Adam Graham's Blog: Christians and Superheroes, page 100

Wonder Woman: Mistress of Many Clothes

I finally read a modern Wonder Woman story after reading Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told and was left with a big question. Why does Wonder Woman change clothes so often?

The premise of the story was that Lois Lane was doing a day in the life story following Wonder Woman around and during the course of the day, she has many wardrobe changes.

She begins in the classic Wonder Woman costume in which she addresses a group of college students, but begins a dizzying number of wardrobe changes:

1) She goes back to the JLA watch tower and changes into a smart outfit of a Purple turtle neck and mini-skirt to do science stuff and then does a women's TV show in that outfit.
2) She goes to the White House meets with President Lex Luthor and wears a red drape like dress.
3) She then goes to lunch with Lois and changes into the Wonder Woman costume with a mini-skirt instead of shorts.
4) She goes to Atlanta to tutor African American young people and changes into a basketball playing outfit.
5) She travels to Indonesia and changes into an exercise outfit.
6) She goes to Rwanda and changes back into her Wonder Woman costume with mini-skirt.
7) She goes to the UN and changes into a tunic and and slacks.
8) She goes to Metropolis to volunteer at an AIDS event and wears a t-shirt and jeans with then goes and shoots pool with Lois and has a heart to heart to heart talk.
9) Before leaving the pool hall, she changes back into the slacks and tunic.

In eighteen hours, she wears seven different outfits and changes clothes nine different times.

Superhero comics require a bit of suspension of disbelief when it comes to clothes, particularly in the DC universe where what happens to the civilian clothes of Batman and Superman is a bit of a mystery, but come on. She changes outfits nine times and is never shown carrying a bag.

Throughout the story, she's using JLA teleporting technology to go from one city to another, so maybe she goes up to the Watch Tower for a trip to the "Amazon Princess" room for the change.

Most of these changes seems totally inexplicable. I get that you may want to dress up for a trip to the White House or to represent your country at the UN, and maybe she'd do better not to show up in an Islamic country in her normal attire, but why make most of these changes at all? First of all, she's Wonder Woman and most people are going to expect to see her in costume. If she's going to be dressing up for various places and her outfit considered unacceptable attire for going on television, why wear it to a speech to a University. Why change clothes to go to the AIDS clinic? And why change clothes again to walk down the street and talk with Lois?

I decided to ask my wife about this. Do women have some secret desire to change clothes all the time? I said, "Honey, have you ever wanted to change clothes a lot in a single day?" She gave me a weird look.

When I explained the situation, her first concern was that this was creating a lot of laundry and she wondered who was doing it. The best I can figure out is the Martian Manhunter really enjoys doing laundry and that perhaps this is all some effort to support his training.

Of course, some people might think I'm sexist for noticing this, but I'd defer any accusation and put it on Andy Lanning, the artist who drew this story. He's the one who thinks that the world's most powerful woman wants to change her clothes all day long. While I write superhero parody, I don't think I'm going to touch this in the story, thus the reason for the blog post.

Hope for Superman/Batman Movie Takes a Hit

Ben Afleck as Batman. Seriously?

My hopes that the new Superman-Batman movie will be good just took a hit.

The only hope is that if in hiring Afleck they want to restore Batman to being DC's lesser hero behind Superman. With a right script, Afleck could do that.

But I'll say that the odds of me waiting to see this one at my local discount theater have just gone up.

Why Must Christian Fiction Whisper While Atheist Fiction Shouts?

I finished reading Neil Gaiman's Marvel 1602 which re-imagines the Marvel Universe characters beginning in the 17th century as opposed to the 20th and reimagines most of the characters from the Marvel universe.

It's a very good book, however Gaiman is also a agnostic and his anti-Christian views come into play in 1602. In Neil Gaiman's world, the Protestant and Catholic Churches existed mainly to kill people. And their adherents are universally portrayed as either murderous or superstitious. In fact, you get the idea that the typical Christian ceremony is to go commit a murder after Communion.

Gaiman does briefly acknowledge that Protestants and Catholics were at odds at the era, but he portrays them as coming together around the common goal of persecuting the X-men who the church misidentifies as witches. Magneto has managed to worm his way into being head of the Inquisition and ends up aiding in the assassination of Queen Elizabeth in a plot with Doctor Doom. The Vatican does send a messenger to find out what the heck is going on and Magneto kills him. Then Catholic forces finally seize Magneto and prepare to execute him and even though Magneto is a major supervillain, Gaiman still turns it into another vilification of the the Catholics. At the end of the story, our mostly Godless or Agnostic characters make it to the New World safe from religious zealots.

