However (seamless transition), it has been conducive to a fair amount of reading.  To my surprise I’ve been reading several series.  Normally, I’m not one to read series, especially long series of thick books.  I look at a series like, say, George R.R. Martin’s epicly fat books of fantasy, and I think, “I really do want to read those, OR I could read, say, six unrelated books by six different authors in six different genres and learn lots of different tricks from all of them.”  And I invariably choose the later, because, well, basically, I’m a dilettante when it comes to my reading habits.

Yet, faced with epic multi-state journeys, somehow epic sagas seemed both appropriate and comforting.  These are the books that have been keeping me company in my travels:

• C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series: A ship full of thousands of humans is stranded on an alien world, and after a devastating war between humans and the alien atevi, a fragile peace is made and a single human is appointed as the sole ambassador between the two species.  The series follows Bren, that sole ambassador, as he navigates between human and  atevi cultures–the latter of which has no concepts of friendship or love in the sense that humans understand them, but rather manchi, a feeling of devotion and loyalty to a leader and to certain associations.  This series is fascinating to me because it routinely breaks any number of writing 101 rules: the exposition is endless, the action often feels slow, and a number of character details and plot developments are “told” instead of “shown.”  And yet I find it utterly riveting.  I think it all works because (1) we’re so deeply in Bren’s head that it all flows naturally; (2) the alien culture is so rich and interesting I have no problem spending many pages exploring its most subtle nuances; and (3) Cherryh is just a master.
• David Wellington’s Vampire series:  Wellington’s vampires are the antithesis of Laurell K Hamilton or Twilight vampires.  They are scary, vicious monsters and they most certainly do not sparkle.  The series follows Laura Caxton, a state trooper turned ersatz vampire hunter.  Wellington’s pacing and plot are brilliant, and the characters also evolve over the course of the series in interesting and unexpected ways.  (Full disclosure: Dave is a member of my NYC writing group.  I’ve gotten a taste of the upcoming fifth book, the final confrontation with the Big Bad, and am eagerly awaiting the chance to read the whole thing!)
• Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series: I’m a bit of a latecomer to this one, but am now a total convert. Scott Pilgrim is a young 20something doing many of those early 20somethings things–living with a roommate, dating, trying to make it in a band, navigating the world of landlords and jobs, etc. When he starts dating Ramona, he discovers he must fight her seven evil exes in order to continue dating her.  Fun fight scenes ensue, interspersed with soap operatic romantic drama.  O’Malley has basically invited a new sub-genre with this graphic series – superhero surrealism, perhaps? – and there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.  And his ability to convey complex and intense emotions with only a few strokes of the pencil is mind-blowing.  Eagerly awaiting the final volume and the movie.

More travels coming up, but will try to at least pop in and say hi here with some regularity…

The Siege storyline was fun, a bit different from the usual crossover, though the end was somewhat anti-climactic. But then crossover endings are almost always anti-climactic, and writer Brian Michael Bendis’s strength has always been small, funny, and sometimes poignant moments of (super)human interaction, much more so than the big battles.

Maybe it’s the geek purist in me, but I do wish there had been a bit more of a role for Spidey in this one.  The Green Goblin *did* come to us from Spidey’s rogue’s gallery, after all.  One of my favorite things about Dark Reign has been that Cap and Ms. Marvel and all these big-shot Avengers are all, “OMG, the villains are in charge of everything in our lives, this is the worst thing EVAH!” And Spidey basically says (1) Welcome to my world; and (2) Don’t worry, Osborn will shoot himself in the foot eventually, trust me, he always does.  It was really fun watching Spidey school the other super-heroes on how to handle being the underdog, and a big part of me wanted him to have a moment of standing over a defeated Osborn saying, “See, told you so.”  Maybe that’ll happen in the first issue of the New New Avengers re-launch or whatever they’re calling it.

