Got a hankerin' to go buy me some war bonds now.

Had a Cap-tastic day today.  Went to the comic shop for my bi-weekly fix, and while there, I found Captain America (vol.4) #1-6 on the 99-cent rack.  For those unfamiliar, this was the Marvel Knights revamp of Cap that began in 2002, roughly seven months after 9/11, and that tragic event forms the spine of the title's opening story arc.  It draws parallels between the World Trade Center and the Allied bombing of Dresden during WWII, as well as bringing up a few other nasty truths in the ongoing debate of "us versus them".  Overall, John Ney Rieber and John Cassaday deliver a story that is both action-packed and deeply moving, and I highly recommend picking it up if you missed it the first time around.

A few hours after devouring those issues, we went out to finally see Captain America movie (in glorious 2D, 'cause we're cheap).  I am soooooo glad it isn't as glossy-looking as some of the commercials made it out to be!  To be sure, it's leaps and bounds better than the Cap flicks I talked about a few weeks ago.  This had action and heart and enough fanboy in-jokes to keep me entertained throughout.  I did glance at my watch once, but that was only because it seemed like we were approaching the end, story-wise, and I was shocked to see that we'd only been in the theatre for an hour.  "Geez, if this is only the first half, what else is coming up?" I thought.  Turned out a whole lotta stuff was coming, and as we approached the real end of the movie and it looked as if Cap was going to die, I actually found myself getting a little choked up...even though I knew good and well that Captain America was gonna be in the upcoming Avengers movie!  Bonus points to Chris Evans for achieving that all-important connection with the audience.

Oh, and in case you haven't seen the movie yet, please remember to stick around for the extra scene after the credits.  Of course, everybody who's watched a Marvel movie in the past few years knows by now that you can't just get up and go when the house lights come on, there's always one last scene to see.

I'm famous on the Internet

As I mentioned a few months back, I'm a writer, or I at least fancy myself to be one.  I guess it depends on whether or not you define a writer as someone who gets paid to do so.  If you do...well, then I'm just some dope that's deluding herself.  But if you merely define it by talent and recognition of such, then I suppose that I've earned the title.  I've got fans that eagerly wait for me to put out another story, and I've received notes from published authors that tell me to keep up the good work.  But money?  Actual dollar-amount compensation for all the time I put into the craft?  I haven't made one thin dime yet, and some days I wonder if I ever will, seeing as how I've sent my 300-odd page manuscript off to roughly twenty different publishers and agents only to receive nothing but rejection slips in return.  Yet if you put "Susan Hillwig" into a search engine, my name pops up all over the place, with most entries acknowledging me to be an author.

How the heck did such a dichotomy come about?  Simple: I write fan fiction, a strange little offshoot of the usual sort of fan activity that genres like comics and movies tend to attract.  It's not something that the non-fans hear much about (though TIME recently did an article about fanfic), and even some who are well-immersed in fandom don't pay it any mind at all.  But it does exist, and for the past six years, as I've tried to get my original manuscript published, I've cranked out a score of stories that I cannot legally get paid for.  The short explanation is that, since fan fiction utilizes characters owned by other people, it's considered "fair use" so long as no one makes any money off of said fan fiction.  So I can write fics all the live-long day and be praised to high heaven for the results, but I can't make a living as a writer by doing so...at least not without getting sued.

You'd think the lack of monetary gain would scare off writers, but it doesn't.  There's all sorts of crazy things that fans do simply for the love of the genre, and that's where my involvement comes in.  I wanted to write a story that filled in a very large blank in a certain comic book character's history, namely Jonah Hex and his ill-advised trip to the future.  I had a very solid idea, and I knew DC most likely would never resolve the problem of their own volition, so I stepped up to fill in the blank.  The result was The Long Road Home, and it pretty much sealed my fate as it relates to fanfic.  The overwhelmingly-positive response encouraged me to keep going with this thing, so I wrote another Hex-related fic, then expanded into other DC Western characters, and before I knew it, I'd made a name for myself in this non-business, one that now seems to be inexorably linked with Jonah Hex.  I'm not complaining about that, mind you, but I don't think I really expected this outcome when I sat down to write my first fic.  To be sure, I never expected this, either:

No, that's not some Photoshop trickery, it's an actual panel from Jonah Hex (vol. 2) #34, wherein Jonah decides to leave his old life behind and live under an assumed name...and Hex writers Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray decided to tip their hats in my direction by giving him the alias of "Hillwig".  I just about fell off the couch when I read that panel, and my husband (who has no real love for the character) went about for a week or so occasionally muttering "Mister Hillwig" with a smile.  That's not to say that other fans haven't gotten their names slipped into the series (I can think of about a half-dozen guys that I know fairly well who've been given that honor), but it's the way it was done here that tickles me so.  Over seventy issues, J&J have had Jonah use an alias on two other occasions: once as "Albano" (who created Jonah Hex along with artist Tony DeZuniga) and later as "Fleisher" (who wrote Jonah for about 15 years straight and established almost his entire history).  So forgive me if I'm reading too much into it, but having Jonah use my last name in such a way feels like J&J acknowledging me as a person who's contributed something of import to the character.  It's not money, it's not a byline, but it's the closest I've ever gotten to payment for my work.  Trust me, permanent enshrinement in the Jonah Hex mythos equals some serious coin in my heart of hearts.

