Amazon

Geek Punditry #144: Now Where Do We Find Our Comics Part II

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , ,

In last week’s column, a work of foundational literary greatness which has already replaced things like the Magna Carta in terms of historical significance, we discussed the collapse of Diamond Distribution and the way its disintegration has disrupted things for the comic book world in North America. But that’s only part of the story. Like traditional books, the digital market for comic books has become a significant player. True, comic fans (even more so than readers of regular books) have a strong collector’s mindset and will probably never outgrow the desire for physical copies. But for comic readers, the convenience of digital is appealing to many. 

REMEMBER. REMEMBER WHAT THEY TOOK FROM US.

Once upon a time, there was a great little app called Comixology. It wasn’t the only game in digital comics, but it quickly became the dominant one because it cut deals with virtually every major publisher and almost every minor one you could name. It had a gargantuan catalogue to choose from. There were a mountain of comics available for free as well – lots of first issues and special one-shots in addition to simple previews – enough to let you try almost anything before you started to think about whether you wanted to buy anything or not. There were sales every week, where tons of comics were reduced in price and others were made freebies temporarily. One time, Marvel had an event in which the first issue of EVERY MARVEL TITLE was free for a few days, and the response from people “purchasing” the digital comics was so great that the app crashed and they had to issue rain checks. They even had a program in which independent comic book creators – those making comics on their own without the benefit of a publisher – could submit their work to Comixology and make it available for sale on the biggest digital comic book platform in existence. 

It was popular, is what I’m saying.

“Sounds great, Blake,” you’re saying. “What happened to it?”

Amazon bought it, of course. 

Don’t you smile at me like you don’t know what you did.

Look, I’m not going to get into the various reasons that people hate Amazon. I’m not going to get into politics or the abusive nature of how they treat their workforce. I’m certainly not going to point out the fact that Jeff Bezos really, really looks like Lex Luthor. I’m going to focus on what’s actually pertinent to this column, namely the fact that when Amazon purchased Comixology, they turned it from a fun, easy app to use to read and collect digital comics into a system that – and here I am directly quoting St. Francis of Assissi – “sucks.” 

Like many things Amazon buys, nothing changed…at first. But they slowly began to integrate Comixology’s functions with their own. They married your Comixology library with the library from the Amazon Kindle store, their own digital platform, and eventually they did away with the simple, easy-to-use, easy-to navigate Comixology website. By forcing you to access the digital comics via Amazon’s own website, they absolutely crippled its usefulness. 

On Comixology, it was easy to track comics in various ways – title, publisher, creators. One could simply click on a single title – Amazing Spider-Man, for example – and add each issue that you wanted to your cart, then buy them. Amazon’s interface does NOT make this simple. When you do a search on Amazon your results are determined by algorithm, a word I am beginning to despise in much the same way I despise words like “smallpox” or “cauliflower crust pizza.” So instead of simply searching for Spider-Man and finding the various series of Spider-Man comics, now when I search for Spider-Man I get a dozen “sponsored” results, a couple hundred Funko pops and t-shirts, some movies and TV shows, and EVENTUALLY I’ll find individual comic books that have no logical sequence or arrangement that can be detected by the human brain. It’s an utter mess and nearly impossible to keep track of what you already own or to find what you’re looking for. 

Even worse, Amazon eventually abandoned the Comixology app as well, fusing it with the Kindle Reader. The Kindle Reader is adequate for books, but as a platform for keeping track of thousands of individual comic books amongst hundreds of series, it is an absolute nightmare. I still have my “collection,” but it’s so rare now that I get a digital comic from Amazon that if they shut down the entire system tomorrow, it would be weeks before I would even notice. I DO use the Kindle Reader frequently, mind you, but I have to “hide” the comic books to prevent the app from crushing under the weight loading the ridiculous number of comics I accumulated during the years of Comixology’s existence. When Amazon killed Comixology, they abandoned one good app and made an adequate app less easy to use even when I’m not reading comics. 

This is not to say that I’ve stopped reading comics digitally. Far from it – in any given week I probably read more comics on my tablet than I do on paper (especially with the whole Year of Superman thing I’ve been doing since January). It’s just that I’ve found other ways to do it. And in many ways, these alternatives are far preferable if your ultimate goal is not just to have a paper copy of every conceivable comic in the universe sealed in plastic. There are so many X-Men titles, for example, that trying to collect them all could bankrupt the average American. But with an affordable subscription to Marvel’s digital app, you can read as many of the books as you want if you’re willing to wait a few months.