But, more than anything, some part of me is sad that the super-villains aren’t in charge anymore.  It’s just so much more fun when the villains are on top.  (See also the original Star Wars trilogy, Lex Luthor’s tenure as president of the United States in the DC Universe, or the many Cylon victories in BSG.)  I suspect there are several reasons why it’s appealing when the villains have the upper hand, among them, (1) it gives the heroes a bigger and more interesting challenge, almost always a good way to go; and (2) at some level, don’t all of us occasionally, secretly identify with the villains, and want their crazy schemes for world conquest to succeed?  Who wouldn’t love for poor Brain *just once* to succeed when he tells his friend their plans for the evening: “The same thing we do every night, Pinky.  Try to take over the world.”  Seriously, I’d pay a lot of money to see an episode where Brain succeeds.  Among other things, I’d like to know, What would Brain do next?  How would humanity feel about their rodentia overlord?  What would Pinky’s role be in a Brain dictatorship? Etc.  With stories like Dark Reign, we get to see both heroes and villains react to situations we haven’t normally seen them in before – especially refreshing in the comic book sphere, where so many stories and battles get recycled.

(Minor spoilers below the fold.)

So, I’m already starting to miss Norman Osborn and his much-maligned hair-do.  ”The Heroic Age” storyline that begins immediately after Siege doesn’t seem to have nearly as much dramatic potential, though I am somewhat interested in the idea of  Steve Rogers (Captain America) being in charge of SHIELD instead of Nick Fury.  I’m hoping it turns out to be much harder than Cap suspects, as he discovers that negotiating politics and changing a large-scale bureaucracy and the like are much harder than punching out the Red Skull – an apt storyline for the current age.

(Note: My main focus here is on superhero movie series that start out at least decent and become quite indecent.  So there is no place for, say, Fantastic Four in this analysis, since that series had nowhere to go but up after its frightful start.)

1. Supervillain Proliferation

As a franchise goes on for one or more sequels, some brilliant producer inevitably gets the idea, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if there were two supervillains in this movie?”  Alas, it is rarely cool.  Mostly it just leads to a crowded cast and a crowded script, and lots of cornball moments.  An early example is Batman Forever, when the Riddler finds Two-Face in his lair and basically says, “Hey, we’re both supervillians with weird fetishes and a shared hatred of Batman.  Let’s team up!”  Jim Carey’s over-the-top humor almost makes it work.

More recently, Spider-Man 3 had a major supervillain overdose, with Sandman, a new Green Goblin (Harry Osborn), and Venom all crammed into one plot.

There are notable exceptions to the rule, of course. Batman Begins worked perfectly fine with both the Scarecrow and Ra’s al Ghul – but in that case, Scarecrow was working for Ra’s al Ghul from the start – very different from an awkward team-up or a jigsaw puzzle of disparate plots.  And, of course, at least two X-movies did okay with a team of super-villains.

Things don’t look great for Iron Man 2 on this count, with both Justin Hammer and Blacklash/Crimson Dynamo taking the stage.

2. The Hero Goes Bad, Often for Silly Reasons

The superhero going bad seems to be a low-hanging fruit for comic-book sequels, often for fairly contrived reasons, and almost always with disastrous results.  The first superhero sequel to go this route was probably Superman 3, wherein Supes goes bad after exposure to faulty kryptonite mixed with cigarette tar. But, without a doubt, the most painfully egregious offender on this score is Spider-Man 3, in which possession by the black suit makes Spidey go evil, exposing millions of unsuspecting fans to Tobey Maguire dancing awkwardly to disco music.  A lesser offender is X3: the Last Stand, with Jean Grey transforming into the evil Phoenix.

Also of note are the clever visual cues directors use to indicate the hero’s new, evil-fied persona:  evil Phoenix’s veins pop out of her skin; evil Superman is unshaven, has a tan, and a costume that looks like it hasn’t been laundered in a while; and, most frighteningly of all, evil Peter Parker has bangs.

I’m not sure how they’d depict an evil Iron Man, since Tony Stark already has a beard and what-not, but it does sound like Stark is a bit of a jerk in Iron Man 2, but far from full-on evil.

3. The More Plots the Merrier

This one is a close corollary of indicator #1.  As villains proliferate, so too do the number of plot convolutions.  Many storylines are crammed together – some of them even interesting! – but none are explored in-depth because the script is just too crowded.  Witness Wikipedia’s sad attempt to briefly summarize the premise of Spider-Man 3:

The film begins with Peter Parker basking in his success as Spider-Man, while Mary Jane Watson continues her Broadway career. Harry Osborn still seeks vengeance for his father’s death, and an escaped convict, Flint Marko, falls into a particle accelerator and is transformed into a shape-shifting sand manipulator. An extraterrestrial symbiote crashes to Earth and bonds with Peter, influencing his behavior for the worse. When Peter abandons the symbiote, it finds refuge in Eddie Brock, a rival photographer, causing Peter to face his greatest challenge.