Of course, in the real world, the fact of the matter is that the people who fled to the new World did so more or less because of religious faith because didn't quite fit the Church of England mold: Puritans, Seperatists, Quakers, and Catholics, not Atheist mutants were the type of people who relocated to the New World. Of course, it can be claimed, this is an alternate history, but the way that one was written shows a very strong anti-Christian bias.

The book wasn't very subtle and it contained no warning label that we were going to be exposed to anti-Christian content. The label is something that atheist reviewers will demand that books with Christian content will contain. Subtlety is something that many Christian fiction experts say is a must. Any Christian content has to be subtle, wrapped within an allegory while covered in similie, and as cleverly disguised as a Trojan horse.

Yet, it's not hard to notice that no one ever thinks that atheist and humanist works have to be more subtle.

Take the legendary Robert Heinlein who wrote Job: A Comedy of Justice a sacrilegious re-imagining of the book of Job that presents a Hell where everyone is nice and a Heaven controlled by upstart Angels.

Even when the hits are less direct, they are often quite obvious. Take for example , the first season finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in which Vedek Winn comes on to Deep Space Nine to protest Keiko O'Brien's school teaching about the science of the wormhole and not about the Prophets (the aliens who are worshiped by the Bajorans and inhabit the wormhole.)

Keiko is incensed and refuses a compromise which would allow her just to not address the whole wormhole thing. She stands firm demanding what will happen when other topics might come up including the origins of life. I wonder what that's all about? Hmmm. At least, Star Trek's writers didn't waste the "The line must be drawn here" line on Keiko, but that was the general idea.

However, Pat Robertson-I mean Vedek Winn continues her crusade even pushing one follower towards violence in the name of religion as she uses her fundamentalism as tool to power.

The whole episode was a slam on religious conservatives, pretty blatant actually.

To be fair, after the death of Gene Roddenberry, DS9 did began to change, taking religion in some form more seriously, as the Prophets got played as more than aliens which many Christian critics view as a positive portrayal of faith. And rather than being really sincere about anything, Winn becomes much more a politician willing to do anything for power.

But DS9 wasn't done slamming religion. In the Season 5 episode, He Who is Without Sin, a fundamentalist group of Christian like folks is portrayed attacking innocent people on the Risa pleasure planet and then attempting to cause real damage with Earthquakes.

Yes, given the chance, orthodox Christians will cause Earthquakes.

And what about all those signs of intelligent design in nature or even the fact that humanoid life dominates in the Star Trek universe? Star Trek: The Next Generation explains that it was all seeded by ancient humanoids, the last ditch theory for anyone who can't see everything happening randomly but don't want there to be any God.

And all of this was published or produced for television. If the opposite point of these works was made in the same manner by Christian writers, it would have many Christian editors and fellow writers upset and pointing out the need for subtlety, the need not to portray people you disagree with as caricatures, and the need to avoid so obviously and blatantly preaching.

None of this constrains secular authors. If you can do it well (and oftentimes even if you can't), you can use your stories to teach atheism, paganism, universalism, or satanism, just as long as it's not Christianity. That needs a warning label.

I can get why secularists like this sort of double standard. What I can't get is why so many Christian writing experts are going along with it.

When every other philosophy and belief can be proclaimed as blatantly as you like, a Christian message in books has to be harder to find than Waldo at a convention of people who wear red and white striped shirts.

This isn't to say every book a Christian author writes ought to have a very blatant Christian message. Indeed, the story as well as the author's style often dictates another approach. But Christian authors and editors who are demanding every story be subtle are helping to establish a double standard of self-censorship for Christian fiction.

Why should they do it?

The Pitfalls of the Strong Female Character

Sophia McDougall, writing over at the New Statesman writes a provocative piece, begins by her saying, "I hate strong female characters."

An interesting premise. She says that while she loves "all sorts of female characters who exhibit great resilience and courage." But that there's a certain trope that's developed.

I remember watching Shrek with my mother.

“The Princess knew kung-fu! That was nice,” I said. And yet I had a vague sense of unease, a sense that I was saying it because it was what I was supposed to say.

She rolled her eyes. “All the princesses know kung-fu now..."