Marvel and DC both have similar apps with a subscription that lets you read their massive back catalogue, but I think they’re the only two individual publishers that have such a thing. And that makes sense, honestly. The other players in the comic book game are either too small to have a bench deep enough to justify the subscription model (you could potentially read every comic Abstract Studios has ever produced in a couple of months, for example, and then why would you maintain the subscription?) or they are heavily reliant on comics that are owned by their creators (such as Image Comics) and IPs licensed from TV, movies, toys, and so forth (Dark Horse, Dynamite, IDW, and many other publishers have a long list of these). Having so many books owned by different copyright holders makes arranging a digital subscription service difficult and subject to having huge swaths of their catalogues suddenly vanish if their deal with the owner of the IP is not renewed. 

Tunnel, meet light.

There are alternatives, however. GlobalComix, for example, is a service that has a lot of comics – including new comics – available for purchase, as well as a subscription service that gives you access to their entire library for $6.99 a month or $69 for a yearly pass. Their catalogue includes publishers including (but not limited to) Dark Horse, Image, Mad Cave Studios, IDW, anime publisher Kodasha, TONS of small publishers, and even selections from DC and (beginning on Oct. 15) Marvel. It’s not immune to the problems I mentioned before, of course. If a deal with a certain publisher or rightsholder expires and isn’t renewed, then the readers’ access will be cut off. But in this case, GlobalComix has deals with enough different publishers that the loss of any one specific publisher isn’t likely to cause the whole system to collapse. 

You can purchase individual comics to read if you don’t want the subscription, similar to how we all once built up our huge Comixology libraries, but the notion of a digital “collection” seems weird when a subscription is available. If it would cost more to buy two new comics this month than it would cost to buy an unlimited monthly subscription, why the hell buy the two comics? It’s not like you actually “own” them. As we’ve learned with things like licensed movies and music, you never really “own” digital content unless you’ve got it on a hard drive somewhere. All you “own” is a license to read it, and that can be revoked. I guess the only kind of digital exception to that would be something like an NFT, but the whole concept of NFTs is – and once again I’m going to quote St. Francis – “as stupid as a pig touring the Hormel plant.” 

That said, there does seem to be a small niche appearing for digital “collectibles” of a sort, and that’s the concept of personalization. This summer, comic publisher DSTLRY announced that they were launching a new digital comics platform called Neon Ichiban. DSTLRY, it should be noted, was founded by David Steinberger and Chip Mosher, the guys who founded Comixology in the first place before selling it to Amazon in 2014. I guess after their decade-long non-compete clause expired, they decided that something had to be done about the mess that was made of their baby.

“We got out of our beds stuffed with Amazon money because SOMEBODY has gotta fix this mess.” — Steinberg and Mosher, probably.

The program is still in beta at the moment, but I’ve signed up for it and some of the things I’ve seen have been pretty promising. It’s not hard to find what you’re looking for on the site, or to add it to your collection. Technically, I should say, I haven’t actually purchased anything from Neon Ichiban yet. I’m a little reluctant to do so while it’s still in beta, even though I’m sure they intend to roll any beta purchases over into the finished version of the site. I have, however, “bought” several of the free comics available in order to test out the functionality, and it’s not bad.

There are definitely things that need to be improved, primarily the fact that they need to roll out a dedicated app for the service. At present there is no app, and customers have to read their comics through the Neon Ichiban website. The interface is okay, but not nearly as convenient as having an app will be, especially when reading on mobile (which is preferable – to me, at least – to reading on a computer screen). The service is also still fairly new, the Beta only launching in August, so they’re working on building up their back catalogue. I’m impressed by some of the publishers they’ve already partnered with, though, including the juggernauts of Marvel and DC, as well Dark Horse, Vault Comics, Kodansha, and others, with the promise of more to come in the near future. Each week since the Beta has launched they’ve added that week’s new comics from the participating publishers to the service, and they’ve all been slowly adding older books to the library as well. The last time I checked Marvel (not surprisingly) had the largest back catalogue on the site, and although it’s not nearly the number of comics available on Marvel’s own app, it’s not inconsiderable either.