Yikes.  A more distressing example was X-Men: The Last Stand, which took two awesome storylines directly from the pages of the comic books (Chris Claremont’s classic Dark Phoenix Saga and Joss Whedon’s more recent “mutant cure” story), and then put them in a blender to make one awful mess of a movie.

No one seems able to summarize the plot of Iron Man 2 in three sentences or less, which has me worried.

4. Awkward Love Sub-Plots

At some point in any superhero series, the standard superhero love interest gets boring, and convoluted love sub-plots often ensue.  And so we have Lana Lang attempting to fill in for Lois Lane’s absence in Superman 3, Cyclops getting killed off so that Wolverine and Jean Grey can have more sexy screen time in X3, and a lazily undeveloped love triangle between Peter Parker, Mary Jane, and Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man 3.

With both the Black Widow and Pepper in Iron Man 2, this may be yet another sign of danger…

5. The Title Has a “3″ in it

As you may have noticed, I’ve picked quite a lot on Batman Forever, Spider-Man 3, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Superman 3.  All four represented turns for the worse in series that, up until that point, had produced movies that were at least decent, if not excellent.  One final thing they all have in common is that they were all the third in the series.  So perhaps there’s still hope for Iron Man 2!

The main thrust of the story focuses on her relationship with her father, an English teacher who is obsessed with the historic restoration of their gothic revival home.  His hobby makes the family’s home a bit like a museum - both in its archaic beauty and its stifling atmosphere.  Dad seems more interested in restoring the shingles to their former glory than he is in showing any affection for his kids.  In college, Alison comes out to her parents.  She prepares herself for rejection but gets something possibly even more overwhelming: she learns her father has had affairs with men, including her former babysitter.  A few months later, as she’s still processing this new understanding of her family history, her father dies in what may have been suicide.

It mean some like these are spoilers, but all of this is clear within the first few pages.  Alison unfolds the narrative of her family not-quite-chronologically, going back and forth in time, creating a picture that grows more complex and fascinating with each new detail.  At some point, I think I may haveto re-read the book just to get a better understanding of how she structured it. 

Bechdel is an exceptional master at using the combination of words and pictures, for maximum, astoundingly efficient effect, as in the image below.  She tells her story with honesty and skill, and along the way draws on everything from the Icarus-Daedalus myth to Stonewall and James Joyce.  And on the final page she manages to bring her non-linear narratives together in a way that added yet another layer of complexity to her story and was also deeply moving.  Go forth and read it – you won’t be disappointed!

Fantasy Magazine

Check it out, and while you’re there, check out some of their other awesome stuff, including stories by Michael Greenhut and Peter Ball, which made Fantasy’s top five stories for 2008 as voted on by readers.

While Breedt acknowledges that the recession is sure to dent sales, he has one area of hope. “The most spectacular area of growth in recent years has been in manga and graphic novels, which were non-existent in 2001. But sales have increased by almost 100 per cent year-on-year ever since. In 2008, 114,000 units were sold making £1.5 million. What’s great about this is that it’s a genre bought primarily by young people, which implies there’s a real future for the market.”

Publishers and literary agents are also staying on the sober side of upbeat. They all feel that, for true readers, books are not a “discretionary spend”. As Katharine Fullerton Gerould wrote in the Twenties: “If we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.” But what sorts of books will we be buying through a recession? Most publishers agree we’re likely to turn away from the grimmer stuff. Misery memoirs will take a nosedive, as will “suicidally bleak” literary fiction. We’ll seek comfort between the covers of romances and murder mysteries.

The level of optimism from some of those quoted seems more spin than anything else, but it does make sense to me that some genres will do the same or better while others will take the hardest hit. In spec fic, I imagine YA, high fantasy, and light space opera won’t do too badly…. perhaps the darker subgenres may suffer more?  Of course, this doesn’t really have much to do with the print magazines, which were struggling even before the economy went kerplunk. 

