Speed Force

Austin Grossman’s novel Soon I Will Be Invincible is a fun romp through every super-hero cliché ever invented over the history of the genre. Time-travel, cyborgs, telepaths, aliens, evil geniuses, legacy heroes, secret identities, heroes going bad, villains turning good — everything. It’s an affectionate, tongue-in-cheek parody of the tights-and-flights set.

The book is narrated in alternate chapters by Dr. Impossible, a mad scientist who has held the world in his grasp a dozen times, only to be defeated by his arch-nemesis CoreFire — whom he inadvertently created — and by Fatale (as in “Femme”), a small-time cyborg hero who has just been invited to join the world’s premiere super-team, the Champions.

The book opens with Dr. Impossible still in prison, a situation that’s taken care of within the first few chapters. The world’s greatest hero CoreFire is missing, and the Champions, disbanded for nearly a decade after the death of one of their own, have re-gathered to find him. Their number one suspect: Dr. Impossible. Once he escapes, it becomes a race between him and the heroes: will he build his next doomsday device before they capture him? And where is CoreFire?

Dr. Impossible’s megalomaniacal nature (he suffers from “Malign Hypercognition Disorder,” the clinical diagnosis given most evil geniuses) suffuses every sentence as he dwells on his tortured past and schemes to take over the world. By the end of the book, he’s monologued his entire origin, down to the day his eighth grade guidance counselor told him he was a genius, and taken us on a tour of the underworld from its greatest peak to its most pathetic.

Fatale, despite being a high-tech super-soldier who can never live a normal life, comes off as the closest the book has to an ordinary person. She’s still an outsider in the upper echelons, and her loneliness is a constant presence in her chapters. She knows her new colleagues mainly from television, from news footage of their battles and from their celebrity endorsements. (One fundraises for Amnesty International. Another has her own line of beauty products.) While much of Dr. Impossible’s narration consists of flashbacks in which he tells the reader what he already knows, Fatale is entrenched firmly in the present, learning as she goes and relaying her experiences straight to the reader.

The Champions form a sort of dysfunctional Justice League (or is that redundant these days?), with CoreFire, Damsel and Blackwolf as the Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman equivalents. Except in this version, Wonder Woman and Batman are a divorced ex-couple, trying to work together. And Superman’s a bit of a jerk. (But then again…) The team is rounded out by man-tiger Feral, ageless Faerie warrior Elphin (who still has a mission to perform for Titania), magician Mr. Mystic (mainly in the Mandrake/Zatara mold, but with elements of Dr. Strange), teen pop idol Rainbow Triumph, and two newcomers: Fatale herself and Lily, a powerhouse from a distant, blighted future who once fought on the other side of the law. (The book’s website has a database of heroes and villains that doesn’t seem particularly spoilery at first glance.)

The book has its requisite battles, but for the most part it’s about what heroes and villains do in between the fighting: the endless investigations that go nowhere. Bickering at team meetings. Rivalries and affairs. Clandestine meetings in dive bars and abandoned buildings. Hunting for the components of a doomsday weapon. The same concerns as anyone else.

One disadvantage the book has is that it points out just why super-heroes tend to work best in a visual medium: the costumes. I only had strong images of a few of the characters, and most of them were taken from other comics. I never did figure out just what Damsel was supposed to look like, so I pictured her as Payback from True Believers. Fatale was somewhat like Liri Lee, a member of the Linear Men whose name I can’t recall (Thanks, West!). CoreFire, I saw as a cross between Red Star (in his red-and-yellow outfit) and Firestorm. Without pictures, the costumes are more or less pointless, and the only reason they’re included is tradition. Small wonder that colorful tights only really came in when heroic fiction made the jump from the pulps to the comics pages.

Although Dr. Impossible does make a case for why, despite Edna Mode’s warning in The Incredibles, a villain might want a cape. It makes for a much more dramatic entrance.

I’m beginning to wonder if there are some closet Flash fans in Opera Software’s PR department. Today’s release of Opera 9.60 features the slogan, Making You Faster. And while speed has always been a highlight of the web browser, it was just six months ago that they used a red-and-yellow blur to promote the then-current beta release.

I’ve been a fan of Opera since I was in college, when a friend introduced me to this browser that wasn’t Netscape and wasn’t Internet Explorer, but was really fast and fit (at the time) on a floppy. (Remember those?) Since then I’ve gone back and forth between Mozilla/Firefox and Opera a lot, and these days I use both regularly. Opera’s still very fast, and still unusually small — somehow they manage to fit a web browser, an email client, a news & feed reader, and even a chat program in the same space that Firefox fits just a browser.