Still, all of this is similar enough to GlobalComix that it would be hard to recommend one service over the other, at least as far as purchasing individual comics goes. And for those who don’t care about “owning” a digital copy, Global’s subscription model gives them the edge. But Neon Ichiban has something that I haven’t heard of before that will probably get people’s attention: some of the comics in their catalogue are labeled “Remarque-able.” Spelling aside, I dug around trying to figure out what the hell that actually means, and from what I can tell, it’s an interesting idea. It seems that “Remarque-able” books will be available to be digitally altered, adding things like digital autographs or commissioned sketches to the comic, similar to the way you can get an artist to sketch on a blank comic book cover now. The idea of a digital autograph seems a little silly to me, to be honest, but if I could commission – for example – Dan Jurgens to draw a one-of-a-kind sketch of Superman on a digital copy of Action Comics #1000…well, I’m not saying I would do it OFTEN, but I admit I understand how such a thing would be appealing to a portion of the audience. There is the question of what – if any – restrictions are in place. If I pay an artist to draw Batman on the cover of a blank Spider-Man, most of them would do it (even if such a request seems odd). Would the same thing apply to a Remarque-able comic, or would they have tighter restrictions on what could be drawn there? Would there be limitations regarding graphic or adult content? And if so, what would they be? I don’t know yet, and those questions need to be answered. Whether I ever did it myself would depend entirely on what artists and books are available and how much it would cost, but it’s something I would at least consider.

So while people in the real world are falling over each other trying to figure out how to get comic books in stores again, there are fortunately already systems in place to keep the digital flow going, and many of them are far superior to what we’re seeing from Amazon. That is, of course, an extremely low bar, but it’s a bar that’s being hurtled nonetheless. 

The future of comics is in flux, I can’t deny that, but I’m not one of those people who think the future is fading either. Comics aren’t going away. They’re evolving in several areas, but people are doing things to get them to the readers, which is where they belong. And like in the physical distribution front, I think having a few different competing digital services is probably a good idea. As much as I liked Comixology, had there been any serious competitors at the time, it wouldn’t have been such a disaster when Amazon ruined it. I haven’t gone all-in on either GlobalComix or Neon Ichiban yet, but knowing that they’re both out there is honestly pretty comforting.

At the moment, though, I’ve still got 90 years of Superman comics to get through first. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Now he’s thinking of commissioning Scott Shaw! to draw a Spider-Ham/Captain Carrot mashup. Really, people, the time has come. 

Geek Punditry #83: The Simple Way to Save the Day

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , ,

The truth is, I kind of blame myself. The very first Geek Punditry column I ever wrote was to extoll the virtues of Star Trek: Prodigy on Paramount+. Then, like a thief in the night, the Paramount bigwigs decided to cancel the show, despite the fact that the second season was nearly finished, and even removed the previous season from the service. A few months later, at the conclusion of Star Trek: Picard, I made a powerfully compelling case (if I do say so myself) for using it as the launchpad for showrunner Terry Matalas’s proposed Star Trek: Legacy project. And yet here we sit, over a year later, with no movement on that front. You would think I would have learned my lesson, but no – upon the conclusion of season four of Star Trek: Lower Decks, I wrote about what makes it the best Star Trek series of the century so far. I may as well have signed its death warrant myself.

“WHY? Why would he TELL THEM he likes us?”

It’s enough to make a guy consider pretending to like crap just to get it off TV.

But no, I refuse to compromise my principles like that. I’m going to keep talking about those things I love, damn the consequences. The word from Paramount+ is that the Lower Decks will end after the upcoming fifth season, but consarn it, this show deserves more. Sure, some people point out that it’s ending after five seasons, same as Discovery, and while there certainly HAVE been “save Discovery” campaigns, they haven’t caught fire or gained traction like the Cerritos fans. I think what you have to remember here is that, as a half-hour animated series, a ten-episode season of Lower Decks only gives us five hours of content, a total of 50 half-hours. A season of Discovery would have as many as 13 episodes, with a runtime usually between 45-60 minutes, totaling 65 episodes at the end of the run. That’s far more than twice the Disco, comparatively. Or to put it in even clearer context, back in the 90s a season of Next Generation or Deep Space Nine could go on for 26 episodes. With commercials, that’s 26 hours of Trek. Lower Decks will end with five five-hour seasons – altogether the entire run of the show will be less than a single season of any of those series we grew up with. It’s simply not time for this show to end.

