He's the Goddamned Batman!

I was recently asked by my buddy Jim Beard to contribute to Gotham City 14 Miles, a book of essays on Batman he is editing for the Sequart Research & Literacy Organization (to be published in July 2010). My subject was the lasting effects of the 1960s Batman TV show on the character and on pop culture. The first section thereof is below:

“Some Days You Just Can't Get Rid of a Bomb”:
The Legacy of Batman

© respective copyright holders

“Oh, my.”
Leonard Goldenson, ABC Television President, in response
to the pitch for the Batman television show

When that first episode of Batman aired on January 12, 1966, I was ten and one-half years old. I was already a hardcore comic book reader and something of an accumulator, if not quite yet a collector, of as many comics as I could lay my hands on.

I was the audience for that show, eager, no dying to see another of my four-color heroes come to life on the TV screen, like The Adventures of Superman, the 104-episodes of which originally aired between 1952 and 1958 and continued on and on in daytime syndication during my childhood on New York’s WPIX-TV, Channel 11.

Pow! Zap ! Bam!

Yes, I recognized they were making fun of Batman, but so what? Grown-ups always made fun of comic books. My father, himself a reader of Doc Savage, the Shadow, Conan, and G-8 and His Battle Aces in the pages of the ten-cent pulp magazines of the 1930s, who brought home the 1960s Ace Books editions of the Tarzan novels with the gorgeous Frank Frazetta covers for his sons to read, who nurtured the creative instinct in the three of us, all of whom went into some sort of creative field, my father, who must have understood the appeal and certainly never discouraged our interest in comic books, nonetheless called the four-color pamphlets my older brother and I separately hoarded by the hundreds “Popeyes,” as in Popeye the Sailor Man, whose name became the noun for all comic books. “You left a pile of your Popeyes in the car,” he would say. “When you’re finished reading your Popeyes, would you take out the garbage?” Most adults just called them “funny books.”

And even in the ghetto of Pop Culture, comic books were the lowest of the kid stuff. Dangerous, even, if the doomsayers of the 1950s witch-hunts against the evils of comic books and their damaging effect on young minds were to be believed. And even if not dangerous, certainly disposable. To modern collectors in their Mylar bags sealed between slabs of plastic, the notion that a comic book was rolled up and stuck in the back pocket of an eleven year-olds jeans before and after being read (repeatedly, and by many kids) is sacrilegious, but that was exactly what we did. That issue of Spider-Man I romped around with in my back pocket in 1964 is worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars today, but back then, it was the center of my universe and, until I learned better a couple of years later, I ran around with it, or another one like it, rolled up in my pocket, where I could bring it out any time to read again. A copy of a Flash Annual from around the same period will forever carry the grit of New York’s Reis Park beach sand ground into its square-bound spine from that summer when it was the comic book I could not go anywhere without.

Pow! Zap! Bam!

Comics did not get respect before Batman and, aside from the recognition of comics during the run of the show, was no better off after than before. Respect was too much to ask of a funny book. The comics had been effectively neutered by the 1950s and were unlikely to feature anything capable of offending anybody (although there’s always someone to be offended by anything), but Senator Kefauver’s Congressional hearings into the link between comics, juvenile delinquency, and childhood emotional problems were only a decade in the past. These hearings were inconclusive and came up with no result other than the creation of the industry’s self-policing agency, the Comics Code Authority of America. The bad taste had nonetheless been left behind in everybody’s mouth and, in their memory of the hearings, comics had been officially stamped “garbage” by the U.S. government. What other proof did they need?

When it came to picking from this heap, Hollywood had not always approached it with such trepidation. In the 1940s, superheroes were successful on the radio (Superman on a three-times a week program on the Mutual Network) as well as on the big screen as serialized adventures, 10 or 12 15-minute weekly shorts, each with a cliffhanger ending to draw the kids back to the theater to see how the hero gets out of this one! Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Blackhawk, and others from the comics were made into serials, while a series of Superman cartoon shorts produced by the Fleischer Studios (creators of Popeye and Betty Boop before the Man of Steel) for Paramount are still considered classics of animation. The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves was, despite, the nostalgic chuckles it elicits today, a very faithful and, for the most part, straight adaptation of the Superman then in the comic books, scaled down from his skyscraper-lifting level of four-color power to a syndicated TV program’s budget. But, of course, the program was produced by DC Comics, its stories overseen by comic book editors-turned-producers Whitney Ellsworth and Mort Weisinger. They were company men playing with company toys and they were very careful not to break anything.

The one thing all of the above have in common is that they were created as and always intended to be for kids. Serials were shown on Saturday mornings, along with cartoons and other kid stuff. The Adventures of Superman radio program ran for 11-years in a late afternoon timeslot. The Adventures of Superman TV show, though its first two seasons, in black and white, are darker and more serious than the later color seasons, was always a kids show, right down to its sponsorship by Kellogg’s cereals.

Comics only started getting into on-screen trouble when someone decided to do a TV show for grown-ups without first getting over their embarrassment at what they were doing.

One always has to start from the premise that the people adapting comics to the screen, big or little, do not have any respect for the material, certainly not then and, comics overall public relations progress to the contrary, not still.

The people who make movies and television shows, who stage Broadway shows and publish literature are embarrassed by the source material, whether they will admit to it or not. They voice a love and admiration for this true American art form, but if what has hit the movie and television screens is the result of love, hate me, please. Even the best of them can not help metaphorically winking uncomfortably in acknowledgment of the source. The subtext may be Shakespearean in scope, but the brilliance is clad in primary colored spandex that overwhelms even the strongest message. (These same dramatists forgetting that Shakespeare himself was little more than a TV writer of his time, the legends and tales of the era serving as the source material for his plays, themselves pandering to the lowest common denominator in the cheap seats.)

But no message, as it turned out, would ever be stronger than this:

Pow! Zap! Bam!

It made the show. It was, the first time it hit the screen that January night in 1966, a self-announcing visual punch in the nose. It made mom and dad laugh. It was kitschy, campy, and in tune with the “pop art” movement popularized by such commercial artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, both influenced by comic art, Lichtenstein, indeed, lifting, without credit or remuneration, entire panels from romance and war comics to recreate as such paintings as "Drowning Girl" and, more to the point of Pow! Zap! Bam!, "Whaam!" Marvel Comics, which, under the creative direction of Stan Lee and his co-writing artist cohorts like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and others, had bumped up the level of comic book sophistication with continuing stories and heavy doses of soap opera elements inflicted on superheroes whose secret identities lead less-than-perfect lives, even went so far as to change its corner symbol identifying their titles as “Marvel Pop Art Productions” for four or five months during 1965, riding the wave of a trend their existence helped to set rolling.

“Pow! Zap! Bam!” was brilliant, an inclusive nod to the source material. Sound effects have long been a vital part of the vocabulary of comics. A picture of a fist in the vicinity of a chin is only half the story. The “WHAM!” of the knock-out punch or the “whoosh!” of the fist sailing past its target tells the rest. Hand-lettered onamonapia was straight out of the newspaper comic strips and comic books the chuckling adults had read as children. It was self-referential and precious and it was exactly the right touch of gentle mockery to catapult Batman into a full-blown, two-year long bona fide fad.

The only problem was, even after Batman was gone from the airwaves, it left “Pow! Zap! Bam!” behind.

JSA: The Novel, Part 4

It's been a while since I ran anything from the still-unpublished novel I wrote for DC Comics in 2005, JSA: Ragnarok (efforts to get it into print continue). More bits and pieces can be found here, here and here:

JSA: RAGNAROK

JSA and all related characters and elements © DC Comics

Chapter 3

Rolf Steiner drew a last nervous puff on his cigarette before flicking the butt into the black, oily water of the Nord-Ostee-Kanal. The port at the mouth of the north German shipping canal in Kiel, which connected the Baltic with the Northern Sea some one hundred kilometers to the west, was, in the daylight hours, a bustling and heavily trafficked place.

After dark was another story. Now, in the dead of night, it was deserted and just plain scary.

This was a mistake, he thought. He never should have agreed to meet all alone like this. Who, outside of characters in bad espionage movies, arranged secret waterfront meetings at 3:30 in the morning?

Well, the dark haired man told himself, patting his overcoat pocket for reassurance, maybe it wasn’t only spies. People with contraband to sell also had to play like spies, better safe than sorry.

Except how safe was it to agree to these conditions, suggested by a stranger he knew only from an internet bulletin board and e-mails?

And a stranger interested in this sort of stuff, at that. A stranger who had seen Rolf’s posting on a site dedicated to such things. What kind of sick mind thought this stuff was cool anyway? He thought the whole fascination with the subject and its memorabilia was warped, yet it was all around, even here in Germany where you would think people knew better.

Rolf had learned at an early age to keep his own familial connection to the Nazis to himself. He was less than proud of the Steiner family history, and when anybody asked about his grandfather, he would say only he had never known the man, that he died in the war, thirty years before Rolf was born. Which was true, more or less. So what if he fudged the dates and omitted a few salient details? Yes, it was true that his grandfather Hermann Steiner had died a long time ago, though not exactly during the war. More like in 1947. In a Communist prison in East Germany, a result of the role he had played in the war.

