If you're interested, just find the link on the right and you can order straight from here!
Showing posts with label Superman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Superman. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Hey, Kids! Books!
If you're interested, just find the link on the right and you can order straight from here!
Sunday, October 18, 2009
George Tuska, 1919-2009
I've always said that I was lucky to get into comic books when I did. The giants of the Golden and Silver Ages were still working and I was getting to work with them. One of my earliest jobs for Charlton Comics was drawn by Steve Ditko, and once I got to DC Comics, my scripts would be handed to the likes of Curt Swan, Gil Kane, Kurt Schaffenberger, Carmine Infantino, Irv Novick, Rick Estrada, Bill Draut, Don Heck, George Evans, Dick Giordano, Jim Aparo, Jerry Grandenetti, Jose Delbo, Dick Ayers, Win Mortimer......Or George Tuska.
George was, without doubt, one of the greats. Pete Morisi, a Golden and Silver Age great himself better known as the creator of Charlton's Peter Cannon Thunderbolt under the pseudonym P.A.M., told me how in the early-1950s, George was the artist to emulate (i.e., copy) by younger artists. Pete felt that he had taken so much from George that it was only right to go to the veteran artist and ask if he minded the...er, homage. George did not mind.
You'll read details of George's resume in obituaries elsewhere. For me, George Tuska was Marvel's Iron Man (1968-1978) and, later, collaborator on a couple of extended projects at DC: the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe comic book miniseries, and the Superman syndicated newspaper strip. I knew how Pete Morisi must have felt looking at George's work for Lev Gleason's Crime Does Not Pay and on such syndicated strips as Scorchy Smith and Buck Rogers. His line was simple and direct, his style a mix of cartoony (in the best sense of the word) and dynamic action, with an ability to lay out a page -- or a comic strip tier -- and tell the story that was usually pitch perfect. He might have gotten the costume details wrong (reference just slowed him down), but he drew the hell out of every page and made me happy to see what he had done with my scripts.
George Tuska died last week. He was a sweet man and a giant in the industry (literally and figuratively; George was very tall). I will miss his presence in this world, but I'm glad that his work, and our brief collaborations, remain behind to remind me of the man and his talent.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Look, Down In That Bottle...!
Way back at the beginning of my career, I wrote an ongoing 10-page feature in Superman Family (an anthology title, for which I later wrote Supergirl and Jimmy Olsen, and which also featured Superboy, Krypto, and Lois Lane stories) featuring Nightwing and Flamebird. Nightwing and Flamebird were the costumed secret identities Superman and Jimmy Olsen had assumed to fight one evil or another in the bottled city of Kandor, the Kryptonian city shrunk down to miniature size and stolen by the evil alien super-intelligent robot, Brainiac.
The Superman Family run featured two Kandorians in the roles of the superheroes: Superman look-alike, Van-Zee (who first appeared in a Lois Lane story by Otto Binder in 1960) and his nephew, Ak-Var (who debuted in an Edmond Hamilton story in Action Comics in 1966). Van-Zee may have been Superman's cousin, but I don't remember. It's been 30 years...and, while they do show their age (and my inexperience), Nightwing and Flamebird (with different characters behind the masks) are playing a major role in the current Superman continuity, so, for better or worse, these 12 stories have been reprinted in Superman: The Adventures of Nightwing and Flamebird trade paperback from DC Comics, along with an earlier Superman and Jimmy NW and FB story by Cary Bates and Kurt Schaffenberger from Superman Family that may have inspired editor E. Nelson Bridwell to start up the Kandorian-based series. Art on my stories are by Ken Landgraf and Romeo Tanghal, except for the first story, by Carl Potts and Al Milgrom, and the finale, by Marshall Rogers, truly better than the writing deserved and the original art for a page of which (page 3) I have hanging on my wall at home.
It's good old-fashioned goofy comic book fun, the kind don't hardly no one make no more.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Extra! Extra! Read--And Hear!--All About It!
In the past year or so, I have written five (and am about to start on my sixth) kids chapter book for Stone Arch Books. These are fun little stories, running about 4,000 words, starring Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, and are done in the animated style. There are 54 of 'em so far in the DC Super Heroes line, although you're unlikely to find them in bookstores; Stone Arch produces books for readers with reading difficulties, so while the stories are aimed at 5th graders, the language is aimed at the 2nd to 3rd grade levels. They're sold primarily to the education market and to libraries. Friends and colleagues including Bob Greenberger, Martin Pasko and Martin Powell have also contributed stories to the series.
I was asked to write a Superman book that was to feature the winner of an essay contest about a real life hero who inspired them, along with guest-appearances of said inspiration. I wrote a story that allowed for names and locations to be easily plugged into the story about a kid who saves Superman, the winning essay (by a kid from my native Brooklyn!) was selected by the publisher and announced, and now the book, strangely titled The Kid Who Saved Superman is finished and making the news...well, the New York Daily News anyway...
...And now New York's NBC News affiliate as well...
...And MSNBC.com...
...And WNYC.com, New York's Public Radio Station...
...And the Kansas City Star...
...The Hartsford Examiner...
...The Charleston Daily Mail and numerous other media outlets.
Nice!
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Later, Schwartz!
It's exactly one month and a day shy of the fifth anniversary of the death of Julius Schwartz, legendary comic book editor, science fiction agent, bon vivant, and a dear friend. I don't remember exactly when I first met Julie, but I had to have been a kid (I started hanging around the DC offices around 1970, when I was 15) and he was, no doubt, the scariest editor I had ever seen. He was Perry White and when the man growled, his writers and artists jumped. I distinctly remember freezing at the typewriter the first time I wrote anything for him; it must have turned out okay because, years later, I was writing a steady stream of stories for him for Superman, Action Comics, DC Comics Presents, Supergirl and Superboy, and, in his retirement years, on his weekly visits to his Editor Emeritus office on the 6th floor at 1700 Broadway, we became even faster friends. When he died, February 8, 2004, I felt as though I had lost a grandfather. I keep a little reminder of him, on a bookshelf near my desk.
A few months after his death, I started this short story, but I could never quite work out how to get where I wanted with it: Julie Schwartz saves the world from alien invaders. Maybe one day I'll work it out...
Late in the afternoon, after his homework was done and his chores completed, 11-year old Julius climbed up the stairs from the third floor tenement apartment he shared with his mother, father, and baby sister to the tar-paper covered roof. In one hand he held a rare treat, an ice-cold nickel bottle of Pepsi-Cola. In the other was an issue of Amazing Stories, a magazine with a shiny, brightly colored cover and thick with coarse, off-white pulp pages. The moment he had seen the magazine with its painting of a monstrous serpent-necked sea creature about to swamp the crude raft on which were perched three frightened men in his friend Charlie’s hands, he knew he had to have it. It was so different from the books and magazines he usually read, the sporting adventures of brothers Dick and Frank Merriwell, the detective stories about Nick Carter, the light-hearted fantasy and fairy tales of the Blue Fairy books he borrowed from the hushed stacks of the New York Public Library, something utterly irresistible.
He pushed open the rooftop door on its squeaking hinges and stepped into the warm, late spring air, just as quickly closing it behind him. It had cost Julius two Merriwell boys and one Nick Carter book for this new prize, but he felt it was going to be worth it. Besides, he had read those books, cover to cover, numerous times. He already knew how Dick and Frank won the big game, how Nick Carter tricked the murderer into confessing to his crime. The sea monster, on the other hand, was something altogether new. Where had it come from? Who were these men? And, there, in the lower right hand corner of the illustration, was that the head of a giant turtle poking up out of the water? What was going on here?