The graphic novel upswing as evidence for optimism seems especially odd.  I don’t know a lot about it, but it seems like that’s really just about the big companies finally figuring out they could take nearly everything they put out and repackage it as trade paperbacks for distribution through book stores – not sure if it’s evidence of any trend beyond that.

More interview meme-ing fun to come later …

So the build-up to Secret Invasion – “the infiltration” – was pretty cool.  The Avengers are battling Elektra, she gets killed and in her death she turns all Skrully.  Not even Wolverine with his enhanced senses or Dr. Strange with his fancy all-seeing Eye of Agamatto (sp?) picked it up.  This is why the Skulls had been loser villains for decades – they were shape-shifters, but there were dozens of telepaths, supersensory people, and mystics (not to mention Reed Richards’ zillion inventions) that could see through the disguise. which made them sort of not-at-all-threatening.  But now the Skrulls figured out a way around that, and suddenly our heroes all start wondering which among them are Skrulls. Of course, this has been done before, even in media SF (Deep Space 9 and Battlestar Galactica come to mind), but it was fun watching this particular trope play out with these characters. There was a great moment early on where the Avengers were all accusing each other of being Skrulls, and one of them says, “Iron Man? Iron Man’s been acting the Skrulliest of anybody.” (And it was true, he was acting the Skrulliest of anybody.)

But then the official big-event Secret Invasion crossover started, and the Skrulls revealed their master invasion plan, and things got much less interesting.  I’m a big fan of Bendis’s writing – he has witty dialogue, strong characters, and has done a great job bringing superheroes into the 21st century.  But his slow-paced style seems better suited to the teen melodrama of Ultimate Spider-Man than to the big climactic events.  OR – maybe more accurately, when he’s writing the big events, he focuses so much on trying to make it big and climactic that he ends up leaving out a lot of the stuff that makes his other work so enjoyable.

I would have loved to see a bit more of the distrust issues carried through the climax of the story in a more meaningful way – the way we have on Battlestar Galactica with several leading characters having to cope with the unexpected revelation of their own Cylon identities.  There were a few hints in this direction, like Captain Marvel discovering he was a sleeper Skrull agent, but none of them seemed to fully pay off. Also would have loved to see more done with Skrull good-guys, like Hulkling, to see how they reacted to the invasion and how the other superheroes reacted to them, but very little was done with that.

On the whole, though, I found the whole saga fairly enjoyable, up until the final issue, which was mostly a series of wha-huh? moments for me.  In the opening pages, the Skrulls have triggered the Wasp to release a deadly toxin, killing herself and everybody, and Thor does…. something… to stop it. And the Wasp sacrifices her life to save the world.  Which might have been a powerfully tragic moment, if not for the art/storytelling being so weak that  it totally obscured what was happening.  Not quite a Supergirl Crisis send-off for Janet Van Dyne….

But then there’s the big Wha-huh?:  Somehow all of this leads to Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, taking over the Marvel Universe.  Mostly because he shot the Skrull Queen on live television.  But don’t a lot of people know that Norman Osborn is, um, evil?  If Osama bin Laden had shot Saddam Hussein on national television, I still wouldn’t want bin Laden to run the CIA.  Or did the whole world forget that Osborn is the Green Goblin because of the recent bizarre re-write of Spider-man’s history? I’m so confused.

Now I’m a big fan of a classic oh-no-the-evil-mastermind-already-has-taken-over-the-earth-what-do-we-do-now story, but this one seems out of left-field. As with House of M, the closing of Secret Invasion doesn’t seem to have much to do with the story itself, but with the new shaken-up status quo that the editors want for the Marvel Universe.

So now the Dark Reign has officially begun, the supervillains are running the Marvel Universe. The set-up seems silly to me, but maybe it will turn out to have some interesting turns, like when Lex Luthor was president of the U.S. in the DC Universe.  If there are some decent stories in it I’m willing to roll with almost anything….