The only reason Rolf even had the damned thing in his possession to begin with was because his father had hung onto it in the belief it might one day prove valuable. Which, as it turned out, it had. Still, if Rolf hadn’t been in need of money since losing his bartending job in Hamburg two months ago, he never would have even thought of going online to investigate its worth in the first place. Lord knows, there were more than enough internet sites dedicated to the Nazis. He had received over three hundred e-mails responding to his inquiry, most of them frightening in their adoration of Hitler and the Nazis. On the one hand, he felt the damned thing was cursed and hated to feed some Aryan sicko’s diseased interest. On the other, had he known what he would be offered for it, he might have done this a lot sooner.

But still.

Rolf pulled the red and white pack of West cigarettes from his pocket and lipped a fresh one from the crumbled package. He looked at his watch. The man, this Isaac, was due in just a few minutes and, for the umpteenth time that night, Rolf hoped he was doing the right thing.

“You are Rolf?”

The voice, speaking in accented German, came from the shadows of a stack of cargo containers piled on the edge of the canal, scaring the hell out of Rolf. The cigarette dropped from his mouth and he took a step backwards.

“Who...,” Rolf stammered. “Isaac?”

“Yes, I am Isaac.”

Isaac shuffled out of the shadows and into the meager lights that illuminated the waters edge.

Rolf almost laughed out loud in relief. Isaac was an old man, seventy-five or eighty years old if he was a day. He had once been a tall man, over six feet Rolf guessed, but time and age had bent his back. The white hair that framed his narrow bony face was long, combed straight back to hang below the collar of his black overcoat. His hands, when he took them from his pockets as he approached Rolf, were gnarled and twisted by arthritis.

There was nothing to be afraid of here, Rolf thought. He bent and retrieved his fallen cigarette, lighting it with deliberate nonchalance, as if to compensate for his earlier show of fear.

“It is good to meet you,” Rolf said.

“Yes,” Isaac said in German. “Do you speak English?”

Rolf nodded. “Yes,” he said, switching to English. “Enough, if it will make you more comfortable.”

The old man shrugged. “I just want to be sure there’s no misunderstanding.”

The unemployed bartender smiled. “As long as you can translate dollars into euros, there will be no problems. Your accent... you are American?”

Isaac ignored the question and said, “Do you have it?”

This one was all business, Rolf thought. He pulled the cloth-wrapped bundle from his pocket. Very well, two can play at that game. “Yes. Do you have the money?”

Isaac held out a gnarled hand. “May I?”

The corner of the old man’s mouth twitched. His breath became labored and his gnarled hands trembled as he carefully unrolled the rough, crumbling burlap that surrounded the object. Rolf felt a twinge of revulsion at the almost sexual reaction the nearness of this thing seemed to bring about in the other man. These people truly are mentally ill, he thought. Let’s just finish this as fast as possible and get out of here, Rolf thought.

Isaac gingerly pulled the object from its wrapping and held it up to catch the light from the nearest lamppost. As always when he looked at it, Rolf was struck by the sheer ordinariness of it: a hunk of wood, maybe half a meter long and roughly turned to a thickness of less than four centimeters, jagged at both ends where it was broken off from a larger whole. It was chipped with age and the tattered remnant of some dried, cracked leather binding hung from one end.

Just a hunk of wood.

But a hunk of wood with a provenance.

“Tell me again,” Isaac said, licking his lips. “How did this come into your possession?”

“It was all in my e-mails...”

“Tell me again!” the old man repeated, louder this time, waving the stick in one twisted fist.

“Calm down,” Rolf said, further repelled by Isaac’s vehemence. He liked nothing about this man or their business together. “My grandfather was Oberleutenant Hermann Otto Steiner. He was an SS officer who served on Hitler’s personal staff at the end of the war... I brought his service papers with me, in case you need proof of his record.”

Isaac waved this aside, “Yes, yes, later. Go on.”

“Well, Hermann disappeared for almost a month after the fall of Berlin. My father said everyone believed he had died with Hitler in his bunker, but, he returned home to Bremen by the end of May, 1945. He would not say where he had been and he had with him this... item, which he said had been a piece of Hitler’s own walking stick. My grandmother wanted to burn it, but he wouldn’t allow it.”

Rolf shook his head in disbelief. “Grandfather was apparently a believer until the end. Until after the end. At any rate, he hid it away while making plans to escape with his family from Germany. I believe the idea was to go to South America and join other escaped Nazis. But Bremen was, of course, in the Soviet sector and the Russians were on the lookout for men such as him. He was arrested and died in prison some time later. After my grandmother’s death in 1992, my father was cleaning out her house and found the walking stick hidden in the basement where it had been since 1945. He kept it and, just before he died of cancer three years ago, passed it on to me.”

Isaac smiled. “So it’s been in your family’s possession since 1945?”

“Yes. I cannot vouch for my grandfather’s story of its origins, but I can assure you it is the same item that he brought home.”

“That’s good,” Isaac muttered, nodding and stroking the old piece of wood. “That’s excellent.”

“So,” Rolf said. “We have a deal, yes?”

“Indeed we do,” the old man said. “This is exactly what we’ve been searching for.”

“We?”

Isaac’s eyes danced with light, his aged face creased in a smile. “My friends and I.”

The younger man didn’t care to know anything about this strange old bird, but he could tell Isaac was just waiting for him to ask the question, so he said, “You are some sort of group? A club?”

“A society,” Isaac said, and reached into his pocket.

“Well, good. I am pleased this goes to people who will appreciate it. So, the price we agreed upon was, I believe, 10,000 euros?”

“That’s what we agreed on, yes. But now that I see it, I think it’s worth far, far more than that.”

Rolf blinked in surprise and confusion. “Yes?” If what he said was true, why in the world would the silly old man talk himself out of a bargain?

“Oh, yes, I’d go so far as to say it’s priceless.”

Isaac’s hand came out of his pocket. He fired a single shot into Rolf’s forehead from the silenced nine millimeter pistol gripped in his fist. The younger man went down as the back of his skull exploded in a grisly spray of blood and brain matter. He was dead before he hit the ground, before he had could even register what had happened to him.

Isaac pocketed the gun and without another look at his victim, turned and walked back into the shadows, smiling.

“Priceless,” he said to the night.

JSA: The Novel, Part 3

In 2005 I wrote a novel, JSA: Ragnarok, which was to be published by Byron Preiss' iBooks. Byron's tragic death in an car accident ended iBooks and, while the company's assets were bought by a new owner, the fate of Ragnarok remains up in the air. I've run an excerpt or two here in the past. Here's another, from a chapter set in May 1945:

JSA: RAGNAROK

JSA and all related characters and elements © DC Comics

Sandy Hawkins, in blue slacks and a white shirt with rolled up sleeves, turned the corner onto the Coney Island side street where Wes had parked and now waited by the car after ditching his Sandman get-up and Sandy’s Golden Boy costume.

Wesley closed the trunk of his 1936 Duesenberg SJ coupe. He checked the knot of his tie in the gleaming chrome bumper, then waved at Sandy.

“I brought you something,” said Sandy, handing Wesley a hot dog covered in mustard and sauerkraut. “I ate mine on the way over, I was starving.”

“It’s...what is it? A hot dog?” Wesley asked, scrutinizing the assemblage of foods in his hand.

“It’s not just a hot dog. It’s a Nathan’s.”

Wesley looked at him.

“You never heard of Nathan’s?”

Wesley shook his head.

“You’ve been to Coney Island before, right?”

“Of course.”

“And you’ve never had a Nathan’s hot dog?”

“We usually catered our little jaunts.”

“You’re trying to tell me that in your entire life, you’ve never had a Nathan’s hot dog?”

Wesley shrugged.

“You’re that rich?”

“I am that rich,” Wesley grinned and took a massive bite of the frankfurter and kraut. “And you are that gullible, my friend. I’ve been downing Nathan’s dogs, only the best frankfurter in the known world, since I was a third your age.”

Sandy laughed. “I knew you had to be kidding me.”

“No you didn’t. Listen, kid, just because I happen to be filthy, stinking rich doesn’t mean I’m not human. What’d you think, they fed me lobsters and caviar when I was a kid?” Wesley took another bite of the hot dog. “And if you know so much about fine dining, how could you even think of coming back here without any of their french fries?”

“I couldn’t carry it all and eat at the same time. Guess we’ll just have to go back for them.”

“Let’s go, kid,” Wesley said, popping the last bit of hot dog in his mouth. “The next round’s on me.”

* * *

Several hot dogs, fries, cotton candy, rides, popcorn, attractions, and ice cream later, Wesley and Sandy found an empty bench on the boardwalk. It was too early in the season for sunbathers and swimmers, but strollers filled the beach, many of them young and in uniform, hand in hand with wives or girlfriends, watching younger siblings or their own children, gathered in groups, all celebrating the end of the part of the conflict that required they wear those uniforms.

“Wesley,” Sandy said.