He had made the trade, haggling with Charlie for almost half an hour before the other boy relented, then begged off the game of stickball that was forming outside the building on Caldwell Avenue. He couldn’t wait to get up here, to the roof, to his special, private place where he could always find the peace and quiet to read and open the brilliant red and blue cover of this special magazine and dive into the secrets its stories would reveal to him.
Amazing Stories, it said, in large white letters that splashed dramatically across the background red sky. June, 1926. 25 Cents. A whole quarter for a magazine! Imagine that. He could buy so much for so large a sum, penny candy enough to feed the entire block! An entire day at the movie theater...five trips to anywhere in the whole city, the Bronx, Manhattan, all the way into Brooklyn even, on the trolley or the subway!
And, here, just under the title, in small, neat type, these mysterious words:
Julius didn’t know who Hugo Gernsback was, nor what an “editor” was. Maybe the person who owned the magazine? He knew what an author was. They were the people who wrote the stories, for which their names were displayed on the cover, like Burt L. Standish, who wrote the Merriwell boys stories. Like there, on the magazine’s lower right corner, “Stories by H.G. Welles, Jules Verne, Ellis Parker Butler.” He had seen books by these names in the library. But “editor.” That was new to him. Maybe papa would be able to explain it, or he would look it up in the dictionary at school tomorrow. Whatever it was, he was sure it had to be important to warrant so prominent a position.
Julius settled on the overturned wooden cheese crate that served as his seat up here in his quiet retreat, his back against the brick chimney stack. He set the Pepsi carefully on the ground, then, wiping the moisture on his hand from the bottle on his trousers, opened the cover of Amazing Stories. The stories were all listed on the contents page, all featuring titles that were, as promised, amazing: “A Trip to the Center of the Earth,” “The Coming of the Ice,” “The Scientific Adventures of Mr. Fosdick: Mr. Fosdick Invents the ‘Seidlitzmobile’,” “The Star,” “Whispering Ether,” “An Experiment in Gyro-Hats,” “The Malignant Entity,” “Doctor Hackensaw's Secrets: Some Minor Inventions,” and “The Runaway Skyscraper.”
A runaway skyscraper?
Julius didn’t know what a “Seidlitzmobile” might be, and, frankly, “Gyro-Hats” sounded downright silly, but a runaway skyscraper...how in the world could a skyscraper, one of those impossibly tall buildings that filled Manhattan, go anywhere? Blinking rapidly behind the lenses of his wire frame glasses in anticipation, Julius flipped through the pages in search of this intriguing title.
“The Runaway Skyscraper.” By Murray Leinster.
“The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backwards,” Julius read and, sucking in a deep breath that he only remembered to release a few paragraphs later, he didn’t look up from the pages of Amazing Stories until he had read through that remarkable story. Twice.
A few months after his death, I started this short story, but I could never quite work out how to get where I wanted with it: Julie Schwartz saves the world from alien invaders. Maybe one day I'll work it out...
PLOT HOLES
© Paul Kupperberg
Late in the afternoon, after his homework was done and his chores completed, 11-year old Julius climbed up the stairs from the third floor tenement apartment he shared with his mother, father, and baby sister to the tar-paper covered roof. In one hand he held a rare treat, an ice-cold nickel bottle of Pepsi-Cola. In the other was an issue of Amazing Stories, a magazine with a shiny, brightly colored cover and thick with coarse, off-white pulp pages. The moment he had seen the magazine with its painting of a monstrous serpent-necked sea creature about to swamp the crude raft on which were perched three frightened men in his friend Charlie’s hands, he knew he had to have it. It was so different from the books and magazines he usually read, the sporting adventures of brothers Dick and Frank Merriwell, the detective stories about Nick Carter, the light-hearted fantasy and fairy tales of the Blue Fairy books he borrowed from the hushed stacks of the New York Public Library, something utterly irresistible.
He pushed open the rooftop door on its squeaking hinges and stepped into the warm, late spring air, just as quickly closing it behind him. It had cost Julius two Merriwell boys and one Nick Carter book for this new prize, but he felt it was going to be worth it. Besides, he had read those books, cover to cover, numerous times. He already knew how Dick and Frank won the big game, how Nick Carter tricked the murderer into confessing to his crime. The sea monster, on the other hand, was something altogether new. Where had it come from? Who were these men? And, there, in the lower right hand corner of the illustration, was that the head of a giant turtle poking up out of the water? What was going on here?
He had made the trade, haggling with Charlie for almost half an hour before the other boy relented, then begged off the game of stickball that was forming outside the building on Caldwell Avenue. He couldn’t wait to get up here, to the roof, to his special, private place where he could always find the peace and quiet to read and open the brilliant red and blue cover of this special magazine and dive into the secrets its stories would reveal to him.
Amazing Stories, it said, in large white letters that splashed dramatically across the background red sky. June, 1926. 25 Cents. A whole quarter for a magazine! Imagine that. He could buy so much for so large a sum, penny candy enough to feed the entire block! An entire day at the movie theater...five trips to anywhere in the whole city, the Bronx, Manhattan, all the way into Brooklyn even, on the trolley or the subway!
And, here, just under the title, in small, neat type, these mysterious words:
Hugo Gernsback
Editor
Editor
Julius didn’t know who Hugo Gernsback was, nor what an “editor” was. Maybe the person who owned the magazine? He knew what an author was. They were the people who wrote the stories, for which their names were displayed on the cover, like Burt L. Standish, who wrote the Merriwell boys stories. Like there, on the magazine’s lower right corner, “Stories by H.G. Welles, Jules Verne, Ellis Parker Butler.” He had seen books by these names in the library. But “editor.” That was new to him. Maybe papa would be able to explain it, or he would look it up in the dictionary at school tomorrow. Whatever it was, he was sure it had to be important to warrant so prominent a position.
Julius settled on the overturned wooden cheese crate that served as his seat up here in his quiet retreat, his back against the brick chimney stack. He set the Pepsi carefully on the ground, then, wiping the moisture on his hand from the bottle on his trousers, opened the cover of Amazing Stories. The stories were all listed on the contents page, all featuring titles that were, as promised, amazing: “A Trip to the Center of the Earth,” “The Coming of the Ice,” “The Scientific Adventures of Mr. Fosdick: Mr. Fosdick Invents the ‘Seidlitzmobile’,” “The Star,” “Whispering Ether,” “An Experiment in Gyro-Hats,” “The Malignant Entity,” “Doctor Hackensaw's Secrets: Some Minor Inventions,” and “The Runaway Skyscraper.”
A runaway skyscraper?
Julius didn’t know what a “Seidlitzmobile” might be, and, frankly, “Gyro-Hats” sounded downright silly, but a runaway skyscraper...how in the world could a skyscraper, one of those impossibly tall buildings that filled Manhattan, go anywhere? Blinking rapidly behind the lenses of his wire frame glasses in anticipation, Julius flipped through the pages in search of this intriguing title.
“The Runaway Skyscraper.” By Murray Leinster.
“The whole thing started when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backwards,” Julius read and, sucking in a deep breath that he only remembered to release a few paragraphs later, he didn’t look up from the pages of Amazing Stories until he had read through that remarkable story. Twice.
