Something I Heard: A Trio of Science Fiction Podcasts for Mother’s Day

Here are three Mother’s Day-themed science fiction stories from Lightspeed Magazine and Escape Pod.
 

“Conditional Love” by Felicity Shoulders was podcast February 11, 2011, at Escape Pod and read by Mur Lafferty (runtime 43:16). It takes place in a care facility for illegally genetically engineered children (or, more aptly, mis-engineered children) where a doctor meets a young boy who wakes up every morning and imprints on the first adult he sees. “Conditional Love” was a 2010 Nebula Award nominee.

“The Thing about Shapes to Come” by Adam-Troy Castro was podcast by Lightspeed Magazine January 2014 and read by Gabrielle de Cuir (runtime 47:00). This is a weird but touching story about a woman who gives birth to and raises a cube. Adam-Troy Castro also wrote “My Wife Hates Time Travel,” which I recommended as a Valentine’s Day story.
 

Finally, there’s “Raising Jenny” by Janni Lee Simner podcast at Escape Pod September 16, 2010, and read by Mur Lafferty (runtime 50:43). In it, a young woman accedes to her dying mother’s wish to give birth to her clone. She means to give little Jenny the support and freedom she felt she never got from her mother, but not turning into one’s own mother is a tricky thing, particularly in this case.

Now if you want a Mother’s Day-themed science fiction movie, you can’t go wrong with James Cameron’s 1986 classic Aliens with its climactic battle between Sigourney Weaver trying to protect a little girl and the alien queen trying to protect hundreds of its eggs.

Meanwhile, the only “Mother” in the original Alien is the Nostromo’s AI, which has been programmed to bring back a live alien even if it kills the entire crew. In 1979, Alien was the first R-rated movie I’d ever been to. My mom took me.

Just Enough Trope to Hang Myself: There’s Something about Mary Sue

In fact, I actually have been writing. Just not here.

I had been thinking about different tropes I could play with. Tropes, as defined on the Television Tropesand Idioms home page, are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. (If you want to see a whole lot of time magically disappear, head on over to that page and click the “Random” button.) Anyway, my musings got me to thinking about the concept of a Mary Sue character. Is it possible to write a good story centered around a Mary Sue or does her very “Mary Sueness” make that impossible? If the latter is true, why is that? What’s wrong with being young, attractive, charismatic, hyper-competent, and sympathetic? We like that in our heroes, don’t we?
 

I’ll back up a tick. “Mary Sue,” according to Television Tropes and Idioms, “… is a derogatory term primarily used in fanfic circles to describe a particular type of character.” The article the goes on for quite a bit discussing the characteristics of said “particular type of character,” because like all things Internet, there is much disagreement over what makes a Mary Sue a Mary Sue.
 

The term comes from “A Trekkie’sTale,” a 1974 Star Trek fanfic parody by Paula Smith published in the second issue of the fanzine Menagerie. The super-short story stars Lt. Mary Sue, a half-Vulcan who, at 15½ is the youngest lieutenant in the history of Star Fleet. This does not prevent Captain Kirk from immediately hitting on her, but she’s not that kind of girl. She proceeds to impress Mr. Spock with her logic, beam down to a planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy, encounter hostile green androids, use a hairpin to help them escape imprisonment, and then take command of the Enterprise while Kirk, Spock and the other senior officers are incapacitated with a space illness. In the end—spoiler—Lt. Mary Sue contracts the space illness herself and dies tragically and beautifully, surrounded by the mourning crew of the Enterprise.

 

Many years later, the story led to this awesome bit of webcomic hilarity

 

A Mary Sue is typically an author wish-fulfillment character. Her most widely agreed-upon characteristics may include any or all of the following to varying degrees: In addition to being young, attractive, charismatic, hyper-competent and sympathetic, as noted above, she is a natural leader (usually because it says so somewhere in the narrative), is widely adored and admired by those around her, has striking (often exotic) good looks, may possess one or two endearing personality quirks, and likely comes out of a complex and dramatic (often traumatic) back story. In the case of fanfic, which is Mary Sue’s natural habitat, said dramatic back story may intertwine in some way with a main character’s back story (e.g., Captain Kirk’s long-lost daughter, Dumbledore’s college roommate’s great niece, a pirate girl turned into a vampire by Lestat come seeking her sire, and so on.)