“What, kid?” Wesley couldn’t remember the last time he had been this tired this early in the day. Tromping up and down the boardwalk, waiting in endless lines to mount dizzying rides and pass through goofy funhouses, eating all that food that tasted so good but was so bad for you...unless you were a thirteen-year-old boy with an endless capacity for getting dizzy and eating junk. His stomach was begging for a bromo, his pants felt too tight and his feet were hot and throbbing.

“Thanks,” Sandy said. “This was a lot of fun.”

“Well,” Wesley said, suddenly not quite so bothered by his sour stomach and aching feet, “that was the plan.”

“Sure, but you know what it’s like for guys like us.”

“Guys like us?”

“You know, mystery men guys. I mean, before we could even ride the Cyclone, which is only the best roller coaster in the world, we had to go chase after that Bullwhip goon.”

Wesley nodded. “It’s not easy, Sandy, I know. Everyone else gets to go on with their lives while we have to break off from ours to do what we do.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Wes,” the blond boy said earnestly. “I wouldn’t trade being Sandman’s partner for anything, but it’s just that me and you don’t get to spend a lot of time together, y’know, when I’m not the Sandman’s partner.”

“Just plain Sandy, huh?”

“And Wes. Yep.”

“Okay, Sandy.”

“Thanks, Wes.”

They watched the waves roll onto the beach for a while.

“Wes?”

“Hm?”

“You’ve been dating Aunt Dian for a long time now, haven’t you?”

Wesley, his eyes closed as the sun warmed his face, said, “Did your aunt get you to badger me to marry her?”

Sandy’s laugh was a short, amused bark. “If Aunt Dian was that crazy to get married, she would just ask you herself.”

“Yes,” Wesley said. “Yes, she would. And, yes, we have been seeing one another for...well, we met at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Half a dozen years. And, yes, I do love her madly and completely and, I suppose, one day we will get married but so far neither of us is in a rush. Plus, I might add, I’m rather pleased that she has a nephew who, for a pain in the neck, is otherwise a pretty swell kid.”

Wesley glanced at Sandy, who looked straight ahead, but now with a big grin on his face.

“A bunch of us in the JSA were talking earlier in the week,” the older man said. “We all agreed that with the war winding down, now would be a good time to spend less time as our costumes and more time as ourselves. I know almost everything about Sandy, the Golden Boy, but I couldn’t even tell you Sandy Hawkins’ favorite baseball team.”

“The Giants,” Sandy said.

“Ouch,” Wesley winced. “Yankees here...although sometimes, and usually in secret, I’ve been known to root for the Brooklyn bums from time to time.”

Sandy looked up in surprise. “Me, too! Even when the Dodgers play the Giants, I hate to see ‘em stomped too bad.”

“All right, then,” Wesley said, “we’ll alternate between Giants and Yankee games...and an occasional Dodgers every month or so. Agreed?”

Sandy shook his hand. “Deal!”

“Next, favorite authors?”

Sandy grinned. “Who’s the guy who writes the General Glory comic book?”

“At last,” Wesley said in mock relief, “something we can agree on!”

* * *

The Duesenberg’s 240-hp engine rumbled happily under the hood as they idled at the traffic light on Surf Avenue, parallel to the Boardwalk.

The day had, Wes thought, been a complete success. Sandy was a good kid with a lot of heart and it was high time Wes started treating him as such and not as just another tool in his crime-fighting arsenal. He should, in fact, encourage the boy to spend more time being a kid instead of saddling himself with the grown-up responsibilities of catching criminals and defeating despots. Besides, what if something were to happen to him during one of their adventures? When Sandy had first joined the Sandman just a few short years ago, the world had been such a different place. Now, the war had somehow upped the ante and made it that much more dangerous. Bad guys were no longer disposed to surrender so quickly, the weapons seemed to have gotten bigger, and the costumed villains were turning insane and seriously dangerous.

Wesley said nothing of this to Sandy. Why ruin a great afternoon with something so serious? And the kid had had a ball, that’s for sure. Sandy had no father, no big brother to look up to. And here was Wesley Dodds, bachelor, man-about-town, bon vivant...auditioning for the part. Was he a sap or what?

Wesley glanced to his left as he waited for the light to turn green. He was stopped in front of the Half Moon Hotel, a rundown fleabag with a history. “See that place?” Wes asked, pointing to the painted brick façade. “About a month before Pearl Harbor, New York’s D.A. William O’Dwyer had a Murder Inc. stool pigeon named Abe ‘Kid Twist’ Reles under police custody in the Half Moon.”

“I read about Reles,” Sandy said. “His testimony was supposed to send half the Brooklyn mob to the chair.”

“He helped get a few convicted, until someone pushed him out of the sixth floor window. They called him ‘the canary who could sing but couldn’t fly.’”

“I guess the only thing worse than a crook is a crook who turns rat, huh?”

“Like they say, Sandy, there’s no honor among thieves.” The light turned green and Wesley started to let out the clutch. He took one last glance at the old Half Moon, his gaze almost passing over the man with the carefully groomed goatee and string tie walking up the street. He hesitated a split second before putting the car in gear, looking straight at the bearded man.

He knew that face.

The man turned into the lobby of the Half Moon and was gone. Wesley frowned and then, at the urging of the horn of the car behind him, slipped into first and drove on.

Steven Sharpe III, the Gambler. Wesley wondered what brought him to town, all the way out to the farthest reaches of Brooklyn, no less. He would find out later, tonight, after he had gotten Sandy safely home.

Off We Go, Into The Wild Blue Yonder

It occurred to me one day, about four or five years, that a kiddie-version of the Tom Clancy formula might work. It might...just hasn't yet, but here's the first chapter of what I came up with:

R.A.P.I.D. FORCE

© Paul Kupperberg

Chapter One
Wiesbaden, Germany

Airman Sean Jordan was on a night time training exercise in the densely wooded forest between Wiesbaden and Frankfurt when his new orders came through. Loaded down with almost fifty pounds of protective gear and equipment, the 18-year old E2 was about to lunge from the HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter as part of the advance squad sent in to survey and establish a forward area refueling point (FARP) for his group. The chopper had been on the ground twenty-five seconds already, its rotors slicing the cool night air, ready to take to the sky again at a moment’s notice, while the first five men had unloaded, scrambling themselves and their equipment to cover. Sean was the last man out, his M-16 locked and loaded while his eyes swept the LZ on the lookout for bad guys.

The goal was to have the chopper back in the air inside of 45 seconds. Sean intended to be out the door and waving it away in less than that. Every second the massive black machine was motionless on the ground was another opportunity to attract enemy fire. And even though the worst that could happen in a training exercise like this one was to be “killed” by the laser-sight on an opponent’s weapon triggering a sensor on the helicopter or his bulletproof Kevlar combat vest, the blond airman did not like to lose.

Losing meant failure and the fact that Sean Jordan was merely a passenger on the Hawk instead of her pilot meant he had failed enough already.

“We’re clear,” crackled the voice of one of his teammates’s in his helmet’s radio headset.

“Roger that,” Sean replied and took a step toward the hatch before a hand clamped down on his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.

“Not so fast, airman,” Senior Master Sergeant Rasmussen said. Though the sergeant was right behind him in the chopper, it would have been impossible to hear the older man over the thunderous noise of its beating rotors without the radio headsets they all wore to communicate in the field.

The internal countdown in Sean’s head told him they had been on the ground for going on forty seconds. “What, master sergeant?” he snapped, impatient to be on the ground to his own time-table.

“New orders, airman,” the craggy-faced black man said. “You got a plane to catch back at the base.”

The young Air Force enlisted man was confused. “But we’re in the middle of an exercise, master sergeant.”

“You’re not, not anymore,” Rasmussen smiled. “Dispatch just radioed. Your packet’s come through. You got your transfer, kid.” Then, to the chopper pilot, he said, “Take her up.”

Airman Sean Jordan watched the dark ground fall quickly away from him through the hatch in stunned disbelief.

Over his helmet radio, Sean one of the men he was leaving behind at the LZ asked, “Where you off to, dude?”

As the big machine surged forward at over 150 miles per hour, Airman Sean Jordan stepped back from the crash of air sweeping by the Hawk’s hatch and smiled. “The big show, bud,” he laughed. “See you guys around!”

Wiesbaden Air Force Base, Wiesbaden, Germany

Sean had just twenty minutes to race back to his billet, shower, jump into a clean basic daily uniform (BDU), pack his gear, and hitch a ride back to the flight line.

“We got you deadheading on a Herc leaving at 02300 for Wheeler-Sack, flying light,” the 2nd lieutenant who had met Sean at the chopper pad with the airman’s orders had told him. “You’ll fly commercial the rest of the way to Nellis, reporting no later than 0900 day after, local.” Sean had saluted as he mentally translated the lieutenant’s air force jargon into English: he would be riding an empty C-130 Hercules cargo plane that was returning empty to the States. It was leaving at 11:30 that night for Wheeler-Sack Air Force Base, Fort Drum, in Watertown, New York. From there, Sean would fly a commercial airliner to Los Vegas, Nevada, where he was to report to his new duty at Nellis Air Force Base by 9:00 A.M., local time, the day after tomorrow.