Friday, December 5, 2008
What Day Is It, Kids? It's Capes, Cowls & Costumes Friday!
Yay!Once again, a new installment of Capes, Cowls & Costumes is up on Bookgasm.com, this installment looking at novels adapting major comic book story lines, including Crisis On Infinite Earths and Kingdom Come. Check it out.
Really, do I ask you for much?
Friday, November 21, 2008
It's Yet Another Capes, Cowls & Costumes Friday
Over on Bookgasm.com, the latest bi-weekly installment of my Capes, Cows & Costumes column is up and ready to be read. This week, I look at some of the superhero junior novels on my bookshelf starring Superman, Batman, X-Men and Iron Man.
Friday, October 24, 2008
It's a Capes, Cowls & Costumes Friday!
That's right, yet another thrill-packed episode of Capes, Cowls & Costumes is up and ready for viewing on Bookgasm.com ('Reading Material to Get Excited About'). Not a week goes by that I don't pick up or add to my list at least one book I've seen reviewed thereon. This week, I look at some superhero anthologies.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Getting Down to the Last Bits of a Book I'll Probably Never Write
I've run a couple of pieces from a Superman novel (here and here) that I started playing around with, mostly just to get the words down on paper. Here's some more:
Chapter 1/ Smallville (Continued)
When the first calls came in, Doug Parker was only wishing he were home in bed.
Chief Parker yawned loudly in the dark silence of the police cruiser and scrubbed vigorously at his face with both hands. It was late, he knew, but he was afraid to check his watch to find exactly how late. Douglas Parker was no night owl, not by any stretch of the imagination, and even if he were, Smallville would not be the place anyone with any common sense would prowl looking for action. Of any sort. The old joke about the town that rolled up its sidewalks at sundown had probably originally been told about Smallville.
Smallville, dead set in the heart of Kansas, was just a small town supporting a larger surrounding farming community, nothing but miles and miles of neatly arranged and carefully tended fields of corn, wheat and soy, worked by farm families who were asleep in bed just behind the sun every night and awake ahead of the following dawn. Parker remembered dragging himself out of bed at 4:00 a.m. to do his chores before school, swearing to himself then and there that no matter what else he might do with his life, being a farmer was forever off the list. But he had gone from his parents house to the army – also known for its perverse need to rise at a ridiculously early hour – and then came home to take a swing shift job at the old Electro-Flo battery factory in neighboring Grady before signing up with the Taylor County Sheriff’s Department, which in those days still included the Smallville patrol district under its jurisdiction. By then, his body had become locked into its own cycle and Parker was, farmer or not, unable to keep his eyes open for the last half hour of most early evening television programs.
Usually, this wasn’t a problem. His wife would shake him gently awake at the end of the show and he would grumble his good-night, kiss her, and shuffle off to bed, closing his eyes for eight, solid hours of sleep before they popped open again at 5 a.m. ahead of the alarm clock. Being a cop in Smallville, even the chief of police – the sheriff had spun the Smallville department off as a separate entity twenty-some years back, while Parker was still a patrolman – did not require many late nights. In fact, this was the first one he could recall having to pull since that spate of vandalism six years ago last Christmas. The truth was, hardly anything of importance ever happened in Smallville. Police work consisted largely of traffic control, mediating minor squabbles between neighbors, and searching for lost livestock. Any real crimes – that is, actual infractions of the penal code – were few and far between, mostly domestic disputes, problems with a few of the boys a bit too fond of drink, petty thefts and, sometimes, pranks gone out of control by the local kids, too bored by life in Smallville not to get into trouble.
By those standards, Parker thought, yawning again and reflexively peeking at the glowing dial of his watch before remembering he hadn’t wanted to know, he currently had a veritable crime wave on his hands. And it was too late now to pretend any longer. It was 11:07 a.m. Oh, lord, was that all? He should drink some more of the coffee Lizzie had made for him, good and strong brewed in the old percolator and poured boiling hot into a tall thermos. But while it might wake him up, it would just go right to his kidneys and then what was he supposed to do? He was in the middle of a stake-out. He couldn’t leave the car to seek out a bathroom. You were better off sticking to water on a stake-out. It didn’t run through you quite so quick. On the other hand, it didn’t keep you awake either.
Parker grinned. He wondered if cops in big cities went through the same kind of nonsense in their heads at times like this, or did they have actual crimes and investigations to occupy their thoughts?
Strike that, he thought. He had actual crimes of his own this time. Practically a crime wave, by Smallville standards. Over the past two weeks, four local businesses had been robbed, beginning with Hanson’s Hardware Store, followed the next night with a burglary at Doc Swenson’s pharmacy, then Jonathan Kent’s general story, and, a week later, a return visit to Doc’s and, just last night, Bud’s Service Station was hit. The inventory of stolen items read like a list from a scavenger hunt, including electrical wire, PVC pipe. sheets of aluminum, hand tools of various uses, a variety of medicines and chemicals that could not, as far as Doc could ascertain, be mixed to create anything lethal or hallucinogenic, large quantities of baking soda and laundry powder, and all manner of automotive parts and accessories. The locks were all expertly picked, nothing except the stolen goods disturbed and, oddest of all, any cash left overnight in the registers or, in one case, in plain sight on the counter, was untouched.
Sounded to the Chief like someone was collecting the makings of a junkyard, but it all added up to more than a thousand dollars worth of goods and that was a lot of larceny. More than he felt comfortable sharing his home with. As unaccustomed as he was to having to deal with serious crime, he always managed to deal with it when he had to and, for all his bitching about the late hour and having to pee, he actually loved this stuff. Oh, not too much and not too often, at least not anymore, but why else did he wear a badge? To sit behind a desk, to direct traffic around road construction crews? So he’d do a little investigating, flex his creaky policeman’s muscle, identify the thief and break a major crime wave.
“Earn your pay for a change,” he muttered at the windshield.
The radio crackled in answer and the big, tough cop jumped and shouted “Jeez Louise!” in surprise.
“You awake out there, Chief?” Della Cronkite, night operator, insomniac, and volunteer off-duty hours police dispatcher asked.
Parker grabbed the hand-mike from the clip, “I’m awake, Della,” he said quickly, so she wouldn’t think he had, in fact, been asleep. “What’s up?”
“Got a bunch of calls,” she said. “From the MacDoughals, the Birminghams, the Connelleys, the…”
He keyed the mike to cut her off. “Della,” he called, overriding her before she could waste precious moments on a digression. “What did they call about?”
“Something in the sky, Chief. South of town, out by the McClintock place. They all say it’s all glowing and has been hovering in the sky for five, ten minutes now.”
Parker turned the key and fired up the big police cruiser’s engine, slamming it quickly into gear.
“What took them so long to report it?”
“That’s my fault. Every time I went for the radio, the telephone would ring again and I had to answer it.”
He pressed down on the gas and shot from his parking space hidden behind the bushes surrounding the cannon on Smallville Square.
“Now, doggone it, Della, how many time do I have to tell you? The radio comes first, okay? Folks will wait a few more rings, but it’s important you get information to me first thing.”
“Well, now, they all sounded so scared, I couldn’t…”
“It’s okay, Della. I’m going to sign off now. I’ll call in as soon as I reach the scene. Over and out.”
“You be careful out there, Chief.”