Outside of fanfic, a Mary Sue is sometimes referred to as a “Canon Sue,” which is a character in the original work who serves as the author’s stand-in wish fulfillment character. Some have suggested that the young, hyper-competent Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation was the Canon Sue character for one Gene Wesley Roddenberry.

This brings up another widely agreed-upon Mary Sue trait: The author generally likes the character much better than the readers do. In fact, the more the author likes the Mary Sue, the less the readers do, which makes sense because Mary Sue is there first and foremost for the author’s wish fulfillment needs, not anyone else’s.

 In her paper presented to American Culture Association Conference, March 31, 1999, “Too Good to Be True: 150 Yearsof Mary Sue,” Pat Pflieger posits that many, if not most, writers have a Mary Sue or two somewhere in their pasts. “Write what you know” is the classic advice inflicted on young writers. Well, when you’re twelve or thirteen or fourteen, mostly what you know is your own self and your fantasies. Put those musings on paper (or—heaven forbid—put them online) and you’ve likely got yourself a Mary Sue story. The more you write (and learn to curb your own excesses), the more you gradually move away from her.

One shudders to imagine an early draft of The Great Gatsby by a teenaged F. Scott Fitzgerald

I had some Mary Sues or, in my case, the boy version, Marty Stus. A couple of them were non-player characters in my high school Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. I got called on it too: “Are you gonna have the NPCs do everything?” That was some bad dungeonmastering.

 I will neither confirm nor deny that I came up with a new character to join the New Mutants

 

That brings me back to my original question, bad dungeonmastering aside, is Mary Sue/Marty Stu automatically a bad character? I was keen to play with the concept. First of all, I created an original, or at least originalish, world for my new Marty Stu character because, as I’ve often pointed out, there ain’t no money in fanfic. It’s a world of high fantasy wherein he, the Mardest’u (see what I did there?), is the leader of an elite force of dragon-riding heroes. Naturally, he rides the biggest, most powerful dragon. Our guy is young, brave, brilliant, undefeated in personal combat, a natural leader, has some tragedy in his past, et cetera, et cetera. He is adored by his people; in fact, they’re a bit obsessed with him, particularly with the question of which of any number of beautiful women will eventually win his heart.

So how’d the story come out? Don’t know. I ended up not writing it. Instead, I turned the whole thing on its head and approached it from the opposite direction. Take, for example, the climax of the Harry Potter series. Harry is about to face Voldemort. Dumbledore’s Army is in final battle against the Death Eaters. Meanwhile, down in Hogsmead, a young wizard—probably a Hufflepuff—is on patrol on the off chance that there might be a sneak attack by Voldemort’s forces from that quarter. He wishes he was the Chosen One; hell, he wishes he was as important as Neville. He misses the whole battle and that, in fact, is a lucky thing. He would have been killed in the battle had he been there. He wouldn’t have been the first one killed who spurs the hero to fight on so his death won’t be in vain. He probably would have been somewhere in the middle of the fatalities, possibly by collateral damage or even friendly fire. In any event, it would have happened off camera.

Since when is Hufflepuff's uniform a red shirt?

If it’s Marty Stu’s world, what about the other people who have to live in it? Naturally, everyone adores Marty Stu; that’s one of his defining characteristics after all. (His enemies don’t adore him, of course, but they do respect and grudgingly admire him.) But it’s not hard to imagine a kind of love-hate dynamic going on as well. Even though we can’t all be the Chosen One, everyone is the hero of his or her own story. Those are stories worth exploring too. 

Hamlet: The Story of a Gravedigger who met a Prince

 

But Enough About Me: My Beverly Hills Mall Trip

I took the girls on a shopping trip to Beverly Center in Beverly Hills because we happened to be in the neighborhood. The teens wasted no time in ditching me, so I wandered around on my own.

This is not exactly the manliest of malls. It’s mostly pricey boutiques selling women’s clothes, shoes, and accessories. Glad I brought a book.

Except for this, but there's such a thing as trying too hard.

Not to say that I saw nothing that amused me.

"Aldo" is Italian for "bigger poster."

 

He looks back at the man, Aldo, who put him in this box and vows vengeance.

 

If the answer is "yes," the next question is are you here at Beverly Center because you were evil in life?

 

The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your House and a couple of her coworkers.

 

Miley's first take of "Wrecking Ball" went rather badly.