Sean couldn’t believe his luck. The young airman had joined the Air Force with every intention of becoming a pilot. He had assumed that he had a lock on flight training—he was already a flyer, having taken lessons starting when he was 14-years old, soloing in single-engine craft since he was 16. His father and brother were both active duty U.S.A.F. pilots, his grandfather a retired three-star general and Korean War ace. If anyone had ever been born to fly, it was Sean Jordan.

Except, it turned out, he wasn’t, at least not for the Air Force.

While he had the family history, the reflexes, and the skill, what he didn’t have were the eyes for the job. A routine eye exam during his physical work-up for flight training revealed that Sean suffered from a mild form of something called “night blindness.” The docs explained that his vision, though 20/20 in daylight and under well-lighted conditions at night, was inadequate in blackout conditions, like those he would experience on night combat missions. His eyes just didn’t adjust quickly enough or well enough to the dark for it to be safe for him to fly.

What good was it to be in the Air Force if you couldn’t fly? With his grandfather, father, and brother all decorated combat pilots, he felt like the Air Force was the family business, a proud and elite firm that he wanted, desperately, to join. But while those who came before him were the executives, the guys on the frontlines who made the business tick, he wasn’t qualified for anything more than a job as the janitor, part of the ground crew that cleaned up after the men who did the real work. Heartbroken by this turn of events, Sean had considered running out his enlistment and giving up on a military career. But his grandfather had sat him down and set him straight: flying may have seemed to Sean like the one and only glamour job in the Air Force, but there were more ways to serve heroically and with distinction than from the pilot’s seat of a fighter.

“Matter of fact,” his grandfather had chuckled, “compared to the fellows on the ground, the pilot’s got it pretty easy, flying over where most of the shooting’s taking place.”

Sean knew that wasn’t so. Pilots were constantly at risk from anti-aircraft fire, from surface-to-air-missiles, and attack by other aircraft. But he got the message, especially when grandpop started telling him stories about the Air Force special forces units, the men the pilots ferried in to hot zones to engage in ground combat or handle missions that couldn’t be dealt with from the air.

That was all Sean needed to hear. Maybe he couldn’t be a pilot, but that didn’t mean the only jobs left for him were ground crew or maintenance. He asked his grandfather what the best and toughest Air Force combat special forces unit was and the old man answered without hesitation, “R.A.P.I.D. Force, airman. Reconnaissance Air Patrol and Immediate Deployment! There’s not a dirty job you can think of that those boys would back away from.”

Sean had his papers in for R.A.P.I.D. before the end of the next day and now, six months later, he had orders in hand and was on his way to join up with that very unit.

Sean showed his orders to the loadmaster at the tail ramp of the C-130 and hustled up into the belly of the massive aircraft. It was, he noted, one of the new C-130J-30s, almost 35 meters long by 3 meters high of cargo space with a nearly 40 meter wingspan supporting four Rolls-Royce AE2100DS turboprop engines that delivered 4,700 horsepower. This baby had it all, including an advanced two-pilot flight station with fully integrated digital avionics, color multifunctional liquid crystal displays and head-up displays, state-of-the-art navigation systems with global positioning system, fully integrated defensive systems, digital moving map display, and an enhanced cargo-handling system. Fully loaded she could carry about 75,000 kilograms, or 164,000 pounds of cargo at a speed of around 360 kilometers an hour. If her cargo were human beings, she was big enough to handle 128 combat troops or 92 paratroopers.

There wouldn’t be anything like that many aboard tonight, he noticed. A single pallet of seats had been bolted to the deck, offering seating for six, maximum. There was only one other man aboard, already buckled into his seat. He could only see the back of the man’s head, brown-haired flecked with silver, probably an officer, Sean guessed as he stowed his gear in the webbing along the side of the bulkhead.

The man must have heard Sean behind him and turned his head. He was an officer, and Sean didn’t need to see the man’s brass to know he was in the presence of one-star, a brigadier general. Sean snapped to attention and threw a salute.

“General,” he said smartly.

“Airman Jordan,” the general said with a smile as he returned the salute. “How are you, son?”

Sean stayed at attention and said, “I’m fine, dad. How are you?”

JSA: The Novel, Part 2

The sad, sad story of my poor never-(yet)-published Justice Society of America novel JSA: Ragnarok is related here. Here's another excerpt, set in the days right after Germany surrendered, a charming little chapter that follows superheroes Ted (Wildcat) Grant and Queen (Wonder Woman) Hippolyta on a night out on the town, JSA-style:

JSA: Ragnarok

© DC Comics

Chapter 11/ May 1945

Hippolyta still wasn’t quite sure how she was supposed to behave.

Back home, on the island of Themyscira with her Amazon sisters, her role was well-defined by both tradition and heritage. She was the queen and that was all there was to it. Forms of address, access to her person, acceptable comportment, all were taken care of for her. The structure was a blessing, considering her tendency towards passions that could be a considerable disadvantage to the fulfillment of her royal duties.

Those passions unchecked were always the cause of misery for her and the Amazons.

Although they had also been responsible for the best thing that had ever happened to her and her people as well: Her daughter, Diana, who grew to become the champion Wonder Woman. She had turned her passion to raising her daughter and so it seemed only natural that when Diana’s life was threatened, Hippolyta did what was necessary to save her, putting another Amazon in Diana’s place to die. Yet shortly thereafter, in spite of her efforts, Diana’s life was lost anyway. In penance for her sins, the gods demanded Hippolyta take up the heroic mantle of her fallen daughter. After traveling back to the days of the conflagration in Man’s World called World War II in pursuit of a foe, Hippolyta chose to serve out her sentence there, alongside the JSA.

And then there was Ted Grant.

Hippolyta could not deny it. Another of her passions was handsome, strong and powerful men. Heracles had been the first, and look what that had wrought! Conquered and bound, the warrior women of Themyscira, who had seen their fair share of slaughter on battlefields across their lands, had been humiliated and accepted banishment from mortality and from the world.

Of course, Ted was no Machiavellian godling on a quest to impress his father Zeus, king of the gods, with his cunning. Ted was a man. A noble and kind man, but underneath it all, just a big, sweet...lug?

“Lug?” she said. “Is that the word?”

“I dunno. You talking about a wrench or me? ‘Cause if it’s me, I ain’t no lug.” Ted Grant sat up straight and proud, pointing at himself with a thumb and beaming a brilliant smile at her. “I’m a palooka.”

“A palooka.” Hippolyta nodded in approval. Heracles hadn’t been a palooka, she decided. If Ted was a palooka, a palooka had to be sweet. Heracles had been...ferocious, a mountain of a man with enormous appetites and small honor.

“We’re here, babe,” he said. With an effortless spin of the wheel, Ted maneuvered the sleek black roadster to a flawless stop at the curb. He had cut his headlights halfway up the block.

Hippolyta took in their surroundings. The street was deserted, storefronts dark and gated for the night. Maybe a third of the streetlights worked. They got broken so regularly, the city finally just stopped repairing them. Abandoned cars were everywhere, great shadowy and menacing heaps, stripped of anything of value and left to rot here, in a piece of Gotham City that seemed to have embraced something dark and entirely unpleasant.

“That’s the little joint I was telling you about,” Ted said. There was no need to point. The only sign of life was the candy store, midway up the block. It splashed a patch of light the color of old snow across the cracked sidewalk. A green Breyers ice cream sign hung at an angle over the glass front, the counter open to the sidewalk. A newsstand rack piled with newspapers stood just outside the door.

“Can’t say much for the ambiance,” Hippolyta said. “Shall I bring any accessories?”

Ted shrugged. “Don’t think you’re really gonna need ‘em,” he said. He reached into the backseat and felt around until his fingers closed around the hilt of Hippolyta’s short sword. “But what the hell. Bring the damned thing anyway. I do love the looks on their faces when you come at them with the sword.”

Wonder Woman opened the car door and took the sword from Wildcat’s hand. “For you, dear Ted,” she said. “Shall I take the front door?”

# # #

Everybody called the place Sid’s but no one could tell you who Sid had been. No one particularly cared, either. Not even the gray men and women who worked at Sid’s, selling cigarettes, racing forms, newspapers, chewing gum, and, for customers particularly in the know, some reefer, some horse, and, if you had the price, a lot of guns.

Hippolyta had pointed out that any one of those items alone would be reason enough to shut down this establishment and volunteered to join Ted in doing just that.

She decided to go in making as much threatening noise as possible. That was often enough to paralyze the average felon, especially one who wasn’t expecting trouble. She imaged what it must be like for them, seeing a woman who looked as she did, dressed as she was in a not immodest red, white and blue costume, sword in hand, deflecting bullets off her silver bracelets, charging at them bellowing Amazon war cries. As Ted said, the looks on their faces were worth the trouble of bringing the sword.

Wonder Woman announced her arrival at Sid’s by heaving the wooden newsstand that stood outside its door through the storefront.

The sound of shattering glass and splintering wood seemed to wake the place up.

Behind the counter that cut down the center of the cramped space, a mug in a fedora with an apron over his shirtsleeves pressed against the wall. His eyes were wide with terror and he had not yet gone for a weapon.

Neither had the pair who had been occupying the last of the three small booths in the rear of the store. What Ted would call “professional muscle.” What she called mercenaries, soldiers who hired themselves out to the highest bidder. The newsstand had landed between the first two booths, but the muscle goons were already going for their guns, trying to scramble around the obstruction for a shot at her.