The good news is, it ain’t over yet. Netflix swept in and saved Prodigy, giving both the first season and the new season a home, and that second season has garnered immense critical and audience acclaim. Matalas still talks about Legacy in a way that doesn’t say “never gonna happen,” but rather, “not at this time.” And then last week, at San Diego Comic-Con (which, as you may recall, I was unable to attend), Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan talked about the future of Lower Decks in a way that seems somewhat hopeful. Specifically, McMahan was quoted by several sources as saying “You’re getting a closure that feels like the end of a chapter, but you’re not getting a closure on the Cerritos or these characters.” In other words, he does not see the final episode of this season as the final word on our pals Beckett Mariner, Brad Boimler, Sam Rutherford, and D’Vanna Tendi. And that’s great, because these are amazing characters with the potential to have more and more adventures for many years to come. 

But perhaps even more encouraging than McMahan’s statement was one made by Alex Kurtzman, the sometimes-controversial figure who is in charge of the entire Star Trek franchise these days. After McMahan suggested that fans “watch the hell out of this season when it airs,” Kurtzman further added, “Watch it twice because, actually, it does register. Finish it, and then watch it again… Guys, your petitions are incredible. They’re incredible. Look what you did for Prodigy. Do it again.”

“That’s right, people! It ain’t over ’till the fat Horta sings!”

If this doesn’t ring in your ears as a call to action, I don’t know what will. Talking to the fans, to the actors, to the creators, to the producers, it doesn’t seem like ANYBODY wants Lower Decks to end, with the exception of the boardroom guys at Paramount. THOSE are the people who have to be convinced. One theory I’ve heard – and one that I think has merit – is that they feel like Lower Decks has too limited a potential audience. To be fair, the show is VERY continuity-heavy and a lot of the stories rely on the audiences’ familiarity with the various incarnations of Star Trek. Paramount would rather focus on projects with an easier entry point for new fans. I get that. I think it’s stupid, but I GET it.

The sad truth is that the “business” part of “show business” is often what makes the creative decisions, and the only way to convince the boardroom guys that a show is worth saving is to give them numbers that indicate such a thing. So yeah, that means watching the show, RE-watching the show, and doing it as soon as possible when it drops, because something else they look at very carefully is how QUICKLY an audience engages with the provided content. 

And this is why it drives me absolutely CRAZY when I see fans talk about how angry they are at Paramount+ (I get that), how they don’t trust Paramount+ to give the show the love it deserves (I get it) and how, rather than paying for Paramount+, they’re just going to download the show illegally (you blithering idiots). 

“That’ll show ‘em!” they say. “I’m not gonna give those evil corporations one thin dime, but I’m STILL going to reap the benefits of what they make!” Swell! And in so doing, you’re putting the nail in the coffin of those things you love.

“For your information, MANY Orions haven’t pirated any movies or TV shows for over FIVE YEARS!”

I’m not going to sit here and debate the morality of pirating TV and movies with you guys. I know I’m not going to change your mind. But I AM going to point out that if you really want a series like Lower Decks to continue, pirating it is one of the WORST things you can do. 

Like I said, the studio looks at the viewership numbers. And to be certain, some of you will point out that large numbers of illegal downloads demonstrate that there’s a demand for a series. Sure, that’s true. But it’s even MORE true that the studio doesn’t give one flying fig for your download numbers because they do not make any money off of those numbers. In fact, every number that rings up for an illegal download is a number that they consider a loss.

“It’s not a loss,” you say, “because I wouldn’t have paid for it anyway.” 

My favorite argument.

I want to put yourself in my position for a moment, guys. You know that I’m a writer. I write books and then I try to convince people to buy them. I am not particularly GOOD at that part, but I try anyway. I’ve even got a little Facebook page where occasionally people talk about them. And there is, I believe, exactly ONE person who is blocked from that page, someone who had read one of my books and liked it, and that’s swell. And then she made a comment about how she downloads all her books to “beat” the big companies like Amazon. And I gotta tell ya, it feels GREAT to know that she swindled Jeff Bezos out of his cut of MY book when I’ve got to buy my kid school supplies with a royalty check that looks like a soccer score. But it’s okay because you wouldn’t have read it anyway? You know, I think I would have preferred that you didn’t instead of you popping onto my page and telling me how proud you are of getting away with something.