The Strong Female Character has something to prove. She’s on the defensive before she even starts. She’s George from The Famous Five all grown up and still bleating with the same desperate lack of conviction that she’s “Every Bit As Good as a Boy”.

There's a good deal more in the column, some of which I'll agree with, some of which I think is stifling to creativity. For example, she demands a 1:1 male ratio of male to female characters. I don't think writers and creators can work on a quote system.

But I think she's right that the "strong female character" (SFC) has become a trope in a lot of movies, books, and TV shows are out only to show a female character is capable of beating someone down. That's what we get of the Black Widow and Maria Hill in the Avengers.

But that's really a one dimensional portrayal that's not interesting. One of my big problems with the fourth Season of Batman: The Animated Series was the amount of screen time given to Batgirl. It wasn't that Batgirl has to be a boring character, but it is that the writers made her that way. While her initial appearance was fun, she was a boring SFC in Batman: The New Animated Series and grew up to be a boring SFC authority figure in Batman Beyond. And when Batgirl and Supergirl team up? Same thing. It was two of the same characters.

The real interesting characters in Batman were Batman and the Robins. They were the ones with complex relationship issues and each had lost parents.

Of course, DC did get a little better over time. In the Justice League series, the character Shyera (Hawkgirl) after spending the first season as just a typical brawling SFC, really became an interesting character particularly among all the mayhem of one short characters in the later "Unlimited" series.

Similarly, Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes developed a lot of female characters with a variety of personalities. While Hill remains just kind one note "Strong," the series featured great characters like Miss Marvel, the Wasp, and Jane Foster, all with distinct personalities and strengths that made them one.

Still, I think that there are places that many writers are willing to go with male characters that they just won't go there with female characters.

If you watch through a TV series like Justice League or The Avengers, the scenes showing the most compassion. In Justice League Unlimited, Batman is told to kill Ace from the Royal Flush gang by Amanda Waller, but instead turns in one of the most touching performances in the DC animated universe history as he pursuades her to change reality back and then sits with her until she dies. It's noteworthy that on this mission, he had three f superheroines with him it's hard to imagine any of them doing what Batman did.

It's as if there's a belief that compassion is somehow a weak or feminine trait and that it'd be sexist to show the female action hero using it, but it'd be good writing and against gender stereotypes to show a male character acting with compassion. Thus you end up with female characters that aren't as developed and just aren't as likable.

To me going against this type of writing is what made the Spider-girl comics so successful. My wife and I are both huge fans of the alternate universe story featuring the daughter of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. The character isn't always strong or perfect. She's just a kid trying to do the right thing. She's got personality and character that makes her shine. She shows mercy and tries to do the right thing even if she doesn't always get it right. She's a complete well-developed character that doesn't always need to prove herself or punch someone in the face. The strength she showed while powerless and in the hands of the mad Normie Osborne in Spider-girl #27 was so amazingly powerful.

While the Golden Age was notorious for one dimensional damsels(I'm reading through the Golden Age Marvel Comics Omnibus, Vol. 1 and all the screaming females being rescued are interchangable.) they could also create some interesting characters when they weren't constantly worried about being called sexist for not adhering to the SFC model.

Candy Matson was a great 1948-50 radio series based in San Francisco that a character that could take care of herself. She shot someone, she had a mid-air fight in airplane, and lots of peril and action. But she also didn't take herself too seriously. She could show warmth, humor, and compassion. She was just a great character.

The same thing goes for Barbara Denning's Mrs. North in the TV series Mr. and Mrs. North from the early 1950s. Many of her zany antics may get an eye roll from feminists as she can seem ditzy or someone whose patronized. But she's also was the one who almost usually solved the case, showing pluck, courage, and cleverness that left many murderers wishing they hadn't encountered such a surprisingly dangerous foe. Mrs. North much like Columbo would let her foes underestimate her and then *bam* catch the murderer.

And perhaps, that best explains why the SFC continues to dominate in action stories. It's a safe type of character to create. No one's going to send a letter complaining about SFCs. Indeed, columns like this and Ms. McDougall's are rarely written and I would never have written this if a woman hadn't written the piece first.

Both male and female viewers feel like they are obligated to like these characters no matter how bland or boring they really are. Wandering too far from the SFC, making your female characters too nuanced, or using any characteristics that could be "stereotypical" could result in bad reviews and a torrent of emails. Much better to have a "strong character" no matter how underdeveloped they really are.

The challenge is to make all characters well-written and well-rounded regardless of gender and to give authors the freedom to do that.