The radio went dead and Parker dropped the handset on the seat next to him.
Lights in the sky.
Not exactly the crime in progress he had been hoping for, but at least it was something to break the monotony. He received, on average, eight or ten such reports every year, although they usually proved to be lightning or a reflection on a window or windshield, or too much whiskey and an overactive imagination. Although there had been that one instance, thirteen, fourteen years back, when dozens of people in several states had seen something.
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME
Superman and all related elements © 2008 DC Comics
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg
Chapter 1/ Smallville (Continued)
When the first calls came in, Doug Parker was only wishing he were home in bed.
Chief Parker yawned loudly in the dark silence of the police cruiser and scrubbed vigorously at his face with both hands. It was late, he knew, but he was afraid to check his watch to find exactly how late. Douglas Parker was no night owl, not by any stretch of the imagination, and even if he were, Smallville would not be the place anyone with any common sense would prowl looking for action. Of any sort. The old joke about the town that rolled up its sidewalks at sundown had probably originally been told about Smallville.
Smallville, dead set in the heart of Kansas, was just a small town supporting a larger surrounding farming community, nothing but miles and miles of neatly arranged and carefully tended fields of corn, wheat and soy, worked by farm families who were asleep in bed just behind the sun every night and awake ahead of the following dawn. Parker remembered dragging himself out of bed at 4:00 a.m. to do his chores before school, swearing to himself then and there that no matter what else he might do with his life, being a farmer was forever off the list. But he had gone from his parents house to the army – also known for its perverse need to rise at a ridiculously early hour – and then came home to take a swing shift job at the old Electro-Flo battery factory in neighboring Grady before signing up with the Taylor County Sheriff’s Department, which in those days still included the Smallville patrol district under its jurisdiction. By then, his body had become locked into its own cycle and Parker was, farmer or not, unable to keep his eyes open for the last half hour of most early evening television programs.
Usually, this wasn’t a problem. His wife would shake him gently awake at the end of the show and he would grumble his good-night, kiss her, and shuffle off to bed, closing his eyes for eight, solid hours of sleep before they popped open again at 5 a.m. ahead of the alarm clock. Being a cop in Smallville, even the chief of police – the sheriff had spun the Smallville department off as a separate entity twenty-some years back, while Parker was still a patrolman – did not require many late nights. In fact, this was the first one he could recall having to pull since that spate of vandalism six years ago last Christmas. The truth was, hardly anything of importance ever happened in Smallville. Police work consisted largely of traffic control, mediating minor squabbles between neighbors, and searching for lost livestock. Any real crimes – that is, actual infractions of the penal code – were few and far between, mostly domestic disputes, problems with a few of the boys a bit too fond of drink, petty thefts and, sometimes, pranks gone out of control by the local kids, too bored by life in Smallville not to get into trouble.
By those standards, Parker thought, yawning again and reflexively peeking at the glowing dial of his watch before remembering he hadn’t wanted to know, he currently had a veritable crime wave on his hands. And it was too late now to pretend any longer. It was 11:07 a.m. Oh, lord, was that all? He should drink some more of the coffee Lizzie had made for him, good and strong brewed in the old percolator and poured boiling hot into a tall thermos. But while it might wake him up, it would just go right to his kidneys and then what was he supposed to do? He was in the middle of a stake-out. He couldn’t leave the car to seek out a bathroom. You were better off sticking to water on a stake-out. It didn’t run through you quite so quick. On the other hand, it didn’t keep you awake either.
Parker grinned. He wondered if cops in big cities went through the same kind of nonsense in their heads at times like this, or did they have actual crimes and investigations to occupy their thoughts?
Strike that, he thought. He had actual crimes of his own this time. Practically a crime wave, by Smallville standards. Over the past two weeks, four local businesses had been robbed, beginning with Hanson’s Hardware Store, followed the next night with a burglary at Doc Swenson’s pharmacy, then Jonathan Kent’s general story, and, a week later, a return visit to Doc’s and, just last night, Bud’s Service Station was hit. The inventory of stolen items read like a list from a scavenger hunt, including electrical wire, PVC pipe. sheets of aluminum, hand tools of various uses, a variety of medicines and chemicals that could not, as far as Doc could ascertain, be mixed to create anything lethal or hallucinogenic, large quantities of baking soda and laundry powder, and all manner of automotive parts and accessories. The locks were all expertly picked, nothing except the stolen goods disturbed and, oddest of all, any cash left overnight in the registers or, in one case, in plain sight on the counter, was untouched.
Sounded to the Chief like someone was collecting the makings of a junkyard, but it all added up to more than a thousand dollars worth of goods and that was a lot of larceny. More than he felt comfortable sharing his home with. As unaccustomed as he was to having to deal with serious crime, he always managed to deal with it when he had to and, for all his bitching about the late hour and having to pee, he actually loved this stuff. Oh, not too much and not too often, at least not anymore, but why else did he wear a badge? To sit behind a desk, to direct traffic around road construction crews? So he’d do a little investigating, flex his creaky policeman’s muscle, identify the thief and break a major crime wave.
“Earn your pay for a change,” he muttered at the windshield.
The radio crackled in answer and the big, tough cop jumped and shouted “Jeez Louise!” in surprise.
“You awake out there, Chief?” Della Cronkite, night operator, insomniac, and volunteer off-duty hours police dispatcher asked.
Parker grabbed the hand-mike from the clip, “I’m awake, Della,” he said quickly, so she wouldn’t think he had, in fact, been asleep. “What’s up?”
“Got a bunch of calls,” she said. “From the MacDoughals, the Birminghams, the Connelleys, the…”
He keyed the mike to cut her off. “Della,” he called, overriding her before she could waste precious moments on a digression. “What did they call about?”
“Something in the sky, Chief. South of town, out by the McClintock place. They all say it’s all glowing and has been hovering in the sky for five, ten minutes now.”
Parker turned the key and fired up the big police cruiser’s engine, slamming it quickly into gear.
“What took them so long to report it?”
“That’s my fault. Every time I went for the radio, the telephone would ring again and I had to answer it.”
He pressed down on the gas and shot from his parking space hidden behind the bushes surrounding the cannon on Smallville Square.
“Now, doggone it, Della, how many time do I have to tell you? The radio comes first, okay? Folks will wait a few more rings, but it’s important you get information to me first thing.”
“Well, now, they all sounded so scared, I couldn’t…”
“It’s okay, Della. I’m going to sign off now. I’ll call in as soon as I reach the scene. Over and out.”
“You be careful out there, Chief.”
The radio went dead and Parker dropped the handset on the seat next to him.
Lights in the sky.
Not exactly the crime in progress he had been hoping for, but at least it was something to break the monotony. He received, on average, eight or ten such reports every year, although they usually proved to be lightning or a reflection on a window or windshield, or too much whiskey and an overactive imagination. Although there had been that one instance, thirteen, fourteen years back, when dozens of people in several states had seen something.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
More of a Book I’ll Probably Never Write
On July 22 I posted the Prologue to a Superman novel that I started playing with last October for no other reason than I had the idea and needed to get it out of my system. After a lifetime as a commercial writer, it’s unusual for me to work on something featuring someone else’s intellectual property without there being a paycheck waiting for me on the other end, but, as I wrote when I ran the first part of this, it was a creative itch I needed to scratch.