Independent authors are eating ramen noodles, but at least Lex Luthor had to settle for only six yachts this year.

But that’s getting back into the morality of it again, and I’m sure nobody wants to hear that, because it may force you to question your judgment. Let’s get practical. The guys in the boardroom look at the pirate numbers and ask – surprisingly logically – “why should we keep spending money to make something that these people are going to watch for free?” The point of a business – ANY business – is to make money, and to continue spending money making a product that loses money is foolishness. 

The way to save Lower Decks – to save ANY television show that’s on the cusp – is to convince the studio that keeping it alive makes financial sense. That means buying the DVDs, getting the t-shirts, snagging the merch, pre-ordering the comic books, supporting the sponsors, and (and this is the part that’s going to make some people angry) WATCHING IT ON A LEGAL PLATFORM. Whether that’s a paid subscription like Paramount+ or a free ad-supported platform like the Roku Channel, these are the ways that the creators of the shows make their money. If you want them to keep making the shows, you need to keep making money for them.

Plus, you’ll still have the physical media if the studio decides to remove it from the app as part of their plan to commit tax fraud.

By the way, I’m talking about TV shows because Lower Decks is the current show that’s sending out the S.O.S. signal, but this is all true of movies and any other form of media as well. Everyone wants to complain that Hollywood has “no new ideas,” that all they make are sequels and spin-offs and remakes. Guys, look at the top movies for the past decade. How many of them are sequels or spin-offs or remakes? Hell, look at the box office receipts for THIS year! As of this writing, the top TWELVE movies for 2024 are all sequels or spin-offs or remakes. You don’t get an original idea (John Krazynski’s imaginary friend fantasy IF) until spot number THIRTEEN. Now ask yourself how many lower-tier movies – movies that AREN’T sequels or spin-offs or remakes – have been downloaded. 

I took a screenshot in case it’s changed by the time you read this. Inside Out 2 totally deserves that spot, by the way.

If you love Lower Decks – and if you’ve bothered to read this far I believe that you do – you need to heed McMahan and Kurtzman’s call to watch it, watch it a lot. But if you don’t watch it the right way, it doesn’t matter at all. If you don’t, then our pals on the Cerritos will join the likes of Trelane, Beverly Crusher’s husband that Picard got killed, and those salamander babies Tom Paris and Janeway had  – a vibrant afterlife on Memory Beta, but in canon, merely a remembrance of something golden.

RED ALERT: UPCOMING PLAYING FAVORITES!

Well, friends, back to school is creeping up on us. Whether your kids go back next week like mine or if you still have a free chunk of August, the time is approaching…so I’m going to celebrate with another PLAYING FAVORITES! In “Playing Favorites,” I throw out a topic and ask YOU to give me categories to cover in an upcoming “Geek Punditry” column. For instance, when the topic was “Christmas,” I was asked for my favorite songs written for a Christmas movie. With the “Superhero” topic I was asked my favorite sidekicks. In the “Summer” topic I talked about my favorite beach movies, and so forth.

This time the topic is SCHOOL. I’m looking for categories that apply to the usual Geek Punditry quadrants: movies, TV, books and comics. As always, I’ll pick my favorite suggestions and give my picks. Let the nominations begin!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He really wants you to think about a creative parent having to explain to their kids why they have to get Rose Art crayons instead of Crayola the next time you download something. Jerk. 

A preorder! A newsletter! Two, two, TWO announcements!

blakemp News, Writing Life , , , ,

Hey, everyone. It’s time for two – count ‘em – TWO announcements that anyone who cares to keep up with what I’m working on will want to know about! First of all, as you know if you keep up with me on social media, January finally brought us to the end of the long-running Kindle Vella serial, Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars. I loved writing that project, spooling out the adventures of Andi, Keriyon, Tony, Vic, and the others for over two and a half years. But so many people couldn’t get Vella or DIDN’T get Vella (it’s still not available outside of the US for some crazy reason), so now it’s time to take the story of Andi Vargas to its permanent home.

Twinkle Twinkle, the first volume in the Little Stars Trilogy, is coming out on May 4! This is an edited version of the Vella serial, with the text cleaned up and some tweaks to fix continuity errors. For the most part, though, it’s the same story you read the first time. The book will be available in both print and eBook, and unlike Vella, it should be available in every market that Amazon covers. And if you’re worried that you’ll forget before May 4th, have no fear! If you want an eBook, you can CLICK THIS LINK to go to Amazon and preorder it RIGHT NOW! 

