Year: 2016

I will be attending this year, along with Kathleen and Caroline. I am an actual guest this year and will be doing panels and also have a table in Artist’s Alley. I will have copies of “Pyramid Schemes” among other things, so come by and visit.

PAD

For the first time in years, I was able to walk into a standard box store rather than a Big & Tall shop and buy several pairs of pants. A necessary purchase because I’ve dropped four inches off my waist and so the trousers I’d been wearing kept threatening to slip off.

I’ve lost a total of 57 pounds so far. Still have a long way to go, but at least I can shop for clothing without having to go to special stores anymore.

PAD

I’ve noticed fans lately commenting on the fact that Marvel is routinely renumbering and relaunching series. Some fans see this as a relentless marketing gimmick while others seem to understand the need for doing so: to attract new readers.

If it were up to me–if I were running Marvel–I would do away with numbering entirely.

There’s no point to it anymore.

It’s not like in the days where I was first buying comics, where I could cheerfully buy “Action Comics” or “Detective Comics” and not feel compelled to obtain the previous several hundred issues worth of books. Nowadays the longer a book goes, the more the numbering serves as a disincentive. If a book gets up even to the twenties or thirties, new fans won’t be bothered to pick it up because they don’t want to invest in the considerable capital required to purchase the previous books; and no one wants to come into a story that is already underway, no matter how much Marvel might be putting summaries on the title page. So the numbering discourages new readers from coming aboard while simultaneously you’ll lose readers through attrition, if nothing else.

As far as I’m concerned, numbering has outlived its usefulness. When was the last time anyone gave a dámņ which issue number “Time” or “Entertainment Weekly” was up to? I would simply put the month and year on the cover for reference and be done with it. This is the July 2016 issue of “Spider-Man 2099.” What more do you need to put it in the correct order in your longbox?

If Marvel just does away with numbering, yes, they’ll lose the advantage of relaunching with a new number one. But the more number ones they produce, the more they make people tired of the obvious promotion. On the upside, they’ll stop losing potential new readers, so to my mind, that’s a wash.

PAD

Yes, the latest adventure of “Sir Apropos of Nothing” is now an ebook. You can get it here.

Now please, for God’s sake, don’t start asking me about half a dozen other formats because you only read things on iTunes or ePub or anything else. It’s out in two formats which is one format more than when I was reading books back in the day. Just go buy it.

PAD

So about a month ago, George Takei’s husband, Brad, told me at a convention that the new incarnation of Sulu, played by John Cho, was going to be established as gay. He told me to keep it under my hat, that it was top secret.

Yeah, well, so much for that.

Some fans are crying foul, including George himself, declaring that it flies in the face of Trek continuity. Well, as the guy who wrote “Demora” in which Sulu is most definitely not gay, I’m here to say:

The fans are wrong. Even, with all respect, George is wrong.

In 79 episodes and all the movies, there is simply nothing to establish that Sulu is hetero. Yes, he has a daughter. Neil Patrick Harris has kids, too, so so much for that argument. He only displayed hetero leanings in exactly one episode: “Mirror Mirror” in which he is coming on to Uhura. But that wasn’t our Sulu. That was the Sulu of the mirror universe, and if the mirror Sulu is aggressively straight, then I suppose it makes sense that our Sulu would be gay, right? He’s the opposite, after all.

Sure, it blows my novel out of the water, but the moment they blew up Vulcan, ALL our novels became moot, so it’s kind of late to bìŧçh about it at this point.

What it comes down to is this: if Spock can be romantically involved with Uhura, which was scarcely hinted at in the original series, then Sulu–who never had the slightest romantic relationship previous to this–can be gay.

PAD

Yes, despite absolutely no requests at all, Sir Apropos of Nothing has returned. This time his adventures take him to the ancient land of Rogypt where he must free a race of slaves while avoiding a mummy’s curse. It’s “Pyramid Schemes,” now available in paperback, with the eBook version out in a few days.

You can find it here.

PAD

Finally.

Finally finally FINALLY. Hollywood has given us a Tarzan film about the character created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not a monosyllabic swinging caveman. Not basically an American running around in a loin cloth. This film is freaking TARZAN of the freaking APES.

And of course the dumb ášš critics, the same ones who lambasted “John Carter” into oblivion, are dismissing it for no good reason.

This is quite simply the first Tarzan film I’ve ever seen that seems like it could have been drafted directly from an ERB novel. Featuring a sidekick who is clearly out of his depth (as was commonplace in the ERB novels) and a villain based on an actual historical figure, “The Legend of Tarzan” moves its way deftly between John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, as he tries to balance his life between being a British aristocrat and a denizen of the jungle.

Alexander Skarsgard is thoughtful and brooding as the ape man as he alternates between dealing with his current crisis and having flashbacks to his origins, and Margot Robbie is game as a 21st century woman portraying the distinctly 19th century Jane Porter (correctly portrayed as American, although her origins are somewhat different.) Christopher Weitz is comfortably evil, as we’ve grown accustomed to him being, and Samuel L. Jackson serves as something of a conscientious everyman as the historically based George Washington Williams. He provides a consistent 19th Century point of view of a man who has come through the civil war and is concerned about slavery as a broader issue.

What amused me is that one of the few positive reviews I’ve seen of the film likened Tarzan to Aquaman, which is funny considered I often likened Aquaman to Tarzan. Two lords of their environment who can communicate with animals.

Is it perfectly paced? No. The first half drags in places. But it’s totally worth sitting through. One review said in its headline that this is not your grandfather’s Tarzan. Yes, it is. This is the Tarzan that your grandfather read about as a kid and loved. You should, too.

PAD