Chapter 1/ Smallville
The blinking halo of light swept across the night sky between McClintock’s farm and the woods that billowed from the edge of town south of Maple Street. The glow sailed against the star crusted October darkness like curiosity in a realm of unfamiliar sensations. It made no sound but would hover in the area for a full ten minutes while the first telephone calls were made to the police. No one bothered dialing up the police station; they called straight on to Doug Parker’s house. At this hour, nearly 11:00 p.m., City Center and all its offices would be locked up tight and everyone, including Chief Parker and the town’s three other police officers, would be home, likely asleep.
Well, a mysterious light in the sky, everyone would agree, was ample excuse to disturb the chief at home.
But there, down in the broad field that Mr. McClintock used for grazing, the halo could be heard as a dry papery snap and the muffled laughter of adolescence.
“Give it more string,” Clark Kent said in a loud whisper as they ran, their way lighted by the shimmering glow sailing a hundred feet above their heads.
“Keep it down, willya,” Lex Luthor said with a laugh in his voice. “This is supposed to be a secret mission.”
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Clark said, turning his eyes to the apparition overhead as light danced on the lenses of his horn-rim glasses.
Lex tugged at the lightweight tungsten wire stretching from the spool in his hands, carefully guiding the kite at the other end into a slow loop in the night air. A battery in the spool sent a small current up the wire that activated a phosphorous compound painted on the kite; a touch of a copper strip turned the current on and off. On. Off. On. Off.
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. He had come up with the compound in the small and undersupplied laboratory in the corner of the family’s cramped garage for just this reason. “They’re gonna freak out for sure.”
“Yeah,” Clark agreed, almost breathless, his eyes following the glowing kite with the intensity of someone willing himself to remain earthbound and not follow it into the air.
“Shh, both of you!” Lana Lang whispered. “I don’t think a U.F.O. is supposed to sound like two boys chatting.” Then she erupted in a fresh peal of giggles, clapping her hands over her own mouth to stifle the sound.
“Uh-huh, it’d sound more like that, I’m sure,” Clark said with a roll of his eyes. He looked at his watch. “Seven minutes, Lex.”
“Plenty of time, pal, plenty of time,” Lex said with studied casualness and an easy grin.
Clark grinned back and, shoulder to shoulder with Lana, watched one of his other best friends pull probably the best prank he could ever remember being pulled in Smallville. It was a perfect late October night, crisp, a hint of wood smoke in the air, a week before Halloween because, Lex explained, who expects to be pranked the week before? Clark couldn’t argue with the red head’s logic. He never could, not since the very first day Lex Luthor appeared in the doorway of Smallville Elementary School’s fifth grade class, a glowering mid-term transfer from Metropolis, torn from his rough and tumble urban world and dropped in the middle of a somnambulistic farming community.
Clark had felt sorry for the new kid and made sure to introduce himself during lunch. By the end of afternoon recess, they were fast friends. By that weekend, Lex had joined Clark’s tiny clique, which also included Lana and Pete Ross, and the quartet had been intact since, Lex sliding easily and naturally into the role as leader of the pack. Clark didn’t mind. Lex was smart ... actually, Clark was smart. Lex Luthor was a genius, one of those rare kids so scarily smart that educators have to throw away all the definitions and expectations and get out of his way. In a big city like Metropolis, a kid like Lex would be in special classes, skipping over grades and acing advanced placement tests.
In the Smallville school system, the best the teachers could do was let him follow his own interests and inclinations, especially since he had turned in all the homework and mandatory and extra credit assignments for the entire year on the morning of his second day of class. Clark, who could have done the same thing if his parents only allowed him to actually do the things he was capable of doing, knew how smart that made someone like Lex, who was, as far as Clark could tell, different but not in the same way he was. It didn’t take much longer for Clark to see that as smart as he was, and he never forgot anything that he read, saw, or heard, Lex was smarter. Lots. Not because of what he knew, but because of what he could do with what he knew. The best Clark could compare their styles, he took information and filed it away in a neat and orderly fashion in his memory like facts jotted on countless individual, alphabetized index cards. Lex’s brain took all those orderly index cards and flung them in the air, letting them mix and match however they happened to fall while he searched through them for commonalities and patterns, finding truth and inspiration by processing and ordering chaos.
Lana dug her elbow into his ribs. “Hey!” she snapped. “Time?”
He blinked, knowing he had been doing it again, that thing ma called his “thousand yard stare.” He could gaze off, eyes fixed on nothing while his mind wandered and his thoughts became lost. Pa said it was natural enough for a boy of fourteen; ma was worried he’d get so lost he’d cross the street without looking both ways. The thought made Clark shake his head. She wasn’t worried he would be hurt, but that someone else might be and, even worse, when he wasn’t injured, that his secret would come out. The truth was the worst thing his parents could imagine. They thought if anyone knew, “they” would come and take Clark away from them. As if anyone could make him do anything he didn’t want to do. But ma and pa wouldn’t think that way. If someone from the government knocked on the door, he wanted to believe pa would fight them for him, but he wasn’t sure. They didn’t come more law-abiding than Jonathan and Martha Kent. Clark knew for a fact that his father’s general store was an all cash business, yet his father reported every cent on his income taxes and was known to go to the homes of customers whom he had accidentally short-changed to repay the difference when he discovered the error.
Pa had been in the army, too, and Clark was pretty sure it would the military who came to get him. Some colonel or general yelling in his face, pa might just wind up saluting and handing Clark over, even though he knew, though they never said as much, that images of cells and chains and dissection tables flashed through both his parents’ minds whenever they thought of someone learning the truth.
Clark, on the other hand, could imagine only freedom.
“Nine minutes and fifteen seconds,” Clark said.
“Two more minutes,” Lex said. “Then I’ll cut it loose. The direction the wind’s blowing, the kite probably won’t come down until it’s out of the state.”
“The mystery of the Smallville U.F.O.,” Lana intoned in a serious voice. “This time around, everybody’s going to see it.” She punctuated her announcement with a giggle.
“Don’t you mean someone besides your father?” Even as the words left his mouth, Clark regretted them.
But Lana just shrugged. Since a third grade schoolmate had seen a story in the newspaper that mentioned Professor Lang’s sighting, she had grown accustomed to this particular line of ridicule. “You know daddy wasn’t the only one saw it. Bunch of folks in Grady reported it, and there was that pilot who also saw something.”
And ma and pa, Clark thought. And himself, too, although he hadn’t actually seen the U.F.O. He had been inside it. But none of them ever dared report what they knew. That was part of the truth that was the Kent family secret.
“Besides, this isn’t about daddy. This is just for fun.”
Clark and Lex exchanged grins and rolled their eyes. Then Clark checked his watch and announced, “Eleven minutes.”
Lex flicked open a pocket knife and with a smile, said, “Six.”
Clark said, “Five.”
Lana said, “Four.”
“Three. Two. One,” they said in unison and Lex flicked the blade through the tungsten wire. “Blast off!”
The wind holding the glowing kite aloft grabbed the freed chemically treated fabric and hurled it even higher, a vague, luminescence in the night that quickly flickered and died out, leaving the sky empty of any light but that of the stars.
The friends watched it go, smiling, proud of themselves, then Clark said, in an urgent whisper, “The Chief’s coming up the road.”
They didn’t hear a thing, but Lana and Lex didn’t question Clark’s warning. He was always hearing approaching cars and yelling parents before anyone else. Lex joked that his extraordinary hearing was probably nature’s way of compensating for his being half-blind.