Now if print is your thing, if you prefer to feel the heft of a ream of paper in your hands, don’t worry. I’ve got you covered. For Amazony reasons I don’t quite comprehend, I can’t set up a preorder of the print edition, but the print book WILL be available on May 4th, same as the ebook edition. And if you’re in the New Orleans area, you can get your eager hands on a signed copy! Join me at BSI Comics on May 4th, which also happens to be Free Comic Book Day! I’ll be there with several other local writers and artists sharing our work. I’m planning to have copies of the new book too (as well as all of the old books) to sell and sign and chat with anyone who wants to say hello.

Funny how that timing worked out, huh?

“But Blake,” you’re saying, “You said TWO announcements. What’s the other one?” Geez what are you, an accountant?

But since you asked…I said you would have heard the first announcement already “if you keep up with me on social media,” but that may not be entirely true. Social media, as we have learned, isn’t quite the reliable democratizer of communication that we all thought it was going to be. Social media is owned by tech companies and tech companies have bills to pay and somehow they think they can pay those bills more efficiently by subjecting us all to algorithms which believe I’m more interested in using Meta AI to search for ski resorts (I am not) than I am in the fact that someone I went to college with is getting married for the fifth time (I am vaguely interested in this one, because somebody is running a betting pool). 

So the solution to this social problem is to go old-school. That’s right, folks, I’m starting an electronic newsletter! 

Yeah, I know it’s 2024. Shut up.

I’m new at this, so consider it a work in progress. I can promise that I won’t spam you with daily emails, though. I hate that too. When you see my name in your inbox I want you to think, “Oh cool, what’s Blake up to?” instead of “Ugh, Blake AGAIN?” As of right now, I’m planning to send no more than one newsletter a week to update you on all things…well…me. I’ll let you know about new stories when they drop, my weekly “Geek Punditry” columns, tell you what I’m working on writing (the current project, I think, is pretty cool), share witty anecdotes and bon mots, and perhaps re-share classic pieces of writing. At least, that’s the current plan. Like I said, I’m trying to figure it all out.

But, BUT, as a special thank you just for signing up, how about an all-new bonus story? When you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll get a special welcome email that includes an EXCLUSIVE SIEGEL CITY SHORT STORY! A brand-new short story set in the world of Other People’s Heroes that I’ve never published or shared online! How’s that for incentive? 

So CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE and be sure to whitelist the email so I don’t go to your spam folder.

Thanks, everyone. I’ll be back Friday with your usual dose of Geek Punditry, then probably on Saturday, check your email for the first regular newsletter. And thanks so much for following along.

A little star falling to Earth…

blakemp Writing Life , , , , , , , , , ,

I woke up to a strange world this morning. Strange to me at least. It’s a world that hasn’t existed since June of 2021. It’s a world where I did not get up and start thinking about what was going to happen next in Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars.

I guess I should back up a little bit. Several years ago, I had an idea. In and of itself, there is nothing special or unusual about this. This is what people who want to use AI to write or make art will never understand. This is what you simply can’t explain to someone who finds out you’re a writer and says, “Oh yeah? I got an idea. How about I tell it to you and you write it and we’ll split a bazillion dollars?” It doesn’t work that way. The ideas are the easy part. It’s doing something with them that counts.

And the period in which this idea came to me was, frankly, the most fallow period of my life in terms of productivity. For reasons I have gone into multiple times and don’t feel like rehashing now, I had an extended period where nothing was working, from a writing standpoint. Even in that barren era, the ideas were there. I had dozens of them that I started working on and simply abandoned because I couldn’t find any traction. Many of them clung to the themes of parents and their children – sometimes from the parents’ perspective, sometimes from that of the child, sometimes from someone in the middle generation dealing with both at the same time. I liked a lot of the ideas. It was the doing something at which I was failing.