 

This one's from outside a shoe shop; you see, she's not wearing any pants, so your eyes are naturally drawn to her shoes.

 

Something I Heard: Valentine’s Day Podcasts

I have never been a big fan of Valentine’s Day, largely for the same reasons as other people who are not big fans of Valentine’s Day. Twenty years of marriage has done much to dull my sharp disdain for the holiday, but still… Call it a grudge, if you will.

One of the things I do like, however, is listening to science-fiction and fantasy podcasts while going for walks during my lunch break at work. Two podcasts I listen to regularly are Escape Pod and Lightspeed Magazine. Anyway, I thought I’d recommend some sci-fi stories appropriate to the holiday that you can download and enjoy (or not, depending on your disposition). They come in three flavors: Sweet, bittersweet, and so, so bitter.

(Incidentally, I recommended some of these stories last year on my Facebook page, but didn’t really have the space to talk about them.)

Sweet: The first recommendation under the heading of “sweet” is “Impossible Dreams” by Tim Pratt, Escape Pod Episode 105 from May 2007. This is the story of a film nerd who finds a video rental place with a very unusual selection of movies and the girl working behind the counter who doesn’t quite know what to make of him. Tim Pratt’s had a bunch of his short stories podcast on Escape Pod and this one was a 2007 Hugo Award nominee. This is a sweet story for how it captures how exciting it is to meet someone who shares your passions and really gets you, even before the possibility of romance arises.

Not playing anywhere

 

The second story in the “sweet” category is “My Wife Hates Time Travel” by Adam-Troy Castro, Lightspeed Magazine September 2012. As it turns out, my wife hates podcasts. Fortunately, the page includes a text-on-screen version in addition to the audio version so I was able to share it with her. And I really wanted to share it with her. It’s that sweet. In this story, a couple knows that one of them is destined to invent time travel. They don’t know which one of them it is; all they know is they can’t get a moment’s peace thanks to the non-stop interference of their future selves.

 

Bittersweet: “I Look Forward to Remembering You” by Mur Lafferty is a bittersweet story from Escape Pod, July 6, 2006. Mur Lafferty’s also had a bunch of stories on Escape Pod and was the site’s editor-in-chief for awhile. This is the story of a woman who’s reached a point in her life where all she has is her memories. That’s not entirely right; she also has wealth and access to time travel technology and hires a service to go back in time and give her better memories. I love this story but, fair warning, it made me cry.

 It also references Ranma ½, which is awesome.

“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll SeeYou in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan from Escape Pod episode 243, June 1, 2010, is a tale of love and time dilation and a couple who never quite makes it work but are never far from each other’s thoughts even over centuries and light-years. This is a pretty good story, but the definitive story of love (and war) and time dilation remains Joe Haldeman’s novel The Forever War.

Bitter: Finally, there are the bitter stories. “Love Might Be TooStrong a Word” by Charlie Jane Anders is from the August 2012 podcast of Lightspeed Magazine. If you think love stinks, especially this time of year, then imagine how much worse it might be with a rigid class system and four or five extra genders (and corresponding pronouns). Answer: Lots.

Then there’s Robert Silverberg’s “Ishmael in Love,” Escape Pod episode 113, July 5, 2007, originally published July 1970. So very bitter. It’s a story of a dolphin named Ishmael and the marine biologist he longs for. Anyone can tell at a glance that this is a relationship that will never, ever work except for Ishmael. Dolphins are supposed to be intelligent, but as Escape Pod host Stephen Eley notes in the afterword, we’ve all been the dolphin.

Here’s hoping you’re not the dolphin this year, but if you are, remember, February 15 is Discount Chocolate Day.

Big Things Come in Small Blue Boxes: The Waters of Mars

I’ve just finished “The Complete Specials” in my morning elliptical machine viewing of the Doctor Who DVDs. These are the last David Tennant episodes before Matt Smith takes over in the title role. The doctor is traveling alone, so guilt-stricken after what happened to Donna Noble in “Journey’s End” that he even turns down a chance to take on Lady Christina de Souza played by Michelle Ryan as a companion at the end of “Planet of the Dead.”

She would have been a great companion.

 

(On a side note, I feel like the Bionic Woman reboot Ryan starred in never got a fair shake thanks to the writers’ strike that year. The show really could have found its feet if it only had a few more episodes.)