Indie Life: With ACX, There's no Good Reason Not to Do An Audiobook

I read a book from the early part of the 21st Century that placed doing an audiobook as a very expensive way to promote your work with expensive studio and production costs.

By the time, I'd read that, I was already in process of publishing my sixth audiobook production at no cost to me.

ACX (the Audiobook Creator's Exchange) brings together writers and narrators to put together audiobooks for download at Audible.com, Amazon.com, and the Itunes store. Authors can produce their book with no upfront costs, by agreeing to split audiobook profits with the producers. (Note: You do also have the option of paying your producer an hourly rate.)

Of course, you may question why you want to split the royalties with a narrator when you can do it yourself. The good news is that ACX is set up so if you have the talent, you can do it yourself and keep all the royalties, but some of us have a simplistic view of what doing an audiobook takes.

I always thought I'd do my own audiobook. After all, I have a pretty good reading voice. Alas, that's not enough. You have to produce a product that runs for hours without any skips or stumbles and then edit it into a professional package. I made two stabs at starting to record Tales of the Dim Knight and neither went well or got beyond the first chapter. The audiobook for Tales of the Dim Knight is 11 hours and I'd never made it through without professional help that would have cost hundreds of dollars. Audiobook producers earn every center they get.

The royalty payments from ACX are generous beginning with 50% for you and your producer to split from the first copy sold and increasing based on your number of sales. If you sell 20,000 copies, the royalty goes up to 90%. Even if you're splitting some of the money with your producers-royalty rates of 25-45% are hard to beat.

While I can't guarantee you'll rake in the big bucks with 20,000 sales, you will have a new outlet for your books that has less competition. While the number of people who listen to audiobooks increase with our busy lives that makes sitting down and reading a luxury, their options remains pretty limited. There are millions of books on Amazon, there are more than a million of books for the Kindle.

There are just over 100,000 audiobooks available on Audible and Itunes. That's a lot of room for authors to find a place in the market.

So, how do you get your audiobook published through ACX. The website will have the general details, but I can relate my experience with each aspect of the process:

1) Post Your Project to Find a Narrator: Unless you have a specific narrator in mind, or you want to try searching for your dream narrator, the easiest thing to do is to post your project to make it searachable for the available narrators.

The one part of the process that's worth commenting on is the audition script. Choose a piece of your work that represents it best. If it's a work of fiction, use one of your important scenes. Does it sound like you want it to? Don't just choose the first chapter, choose something that conveys the tone of the book at its best.

2) Wait for a Narrator: The most difficult part of my process was waiting for a narrator. If you opt for a passive approach of waiting for a narrator, let me urge you to be patient. Someone will come along because narrators want to have work and build their audiobook business just as much as you want to have an audiobook done. In my case, it took months on each project, but every single audiobook I submitted found a narrator.

Don't just take any narrator who submits. I received an audition for
All I Needed to Know I Learned From Columbo that was so wrong, I marked it no. This is your book and you want someone who can make it great.

I was very lucky to find Scott Wilcox who did Tales of the Dim Knight and the Adventures of Powerhouse, giving voice to each of the characters and making each character sound unique.

3) Wait for the Finished Product: You'll need to make an offer when you find the right narrator. Set reasonable timeframes and then wait. Be patient with reasonable delays. As it happens to writers, it happens to audiobook producers. If you write long enough as an Indie author, you'll miss a deadline. Same thing will happen with producers.

4) Carefully Review the Finished Project:

This is the part where you work. You sit down and you listen to your own audiobook. To me, this is actually pretty fun. To hear my own words read by a professional is a wonderful experience.

It's also important to make sure you put out the best product. The changes will usually be minor, but you have to work to make it as good as possible.

And once the changes are made, you approve the Audiobook, wait three weeks and the whole world can not only read your book, they can listen to it as well

Linked back to Indie Life

Is the Ending of the Back to the Future All About Materialism?

Crispin Glover who played George McFly in the original Back to the Future didn't come back for the sequels. And he claimed that there was a big philosophical reason for not returning:

He noted that he wasn't the only person asking questions about the original ending "It had to do with money, and what the characters were doing with money ... I said to Robert Zemeckis I thought it was not a good idea for our characters to have a monetary reward, because it basically makes the moral of the movie that money equals happiness". Glover argued "the love should be the reward", and "Zemeckis got really mad" over Glover's questioning.