#12 Rictor/Richter (X-books): Rictor is a relatively minor character in the X-universe, but I remember him fondly from my 80s childhood.  He was a young mutant with the power to create earthquakes, and started out as a trainee with X-factor, and then migrated from X-book to X-book (X-terminators, New Mutants, X-force, and I think recently he’s back with the current incarnation of X-factor.)  Rictor was cool (at least at first) because he was a visibly Latino character who wasn’t a blatant stereotype. After I stopped reading X-force (even as a teenager I was turned off by Rob Liefeld’s hackneyed writing), there was apparently some plotline about his Mexican family dealing arms. Doesn’t sound very promising, and if it was written by Liefeld, I doubt it was handled with any subtlety.

It took me quite a while to find a pic of Rictor as I remember him.  A leather vest with no shirt  … kind of a hot anti-costume, but could you get away with that even in the 80s? 

Considering that the X-books are single-handedly responsible for like 75 percent of the diversity of the Marvel Universe, it’s surprising there haven’t been more X-Latinos.  But I haven’t been keeping up well with most of the X-books lately (there are just too many of them), and I’ve heard in recent years they’ve featured some other Hispanic characters, like Empath, Cecilia Reyes, and Skin.

#11 Isaac Mendez (Heroes): From the first season of Heroes Isaac had the power to paint the future.  His heroine addiction (he could only paint the future while high) was a bit of a stereotype as well as a low-hanging fruit for the writers, but Santiago Cabrera’s performance was strong, and I thought the character had potential until they killed him off. 

No, I didn’t include Maya and Alejandro from season two of Heroes … they were just way too annoying for me.  

#10 The White Tiger: The original White Tiger was a B-list Puerto Rican superhero created in the 1970s.  That was before my time, and I suspect the early stuff with the White Tiger is now pretty dated, but I’m pretty sure he was the first Hispanic hero in the Marvel Universe. More recently, Brian Michael Bendis did a story in Daredevil about the White Tiger’s niece, FBI agent Angela del Toro, who inherited her uncle’s mystical amulets.  Angela is initially skeptical and uncertain about the amulets, but after some advice and training from Daredevil, she took up her uncle’s mantle as the White Tiger and was later featured in her own limited series. It was a cool update, making the character relevant in the 21st century.

#9 Echo (aka Ronin of the New Avengers): Maya Lopez (Echo) first appeared in Daredevil in 1999. She’s a rare achievement for a new superhero in that she actually has a fairly original power–she can perfectly imitate any action or skill she sees, whether it’s Daredevil’s acrobatics or flying a Quinjet. This, combined with her deafness, made her an interesting converse of Daredevil’s blind supersenses. Initially, the Kingpin tricked her into going after Daredevil, but she’s now a member of the New Avengers and is one of the more interesting new characters in comics. While Joe Quesada and David Mack created her, it was Bendis who brought her into the Avengers. Kudos to Bendis and Quesada for making the Marvel Universe a bit more reflective of the diversity of our universe.

#8 Kennedy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer): Kennedy was one of the many young Slayers who popped up in Buffy’s 7th season, and she became Willow’s new love interest after Tara’s tragic death. I don’t think Kennedy’s ethnicity was ever explicitly identified, though she was played by Mexican actress Iyari Limon. Given that, I would say her inclusion in this list is somewhat problematic, but Buffy was such a great show, I just had to include someone from the Buffyverse.  Of course, the fact that I had to stretch this far to include a character from the Buffyverse is a sign that it was not quite the rainbow of diversity it’s sometimes made out to be.  Especially considering this was California…

#7 The Question: The original Question was recently succeeded by Renee Montoya, a Gotham City cop turned vigilante.  She’s Dominican and also an out lesbian, who’s been both lovers and occasional crime-fighting partners with Batwoman.  How hot is that?  I don’t keep up with DC that well, but I’ve seen the Question in Final Crisis, and the little I know of her makes me want to check out more.

#6 Spider-man 2099: In 1992, Marvel created 2099, a line of comics about superheroes 100 years in the future.  The future version of Spider-Man was geneticist Miguel O’Hara. The 2099 universe was short-lived in its popularity, but Miguel was probably one of the first Latino characters to be featured so prominently.

#5 Victor Mancha (Runaways): Victor is a member of the very-cool Runaways created by Brian K Vaughn (Y: The Last Man) and later helmed by Joss Whedon. Victor’s origins were initially unclear, until it was discovered that he’s actually a cyborg created by the evil Ultron (with some help from his Mexican mother’s DNA). He gets major props for

transcending his programming and being the only Latino robot to make the list. It’s about time we saw a greater diversity of robots in science fiction!