(On another side note, I like to imagine that somewhere deep inside Donna Noble’s subconscious, Doctor-Donna is working on the problem of restoring her memories without causing her brain to burst into flames. When she succeeds, she gets the Doctor to go with her to find 1960s companions Jamie and Zoe and restore their memories as well. It’s a cool idea, but as I’ve already noted, there ain’t no money in fanfic.)

(On one further side note, I’ve completely lost my place.)

Right. “The Waters of Mars.” It’s Doctor No. 10’s penultimate adventure, and it’s a dark one. The Doctor arrives on Mars at what turns out to be the first colony on Mars. It also turns out that the first colony on Mars is doomed and the Doctor can’t do anything to prevent the colony’s destruction without unraveling thousands of years of future history. Specifically, colony commander Captain Adelaide Brooke’s granddaughter will be the captain of humanity’s first interstellar mission to the stars, taking the inspiration from her grandmother and following her into space. As shown in a flashback, even a Dalek knows better than to screw with that level of future history and turns away from an opportunity to kill Brooke as a young girl.

 

So when the colonists start getting homicidally infected by something in their drinking water, the Doctor knows there is nothing he can do to save any of them. They will all die and the colony will self-destruct to prevent spread of the contagion. Their sacrifice saves the future.

Except, the Doctor has a change of hearts at the last minute. He’s already lost Donna and, damn it, he’s going to save the rest of these people. Why should Time Lord law apply to him when he’s the last Time Lord? He declares himself the Lord of Time and transports the last three survivors, including the commander, safely to Earth.

Brooke realizes the gravity of what the Doctor has done and what he’s becoming and, instead of thanking him, goes home and shoots herself. The other two survivors are left to tell the story of her heroism and, somehow, the future is preserved. Meanwhile, the Doctor realizes that he’s gone too far and even his time is running out. He climbs into the TARDIS and heads off to face the music in “The End of Time.” 

Her death is a fixed point in history. As they used to say at the Academy, "If it's fixed, don't break it."

 

I have some problems with this episode despite any number of outstanding dramatic performances by the entire cast. I can accept that the first colony on Mars is British because Doctor Who. I can accept the colonists packing guns instead of, say, bicycles. I can even accept building the entire colony on top of a nuclear warhead, just in case. (I figure the latter two recommendations came from some classified UNIT or Torchwood document that essentially said, “Hey, there may be Ice Warriors or Sutekh, so take some guns and bombs. They never actually help, but at least it won’t look like we weren’t paying attention.”)

This is one of those episodes that could have been solved by piling everyone into the TARDIS and getting out of there. Of course, that’s what he wound up doing; but why take them to Earth? Where history’s concerned, “presumed dead” is as good as “dead.” Especially when the supposed cause of death is a nuclear explosion on another planet. He could have taken them anywhere. He could have taken Captain Brooke to Proxima Centauri to meet her granddaughter. By that point, history’s already happened, so no harm, no foul.

C'mon, they named the ship Titanic. I have zero sympathy.

 

I get where the episode was going thematically. It goes all the way back to the first episode of the season, “Voyage of the Damned,” wherein the Doctor finds himself a passenger on a sabotaged luxury space liner. The adventure goes particularly badly for a Doctor Who episode and a lot of sympathetic characters die before it’s all over, including would-be companion Astrid Peth, played by singer Kylie Minogue. One of the survivors turns out to be a greedy self-centered businessman who not only lives but gets even richer because he’d just sold his shares in the doomed luxury liner’s company. Someone comments to the Doctor at the end that he was probably not the person that the Doctor (or the viewers) would have chosen to survive. But then again, the same observer adds after thinking for a moment, if you got to choose who lives and who dies that might make you sort of a monster. That’s what’s at the core of the Doctor’s epiphany at the end of “The Waters of Mars” when he says that he’s gone too far. I would have rather had a callback to that realization instead of Captain Brooke’s pointless suicide.

So, instead of following her grandmother into space, she follows her to a self-inflicted laser shot in a London flat? Dunno how they dodged that bullet, but then again, if there's one thing science fiction television teaches us, it's that lasers are much easier to dodge than bullets.