This shows a Hollywood actor can be part of a great movie and entirely miss its point. The ending of Back to the Future wasn't about materialism, in the end it was about the power of a father to shape his family's destiny.

Warning: This discussion will contain spoilers for any of the three people who haven't seen it yet and you ought to

At the beginning of the movie before Marty goes back to the 1955, George McFly is a joke. He's been being pushed around by the same bully he has for more than 30 years. Biff Tannon is still getting George to do his work for him and reaping the profits.

George won the love of his wife because he was peeping into her window, fell out and got hit by a car. She felt sorry for him. Again pathetic.

Even worse, we learn that George McFly would let Biff interfere with his kids and call his kids name without any defense. George McFly was a weak immature man who never grew up and was never really challenged to. No wonder his kids grew up a bunch of insecure underachievers.

However, one moment in 1955 when he laid out Biff Tannon to save the lovely Elaine. The same woman fell in love with him: not because he was pathetic, but because he'd stood up for her. He grew up and developed moral courage. He became a different man and it changed the destiny of his entire family. Yes, that meant Marty had a nice truck, but it also meant he had a better family whose lives were touched by a father who could stand up for himself and for them.

Understanding that, I can get why Robert Zemeckis got mad because a 20 year old actor came in and suggested a major rewrite because he didn't actually understand what the movie was about. The sad thing is that all these years later, Glover still doesn't.

How Superman Was Interesting: Even Without Kryptonite

It's an oft-repeated warning to writers that basically says, "Don't make a character like the golden age Superman. He was perfect and could defeat anyone. There was no tension and so they had to introduce kryptonite and then they used it all the time to keep stories interesting, so that Superman could in theory be defeated."

It's not a bad piece of writing advice: a character who can't be defeated can get really boring.

However, the illustration is a big misnomer and misnomers bother me. Similarly, I'm bothered by people saying that Joe Friday from Dragnet always said, "Just the facts, ma'am." when Joe Friday never said that. It came from a Stan Freberg parody.

Similarly, Superman was far from a boring character who needed Kryptonite as a crutch to excite the public imagination. The Golden Age Superman was a beloved and best-selling character that had become a star of film, comics, and radio.

Without anything that could easily imperil his life, Superman was pretty darn interesting in the 1940s, and I'll take a look at some of the ways readers were entertained and perhaps there are some other ideas that can serve writers well.

Catharsis: Golden age Superman was all about catharsis. Quite a few of his battles were against common criminals, unethical and greedy businessmen, and corrupt politicians. Foul, cry many fans: they're no physical match for Superman.

True, but strange as it seems, these characters really were antagonists of real people: racketeers that extorted money and ruined people's lives while corrupt police took payoffs. There were businesses that operated under extremely unsafe conditions. And there were arms dealers who helped to foment the first World War and then turned a huge profit when ten million people died such as Basil Zaharoff.

So in Action Comics #1 when Superman took on gangsters, a wife beater, and an arms dealer who was trying to start a war, Superman was taking on real threats. Superman was advertised as "savior of the oppressed" and if you're oppressed, you really don't care how close or how fair the battle is, you want oppression taken care of.

The escapism of Superman was that you could go into a world where people who spent their lives oppressing others were turned to quivering masses before Superman and that's satisfying in the same way that the Dirty Harry or the Death Wish series in the 1970s, though Superman was far more benign an expression of this instinct.

The same catharsis would be key in comic books in general when our heroes started taking on the Nazis and Japanese who were fighting American soldiers overseas.

Secret Identity: Another key aspect of Superman stories was needing to do his Superman stuff while maintaining his secret identity. This would be a challenge as he'd have to find ways not to blow his cover while fighting bad guys. Sometimes, it would be easy, but other times it would be a more challenging problem when people began seriously hunting for his identity.

Mystery: Superman stories were often set up as mysteries. If Superman knew who the villain was, it'd be simple for him to take care of the bad guy but Superman often didn't know who was behind it. Sometimes, he'd have to fight his way through multiple minor bosses to at last get the connect he needs to the big boss. You throw in a good old fashioned time bomb and you're set for a great Superman adventure that's just as good or better than what characters like Batman, the Shadow, or Doc Savage would have.

Testing Limits: While we know that most any effort is going to fail to stop Superman, audiences really didn't know what could stop Superman. So villains tried their worse. One villain called the Ultra-Humanite was actually able to knock Superman out in early Superman story. And of course Mister Mxyzptlk made plenty of mischief long before Kryptonite was a factor.

