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On the Jacket
Curt found himself realizing he hadn’t forgotten a thing over the last seven years. Every twist and turn of the sewers, every second’s reflex, was carrying him through the passageway at top speed.
It all felt so natural to him, that it was almost dreamlike. Max’s uniform... the Omerican’s uniform... fit him like a glove. After debating, deliberating, considering… when he heard the news report of a strange egg-like rock that had appeared in town, he had finally thrown caution to the wind, and put Max’s uniform on. Then he’d jumped on Max’s bike and hit the starter. It had thumbed to life instantly. The bike felt not much different than his, although much more powerful, and incredibly quiet. He’d opened the camouflaged door into the tunnels that led to the L.A. sewer system, twisted the throttle, kicked the bike left, and arrowed down the black tunnel.
Now he was breaking out into the light, sliding to the right, avoiding the wet center of the trough, and accelerating northward at the limits of the bike’s horsepower.
Curt was heading into a battle situation.
He couldn’t help but smile. It was like coming home.
He shook his head in concentration, as he approached The Ramp. Max had made a minor modification to some of the access ramps in the sewer system that allowed a rider on a motorcycle to jump over the security fences. Curt set himself, gunned the bike up the ramp, and flew into the air.
When he cleared the lip of the drainage wall, fully ten feet over the street, a red-white-and-blue uniform on a matching motorcycle, he was sighted almost immediately by a boy eating an ice cream cone. The boy’s eyes popped out of his head, and he dropped his cone in his excitement. He leveled an arm at the colorful figure and yelled at the top of his lungs.
“Look! It’s the Omerican! He’s not dead! He’s back! HE’S BACK!!”
Curt saw quite a number of such responses as he flew down the city streets. It was heartwarming to know how much respect Max had among the people of L.A. It occurred to him that he was carrying a large mantle with him on that bike. He hoped he wouldn’t let them down. He hoped he wouldn’t let Max down.
He brought the bike to a stop a block away from his destination. He didn’t need to get any closer; he could see his target just fine from there. Whatever it was, it was three stories tall, white, bulbous, and sitting in the middle of the street. A small crowd had formed around it, but they were keeping their distance from it, and talking among themselves. A few policemen stood among the crowd, keeping them back, but they weren’t being challenged. Probably due to the reports of lightning coming from it, Curt decided.
He got off the bike, and reached into a hard case mounted next to the seat. Curt had loaded the arsenal into it, all of the Omerican’s heavy fighting gear. He selected a harness that held mini grenades, a magnum pistol, thermite bombs, and a holstered rifle, and strapped it on. Then he advanced into the crowds.
When he was noticed, a number of people pointed and shouted. Before he knew it, a cheer had gone up in the crowd, and the people parted like a tide to let him through. A few people patted him on the back, calling out, “Good to see you back, son!” and “Go get ‘em, Omerican!,” and Curt found himself feeding on the positive energy of the crowd.
Thanks to the cheering of the crowd, Curt almost didn’t notice when some kid picked up a chunk of brick, and hurled it at the white mass, shouting, “You’re gonna get it now, meat!”
The brick struck, and an explosion of lightning immediately followed. People screamed and dove for cover under the lances of electricity, and Curt soon found himself alone in the street. Then he felt the hairs on his arms suddenly stand on end, and training took over. He bounded to the right, took two steps, and launched himself into the air. The arc of electricity shot out and impacted the spot he had been standing on, but he was already forty feet from there, and fifteen feet up. His gloved hands caught the fire escape of the nearby building, and he swung himself up to the next landing. He pulled the rifle from its holster as he lighted.
He remembered standing smack in the middle of the street, wide-eyed, dumbfounded. Staring up at a four-story glob of green jelly with one eye and a mouth, something from a dumb cartoon come to life. Fifth week on the streets with Max, and every bit of fourteen. It was all bank robbers and megalomaniac nutcases before. What the hell was this?
He was frozen in shock, as a glowing tentacle reached out for him, then unfrozen as Max swooped around and propelled him behind a parked car. “Wake up, son! There’s work to do!” “W-what is it? Omerican, what is that thing?” “That’s not important, now. It’s killed eight people... that’s what’s important. And it’s our job to stop it. That’s why we wear the colors.”