 

There Ain’t No Money in Fanfic: Ghost Master

I brought Ghost Master with me on my vacation. It’s a 2003 computer game from Empire Interactive, but it’s one of those games that’s fun to come back to every once and again. In the game, you are the Ghost Master, and it’s your job to deploy various ghosts, imps, spirits, and elementals to haunt locales throughout the town of Gravenville, usually with the objective of sending all the humans on site screaming from the scene. The game looks a bit like the Sims, except you get to dump spiders on the people (if you’ve deployed Clatterclaws, a ghostly spider the size of a kitchen table).

You’re assigned some ghosts and in each haunting mission you have an opportunity to recruit two or three more spirits to your roster. These latter ghosts will introduce themselves to you and tell you what you need to do to free them up to your service. Sometimes it’s simple like getting a mortal to flush the toilet to free the trapped water elemental, other times it’s more complicated. Anyway, the ghosts each have different personalities and there’s some nice bits of voice acting.

"Please flush and remember to wash your hands afterwards."

 

The game ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, as if there was a sequel planned that never came to pass. Even an expansion pack with a handful of new ghosts and a couple of new locations would have been more than welcome, if for no other reason than the fact that you hardly get to use the ghosts you recruit in the later missions. (A bonus level was released that provided some closure, but it was only compatible with the British release of the game. According to Wikipedia, the bonus level is included in the downloads available from Steam and Good Old Games.)

As far as game play as the Ghost Master goes, sometimes your actions in Gravenville might be considered “good,” such as helping a little boy find his stuffed bunny or exposing a crooked cop to avenge an officer slain in the line of duty. Other times, such as setting your ghosts to rampage through a hospital, not so much. Basically, the supernatural world has its own agenda, and one aspect of that agenda throughout the game is to recruit a powerful supernatural creature known as the Darkling.

Since this is a fanfic post and since there is no hint that an official sequel is ever going to happen, here’s what I have in mind for Ghost Master 2: The Darkling Invasion.

The Plot: In the original Ghost Master, one of your goals is to free the Darkling. Since it happens in tha last scenario, you don’t really get to do much with it. But there’s another problem with the Darkling: it’s not one of ours. Look at it. It doesn’t look like any of the other haunters in the roster, not even Ghastly, who looks like he’s moonlighting from the first couple Hellraiser movies (the good ones). The Darkling is gigantic and looks like a full-fledged demon. That’s probably because it is. It eats souls for crying out loud. While your haunters may have set the odd mortal on fire for laughs,* they never actually ate anyone.

* Don’t worry, kids; it’s ectoplasmic flame. No (physical) scarring.



"Boo! I'm a ghost! Boo!"

 

Clive Barker: Call your agent.

 

Recruiting the Darkling was a mistake. Now it and all its demonic darkling friends are trying to take over Gravenville.

 

A lot of the missions will involve scaring humans out of a locale before the darklings get to them and otherwise prevent the Darkling from liberating more of its malevolent kin. (In this pitch, I’ll be referring to the Darkling from the original Ghost Master as “the Darkling.” The aforementioned “malevolent kin” will be referred to as “darklings.” They are all big and demonic-looking with their own power sets.)

Changes in Game Play: In Ghost Master, mortals have three attributes that the haunters can affect: Fear shown as a red bar, Sanity shown as a yellow bar, and Belief in the Supernatural shown as a blue bar. When the red bar is full, the mortal in question flees the scene. For example, appearing in front of a mortal and pulling your face off adds a lot to the red bar. When the yellow bar is full, the mortal goes insane and begin to run around randomly; they are immune to further scaring but for all intents and purposes are considered to have fled the scene as well. Having a bucket of spiders dumped on you adds fear and insanity, but running into your doppelganger who then pulls his face off is the Crazy Train Express. In most but not all instances, the blue bar is not much of a factor with regard to play; however, it may indicate how susceptible the mortal is to your supernatural shenanigans.

If a darkling gets a hold of a mortal, all three bars go gray, the darkling gets more plasm to fuel its unearthly powers, and that mortal is under the darkling’s control. Darklings will generally use their mortal slaves to bring more mortals to their master. More importantly, these mortals don’t scare, which means they don’t generate any plasm for your haunters. The more humans the darklings convert, the weaker you and your ghosts become.

One of the limitations in dealing with the Darkling and its kin is that haunters and darklings cannot affect each other directly. While you can set humans on fire for laughs and scares, you can’t do the same to the darklings. However, you can affect the environment. Use your various ghostly powers to move debris and/or fire to keep humans away from the darklings.

"Really, I'm just a ghost and am not involved in any kind of demonic invasion. Honest."