Similarly, Superman got knocked for a loop when fighting a comet in the Fleischer Cartoon, The Magnetic Telescope..

One of my favorite stories from the Superman Daily Comic strip took place over eight months and had a group of mad scientists called, "The Scientists of Sudden Death." trying to kill Superman with each taking their turn with another strange device. (note this story is collected in Superman: The Dailies, 1941-1942)

Even today, while Kryptonite is the most famous way to get at the Man of Steel, it 's far from the only way. Magic is the most common example, but several aliens gave Superman a run for his money during the golden age.

Missions of Mercy: Many early Superman stories were capable of warming the heart. Superman was not just a character who fought bad guys, but he cared about people. In any early Superman Comic, he helps a down on his luck former boxer get back into the ring by taking his place. In a comic strip series, Lois is editing the lovelorn column and throws away a letter from someone viewing him as utterly pathetic and unimportant. Clark Kent takes another view, "This fellow and his problem may seem petty, but to him it's the greatest crisis in the World! Big problem interest me and it looks as if Eustance and Superman are going to get together."

He finds a guy whose being pushed around by everyone and helps him become more assertive, get the girl, and defeat a bully of a rival. Of course, there's some great fun and super powers along the way.

There are other great stories like, "The Girl Who Didn't Believe in Superman." or "Christmas Around the World" which has Superman travelling with refugees to war-torn portions of the Earth. No Krytonite, no supervillains, just a lot of love and a lot of heart for humanity.

Humor: Superman and his writers could just have fun. One great example was a comic strip series that had Clark Kent drafted to play Superman in a movie due to his similarity to Superman and Lois unable to believe that anyone could think that boring Clark Kent looked like Superman.

Morals: Superman also could use his powers to teach morals. In one 1940s story, a conman conned several businesspeople hoping to avoid some of the post-war problems a chance to go to sleep in a machine that would allow them to wake up in a brighter future. Superman rather than merely exposing the con, flew the house to the middle of nowhere and used his powers to build the type of world where people sat around and waited for things to get better rather than working hard. The lessons to the characters and the readers was clear and pretty well executed, even though most modern experts will dismiss such a story as preachy.

At the end of the day, the early Superman stories weren't great literature, but they were a lot of fun to the original readers and I enjoy them quite a bit.

I think that people who are interested in superheroes owe it to themselves to sample these early Superman stories and decide for themselves whether they enjoy them rather than listening to well-intentioned examples that don't paint the whole picture.

Realm Makers Conference After Action Report

More than 60 Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy writers showed up for the Realm Makers Conference in St. Louis at the University of Missouri St. Louis (note: this is different from St. Louis University as I learned after spending an hour wandering around the dormitories of the wrong campus in the dark.)

The conference was organized by Becky Minor who did a very good job. She organized this conference in St. Louis mostly from her home in Pennsylvania.

No conference is without its issues. I took part in planning three conferences in Boise from my home in Boise and I ran into enough issues to know what a task it is on that level. On the level that Becky did it, it's a great achievement, with few snags along the way.

I hope this becomes an annual event and I was honored to be there for the first one.

What we had was two very full days of writing and fellowship. We heard from industry leaders in the Christian Sci Fi/Fantasy industry.

Some highlights:

1) No Indie/Small Publisher is Writing the Breakaway Christian Speculative Best Seller: Our conference featured the very talented and prolific Bryan Davis, as well as Kathy Tyers who has written for the Star Wars franchise and had some successful Christian books for Bethany.

However, the bulk of the authors were from smaller presses and indie authors. The results mentioned were cause for thought. On average, book sales for small publishers like Marcher Lord Press and Splashdown books were in the hundreds per title, with a few books reaching the high number of the low thousands.

On one hand, the numbers are sobering suggesting that by and large, Indie Christian Speculative Authors aren't finding their market. On the other hand, it does mean that just because you're not selling thousands of Christian speculative book doesn't meant that you're doing something wrong within the genre.

Hard work was identified as the key. One indie author said it was her practice to keep writing books and because of that she was averaging sales of 150 titles per month. Even Davis has enjoyed his success to his tireless promotional schedule. The key is hard work. Of course, those of us with full time jobs are looking for a "smarter not harder" way, but it may just be more time, more work, and more study. But the positive take away was that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with where I was as a Small press/Indie author of Christian Speculative fiction.