Then an idea came to me for a new story in my Siegel City series. This one would not feature Copycat or any of the previous heroes as main characters (although Copycat would grow to more prominence in the story than I originally intended, it is still not HIS story) but a whole new generation of young heroes…plus one young woman who was desperately trying NOT to be a hero. The trouble with this particular idea was that…well…the Siegel City yarns were all novels and short stories, but this was neither. This was a longer tale, something that would be comprised of multiple mini story arcs that would build together into a larger tapestry before finally colliding in a grand finale. It was less like a novel and more like seasons of a television series or a longform comic book. I would have loved to turn it into a comic book, honestly. That’s my most fervent dream.. I even wrote most of the first issue for such an enterprise. But then it died off, as I am largely a one-man operation. It is possible, if not profitable, to write and publish novels and short stories on your own. But it is far more difficult to do so with comic books. I don’t have a publisher and I can’t draw anything so much as a stick figure, and even those look hideously malformed, so producing a comic book as a solo endeavor was out of the question. (Whenever I tell people this, someone inevitably points out how many friends I have who ARE professional comic book artists, and I reply that yes, they are PROFESSIONALS, and as such deserve to be paid for their work, which isn’t really possible for a guy on a public school teacher’s salary.) 

And so I pushed the story aside, thinking it would join a dozen others in this fallow period as a “nice idea, but didn’t go anywhere.”

In spring of 2021, though, the evil empire called Amazon actually kind of saved me. Amazon was launching a new platform called Kindle Vella, in which writers could serialize stories a chapter (or “episode,” as they called it) at a time. That…actually sounded pretty good. I would have the ability to do a longform story without having to pace it like a novel. I could do my arcs. I could take breaks in between, if necessary. And the chapters, as a constraint of the platform, could be no longer than 5000 words. Even in this awful, rudderless time, I thought, I could do 5000 words a week.

And so I did. In June of 2021, I dropped the first three episodes of what had become Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars. It was the story of Andeana Vargas, a high school senior whose mother, Carmelita, was secretly the world-famous and universally-beloved superhero called Shooting Star. Everyone who knew her mom’s secret also knew Andi, and expected her to grow up to be a hero herself, even though Andi had no intention of doing so. Then, at the end of that third chapter (this was important, because on Vella the first three chapters are free, so ya gotta have a hook), a video is leaked to the press that shows Andi’s mother removing her mask and revealing her true name to the world. Where did the video come from? Who made it? And what were they going to do now that their greatest secret was no secret at all?

This past Sunday afternoon, while the Detroit Lions were winning their way to their first NFC Championship game in three decades, I was doing something that was, frankly, much more remarkable: I finished writing Little Stars. The final two installments will both drop on Wednesday, because the final episode isn’t really a chapter in and of itself but more of an epilogue, and I didn’t think it would be fair to make people wait a week for it after the climax of the story. When I began, I thought the story would take maybe a year to get out of me. Of course, when I started writing the original Other People’s Heroes, I thought it would be a short story, too.

Shows what I know.

Two and a half years of my creative life went into this story, and while the journey isn’t quite over for me (more on that in a minute), I think this is a milestone worth sitting back and appreciating. I never thought it would take this long. I never thought it would be this long. But the final word count for all 119 episodes is a little over 400,000 words. That’s more than most people read in two and a half years, let alone write. For you non-writers who may be asking how many pages that is, it doesn’t matter. Page count is a little useless for a writer. It can change from one edition to the next, change because of page size or font size, and it’s impossible to keep track that way. It’s the number of words that matter to us, because word count is constant unless you revise. For comparison, for my own edification, I looked up the word counts of some of the most famous doorstoppers of literary history.

WAR AND PEACE: 587,287 
LORD OF THE RINGS (All three volumes combined): 579,459
LES MISERABLES: 545,925 
THE STAND (Uncut): 467,812
GONE WITH THE WIND: 418,053 
OTHER PEOPLE’S HEROES: LITTLE STARS: 409,206

I didn’t set out to write my Lord of the Rings, and of course I have no intention of comparing myself to Professor Tolkien (Little Stars, for instance, has considerably less food blogging), but just in terms of how much crap we’ve dumped on the page, I’ve actually chiseled out a spot among the giants here. And I feel like I’ve come out revitalized. I’ve done several short stories in the time since I started Little Stars. I started my weekly Geek Punditry columns right here. I feel like I can create again, and the memory of that time in which I couldn’t chases me like a wild bear I need to escape. I don’t want to go there again.

So the question is…what now?

Well, first I drop the end of the story on Wednesday, and I really hope you’ll all be there for it. This is something that clearly means a lot to me, and I hope I stick the landing. But after that, maybe a little break, and then the revision work will begin for the next iteration of Little Stars.