 

New Locales and Characters: With a new game, there should be new locales. Let’s have a high school, a spooky amusement park, some warehouses down by the docks, a modern office building with a secret high-tech R&D center, a nice country club, and a sketchy neighborhood complete with dive bars and dark alleys. A visit to the Darkling’s home dimension would make for an especially challenging finale.

More ghosts, of course. I want a scary clown, maybe some kind of howling beast-man, and a mad scientist ghost. Also, a demonic biker who shall not be referred to as “Ghost Rider.” Also, an undead creature called “Sparkles the Vampyre.”

The original Ghost Master game had a few wild cards among the mortal would-be victims: a medium, a priest, some amateur witches, and a trio of “ghost breakers” complete with proton packs. These guys had the power to detect and banish your ghosts if you weren’t careful. Here are some new wild cards:

·        John Heckburner is a paranormal investigator who hangs out in a bar in the sketchy part of town. He can banish ghosts and darklings and doesn’t scare easily, though he can be misled or distracted. He also drinks a bit too much.

·        Bunny the Slayer is a student at the high school. She will physically attack ghosts and darklings until they’re banished. She doesn’t scare easily either, but can be driven off with overwhelming force.

·        Billy Phantasm got caught in a mishap at the high-tech R&D center and can now change from an ordinary mortal to a hero with ghost powers. In his ghostly form, he is immune to attacks by haunters and darklings and is able to banish both with impunity. Luckily, he can only stay in this form for limited periods of time. The rest of the time, he’s vulnerable.

·        There are these four meddling teenagers and their dog—Frankie, Dana, Thelma, Shabby, and Scoopy Doo—who hang out at the amusement park. While they scare just as easily as other mortals (if not more easily), for some reason, the act as a natural ectoplasmic sink. Higher level ghost and darkling powers simply can’t be used while they’re on site. Even more frustratingly, although they can be separated, they can’t be driven away until the whole team is scared enough to leave. They seem to have some sort of history with one of the ghosts from the original game, Old Man Carter.

·        Finally, there’s Professor Weird, Master of Magic Powers. He tends to show up when a lot of magic is being used at a site. He’s immune to darkling and ghost powers and will banish anyone he sets his sights on. The best strategy is to turn your powers down and lay low until he goes away, though if you’re clever and careful, you can sic him on the darklings.

Finally, one important change to the original game: There was a poltergeist who was the combined spirits of all the chickens that had died in a poultry processing plant. Its name was Hard Boiled, but it should have been called Fluster Cluck. That is all.

"It's a chicken! A giant chicken!"



 

Follow-up: I just downloaded a version of Ghost Master from GOG.com, which includes the game's spooky soundtrack by Paul Weir. It's great. Also, Ghost Master co-creator Chris Bateman has a blog that discusses Ghost Master's failures and successes and the unlikelihood of a sequel. It's interesting reading.

I was a Teenaged Marvel Zombie: In the Beginning

I don’t read superhero comics much these days. I used to. Boy howdy, did I. But that’s been over for a long time now. I’ll pick up the occasional trade paperback if I find myself standing in the graphic novels aisle of Barnes & Noble reading one for a long time, but mostly the magic’s been gone since I jumped off the bus in the ‘90s. One of my favorite blogs is called “Comics Should Be Good.” I agree and very little that I’ve read there tempts me to start making that weekly journey back to my local comics shop. I’m not even sure I have a local comics shop.

It wasn’t always like that. I’d read comic books as a kid, mostly Harvey and Gold Key titles.

 

 

Believe it or not, I remember owning all three of these at one point: Baby Snoots goes to elephant summer camp and all the other elephants are horrified by his mouse friend; Daffy talks Elmer Fudd into traveling the world to take pictures of him to win a photo contest; and the Headless Horseman turns out to be fake, but he would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling kids and their ... ghost? (Actually, the Funky Phantom locked himself inside a grandfather clock while hiding from some Redcoats during the Revolutionary War and couldn't get out afterwards, which is actually a pretty horrible way to die. This should also be a plot for Sleepy Hollow next season.)