Their strong suit has long been innovation: a lot of features that have become standard in web browsers got their start in Opera. One of the nice capabilities that’s been added recently is Opera Link, which will synchronize bookmarks, search history, notes and other data not just between different computers running Opera, but also with mobile phones running Opera Mini and Opera Mobile.

On a related note, Opera has released the following short video, “Sketch of my life,” all about choices. (I haven’t watched it with sound yet, since I don’t have speakers on my computer at work.)

The Weather Channel has posted a short interview and video clips with a man who survived being struck by lightning outside a gas station — and was caught on the station’s security cameras.

William Hall was filling up the tank when lightning struck the ground nearby, traveled along the ground, and passed through him, knocking him out. He survived with only minor burns.

The video includes three clips of surveillance footage:

• Outside the station, a huge orange-yellow blast appears in the parking lot.
• Inside the station, a brilliant light bleaches the frame almost to white.
• Outside again, Hall collapses to the ground.

Looking at this weeks new releases, I noticed the CMX manga title, The Girl Who Runs Through Time by Gaku Tsugano. From the description, it sounds like the character’s origin may have been inspired by the Flash:

Kazuko is a high school senior who has no idea what she wants to do in the future. Alone one day after school, she discovers a broken beaker in the science lab. She smells something sweet in the air, passes out, and finds herself transported back to her own past! Will Kazuko use her ability to travel through time wisely or selfishly?

Fumes from a broken beaker in a school science lab? Sounds like Jay Garrick’s origin to me! Time travel by running? Positively Flashy! (Though it looks like the “running” is actually metaphorical.)

The manga appears to be based on a 1976 1965 Japanese novel, The Girl Who Could Run Through Time by Yasutaka Tsutsui. According to Wikipedia, it’s been adapted to many media including at least two live-action films, an anime, and two TV series. To make matters more confusing, there’s a manga adaptation of the anime (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time) in addition to this manga adaptation of the book.

The Girl Who Runs Through Time is a 2-parter, with Volume 1 out this week and Volume 2 coming in November.

ABC has bought the TV rights to Robert J. Sawyer’s novel, Flashforward, based on a script by David S. Goyer (Batman Begins and the Flash movie that never happened) and Brannon Braga (Star Trek, 24). The network wants to turn it into a series, and thinks it could become a companion piece to Lost.

As described by Pop Critics (where I learned about the deal):

During [a scientific] experiment, as the button is pressed, the unexpected occurs: everyone in the world goes to sleep for a few moments while everyone’s consciousness is catapulted more than twenty years into the future. At the end of those moments, when the world reawakens, all human life is transformed by foreknowledge.

Why am I mentioning it here? Because I really like Robert J. Sawyer’s novels, and the word Flash is in the title. I discovered him through his Neanderthal Parallax trilogy, and since then I’ve read Calculating God, Mindscan, and Rollback. I haven’t gotten to Flashforward yet, but it’s on my to-read list.

Sawyer tends to write social science-fiction: if X technological advance occurs, or Y scientific principle is discovered, what impact will that have on society? How would we react to discovering an alternate reality in which Neanderthals developed civilization instead of us? Or if aliens landed and claimed they had scientific proof that God exists and created the universe 14 billion years ago? What are the legal implications of being able to copy your personality into a virtually immortal, lifelike robot?

Regarding the title: In Sawyer’s blog, he mentions that the actual title is Flashforward, but because it was split into two words on the cover, it tends to get referred to as “Flash Forward.”

Sometime during either Villains United or the Secret Six miniseries, I realized that when I read Catman, I hear the voice of Sawyer from Lost (Josh Holloway).

Yesterday I read Secret Six #1, and today I realized that I hear Deadshot as Jayne Cobb from Firefly and Serenity (Adam Baldwin).

Top Cow’s Velocity comic book by has been pushed back from November to a January launch. Publisher Filip Sablik:

We hit a “speed bump” (ouch!) and rather than stick with the original solicitation schedule and end up with a late book, we opted to push Velocity back to a January launch. The delay in solicitation will ensure that the series will come out in a timely fashion and Joe Casey and ChrisCross have the time to make this series truly butt-kicking.

Speed Force lost the fight for the #3 spot at Comic Blog Elite when long-established blogs The Absorbascon and 4thLetter! signed up. Now it’s trading off spots 5 and 6 with downthetubes.net.

Asgard Press is publishing a Vintage DC Super-Heroes Calendar for 2009, featuring covers from the 1930s through 1960s. It’s a 16-month calendar, and October 2008 features the cover to Showcase #4, first appearance of the Silver-Age Flash. (The Golden-Age Flash Comics #37 gets a spot too, but it’s a Hawkman cover.)