“You—stay put!” she warned Fedora as she ran past him, the sword up in her hand.

With a savage cry, Wonder Woman’s sword cleaved the weathered wood of the newsstand. That stopped the muscle for a moment, long enough for her to leap over the booth and knock the closest one cold. By the time the other one remembered it would prove useful to have a weapon in hand, the tip of a finely crafted Amazon short sword was pointed at his throat.

“Who’s back there?” she asked the muscle, whose eyes had doubled in size, pointing with her chin at the doorway at the rear of the store.

Slowly and carefully the muscle shrugged.

“Loyalty to your employer?” Wonder Woman said, surprised to find any honor among these thieves. “I’m impressed.” Then she slammed her fist across his chin, sending him slumping across his two companions.

Wonder Woman turned to Fedora. He still hadn’t moved. She pointed at him with the sword. “You!”

“Ye-yes ma’am?” he stammered.

“Who is back there?”

He shrugged and spoke quickly, “A guy, says his name’s Lou, ain’t never seen him other than when he comes in to work the back room there, but I don’t know nothin’, okay? I just work the counter, selling smokes and gum, see? Back room’s none’a my business. I ain’t even packin’.” He pulled off his apron, spreading his arms and pivoting like a ballerina to show her he wasn’t armed.

Wonder Woman nodded sharply, then turned her back on him. He was a non-combatant, no longer worth her attention. “Go,” she said. He went.

The door at the rear of the store opened. Wildcat stepped through it, an unconscious heap in a cheap suit dangling from the end of one of his fists. He glanced around approvingly at the destruction left behind by Wonder Woman’s entrance. “Nice,” he said. “Anyway, backroom’s packed with hot goods, from guns to drugs, plus a nice pile of cash. This one’s named Lou, but he’s just hired help manning the contraband concession.”

“Then we’ve hit a...dead end?”

Wildcat grinned, “We hit the mother lode, doll! Lou wasn’t alone back there. He had a pal visiting him on other business.”

“Which is...?”

Wildcat let his unconscious burden slump to the floor and, still grinning, beckoned his star-spangled partner into the back room. She followed.

The area behind the candy store was easily twice as large, with every spare inch filled with stacks of wooden packing crates. A wobbly card table and two folding chairs sat by the door under a single bulb dangling by a frayed wire from the ceiling.

Also dangling from the ceiling, suspended by one foot attached to a hoist used to move the heavy crates, was a second man. He was in his mid-thirties, with receding hair, and a narrow, stern face.

“Wonder Woman, meet Herr X,” Wildcat said by way of introduction.

“Herr?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah. When I popped in through the back door, this one here started spouting off in German. I didn’t catch all of it, but apparently, my mother and father were never married but that doesn’t really matter, I guess, because I’m pretty much just a pig anyway. He also pulled a Luger on me, but that didn’t hurt near as much as the name calling.”

“So this is a front for a Nazi set-up?” She stepped up to the man hanging by his ankle, looking into his upside down eyes. “Is that it?” she asked in flawless German. “The master race is selling drugs and firearms to America’s children?”

“I have nothing to say,” the man answered in heavily accented English through clenched teeth.

Wildcat crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame. “Gosh, he’s got nothing to say. What’re we gonna do?”

Wonder Woman unhooked the glowing golden lasso that hung at her side. “Perhaps I can convince him to talk.”

“I have nothing to say to...” the man said fiercely, then stopped speaking as Wonder Woman looped the golden rope around him.

“Just relax,” she told him. “You can fight my lasso of truth but you won’t win. Its touch compels you to speak the truth.”

Muscles twitched in the German’s face.

“What is your name?” Wonder Woman said.

“St-Steiner,” he stuttered, his voice squeezing through a throat clenched tight.

“Hermann Steiner.”

“Hermann,” Wonder Woman said. “How long have the Germans been running this operation?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head convulsively. “Not ours.”

“Then what is your connection to it?”

“Operation Ragnarok.” The words tumbled from his mouth against his will.

Yeah, I'm Talkin' To You!

Back in July and September, I ran a couple of excerpts from Hey, Sophie!, a YA novel I wrote based on someone's intellectual property. Alas and alack, the book has not seen publication and likely never will, which is a shame. I thought it turned out well and it received a good reaction from others who read it (including a focus group of 10-12 year old girls, the target audience). Here's some more...

HEY, SOPHIE!

© Stirred Water Studios

Chapter 7

Sophie waved and ran off up the street, through the crowd of Saturday morning shoppers. As she passed food and grocery shops and clothing stores, a pharmacy, a bookstore and a shoe store, it came to her that Hebert wasn’t really so different from New York, at least not where it counted. Maybe the little Louisiana town lacked the big name chain stores that lined the streets where she and her mother shopped, but other than that, the scene was little different from what she was used to, with grown-ups and kids going in and out of the various shops, juggling their bundles of groceries and whatever. Throw a few tall buildings into the background and drain the air of some of the humidity and she could have been back home.

Except, of course, she wasn’t.

Midway up the bustling street, Sophie came to a small storefront. Painted in fancy gold letters on the spotless window was “Bayou-Gazette, Serving Hebert Since 1921. Delson Esponge, Proprietor.” Sophie put her face to the window and peered inside, where she saw two old wooden rolltop desks, both with large black typewriters on them nestled among precariously balanced mounds of newspapers, books, papers and file folders. Tied up bundles of printed newspapers were stacked everywhere. Behind the desks a waist-high wooden railing divided the space in half, on the far side of which stood a massive and, to Sophie’s eyes, ancient, printing press.

“Well,” Sophie said to herself, “it’s not exactly the New York Times.”

“No, don’t suppose anyone would ever confuse the Gazette for the Times,” said a voice behind her. Sophie jumped and spun around. The man standing there, a newspaper folded under one arm and holding a steaming mug of coffee, was about half a head shorter than Sophie, with a shiny brown and round smiling face topped by thick, black framed glasses that were pushed up on top of the few wispy hairs that covered his bald head. He wore wrinkled dark slacks held up by fraying suspenders, an ink-stained white shirt with rolled up sleeves and a dark and hastily tied necktie speckled with bits of what Sophie imagined were his last dozen or so meals.

“On the other hand,” the man said, “I’ll wager you no one at the Times knows the name of every single one of its subscribers.”

Sophie swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t mean any disrespect,” she said quickly. “I was just, you know....”

The man chuckled and waved the hand holding the coffee cup, some of the dark liquid sloshing over the side onto his hand. “Not to worry, young ‘un,” he said. “Man publishes a newspaper and sells all of four hundred and sixty-two copies a week’s in no position to be easily insulted.”

“Are you Mr. Esponge?”

“I am indeed he, owner, publisher, editor, writer, advertising manager, typesetter and printer of the Bayou-Gazette, at your service,” Mr. Esponge said, bowing his head in her direction. “And, unless I miss my guess, you would be Miz Sophie Boudreaux.”

“How did you know?” Sophie asked in surprise.

“Elementary, my dear Watson,” he said with another chuckle. “A good newsman makes it his business to know what’s going on. Now, as we have but one newcomer in town, that being the aforementioned Miz Boudreaux, and since you and I have never had the pleasure of meeting before, you would, ipso facto, be she.”

Mr. Esponge shifted the coffee cup to his left hand, extending his right to Sophie after a quick swipe to his trouser leg to wipe away the spilled coffee. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

Sophie shook his hand. “Hi.”

The smiling newspaperman swung open the door to his office and gestured for Sophie to enter. “To what do I owe this honor?” he asked.

Sophie walked into the newspaper office, followed by Mr. Esponge. The air inside was cool and the large space smelled like pulp paper and printer’s ink.

“I guess you could say I’m also a reporter...well, I want to grow up and be a reporter. But I, you know, write for my school newspaper back in New York, and, well...”

“Ah, yes, of course, a professional courtesy call,” Mr. Esponge said happily as he settled on the wooden swivel chair behind the nearest desk and balanced his coffee cup atop a stack of papers. “Splendid. Please, Miz Boudreaux, have a seat.”

Sophie looked around. The only other chair in view was practically invisible under a confusion of paper and books. She chose instead a stack of bundled newspapers.

“First, young lady,” he said, his bright round face growing momentarily serious, “May I say I know of your troubles and wish you a swift and happy resolution to them all. I knew your papa quite well when he was a boy. Indeed, he used to deliver the Bayou-Gazette about town. But as fine a lad as he was, he grew up to be an even finer man. If there is anything in my power that may be of help to you or your grandmere, you have but to ask. In the meantime, I can only pray for the safe return of your dear parents.”

Sophie swallowed back the lump in her throat and blinked back tears, taken aback by Mr. Esponge’s kindness. “Thank you, sir,” she said softly.

The smile returned to his face as quickly as it disappeared. “Now, then, young lady, about you. When I heard a fellow journalistic was coming to town, I naturally checked out your credentials.”

“Really?”

“Certainly! The Lincoln Center Middle School’s Monitor, isn’t it? Quite a nice website. A lovely showcase for your very enjoyable columns.”