“You know the plan,” Lex said, extending his hand out before him. “We split up, sneak home, and never speak of this to anyone!”
Lana stacked her hand on top of his and Clark slapped his atop hers. Then, with giant smiles and barely suppressed giggles, they melted into the night.
By the time Chief Parker’s car rolled slowly by, playing his searchlight across Mr. McClintock’s field, they were, one by one, making their way through the deserted, shadowed streets of town, each to slip back through unlatched window or cellar door and into bed, where their parents, those that cared, had left them hours earlier.
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME
Superman and all related elements © 2008 DC Comics
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg
Chapter 1/ Smallville
The blinking halo of light swept across the night sky between McClintock’s farm and the woods that billowed from the edge of town south of Maple Street. The glow sailed against the star crusted October darkness like curiosity in a realm of unfamiliar sensations. It made no sound but would hover in the area for a full ten minutes while the first telephone calls were made to the police. No one bothered dialing up the police station; they called straight on to Doug Parker’s house. At this hour, nearly 11:00 p.m., City Center and all its offices would be locked up tight and everyone, including Chief Parker and the town’s three other police officers, would be home, likely asleep.
Well, a mysterious light in the sky, everyone would agree, was ample excuse to disturb the chief at home.
But there, down in the broad field that Mr. McClintock used for grazing, the halo could be heard as a dry papery snap and the muffled laughter of adolescence.
“Give it more string,” Clark Kent said in a loud whisper as they ran, their way lighted by the shimmering glow sailing a hundred feet above their heads.
“Keep it down, willya,” Lex Luthor said with a laugh in his voice. “This is supposed to be a secret mission.”
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Clark said, turning his eyes to the apparition overhead as light danced on the lenses of his horn-rim glasses.
Lex tugged at the lightweight tungsten wire stretching from the spool in his hands, carefully guiding the kite at the other end into a slow loop in the night air. A battery in the spool sent a small current up the wire that activated a phosphorous compound painted on the kite; a touch of a copper strip turned the current on and off. On. Off. On. Off.
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. He had come up with the compound in the small and undersupplied laboratory in the corner of the family’s cramped garage for just this reason. “They’re gonna freak out for sure.”
“Yeah,” Clark agreed, almost breathless, his eyes following the glowing kite with the intensity of someone willing himself to remain earthbound and not follow it into the air.
“Shh, both of you!” Lana Lang whispered. “I don’t think a U.F.O. is supposed to sound like two boys chatting.” Then she erupted in a fresh peal of giggles, clapping her hands over her own mouth to stifle the sound.
“Uh-huh, it’d sound more like that, I’m sure,” Clark said with a roll of his eyes. He looked at his watch. “Seven minutes, Lex.”
“Plenty of time, pal, plenty of time,” Lex said with studied casualness and an easy grin.
Clark grinned back and, shoulder to shoulder with Lana, watched one of his other best friends pull probably the best prank he could ever remember being pulled in Smallville. It was a perfect late October night, crisp, a hint of wood smoke in the air, a week before Halloween because, Lex explained, who expects to be pranked the week before? Clark couldn’t argue with the red head’s logic. He never could, not since the very first day Lex Luthor appeared in the doorway of Smallville Elementary School’s fifth grade class, a glowering mid-term transfer from Metropolis, torn from his rough and tumble urban world and dropped in the middle of a somnambulistic farming community.
Clark had felt sorry for the new kid and made sure to introduce himself during lunch. By the end of afternoon recess, they were fast friends. By that weekend, Lex had joined Clark’s tiny clique, which also included Lana and Pete Ross, and the quartet had been intact since, Lex sliding easily and naturally into the role as leader of the pack. Clark didn’t mind. Lex was smart ... actually, Clark was smart. Lex Luthor was a genius, one of those rare kids so scarily smart that educators have to throw away all the definitions and expectations and get out of his way. In a big city like Metropolis, a kid like Lex would be in special classes, skipping over grades and acing advanced placement tests.
In the Smallville school system, the best the teachers could do was let him follow his own interests and inclinations, especially since he had turned in all the homework and mandatory and extra credit assignments for the entire year on the morning of his second day of class. Clark, who could have done the same thing if his parents only allowed him to actually do the things he was capable of doing, knew how smart that made someone like Lex, who was, as far as Clark could tell, different but not in the same way he was. It didn’t take much longer for Clark to see that as smart as he was, and he never forgot anything that he read, saw, or heard, Lex was smarter. Lots. Not because of what he knew, but because of what he could do with what he knew. The best Clark could compare their styles, he took information and filed it away in a neat and orderly fashion in his memory like facts jotted on countless individual, alphabetized index cards. Lex’s brain took all those orderly index cards and flung them in the air, letting them mix and match however they happened to fall while he searched through them for commonalities and patterns, finding truth and inspiration by processing and ordering chaos.
Lana dug her elbow into his ribs. “Hey!” she snapped. “Time?”
He blinked, knowing he had been doing it again, that thing ma called his “thousand yard stare.” He could gaze off, eyes fixed on nothing while his mind wandered and his thoughts became lost. Pa said it was natural enough for a boy of fourteen; ma was worried he’d get so lost he’d cross the street without looking both ways. The thought made Clark shake his head. She wasn’t worried he would be hurt, but that someone else might be and, even worse, when he wasn’t injured, that his secret would come out. The truth was the worst thing his parents could imagine. They thought if anyone knew, “they” would come and take Clark away from them. As if anyone could make him do anything he didn’t want to do. But ma and pa wouldn’t think that way. If someone from the government knocked on the door, he wanted to believe pa would fight them for him, but he wasn’t sure. They didn’t come more law-abiding than Jonathan and Martha Kent. Clark knew for a fact that his father’s general store was an all cash business, yet his father reported every cent on his income taxes and was known to go to the homes of customers whom he had accidentally short-changed to repay the difference when he discovered the error.
Pa had been in the army, too, and Clark was pretty sure it would the military who came to get him. Some colonel or general yelling in his face, pa might just wind up saluting and handing Clark over, even though he knew, though they never said as much, that images of cells and chains and dissection tables flashed through both his parents’ minds whenever they thought of someone learning the truth.
Clark, on the other hand, could imagine only freedom.
“Nine minutes and fifteen seconds,” Clark said.
“Two more minutes,” Lex said. “Then I’ll cut it loose. The direction the wind’s blowing, the kite probably won’t come down until it’s out of the state.”
“The mystery of the Smallville U.F.O.,” Lana intoned in a serious voice. “This time around, everybody’s going to see it.” She punctuated her announcement with a giggle.
“Don’t you mean someone besides your father?” Even as the words left his mouth, Clark regretted them.
But Lana just shrugged. Since a third grade schoolmate had seen a story in the newspaper that mentioned Professor Lang’s sighting, she had grown accustomed to this particular line of ridicule. “You know daddy wasn’t the only one saw it. Bunch of folks in Grady reported it, and there was that pilot who also saw something.”
And ma and pa, Clark thought. And himself, too, although he hadn’t actually seen the U.F.O. He had been inside it. But none of them ever dared report what they knew. That was part of the truth that was the Kent family secret.
“Besides, this isn’t about daddy. This is just for fun.”
Clark and Lex exchanged grins and rolled their eyes. Then Clark checked his watch and announced, “Eleven minutes.”