Speaking of Comic Blog Elite, MTV sent them a request/press release about casting for True Life: I’m a Fanboy: “If you appear to be between the ages of 16 and 28, and want to share the story of your fantasy obsession, email us at fanboy@mtvn.com with all of the details. Be sure to include your name, location, phone number and a photo, if possible.”

To follow up my review of Flash #243, here are a few other comics I read this week.

Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds #1 (of 5). I’ve never been a big Legion of Super-Heroes fan (the only time I read it regularly was during the early 1990s “Five Years Later” run, which is not represented in this book), but I picked this up based on the hints we’ve been getting about Bart Allen’s possible role in this mini. Not surprisingly, it read a lot like Geoff Johns’ recent “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” arc, which I dropped half-way through. This issue seemed to be 90% introductions, just making sure the reader could recognize the characters, and 10% setup. Oh, and Superman: Good luck with your plan for dealing with Superboy Prime. You’re going to need it.

Questions: (1) Does this have anything to do with Final Crisis other than the name? (2) Has SBP’s multiverse-hopping genocide in Countdown to Final Crisis been retconned out of existence already, or can we simply assume that the characters don’t know about what he did between “Sinestro Corps War” and L3W?

Tangent: Superman’s Reign #6 (of 12). This issue is a pause in the action, as we finally get the explanation of how we got from the end of Tangent 98 to the beginning of Superman’s Reign. Oddly, despide the cover showcasing the DCU and Tangent Green Lanterns (though the Tangent GL gets the origin slot in this month’s backup), this is primarily a Batman story. It looks like, after the break, things will be picking up again next issue.

True Believers #2 (of 5). The miniseries from former Flash writer Cary Bates (more info) continues. After the first issue had the team exposing a kidnapping ring with forced gladiator games, the second issue exposes a police cover-up…of what appears to be Mr. Fantastic being arrested for DUI. (Well, technically, flying under the influence.) It continues to focus on Payback as the viewpoint character, and while she’s interesting, I’m starting to wonder whether there will be room to explore the other members of the team. Despite being right in the middle of Marvel-Universe New York (Payback works for S.H.I.E.L.D. in her civilian ID, the Fantastic Four are in this issue, etc.), it’s self-contained enough for someone like me who doesn’t read much Marvel. Easily the strongest book I read this week, and defintiely recommended.

Noble Causes ends in a few months with issue #40. Apparently the “Five Years Later” relaunch didn’t bring in many new readers, and on top of that, series writer and co-creator Jay Faerber “started feeling like [he] didn’t have much else to say about the characters.”

It’s disappointing news, but hey, it’s always better to leave on a high note than fade into obscurity. And it’s been a pretty solid run: three 4-issue miniseries, two specials, and a 40-issue ongoing.

Noble Causes is about a super-hero team as a dysfunctional family. There are elements of the Fantastic Four, but with personal secrets, double-crossing, affairs, family feuds, cover-ups, and celebrity scandals. The series initially focused on Liz Donnelly-Noble, an ordinary woman who married the family’s resident speedster, Race Noble, and found herself immersed in their bizarre world. (Every once in a while there are some interesting Wally/Linda parallels.) Over time, the scope broadened. A few months ago, the story jumped forward in time five years, and the former viewpoint character has been conspicuously absent.

If you only know Jay Faerber from his disastrous run on The Titans, it’s worth taking a look at some of his creator-owned books. The first Dynamo 5 trade is a good introduction to that team (and it’s pretty cheap), and Gemini is only two issues into a five-issue miniseries.

The post on sexual harassment at Comic-Con on Comics Oughta Be Fun has been making the rounds. It’s disturbing, but worth a read. It lists a few examples of women being harassed during the con, then points out that there’s no written policy against harassment, and no clear procedure for reporting it.

In theory, it shouldn’t be necessary to spell out “Don’t stalk or assault people” in the program. We’re talking about behavior that’s already unacceptable and, once you cross a certain line, illegal. Unfortunately some people either lack basic social graces (I’m trying to keep the language family-friendly, here), or think that costumes give them a free pass.

I do think the convention needs a clear reporting procedure. Let people know they can report incidents to security, and follow through.

They also need better coordination between convention staff and security. My wife and I spent an hour and a half dealing with what we thought was the theft of her purse. She stood up at the end of a panel and it was gone. She reported it to security, filled out a missing property report, checked lost and found, canceled her credit card…and in the end it turned out that the room’s staff had removed it from under her seat during the previous panel break, thinking someone else had left it behind, and put it at the back of the room. But they hadn’t said anything to security about it, and security didn’t ask them.

(Found via several blogs.)