Sophie eyed the ancient manual typewriter on the desk in front of Mr. Esponge. “You have internet access?” she asked in a voice that carried a little more surprise than she had intended.

Mr. Esponge, who seemed to chuckle almost as often as he blinked, said, “Pretty surprising for a backwoods rag, huh?”

“Oh, no, sir, I wasn’t...”

“Just joshing with you, Miz Boudreaux. I may still like to write on my trusty ol’ Smith-Corona typewriter, once the property of my illustrious predecessor, my own papa and founder of this fine paper,” he said, fondly patting the side of the black hunk of metal, keys and typewriter ribbon. “And the Gazette is indeed yet printed on a press introduced not long after the turn of the previous century, but I am a man who is not afeared of embracing progress. I am a long-time subscriber to the nation’s wire services which supply me with news of the nation and the world via the internet.”

Sophie sat up straight, eyes going wide. “High-speed?”

“Top of the line DSL,” he said with a wink.

“Mr. Esponge,” Sophie smiled, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

The Dead Zone

This is a short story I wrote about five years ago; the idea was sparked by a small footstone for Sidney Aronson in the graveyard near where my mother-in-law lies. My father's name was Sidney, so whenever we visit the cemetery, I always put a stone on Mr. Aronson's grave as well (it's a Jewish custom; you put a stone on the grave as either a sign that someone has been there to visit, or as a reminder of the fall of the Biblical Temple, I've heard both cited as the reason). The story's got a decent enough set-up, a good middle, but no finish. Everything I've come up with so far is flat and predictable, but I take a look at it every now and then and see if anything new or fresh jumps out at me. So far,nothing, but here's the first quarter of it:

A STONE FOR THE GRAVE OF MR. ARONSON

© Paul Kupperberg

Silent as a tomb. In the dead of night.

He never really thought about what that meant until now. Walking through a cemetery in the hour just after dusk on a bone chilling autumn evening, colder than the time of year warranted, cold, he thought, as the grave. There wasn’t a sound, not the buzz of insects, not the chatter of birds or the whisper and rustle of wind through the drooping branches of trees, heavy with the dry weight of dying foliage. Quiet. No life except for the one he brought through the graveyard gate and that wasn’t much of a life at all. Too quiet for his tattered nerves. Too quiet for a guy with a kilo of stolen cocaine jammed into the pocket of a lightweight overcoat as tattered as those nerves.

Row after row of cold, hard headstones growing out of withered, brown grass. Otherwise forgotten names long ago chiseled in loving memory, untended tributes to mother, father, grandparent, child. He read off the roster of the dead to himself as he trudged through fallen leaves carpeting the paths between graves. Steinberg, Abramowitz, Levine, Weinstock, Bromstein, Sherman, Tockman. The dates, parenthesis enclosing lives barely lived, lives lived long: 1911 - 1919. 1904 - 1979. 1924 - 1944. Do the math, compute the life-spans, no matter the longevity, never time enough.

Did the math for himself. 1969- 2004.

Koch, 1937 - 1980. Heller, 1901 - 1949. Greenberg, 1940 - 1967.

Anything to keep his mind off the truth, that he had come here to join the dead. Except there would be no carved granite monument bearing his name, no reason to memorialize what he would be leaving behind. He’d seen to that by living as he had.

Get used to it, he thought. This was going to be home for what was left of eternity.

Karp. Cronenberg. Golden. Moser. Deitrich.

Hi, neighbors.

They couldn’t have picked a better place for the meet. The Jewish section of the old cemetery outside of town, its last occupant lowered into the ground more than a dozen years ago, filling the final six foot by three foot by six foot deep piece of real estate. Who came out to an inactive graveyard at this hour, on a miserable night like this? One stop shopping for them: they got back their property and had a place to leave his lifeless sack of flesh when they were through. They told him all they wanted was the merchandise, that he could just hand it over, say he was sorry, and walk away.

But he knew what was going to happen, what had to happen. You didn’t mess with these guys, take what was theirs and not pay for it. Letting themselves get ripped off and doing nothing about it would be bad for business. Examples had to be made, messages had to be sent to the next guy who even thought about taking them off. He would be their billboard warning the whole world to keep hands off. He had hoped that throwing them Rickie, his partner in that sorry town and this even sorrier attempt at instant wealth, would satisfy them, but Rickie had wound up with half his head gone, shoved into the trunk of a wrecked Buick waiting to go through the metal crusher in the salvage yard on the other side of town. Now it was his turn.

The old man was there, standing with bowed head before a weathered headstone. He wouldn’t have seen him in the gloomy silence, would have walked right on by, mistaking him for just another graveyard shadow, if the old man hadn’t spoken, calling out to him, “Hello?”

He stopped, fear squeezing his heart. Were they here already? He had arrived early, why not? There wasn’t anywhere else he could be, no way in hell he could run from them. Besides, a man doesn’t want to be late for his own funeral.

Then he saw the old man, a shrunken figure in black topcoat with sparse white hair framing a withered face with wrinkles that were a roadmap of a long life lived hard. Rheumy eyes glittered at him in the half light. No, this was no harbinger of his own death, merely a mourner of an earlier victim of the reaper. So he forced himself to breath again and resumed walking, head down, back on track to his meeting with the inevitable.

“Excuse me?”

Keep walking, get there and get it over with. He’d been living with the numbing fear of his own coming mortality for more than two days now. Forty-nine hours to be precise, at 4:37 in the afternoon the day before yesterday when he realized there was nowhere to run and Junkyard hissed in his ear that they knew who he was and were looking for him.

“I’d help you, man,” Junkyard simpered, compulsively running his hands up and down the thighs of his greasy coveralls. “You’re my bud, I wanna help, but you gotta understand I can’t, don’t you? They know I did for you, they’ll kill both of us.”

Ray had just stared, a pulse beginning to pound in his forehead. He looked at the neon dial clock over the door of the small service station office. 4:37. The moment his death warrant had been signed.

“And they’ll know. Word’s out, dig? Hands off’a you and don’t no one cross these guys. You see my hands’re tied, don’t you, Ray?”

How had it come to this? How did a life suddenly go from hope to hopeless in the blink of an eye, the tick of a clock on a rainy autumn afternoon at 4:37 P.M.? The scheme couldn’t have been simpler: walk in a door with three bucks to his name, pick up a package, and walk out a minute later richer than he’d ever been, ever hoped to be. It should have been a walk in the park.

So how did that turn into his last mile through a graveyard?

The answer was simple, as obvious as every other piece of ill fortune and bad timing that was the story of his miserable life. Born to the wrong parents, friends with the wrong people, consistently being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong idea. He gave nothing, took whatever he could get his hands on and to hell with who it hurt. Like Rickie, the poor bastard. And for all that, what was he left with? What had he ever done that wasn’t selfish and wrong? Whose life had he ever touched who would give a second thought to him when they heard he was dead? Except they never would hear the news. He’d just disappear, and the few who might, for God knows what reason, have cause to remember him, would just assume that he’d moved on to another place, where he could start stealing and swindling and creating misery among people who didn’t yet know, but would find out soon enough.

Forty-nine hours gone. About twenty minutes left to live. Did he want to spend it talking to some old fart in the cemetery? Would be like getting stuck with his senile old grandpa again. Old man had gone seriously nuts when Ray was in high school and had come to live with him and his mom. That was a trip, his boozer old lady and her old man, him shrinking daily under the weight of Alzheimer, her under the bottle, making each other crazy, spending all day screaming drunken, senile gibberish at each other. Good enough reason for Ray to have quit school in his junior year and get the hell out of there.

The Avenger Chronicles is Here!

Last year I wrote a short story for Moonstone Books' The Avenger Chronicles, an anthology starring the 1930-1940s pulp character. The book is out and I share space with a batch of talented writers, including Will Murray, Ron Goulart, C.J. Henderson and others. Here's how it starts:

The Avenger Chronicles: THE CLOUD OF DOOM

© respective copyright holders

“So, you think you’re a tough guy, eh?”

The tall, lanky man in the yellow checkered vest and straw boater planted himself in front of the approaching couple, jabbing a finger at the man and blocking their way along the Coney Island’s Boardwalk.

The male half of the duo, dressed in a pearl gray summer weight suit and matching fedora pulled low on his brow, peered up at the taller obstacle, his eyes hidden behind round-framed dark glasses. He was of average size, no more than five feet eight inches tall and one hundred and sixty pounds, but something about the man’s dark stare chilled the humid July air around the suddenly unsmiling Boardwalk barker.

“Excuse me?” the gray man said.

The barker swallowed and stepped back, trying to regain his smile, but fear kept it sliding from his lips.

“The bell,” the barker stammered, no longer shouting for the benefit of the crowd that surged around them. He held up the large wooden mallet that had been dangling at his side. “Ring the bell ... win a Kewpie doll. For, for the little lady.”

The “little lady” in question, a small, delicate young woman in a yellow flower print sun dress and wide brimmed bonnet to shield her porcelain complexion from the rays of the sun, tugged discreetly at the man’s arm. “Yes, Richard, why don’t you win me a Kewpie doll.”

Richard turned the black, endless stare of his sunglasses on her. “I wasn’t aware you needed one,” he said.