Anyways, that's about all I have to say regarding "real fame" versus "Internet fame" and my place in it.  I realize the latter may be fleeting, and it doesn't really mean a dang thing to the world at large, but I'm having fun with it while I can.  And for those of you who are now interested and want to see what exactly I've been doing to earn things like name-drops in comic books, look over to the left and click on some of the entries under the heading "My Bibliography".  I apologize in advance if reading any of it curtails your work productivity (I've been told I have this effect on some readers), but if you like it, please send me an email.  Especially if you're a publishing agent, 'cause I've got something with a more profitable angle just sitting here collecting dust.

It was 30 years ago today...

...that MTV launched, corrupting children for generations to come.  In case you missed it, they were running a 30th anniversary marathon of classic MTV moments all weekend....on VH1 Classic.  No, that wasn't a typo: so far as I could tell, the formerly-named "Music Television" (MTV dropped the moniker years ago) made no move to acknowledge the day, choosing instead to run a Jersey Shore marathon while leaving all the hard work of actually noting the occasion to the only network that still plays videos all dang day.  Sad state of affairs, I think.  Best I can figure is that MTV doesn't want the teeny-boppers who tune in to watch their current slate of non-musical programming to know that they're 30 years old.  Because for those teeny-boppers, 30 is dust-fartingly ancient!  How can something that's been around for 30 years be relevant?  Well, in MTV's case, they really aren't, at least not to me.  You won't show videos anymore, old or new, then I have very little need to watch your channel.  I'll tune in when Beavis and Butthead return to the airwaves...wait, I forgot, that's going to be on MTV2.  Okay, I definitely have no need to watch MTV at the moment, then.

As I type this, VH1 Classic is showing MTV's first hour of programming, commercials and all, which just makes it even trippier (I just saw an ad for Superman II, now in theatres!).  Figure by now everybody knows what the first video shown was (if you don't, go look it up, it's the only thing the band's famous for these days anyhow), but do you know what the second video was?  Why, it was this little ditty right here:

Gawd, this was the best we could do in 1981?  I know we had better music than this!  Problem is, the concept of marketing a band by making videos was still rather new at the time, or at least not used with great effectiveness, so there probably wasn't a ton of variety in the beginning.  Give it a few years, though, and the entire music industry would be leaning on MTV like a crutch.  Matter of fact, thinking on this, I'd say that MTV's phasing out of videos is the real reason that the music industry is losing bucketloads of money these days.  It's not file-sharing, it's not changing tastes, it's MTV knocking away that dang crutch by discontinuing the very reason they were created.  The RIAA needs to sue MTV for loss of revenue!  Yeah!  Then MTV will be so broke, they'll have to go back to showing videos because they won't have the dough to produce crappy reality shows about sluts and goombahs in New Jersey!

Yeah, I'm really digging on this idea now!  Who's with me on this?  Huh?  Say it loud, say it proud...I WANT MY MTV!!!

The dirty secret Cap doesn't want you to know!

While I haven't seen the new Captain America movie yet (probably in a week or two), I did manage to get a little star-spangled action yesterday, thanks to Syfy (or as we sometimes call it since the name-change, "Siffy").  For you young'uns out there who may not know, this weekend's flick is the fourth time Captain America has gone in front of the lens.  The first two were made-for-TV movies back in 1979, around the time Bill Bixby was turning into Lou Ferrigno every week.  Not sure if Syfy ran the first movie, but I did try and watch the imaginatively-named Captain America 2...and I do mean "try".  The story moved at a snail's-pace, plus it seemed like it took forever for our hero to suit up, so I ended up flipping between this and...well, just about anything else on TV.  Not that I was really looking forward to seeing that particular version of the suit, mind you, but dangit, if I'm going to keep watching this junk when there's higher-quality junk elsewhere, then I want to see the friggin' suit!

And then I finally saw the suit.  And the clear plastic shield.  And this particular fight.