The thing is, guys, as grateful as I am that the Kindle Vella platform exists and allowed me to crawl out of that nonproductive pit of despair I was trapped in, it didn’t work out that well. Amazon was trying to capture the periodical audience that enjoys apps like Wattpad, but I don’t think it’s carried over like they hoped. Part of that is my own pitiful efforts at self-promotion, of course. I am the worst person on the planet in terms of promoting myself because my paralytic imposter syndrome makes me feel like a snake oil salesman if I try to tell anybody I’ve done something good. But another part is that I don’t think Amazon has done a good enough job selling people on the platform. The “token” system seems to confuse a lot of people, and for some inexplicable reason, when Vella launched it was only available on iOS devices – you couldn’t even read Amazon Kindle Vella stories on an Amazon Kindle. Thankfully they’ve fixed that problem and branched out to Kindle and Android, but the stories on Vella are STILL, last time I checked, unavailable outside of the United States. I didn’t know how many international readers I actually HAD until I started posting about Little Stars and got messages from people asking when it would be available in Australia or the UK. The answer to that, by the way, is, “Soon, I hope.”

So while I like the creative challenge of Vella, I don’t think I would do it again, at least not without some major changes to the platform. What does that mean for Little Stars? It means it’s time for me to revise and reformat. Even though the story wasn’t planned as novels, I’ve figured out what I think are the best places to break it down into three acts, three installments…a trilogy, in other words. I thought briefly about just putting out one ginormous mama-jama book with the entire thing in it, but some wise friends convinced me that the trilogy route was much better. Alexis Braud, if you’re reading this, thank you for pointing out that a 400,000 word book just doesn’t fit comfortably in a purse or bookbag. (There is, however, still just enough of a narcissist in me that I may do a custom printing of that mama-jama edition just so I can put it on my own bookshelf and admire the chunkiness of it all.) 

With this new version, there will have to be some changes to make it fit. So after a little bit of a break I’m going to start revising. I don’t intend to make any massive changes to the story itself, but I will probably tweak the details, fix any continuity snarls that I can find, tighten the story up, and hopefully improve the characters and themes that evolved as I went along. When it’s over, while the Vella version will remain, the novel version will be the “official” history of Andeana Vargas as far as Siegel City canon is concerned, and in any discrepancies between the two, the books will be triumphant.

And then?

I have other ideas, of course. I think I made it abundantly clear that ideas are easy. And two of them are fighting it out right now, both of which are stories I worked on in the past and can’t quite get rid of, which I think is a good sign that they deserve revisiting. One of them is a science fiction epic, a story about two sisters trying to hunt down an inheritance left for them on a distant planet known as Earth. This would technically be a YA novel (or series, if I’m being honest), although I currently have no plans for a love triangle involving a bland, Mary Sue protagonist and a pair of bland, interchangeable heartthrobs. No, this is a story about sisters. And their parents, to some small degree, because I really can’t escape that. But mostly the sisters.

The other story I’m considering would bring me back to Siegel City right away. It’s the story of the oft-discussed but mysteriously missing STAT. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I based STAT on an old City of Heroes character of mine and that I had a whole backstory of his that I wanted to put in a book some day. This is the book I’m talking about. I even found myself working in more frequent references to STAT and dropping some Easter Eggs in the final act of Little Stars, little story seeds that would grow in this hypothetical novel. And yes, once again, this would be a story about parents and children. It’s just THERE.

Or maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow with a totally different idea that I can’t help but get started on. I really don’t know.

But the gap between my last novel, The Pyrite War, and the beginning of Little Stars was nine years. Sure, in that time I kept producing my Christmas stories, a couple of novellas, and my humor book Everything You Need to Know to Survive English Class, but the narrative gap was simply too long. I don’t want that to ever happen again.

So on Wednesday, please enjoy the grand finale of Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars. And then keep coming back to see what I’m working on next. Hopefully you’ll be as surprised by it as I will.

One last note – a special and very sincere thank you to Lew Beitz. Lew and I are moderators on the Comic Book Collecting page on Facebook, and over the last couple of years he’s become not only a friend, but the best darn Beta reader I could ask for. And he may be the only person on Earth who loves Keriyon Hall more than I do. That’s saying something.