“I don’t, but you’ve obviously made this poor man very uncomfortable, so the least you can do is ring his bell,” she said. Then, in a whisper meant only for his ears, “Relax. Remember why you’re here.”

Richard looked at her for several seconds, than reached into his pocket for a quarter, which he flipped to the startled barker, who dropped the mallet to catch the coin. Before the well-worn handle could touch the ground, Richard had it in hand and, as effortlessly as waving farewell, he swung it against the padded wooden lever that sent a hard rubber ball racing up the eleven-foot length of cable, past the crudely painted summations and artistic representations of levels of strength, from “90-lb. Weakling” to “Hercules!!!”, to slam into the waiting bell with a resounding clang that brought an “oooh” and a smattering of applause from onlookers, then gasps as the force of its momentum drove the ball under the copper bell and jammed there.

The barker looked at Richard, his mouth moving but making no sound. In the distance, the sputtering engine of a slow-moving biplane towing an advertising banner through the thick, hot air thumped dully off the water. Closer by, a train of rollercoaster cars thundered by on the Cyclone and from it came a girl’s scream of terrified delight.

“I believe there was mention of a Kewpie doll,” Richard inquired, handing the barker his mallet.

As they walked from the still speechless barker, a cheap little celluloid cherubic Kewpie tucked under her arm, the woman said to Richard, “That was entirely mean. He was just doing his job. Some people have been known to come to Coney Island for fun, you know.”

“I was doing a public service, Nellie,” he said. “One look at that rickety contraption and I could see it was only a few good wallops away from collapsing and injuring someone. I gave him a hundred dollars and made him promise to replace it.”

“Oh,” Nellie said and smiled. “Yes, of course. I should have known.”

Richard didn’t smile back at her. He couldn’t. Beneath the shade of his hat and mask of his glasses, she could see the flesh of his face, so pale as to make her own peaches and cream complexion seem almost ruddy. She had long accepted the dead white immobility of his face, a result of the unimaginable trauma he suffered when his beloved wife Alice and their young daughter Alicia were murdered by gangsters. Nellie and the others who worked for this man’s Justice, Inc. could read his mood by his body language and voice, just one of the many small adjustments they all made when they joined their destinies with the man the newspapers called “The Avenger,” but who they knew as Richard Henry Benson.

His voice when he spoke was warm. “I appreciate your coming along, Nellie. I realize this must be awkward for you.”

“Awkward? Why on earth would you think that”

Richard lifted one shoulder and let it settle back in place, as close a sign of hesitation as he ever made. “We’re business associates. This is a personal matter. I just thought you might be uncomfortable...”

Nellie sighed, “Dear Richard, after how many years together, you still don’t understand, do you?”

But he was no longer listening. His chin had gone up and his gaze had shifted elsewhere. Nellie tried to see what he saw, but all she saw were revelers. Men, women, and children, clustered in all possible combinations and groupings, some in street clothes, many more in bathing suits, all in motion, pausing only long enough to loudly and merrily sample some amusement or Boardwalk delicacy. She couldn’t begin to guess how many were jammed onto the Boardwalk, beach and surrounding streets, but they had to number in the hundreds of thousands. And still more were coming by the minute, spilling out of the subway cars screeching into the elevated Stillwell Avenue station, by car, by bus and by packed trolleys that hissed south along Brooklyn’s major arteries, all culminating here, on a tiny spit of land jutting into the Atlantic Ocean.

It was the Fourth of July, 1941 and, until about thirty seconds ago, Coney Island seemed absolutely the best and most American place in all the world to be celebrating that.

Brightly buzzing neon and countless blinking, flashing light bulbs fought for attention with miles of red, white, and blue bunting flapping atop every arcade, game, attraction, and come-on joint along the Boardwalk. The air was thick with sound and smell, the roar of those countless voices muffled under the ceaseless thunder of the Atlantic surf. Nellie could smell sea and sand, sizzling hot dogs, diesel exhaust, roasting corn, and cotton candy. A pair of biplanes made lazy circles over the beach, one towing a banner extolling beachgoers to drink an ice cold Pepsi-Cola, the other to freshen their breath with new Julep cigarettes.

What she couldn’t see was anything amiss.

“Male Caucasian, blond, in his shirt sleeves, at eleven o’clock,” Benson said.

And then she had him, a tall, muscled man in his late-thirties, wearing a worn, grease-stained blue workman’s shirt with rolled up sleeves, dungarees, and steel-toed boots, striding away from a hot dog vendor, taking a big bite from one with everything.

The Warrior Matron, Conclusion

If you haven't read earlier episodes, you can find them here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7.

And now, the conclusion of...

PASSED LIVES

© Paul Kupperberg

Kahna ate some more of her cold provisions as she continued her journey to the First City on foot. Several miles along, well past the staggering army’s advance, she found a stray horse, saddled and bearing the colors of the City of the Stars. His reins hung to the ground as he drank from a stream. She guessed the beast had fled the battle after his master had fallen to a demon, but it was calm now and didn’t shy from her. She took the reins and, letting the horse drink its fill, talked soothingly to it.

It was only when she tried to mount him that the horse grew skittish. She started singing to calm it, a soothing tune that was, at first, a wordless melody. But then she recognized it and the words came back to her and she began to sing it. The lullaby her mother sang to her, the one she sang to every one of her many, many children.

Kahna turned her head, embarrassed least even the horse see her eyes fill with tears.

* * *

The horse finally let Kahna mount him and she pointed his nose on the road toward the First City. She let him go easy at first, getting used to her weight on his back and her hand on the reins. But soon enough, she had him at a trot, and she was determined to make her destination before nightfall. She was certain she would find Thalis there, one way or another, and be reunited to fix this thing and get on with lives that had been interrupted more that eight centuries earlier.

What would Thalis see when he looked into her eyes, now those of a different woman than the one he last knew?

Once, he told her he saw in those eyes a reflection of his own soul.

If she was indeed who she knew herself to be and not some deluded mad woman, that is what he would see again. Not the tired, sagging face, the thickened body and gray-streaked hair of a middle-aged smith’s wife, but Kahna, his soul mate.

But she knew that each time she looked in the mirror, she would see Malasa.

* * *

Kahna approached the walls of the First City on foot, under the cover of darkness. She began smelling the sea late in the afternoon and, by the time the sun had dropped, she could hear the pounding surf and feel a fine, cooling mist.

She let the horse go and, by the simple act of draping a blanket around her shoulders like a shawl, her sword and shield were hidden and she was effectively disguised as a harmless old woman.

Kahna had deliberately chosen a small gate on the leeward side of the City. As she recalled, it was seldom used and often unguarded, but that had been centuries ago. The entire city might have changed in the time she had been away...

Except time moved slowly for Atlantis, this mighty empire that had stood 50,000 years and might yet see 50,000 more. That which did change did not do so with haste, not even the watch schedule of forgotten portals.

The gate was little more than a doorway that opened onto the back of a row of densely packed dwellings, stinking from garbage and smoke. There was no one about, but Kahna had expected that. Whatever was happening in the City, the merchant and craftsman, the servant and shop clerk would flee from it or hide in their cellars until the danger had passed. Only arrogant royals and stoic soldiers stayed behind while demonic forces came wreaking havoc.

And the mage, she added quickly. The mage was always there until the very end as well. All she need do was first find him and bring him there.

Keeping a hand on the hilt of her sword under her shawl, Kahna made her way through the dark streets of the First City. She stayed close to the homes and shops, joining with their shadows to keep out of sight. She saw no one, but periodically, things passed by overhead that cast large and evilly distorted shadows on the street, accompanied by otherworldly squeals and chitters.

She needed the palace. If the Guard had managed to hold the palace, she would learn much from the commanders and advisors inside the heavily fortified heart of the First City. Kahna smiled to herself, wondering how she would convince the Royal Guard to let her pass. Or generals to reveal their secrets to a housewife claiming to be a reincarnated warrior.

Kahna took a longer but less visible route to the palace. She made her way through alleyways and back streets, circling open areas to avoid crossing in the light. The streets were as quiet as death, patrolled from the air by the same winged monsters she had fought through the night.

Kahna paused on the fringe of the great park that surrounded the darkened palace. The landscape was level and, before it had been pitted and charred by combat, meticulously planted and maintained. The park was wide open, intentionally created to give attackers intent on stealth no hiding places. Whether the palace was held by friend or foe, she was certain any attempt to cross the encircling park would most likely meet with an attack.

She stood in the shadow of a tall, leafy tree on the park’s edge, watching the tall, graceful spire of the palace as she pondered her situation.

Kahna heard a noise and froze in place. Footsteps, shuffling down the street! They were drawing nearer, making no attempt to be silent. Not daring to draw her sword, Kahna slid one of Khar’s daggers out from under her sleeve and slowly raised it, her ears tracking the approaching intruder.

And then she was there, but it was neither demon or soldier who, gasping, drew to a stop when she spotted Kahna. It was a woman, like her. Like Malasa. Middle-aged, worn and haggard, unraveled by her life, wrapped in a dark shawl against the night chill.

“Who are you?” Kahna demanded, her tone harsher than she had intended.