He watched as Max drew a collapsible lance from his belt, and stood up confidently from behind the car. “Worry about what it is later. But we stop it now.” He took three steps and pole-vaulted—Jesus, he’s thirty feet high! —to its eye level, swinging the lance back around in mid-air. Curt came up from behind the car himself as it batted Max’s lance away. Extending his fighting staff, Curt rushed forward as it turned after Max. Gotta help Max. Gotta stop it. That’s why we wear the colors...
He couldn’t even hear the cheers and screams of the bystanders. All he could think was: Time to earn these colors.
He cocked and fired...
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Midgard's Militia: Pulp Screaming to Get Out
Imagine a world of Superheroes: The godlike figures; the daring exploits; the incredible battles; the frightening mayhem; the thrilling victories.
Now imagine a world suddenly without its heroes.
Earth's heroes have just been killed on an outer space mission. And as the deadly force that destroyed them now rushes towards Earth, brave souls come forward to try to take the place of the heroes... to keep the world safe...
That blurb was literally the first thing I conceived when writing Midgard's Militia, my homage to the rollicking world of pulp stories and superheroes.
Midgard's Militia was my second novel. At that time, I was fresh off George R.R. Martin's Wildcards series of novels, and lamenting on how the series had come to an end before the stories had fully run their course (something fairly common to long serials). Wildcards, too, was a superhero story written in the venerable pulp style, though modernized in scope and style to satisfy modern audiences. Which, in most cases, meant sex. Plenty of it, some of it explicit. Not the kind of stuff that kids were supposed to be getting from pulp novels, or their descendants, the comic book.
Now, I had no intention of writing a pulp just for sex, and as it turns out, the sexual references in Militia are more in the old vein (ie, couple hugs, couple kisses, some buttons are undone, cut to anywhere else!). My intention was just as the blurb stated: What does the world do when it has to take over for its missing superheroes? There was a story that was rarely, if ever, explored, and I had some great ideas for the concept.
Take the central character Lee Prime, who is modeled not-too-loosely on the pulp hero Doc Savage. Doc Savage was the seminal pulp hero before comic books brought us Superman. It occurred to me that a normal man scientifically bred to fight crime would become markedly diminished in the world's eye alongside beings who could shift planets and move at the speed of light. And beyond that, even more normal people would essentially stand aside and let the superheroes do the dirty work. Many of them would come to rely on the heroes totally, and others would come to resent them when they failed at their impossible tasks. To a man like Doc Savage, trained to rely on himself and his talents, such a world would be anathema to him. And if he felt diminished or underappreciated with superheroes around, he would certainly be the first to step forward when they were gone.
That was the start. Then came the other natural question: What about all those supervillians? How do normal people deal with them? And when normal people are so physically outmatched, will they fight the fair fight with villians... or just unceremoniously kill them? I wanted to explore that world, too, to see what normal people would attempt, and stoop to, to protect themselves.
One of the most enjoyable parts of preparing the story involved conceptualizing the superheroes. I didn't use characters from existing comics, but I wanted the reader to be able to infer their superhero type from what sparce information was available, even if it was just their name. This would help to sell the idea of the heroes, which would in turn help drive home the catastrophe of losing them. Without them, there's not only less power to the story, there's little point to it.
And finally, the coup de grace: I came up with an explanation for superheroes! Okay, it's clearly a pulpy sci-fi explanation, but it works, and it becomes a major part of the story's development. What is it? Dude... read the story!
So I developed a concept, fleshed out some characters, outlined some of the things I wanted to see... and the story almost wrote itself. And boy, was it fun to write! It was like reading a good pulp novel or comic book—I couldn't stop until it was done!
Once done, I passed the story on to a friend of mine who had read plenty of sci-fi and comics, and he got the concept in one. And loved the story! Why I didn't try to publish it then is sometimes beyond me (other times not), he was so enthusiastic about it. He even gave me a few tips that helped me polish it a bit.
With this release, I'm considering the polishing essentially done, and presenting my homage to the pulps. It's not a superhero story: On the contrary, it's a story about normal people who rise to the challenge of defending themselves against a dangerous, powerful world. A world that needs superheroes desperately. A world that we sometimes wish we could live in.
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The conceptual "Superhero," long a staple of comic books, is presently enjoying renewed popularity, and reconsideration as more than a child's genre.
Superheroes represent our modern mythology, our present-day versions of Hercules, Ulysses, Casey the Engineer and Paul Bunyan. Many of them will go down in history as the reflections of our modern culture.
And a few of them will find themselves under the microscope of future researchers, who will suspect that they may have actually existed!
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