Lex flicked open a pocket knife and with a smile, said, “Six.”
Clark said, “Five.”
Lana said, “Four.”
“Three. Two. One,” they said in unison and Lex flicked the blade through the tungsten wire. “Blast off!”
The wind holding the glowing kite aloft grabbed the freed chemically treated fabric and hurled it even higher, a vague, luminescence in the night that quickly flickered and died out, leaving the sky empty of any light but that of the stars.
The friends watched it go, smiling, proud of themselves, then Clark said, in an urgent whisper, “The Chief’s coming up the road.”
They didn’t hear a thing, but Lana and Lex didn’t question Clark’s warning. He was always hearing approaching cars and yelling parents before anyone else. Lex joked that his extraordinary hearing was probably nature’s way of compensating for his being half-blind.
“You know the plan,” Lex said, extending his hand out before him. “We split up, sneak home, and never speak of this to anyone!”
Lana stacked her hand on top of his and Clark slapped his atop hers. Then, with giant smiles and barely suppressed giggles, they melted into the night.
By the time Chief Parker’s car rolled slowly by, playing his searchlight across Mr. McClintock’s field, they were, one by one, making their way through the deserted, shadowed streets of town, each to slip back through unlatched window or cellar door and into bed, where their parents, those that cared, had left them hours earlier.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Prologue to a Book I'll Probably Never Write
Every now and then, I'll start writing...something. An opening line will pop into my head, a concept, sometimes even a whole book or story and I'll start typing, just to get it out of my head and onto the page. I may have no where to go with it, no hope of selling it, but I'll write it anyway. It's an itch that has to be scratched.
I write a lot of media tie-ins, books and stories based on existing properties from other media, mostly from the pages of comic books. I enjoy the challenge of taking a world usually presented in words and pictures and telling its story in words alone. Something about the process removes a large part of the suspension of disbelief a reader needs to bring to reading a comic book story, no matter how well done it is; words are words, but line drawings on a page take the story a step or two away from reality and make it that much more difficult to believe.
This was one of those itches. It's the prologue for a Superman novel, inspired in part by the literary qualities of Tom DeHaven's excellent IT'S SUPERMAN (Chronicle Books, 2005). I started playing around with it in October 2007:
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME
prologue/at the end of time
He was no stranger to loneliness.
His was a life begun in exile, a family destroyed, a child thrust into a world in which he never truly belonged, try as he might. A stranger in a strange land, made all the worse that it was a land populated by beings who looked so much like him but were not, finally, like him at all.
He was steel.
They were bone China, fragile translucent shells containing lives that broke so easily, wore out too soon.
Still he tried being one of them. Lived among them, loved them. Some of his foes tried exploiting that love, always a mistake, but others just mocked him. They, who were connected to humanity rejected the very bonds he would have given up everything to enjoy.
For all his brilliance, he never really did understand them.
Nor they him. They saw in him abilities far beyond their comprehension and did what humans have done since developing cognizance: they deified him and all those like him. Instinct gave them no choice but to put him on a pedestal above them...or fear him. They did that, too, he was convinced of that. But once they saw he meant them no harm, was in fact, benevolent, they recognized the wisdom of dampening their fear and doing nothing to antagonize him or his ilk. It was all so complicated, exhausting. Heartbreaking. It was, he could admit to himself now, here, at the end of time, the reason he chose, finally, to go. All the public pronouncements about his work being done on Earth, leaving mankind to guide its own destiny into the future, intergalactic age...
He still missed them, though he seldom thought of them anymore.
But when he did...
The images summoned by his mind’s eye made him smile. He forgot nothing, of course. Every moment of his life was stored somewhere, just waiting to be retrieved by any outside stimuli or, sometimes, when he was thinking of nothing at all, when he would just turn off his thoughts and drift, without care to time or destination, through endless nowheres, they would come up like some random shuffle of songs on the jukebox in Doc Parson’s soda fountain. Pete knew how to drop in the nickels and punch the keys in just the right combination to make the old contraption, its colored lights flickering as bubbles percolated lethargically through the plastic tubing on its weathered face, play a mélange of bits and pieces of songs on its dual-turntables that never failed to crack them up, Sinatra mixing with Hendrix fading into Pat Boone, jumping suddenly into Ozzie or the Who, and Pete would grab the nearest girl, usually Lana, and they would dance, trying to keep up with the music and laughing so hard as they breathlessly sang out the words, or at least something close to them...
No.
That was a road he didn’t dare follow, not again. And surely not now. He had trod it before, past the endless, eternal sea of faces and memories, smells and sounds, the curse of perfection, at least where his memory was concerned, and found only sorrow and, at times, madness waiting at the other end. He would see...
Lana, on a perfect summer’s day in childhood, a day not long after the one in which he remembered realizing that she wasn’t just the kid down the road, a classmate and pal, but had, somehow, without his realizing it, become a…female. They had been playing softball all morning in the field out back from Mr. Snyder’s barn and she was laughing at something Pete said as they piled into the dim, cool interior of Doc’s on Main Street for something cold and sweet to quench their thirsts. Her startling red hair was tied back with a yellow ribbon in a ponytail and she wore white shorts, dirty white Converse high-tops and a gray Smallville High t-shirt that was plastered to her back with sweat stains from their hours under the Kansas sun.
He was holding the door for everyone else and as Lana filed by, filling his nostrils with her clean, sweaty, vanilla and jasmine and god only knew what combination of hormones and pheromones scent, she turned her laughing face and green eyes to him and winked and he felt his knees buckle, the more-than-pals feeling awakening with a scream. It made the breath catch in his chest and his heart to pound so loud and so hard that he thought the whole town could hear it. Later, years later, when their lives, intersecting circles that came into contact all too infrequently and often for all the wrong reasons, had reached the safety and comfort of platonic intimacy, she confessed that she too had found it difficult to breath when he was around and isn’t it funny that both of them, feeling as they did, needing only to reach out their hands to one another across the Formica tabletop at Doc Parson’s to touch happiness, could never find even that one-inch of courage to accept what they both knew was true.
Neither of them ever made the leap.
And later...later it would be too late.
...but for just an instant, a sigh of déjà vu, eternity was a summer day and a winking emerald eye...
And of such insignificant increments and fleeting moments are lives altered and histories rewritten.
Not that it mattered any longer. Doc and the jukebox were long gone.
As was Smallville. And Lana and all the women who followed her, though none had ever meant quite what the freckled face redhead had. Still, he remembered their names. Every one of them.
Everything was gone, gone so long that time had finally begun to run out, even for him. Had he ever really expected to outlive the universe? Maybe, once, before he learned all there was to learn and, among that knowledge, the certainty that all of time and all of space and the myriad, diverse threads that twisted around each other to weave the vast tapestry of the multiverse were linked. Time dribbled away to nothingness in everywhere, every universe calved from the same mother lode of energy, at the same time. He had long ago worked out the physics of the universe’s birth; knowing that, it was easy enough to calculate the antithetical event.
Yet still he wondered about that last instant, when all time and space was gone but for the last tick of the cosmic clock. The singularity would be unimaginable – the entirety of the cosmos compressed into a single space – time/space elongating as it approached this ultimate black hole. Would it continue stretching on into infinity, the distance to the event horizon decreasing by half, then half again. And again, dividing ad infinitum, forever forestalling the end? Nonsense science, he knew, but enough to make him think to ride time’s final instant into oblivion and see. Or join with the seething mass of heat and energy that would, when conditions were right and the cycle began anew, explode into new existence. But of course he wouldn’t. He still had much to do before he considered oblivion, labors that begin, paradoxically, when time ends.