#4 Kyle Rayner (Green Lantern, Ion): Kyle became the new Green Lantern after Hal Jordan had a Phoenix-like turning-evil-and-nearly-destroying-the-universe breakdown and died.  (He’s back now and feeling much better.)  I read the early issues that featured Kyle and enjoyed them.  He was different from previous Green Lanterns in that he was not “without fear” but this turned out to be an odd sort of strength in that he faced down his fears.  It was also cool that he discovered that the color yellow was not actually a weakness of the ring’s power (which always seemed sort of silly) – the only real limitation of the ring was its wielder’s imagination.  In the early stories, his ethnicity wasn’t featured prominently (and maybe not even mentioned), so I don’t know the details of how that was handled.  To be honest, it seems like his half-Mexican heritage was a bit of an afterthought, but he’s an interesting character, and it’s kinda cool having a Latino in the iconic role of a Green Lantern.

#3 Spy Kids: Yes, I do mean the 2001 family action movie and subsequent sequel.  Carmen and Juni Cortez are two ordinary kids until they discover their ”boring” parents (played by Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino) are actually spies.  The brave Juni and Carmen unexpectedly have to rescue their kidnapped parents and save the world.  It’s not just that all the heroes are Latino – there’s a uniquely Latino sensibility to the over-the-top sense of fun and unabashed fear of corniness in the Spy Kids movies, which were written, directed, and produced by Robert Rodriguez. 

#2 Araña: Araña is a teenager in Brooklyn who discovers she has Spider-like powers and joins the mystical Spider Society to battle the would-be world-conquering Sisterhood of the Wasp.  Sounds corny, but it’s actually well executed, and was just a good, fun read.  Unlike most of the other characters on this list, Araña‘s ethnicity is neither invisible nor rooted in sterotypes.  She speaks Spanglish, struggles to balance her studies and social life with her battles against the evil Wasps, and has an interesting relationship with her Dad,– a journalist who seems to have a lot of integrity (although he’s s a bit overprotective at times). Clearly a take-off on Spider-Man (who guest-starred in an early issue), Araña had the same entertaining contrast of high school blues and superhero battles as Ultimate Spider-Man or the early days of the classic 60s Spider-Man. Unfortunately, the series didn’t last long, but maybe she’ll make a comeback. 

#1 Zorro: I’ve never been a huge Zorro fan, but there’s no doubt that he’s the most influential Hispanic character in the world of superheroes.  Created in 1919, he was one of the major precursors to the modern superhero, and undoubtedly influenced later characters such as the Phantom, the Lone Ranger, and Batman. It would be interesting to go back and read some of his early pulp appearances and see how they hold up.  

As you can see, this list has a slant toward the stuff I read more of–heavy on Marvel, light on DC and indies, and biased toward the time periods when I happened to be keeping up with comics. One thing that’s definitely missing is any of the characters from Milestone, a line of comics devoted to bringing more diversity to the world of superheroes.  I’ve heard they were well-written, but I just wasn’t reading comics at that point.

There are a few notable trends that stood out as I made this list.  The big one is how recent most of these superheroes are.  The White Tiger, Rictor, and Zorro are the only ones that pre-date the 1990s.  I tried to think of other early heroes like the White Tiger, even if they were stereotypical, but the truth is all the ones that came to mind were villains.  When I was a kid reading comics in the 80s, the main Latino characters I encountered were Spider-man foes like the Tarantula or the Lobo brothers–villains with thick accents who specialized in gang wars and drug deals. Perhaps in a sign of how depictions of Latinos in comics have begun to shift, Marvel recently re-made the Tarantula as a female superhero.

The other somewhat disturbing trend is the overwhelming dominance of white or light-skinned Latinos.  Latino (or Hispanic) is a category describing a (very broad) cultural group, not a racial category or a color.  It’s too bad that comics, like so many other media, are so unlikely to depict Latinos who are Black or even Brown.

So that’s my list and assorted thoughts. I’d love to hear any others you think I missed!

UPDATE: I’ve heard that the latest Blue Beetle is Latino, and that last year Marvel introduced an all-Latino team of heroes, Eleggua and the Santerians.