers didn’t know, didn’t really have a thread that spanned multiple issues. At least, it didn’t until Chris Claremont took over the book. But it was nice to read an average Marvel story, one more by Len, in his honor.

It’s Just Football! (Isn’t it?)

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All right, I said I was just going to do short reviews until I was ready to release pieces of a bigger project. Said bigger project is at 8,000 words, and I’m still mulling it over. But this only-reviews thing just ran headlong into the thing that everyone seems to be talking about: football players standing, not standing, kneeling, hiding in the locker room, etc, during the playing of the National Anthem.

So I feel moved to say, “It’s just football!”

Isn’t it?

No, it isn’t, and I know that. It’s not just a game, it’s a multi-billion dollar industry which is part of America’s civil religion. That’s not me being sarcastic, either. There is a recognized civil religion in this country, and pro football games are one of its sacred rituals. So, for a lot of us, those who would fail to behave as per accepted norms during one of the religious observances which are key to that ritual–i.e. those who are unwilling to stand for the National Anthem–are heretics.

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I Just Finished – Star Trek Discovery (Episode 1)

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“Shoot big now!”

Okay, that really doesn’t mean anything, other than it was my family’s reaction to the first hour (read: first 40 minutes) of the new Star Trek series. I mean, really, CBS, 40 minutes? You’re asking people to pay to watch this show, and you can’t give its fans a full hour? Maybe they’re afraid its fans wouldn’t have the patience to sit for 60 whole minutes? The pacing of the show is so lightning-quick, one wonders.

Which leads me to a special request: can anybody quantify for me, or point me to good, scholarly piece which does quantify, how TV scripting works differently now than it did when Star Trek was first on the air in 1966? I know it does work differently. Scenes are shorter, pacing is faster, there’s more action, and, of course, no story is ever resolved in a single episode. But I’d like to see and down-and-dirty discussion of what all the changes are, and how and when they happened.

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