Paradoxes and ironies. Love, hate, happiness, sorrow. All irrelevant now that there was no one left but him to appreciate or experience...anything. If a tear falls in a forest and no one is there to feel its pain, does a heart still break?
He allowed himself a small smile. As he always suspected: Sarcasm was the last thing in the universe to fall.
The last second came, but before memory was undone and all hope crushed under the weight of the universe, Lex Luthor shifted and was gone, back to when there was a future to look toward...
I write a lot of media tie-ins, books and stories based on existing properties from other media, mostly from the pages of comic books. I enjoy the challenge of taking a world usually presented in words and pictures and telling its story in words alone. Something about the process removes a large part of the suspension of disbelief a reader needs to bring to reading a comic book story, no matter how well done it is; words are words, but line drawings on a page take the story a step or two away from reality and make it that much more difficult to believe.
This was one of those itches. It's the prologue for a Superman novel, inspired in part by the literary qualities of Tom DeHaven's excellent IT'S SUPERMAN (Chronicle Books, 2005). I started playing around with it in October 2007:
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIMESuperman and all related elements © 2008 DC Comics
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg
SUPERMAN: THE END OF TIME © 2008 Paul Kupperberg
prologue/at the end of time
He was no stranger to loneliness.
His was a life begun in exile, a family destroyed, a child thrust into a world in which he never truly belonged, try as he might. A stranger in a strange land, made all the worse that it was a land populated by beings who looked so much like him but were not, finally, like him at all.
He was steel.
They were bone China, fragile translucent shells containing lives that broke so easily, wore out too soon.
Still he tried being one of them. Lived among them, loved them. Some of his foes tried exploiting that love, always a mistake, but others just mocked him. They, who were connected to humanity rejected the very bonds he would have given up everything to enjoy.
For all his brilliance, he never really did understand them.
Nor they him. They saw in him abilities far beyond their comprehension and did what humans have done since developing cognizance: they deified him and all those like him. Instinct gave them no choice but to put him on a pedestal above them...or fear him. They did that, too, he was convinced of that. But once they saw he meant them no harm, was in fact, benevolent, they recognized the wisdom of dampening their fear and doing nothing to antagonize him or his ilk. It was all so complicated, exhausting. Heartbreaking. It was, he could admit to himself now, here, at the end of time, the reason he chose, finally, to go. All the public pronouncements about his work being done on Earth, leaving mankind to guide its own destiny into the future, intergalactic age...
He still missed them, though he seldom thought of them anymore.
But when he did...
The images summoned by his mind’s eye made him smile. He forgot nothing, of course. Every moment of his life was stored somewhere, just waiting to be retrieved by any outside stimuli or, sometimes, when he was thinking of nothing at all, when he would just turn off his thoughts and drift, without care to time or destination, through endless nowheres, they would come up like some random shuffle of songs on the jukebox in Doc Parson’s soda fountain. Pete knew how to drop in the nickels and punch the keys in just the right combination to make the old contraption, its colored lights flickering as bubbles percolated lethargically through the plastic tubing on its weathered face, play a mélange of bits and pieces of songs on its dual-turntables that never failed to crack them up, Sinatra mixing with Hendrix fading into Pat Boone, jumping suddenly into Ozzie or the Who, and Pete would grab the nearest girl, usually Lana, and they would dance, trying to keep up with the music and laughing so hard as they breathlessly sang out the words, or at least something close to them...
No.
That was a road he didn’t dare follow, not again. And surely not now. He had trod it before, past the endless, eternal sea of faces and memories, smells and sounds, the curse of perfection, at least where his memory was concerned, and found only sorrow and, at times, madness waiting at the other end. He would see...
Lana, on a perfect summer’s day in childhood, a day not long after the one in which he remembered realizing that she wasn’t just the kid down the road, a classmate and pal, but had, somehow, without his realizing it, become a…female. They had been playing softball all morning in the field out back from Mr. Snyder’s barn and she was laughing at something Pete said as they piled into the dim, cool interior of Doc’s on Main Street for something cold and sweet to quench their thirsts. Her startling red hair was tied back with a yellow ribbon in a ponytail and she wore white shorts, dirty white Converse high-tops and a gray Smallville High t-shirt that was plastered to her back with sweat stains from their hours under the Kansas sun.
He was holding the door for everyone else and as Lana filed by, filling his nostrils with her clean, sweaty, vanilla and jasmine and god only knew what combination of hormones and pheromones scent, she turned her laughing face and green eyes to him and winked and he felt his knees buckle, the more-than-pals feeling awakening with a scream. It made the breath catch in his chest and his heart to pound so loud and so hard that he thought the whole town could hear it. Later, years later, when their lives, intersecting circles that came into contact all too infrequently and often for all the wrong reasons, had reached the safety and comfort of platonic intimacy, she confessed that she too had found it difficult to breath when he was around and isn’t it funny that both of them, feeling as they did, needing only to reach out their hands to one another across the Formica tabletop at Doc Parson’s to touch happiness, could never find even that one-inch of courage to accept what they both knew was true.
Neither of them ever made the leap.
And later...later it would be too late.
...but for just an instant, a sigh of déjà vu, eternity was a summer day and a winking emerald eye...
And of such insignificant increments and fleeting moments are lives altered and histories rewritten.
Not that it mattered any longer. Doc and the jukebox were long gone.
As was Smallville. And Lana and all the women who followed her, though none had ever meant quite what the freckled face redhead had. Still, he remembered their names. Every one of them.
Everything was gone, gone so long that time had finally begun to run out, even for him. Had he ever really expected to outlive the universe? Maybe, once, before he learned all there was to learn and, among that knowledge, the certainty that all of time and all of space and the myriad, diverse threads that twisted around each other to weave the vast tapestry of the multiverse were linked. Time dribbled away to nothingness in everywhere, every universe calved from the same mother lode of energy, at the same time. He had long ago worked out the physics of the universe’s birth; knowing that, it was easy enough to calculate the antithetical event.
Yet still he wondered about that last instant, when all time and space was gone but for the last tick of the cosmic clock. The singularity would be unimaginable – the entirety of the cosmos compressed into a single space – time/space elongating as it approached this ultimate black hole. Would it continue stretching on into infinity, the distance to the event horizon decreasing by half, then half again. And again, dividing ad infinitum, forever forestalling the end? Nonsense science, he knew, but enough to make him think to ride time’s final instant into oblivion and see. Or join with the seething mass of heat and energy that would, when conditions were right and the cycle began anew, explode into new existence. But of course he wouldn’t. He still had much to do before he considered oblivion, labors that begin, paradoxically, when time ends.
Paradoxes and ironies. Love, hate, happiness, sorrow. All irrelevant now that there was no one left but him to appreciate or experience...anything. If a tear falls in a forest and no one is there to feel its pain, does a heart still break?
He allowed himself a small smile. As he always suspected: Sarcasm was the last thing in the universe to fall.
The last second came, but before memory was undone and all hope crushed under the weight of the universe, Lex Luthor shifted and was gone, back to when there was a future to look toward...
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