Then there was this: Dinosaurs and Indians. Maybe you didn't hear me: Dinosaurs. And. Freaking. Indians. Turok and his teenaged sidekick, Andar, get lost in a cavern and emerge in a world full of dinosaurs and pronoun-challenged cavemen. It was the most awesome thing in the history of ever. (I also learned a valuable lesson about not believing things you read in comics. In the story, Turok and Andar are lost in the caverns when they find a pool of water. Turok wisely counsels Andar not to drink from it and, sure enough, there's a skeleton next to it. Later on, they find an underground river and Turok hypothesizes that running water ought to be safe to drink. I put this theory to the test on a camping trip a couple years later and missed a day of school.)

 

I was aware of other sorts of comics. Remember one time a babysitter’s boyfriend left me a Batman and a Superman comic. I don’t remember what was going on in the Batman one, but in the Superman one, he battled some anti-matter version of himself and accidentally destroyed Metropolis. Spoiler: It was just a dream. There were also war comics on the rack, I remember one title called The Losers, which always showed the main characters thinking everything was under control just as they were about to walk into an ambush or trap or pit full of snakes or otherwise get totally killed. Intriguing, but never enough so for me to actually pick one up, much less plunk down 20 cents for one.

 

 

Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Wait. Too far. Rewind that. It was a sunny day in the summer of 1975. I had ridden my bike down to the newsstand for some reason when I saw it: Giant-Size Fantastic Four #6 featuring the birth of Reed and Sue’s son. I remembered the Fantastic Four from the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons and was familiar enough with the characters, but Reed and Sue having a baby was definitely something that hadn’t happened in the cartoon. So I plopped down my 50 cents (it was a giant-size issue, after all) slipped the comic in my backpack and rode home.

As Stan always likes to say: 'Nuff said.

 

Now, at the time, I didn’t understand that this was actually a reprint of Fantastic Four Annual #6, which was originally published November 1968. Why the Human Torch was shouting “He’s back! Annihilus is back!!” on the cover when the story inside chronicled their first meeting with that particular bad guy remained a mystery to me for years. What I did get was 68 pages of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby at their very finest.

 

The story starts with Reed, aka Mister Fantastic, about to go into the Negative Zone (another dimension). Sue, aka the Invisible Girl aka the Invisible Woman since sometime in the 1980s, is about to go into labor and Reed has learned that she and the baby will die, victims of the very cosmic radiation that gave them all their super powers, unless her retrieves some cosmic energy MacGuffin. Before he can depart, Ben and Johnny, aka the Thing and the Human Torch, inform him that there’s no way he’s going without them, so off the three of them go through the interdimensional portal in the interdimensional portal lab into the Negative Zone. Short version: They find the MacGuffin, defeat Annihilus, drain just the amount of energy they need from the MacGuffin, return home and save Sue and the baby.

 

 

Longer version: Jack Kirby’s Negative Zone was full of explosions, crackling lightning, those black “Kirby dots” that you see after a flash goes off in your face, insane-looking monsters and aliens, and Annihilus himself, the tyrannical ruler of the Negative Zone. Annihilus looks like a nightmarish cross between a giant insect, a dragon, and the latest model killer robot. He is, of course, utterly without mercy.

Meanwhile, Stan Lee moved the story along at a breathless pace. Our three heroes have to battle harder and harder and never give up. I mean, it’s a comic book, of course they’re going to succeed; but Stan Lee pulled twelve-year-old me in to the next layer below that where the whole thing had a very good chance of ending in tragedy as far as our heroes were concerned.

 

What grabbed me even more than that, however, was Ben’s non-stop wisecracks. I had been reading “funny” comics for years, but I found him hilarious. The Thing instantly became my favorite character.

 

 

I was hooked. I ended up reading that issue over and over again until “mint condition” was a distant memory. Within days, I was back at the newsstand looking for more. I got Fantastic Four #164 wherein they battled the Crusader, a vengeance-crazed former 1950s superhero whose gear was eventually passed on to current-day good guy, Quasar. That issue also introduced Johnny’s new girlfriend Frankie Raye who went on to become Galactus’ herald, Nova. The great George Perez was the artist at the time and he had Johnny in an outfit that would have made Greg Brady blush.

We all wore silly stuff in the '70s. But yikes!

 

Around that same time, I bought an issue of Marvel Two-in-One featuring the Thing and Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk featuring the Shaper of Worlds, Marvel’s Greatest Comics featuring reprints of even-then-classic Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four stories, and more. To paraphrase Nick Fury at the end of the first Iron Man movie, I’d taken my first step into a much larger world.