The woman was wide-eyed. She could only stammer, “I, I had not expected...everyone else has fled or is in hiding...!”

Kahna pulled the woman into the shadow of the tree. “You should be doing the same,” she scolded. “What are you doing out here?”

The woman began to tremble and her eyes filled. “Tyrla...my daughter...she’s only a child, but she’s missing, you see,” she sobbed. “I’ve been looking for her everywhere... the first night the demons came...I lost her in the mob....”

Kahna tried to quiet her. “You need to find shelter,” she hissed.

The woman shook off Kahna’s hand. “I can’t,” she said and Kahna was taken aback by the sudden steel in her voice. “They killed my husband and took my children. She is all I have left.”

The woman pushed past Kahna and continued on her way, muttering, “All I have left!”

Kahna stayed in the shadows, not moving until the woman was out of her hearing. Then she turned her gaze back to the palace. There, high above streets torn by demonic warfare, the doors on the king’s balcony had swung open, golden light from within spilling out like a beacon in the night.

A lone figure stood on the balcony, bathed in the lights warm glow.

She took a step forward, narrowing her eyes. The figure was tall and lean, with long flowing hair tied at the neck. He raised his hands high above his head and she saw the light around him grow brighter.

“Thalis,” she whispered.

So...he magician did not need his warrior lover after all! She was surprised that she felt nothing at this revelation. Well, at least she had arrived in time to join him in the endgame with whatever otherworldly foe he now prepared with his magic to dispatch.

She took another step, into the light and the open park.

But the scream made her stop and whirl, drawing her sword and crying out.

Thalis, high above the city, did not hear the woman’s scream.

She looked frantically around. She heard the sounds of chattering demons, the scrape of talons on the walk and ran towards them, sword in hand. A prayer caught in her throat, a prayer for the missing child and her poor mother. A prayer for what she would see when she found the woman.

Dark shapes with leathery wings were melting into the night sky as she burst onto the scene. There was little left of the woman, jagged and bloody pieces of raw red and cracked bones, recognizable only by the dark shawl thrown across a nearby bush.

She sank to her knees next to the remains and, for reasons that would not become clear to her until morning, she knelt there through the night, crying and praying.

All the while, the night sky was made bright as day by the magic spells that would decide the fate of Atlantis.

* * *

By noon, she passed the army she had left the day before as it rode for the First City. She did not bother to tell them it was over.

She had left her weapons and armor on the street alongside the woman and walked from the City through the main gate. She would not need them where she was going.

Not in this lifetime.

But if the past was any indication, the future would hold opportunities aplenty to save the world again. And lives enough to be reunited with Thalis.

But for now Malasa yet had two young ones to shepherd into maturity and a husband with whom she had long hoped to grow old waiting at home.

-- END --

Spiders? Ick!

As a glance at the sidebar to the left of And Then I Wrote... will show, I also write a bit of non-fiction, mostly for the young adult (5th - 8th grade) market. I seem to do about two of these year, the first dozen or so for Rosen Publishing (a library and school school library publisher) and I'm about to begin on my third for Chelsea House, a division of Facts-On-File. I've done books on the Titanic, spy satellites, disease (in general and one on influenza, specifically), Edwin Hubble, John Glenn, careers in robotics and rodeo clowning (you heard me), the Alaska Highway, the Great Depression, hurricanes, and the origin and creation of Spider-Man. The latest is about Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. It's a wide--and sometimes strange--range of subjects, but seeing as how I enjoy reading books on subjects like salt, codfish, the screw, the library shelf, giant redwood trees, oysters and the history of bookbinding, work I enjoy.

Here's a bit from one of the books closer to my heart than something like, say, rodeo clowns and robotics engineers:

ACTION HEROES: THE CREATION OF SPIDER-MAN

© The Rosen Rublishing Group

Chapter Three: Does Whatever a Spider Can!
At first, Martin Goodman gave him every reason Spider-Man would never work.

“For months I had been toying with the notion of a new super-hero, one who would be more realistic than most, despite his colorful superpower,” recalled Stan in Excelsior! “So I did what I always did in those days, I took the idea to my boss...I told Martin that I wanted to feature a hero who had just a touch of superstrength but his main power was that he could stick to walls and ceilings...I also mentioned that our hero, whom I wanted to call Spider-Man, would be a teenager, with all the problems, hang-ups, and angst of any teenager. He’d be an orphan who lived with his aunt and uncle, a bit of a nerd, a loser in the romance department...Except for his super-power, he’d be the quintessential hard-luck kid. He’d have allergy attacks when fighting the villains.”

Creative Differences
Goodman was less than enthusiastic. He told Stan that teens could be sidekicks to adult superheroes but not superheroes themselves. He pointed out that heroes did not have personal problems, which, in any case, only served to slow down the fast-paced action of superhero stories. Stan’s nerdy, allergic Spider-Man was, at any rate, a comedic character not a hero. And anyway, nobody wanted to read about a character named Spider-Man; people were creeped out by spiders. They didn’t want to be reminded of them while reading a superhero comic book story.

Stan was not deterred. He wrote, “I couldn’t get Spider-Man out of my mind. That’s when I remembered the final issue of (the anthology title) Amazing Fantasy, which we were then prepping. As you can imagine, when a publisher prints the last issue of a title, no one much cares about what goes into (it).

“So, just to get it out of my system, I gave Jack Kirby my Spider-Man plot and asked him to illustrate it. Jack started to draw it, but when I saw that he was making our main character, Peter Parker, a powerful-looking, handsome, self-confident typical hero type, I realized that wasn’t the style I was looking for. So I took Jack off the project. He couldn’t care less because he had so many other strips to draw at the time, and Spider-Man wasn’t exactly our top-of-the-line character.”

A Question of Credit
Jack Kirby’s memories of the Spider-Man experience are significantly different from Stan’s. In a July 1982 interview with legendary comics creator Will Eisner, Kirby said, “(Spider-Man) was the last thing Joe (Simon) and I had discussed. We had a script called ‘The Silver Spider.’ ‘The Silver Spider’ was going into a magazine called Black Magic (which was cancelled) and we were left with the script. I believe I said this could become a thing called Spider-Man...so the idea was already there when I talked to Stan.”

Joe Simon, Kirby’s former partner and co-creator of Captain America and countless other characters and comic titles had yet another take on the origin of Spider-Man, although one that still owed more to Simon and Kirby than it did to Stan Lee. According to Simon’s memoir of his comic book career, The Comic Book Makers, the Simon and Kirby creation The Fly (for Archie Comics) had begun as a character they had called first “Spiderman” and then “The Silver Spider.” As Simon told the story, ”As I learned years later, Jack brought in the ‘Spiderman’ logo I had loaned to him before we changed the name to The Silver Spider. Kirby laid out the story to Lee about the kid who finds a ring in spiderweb, gets his powers from the ring and goes forth to fight crime armed with The Silver Spider’s old web-spinning pistol.”

When Kirby turned in his first batch of pages, Stan saw the artist had given him a muscular young man instead of the skinny teenager he had envisioned. Plus, the new character shared far too many similarities with The Fly.

Simon continued, “Ditko ignored Kirby’s pages, tossed the character’s magic ring, web-pistol and goggles into a handy wastebasket, and completely redesigned Spider-Man’s costume and equipment. In this life, he became high school student Peter Parker who gets his spider powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.”

By the time Spider-Man made his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15, the only thing left of Jack Kirby’s contribution was the name (with the addition of the hyphen) and the cover that he had penciled for the issue.

Steve Ditko, Co-Creator
Stan tapped his Amazing Fantasy cohort Steve Ditko to replace Kirby. In an essay that appeared in an issue of Robin Snyder’s History of Comics, Steve Ditko wrote that the five Kirby-penciled Spider-Man pages he received from Stan “...showed a teenager living with his kindly old aunt and hard, gruff, retired police captain uncle...who was hostile toward the boy.

“Next door or somewhere in the neighborhood there was a whiskered scientist-type involved in some kind of experiment or project. The end of the five pages depicted the kid going toward the scientist’s darkened house.”

Ditko saw an opportunity to do a richer and more complex character than the one initially envisioned by Lee and Kirby. “Steve Ditko...working from a synopsis and Kirby’s pages, produced an inspired visual take on the character that drove its story for decades—bottle-thick glasses, slumped shoulders, and a homemade costume,” observed Raphael and Spurgeon in Stan Lee. “...The Spider-Man millions of readers came to know and love got his youth and voice from Stan Lee and his human frailty from Steve Ditko...”

The artist knew the importance of the visual aspect of a character in this most visual of mediums. In his 1990 essay, Ditko wrote, “One of the first things I did was to work up a costume. A vital, visual part of the character. I had to know how he looked, to fit in with the powers he had, or could have, the possible gimmicks and how they might be used and shown, before I did any breakdowns...I wasn’t sure Stan would like the idea of covering the character’s face but I did it because it hid an obvious boyish face.”

Stan was more than pleased with Ditko’s contributions to Spider-Man, finding his “toned down, more subtle, highly stylized way of drawing...perfect for the way I envisioned Spider-Man...Steve did a totally brilliant job of bringing my new little hero to life.”