2) Worldviews Matter: One of my favorite sessions was
L.B. Graham's class on worldviews in fiction. I thought this was so helpful as he went through examined how the worldsviews of men like Asimov and Ray Bradbury came out their fiction.It served as a good reminder to be sure of our own worldview and the message we're communicating with our fiction which can be as important as some of the content issues that people address if not more so.

3) Comics Are Cool: Matt Yocum who has written for the Avengers, Wolverine, and for Indie Comics gave a presentation on comics and then we had a 1-on-1 where I talked with him about my ideas for a Tales of the Dim Knight graphic novel/comic series. Also, during the Saturday night book signing, his table had to be one of the most popular, as people were intrigued by comics.

There is huge potential in the comic book world. I think there are many things about it that are done poorly in mainstream comics that hurt the medium. Having to know 50 years of comic book history to know what the heck is going on is probably a disincentive, as are many of the plot choices, but I think that are small group had an interest that could be made greater with the right writers and creators.

4)Just Write It: One of the least productive "debates" among Christians is whether Christians should only be authors of Christian Fiction or Christians who Write Fiction.

Jeff Gerke, an author of several books on writing and the publisher of Marcher Lord Press took this on his closing remarks saying that Christians who write were called either to write to challenge the Church or to write to the broader world, and that rather than fighting among ourselves, we should, "Let Peter go to the Jews and Paul go to the Gentiles." and bless each other in our callings. Amen to that.

More than that though, Gerke suggested that we needed to get some liberty just as authors when it came to all "the rules" that fiction writing experts place on writers as absolutes that really are just opinions. He described how writers could be frustrated, discouraged, and confused when giving conflicting rules by different experts. One expert demands that description be cut while another demands copious amounts of it so that they can see the scene. An author changes his work for expert #1 only to get slapped down for the changes he made by expert #2. This is a real life scenario that just drives writers nuts.

Gerke talked about writing a book that would take a look at all of these rules, examine the various opinions on questions like description and the use of prologues as to why different experts come down on different sides of these debates so that writers can find their own voice and write their books the way they want to.

To me, this is a book concept I'm very excited about and I think its really needed so that authors can focus on writing their books in a way that engages readers rather than impossibly trying to please every single writing expert.

Once again, this was a great conference and I look forward to more.

Sample Satuday: Is This a Job for Powerhouse?

From Powerhouse: Hard Pressed, Dave Johnson teaches a lesson about what superhero does and what all of our jobs are:

Dave Johnson slouched on his living room couch as he read from The Superman Chronicles Volume 10, a soft cover collection of comic books.
The door to Derrick’s and James’ room creaked open.
Dave called, “Is your homework done?”
“Not yet,” Derrick crept into the living room. “I promise I’ll get it done before bed. I need to talk to you before you go back to the city.”
Should he? The only way Naomi would let him play with the kids when they got home from school was if they got their homework done after dinner. If it was important, it’d be okay. Dave put away The Superman Chronicles. No need to rush. He’d have to wait years to read the next one. “What is it?”
“I have a job for Powerhouse.” Derrick massaged his neck. “There’s a kid at school, Joanie Burns. She’s always getting picked on by this jerk Jordan Reno and nobody does anything.”
“You want me to go beat up a fifth-grader?”
“A really big one! You’ve helped some kids in Seattle.”
“Son, this is the kind of thing where I only try to set a good example for others to follow. I don’t want everyone to become dependent on me to take care of things they should really be doing themselves.”
“What does that mean?”
“This isn’t a job for Powerhouse.” He patted his son’s back. “It’s a job for Derrick Johnson. It sounds like she needs a friend.”
“Not me! Everybody’d tease me and say I had a girlfriend.” Derrick shuddered.
Thank goodness his son wasn’t the sort of fifth grader already checking out girls and wanting to date. It couldn’t be healthy for kids to grow up so fast. “No one ever said being a hero was without its risk.”
“Guess so.” Derrick gave Dave a hug. “Thanks, Dad.”
“No problem, son, but you’d better go finish your homework.”

Read more in Powerhouse: Hard Pressed.

New England Comics is Awesome

As human beings, we tend to complain a lot. If we have a bad customer service experience, the world knows about it. A good one? Not so much.

I ordered a Tick Trade Paperback from Amazon with New England Comics. The Trade got lost in the mail. They not only sent me a replacement copy, they also threw in a free copy of Tick 100, a $7 value for free.

Cool service and really thankful.