Man, I felt bad for Cap's reputation after he got his butt whipped by the dogs.  On the plus side, the motorcycle is kinda cool, and they had Christopher Lee as the main baddie.  Cap versus Dracula!  The good captain should've done to him what he did to Baron Blood way back when.  That would've made this a much better movie.

After this travesty, we finally hit the main attraction: the 1990 Captain America movie.  Last time I saw this was roughly 16 years ago on cable, and call me crazy, but this direct-to-video flick isn't as horrible as its reputation might have you believe.  It does manage to deliver a few good scenes (one of the best being after Cap wakes up and a reporter tries to fill him in on everything he's missed, but all Cap sees is the guy's Volkswagen car and "made in Japan" tape recorder, so Cap figures the guy's a spy and bolts), and Matt Salinger (son of J.D. Salinger) cuts a good form in Cap's red-white-and-blue duds (which are quite accurate to the comic).  The problem is they try to cram a miniseries' worth of info into a 2-hour movie.  The characters (Cap included) are mere sketches of people, so much so that, when people start dying, you really don't care.  Oh yeah, and the Red Skull's Italian for some reason (I don't think you can discuss this movie without mentioning that).  Sorry, guys, Nazis are much scarier than plain ol' fascists, so you lose a lotta points there.  Seriously, though, if you get a chance, sit down and watch this one, and think of it as the Cliff's Notes version for a Cap TV series that never got made.

When I finally get my butt out to the theatre, I'll report back on what I thought of "Cap Part 4".  All I can say right now is that things can only improve from here.

Speaking of zombies...

Just wanted to do a quick post about a pair of zombie flicks that have popped up on my radar over the last couple of days.  First up is Doghouse, starring former Doctor Who companion Noel Clarke.  Jamin stumbled across this on IFC, and while we missed the first half-hour or so, what we did catch was impressive.  It starts with one of the more popular premises for zombie outbreaks -- a government experiment goes awry and infects a small town -- but gives it a twist I've never seen: the zombie virus only affects women.  The result is a "battle of the sexes" to the death!  Clarke and his buddies have to fend off the cannibalistic advances of all sorts of female furies, the result landing somewhere between the social commentary of Romero's "Dead" films and the borderline parody of Return of the Living Dead (or to compare it to other Brit zombie flicks, somewhere between 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead).  This came out in 2009, so I'll have to keep an eye out to see if there's a Region 1 DVD release

The second movie I've only seen in trailer form so far, but it's the country of origin that caught my attention.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cuba's Juan of the Dead:

Any chance we can lift the trade embargo long enough to import this sucker?

The next thing you know, the dang things will start sparkling.

For those of you that don't know, the Hillwig household is a zombie household.  My husband Jamin has been a ginormous fan of the original "Night of the Living Dead" ever since he was a kid, and we've met nearly every surviving member of the main cast (we almost met George Romero too, but he had to bow out of a con at the last minute, so he's still on the "wanted" list).  We also tend check out anything and everything zombie-related, usually finding some new treasure along the way (World War Z, The Walking Dead, Shaun of the Dead, etc.).  Heck, as I type this, Jamin's playing "Left 4 Dead" on XBox360 and giggling like crazy as he blows the crap outta corpses.  Suffice it to say, we both know the genre pretty darn good and have a healthy respect for it...which might be why this struck me as so weird.

A few weeks ago, I'm bringing in the mail, and as I pass Jamin on the couch, he points at a flier on the bottom of the pile and says, "What the heck is that?"  I turn it over to see this:

It's a furniture ad.  Featuring a zombie.  In mid-June.  Now, this isn't the first time I've seen a zombie in a non-Halloween ad (there's one for Starburst as well as that new Honda Civic campaign), but in those ads, the companies in question are trying to be hip or edgy so they can appeal to the younger consumers with disposable income, therefore it makes sense for them to use such imagery, while the use of zombies here just comes off as kinda pathetic.  It's freakin' Gardner-White Furniture!  What's hip or edgy about a mattress sale?  Are there scads of males in the 18-34 range out there going, "Hmm, I really need a Serta Perfect Sleeper, but who should I buy it from?  Hey, these guys put zombies in their ad!  They're the store for me!"

Zombies are the "in" thing right now, I get it.  But we're getting so over-saturated that, last month, I watched a National Geographic special that focused on Romero-style zombies and how they could (hypothetically) happen in real life.  It was a good program, but seriously...NatGeo's cashing in on this?  I feel like the zombie phenomenon is approaching the point that Dracula and Frankenstein and all the other Universal monsters hit in the 1940s when they became fodder for Abbott & Costello movies:

Familiarity breeds contempt, as the old saying goes.  Or maybe it just breeds slapstick comedy.  Take your pick.

52 Pick-Up

Okay, at the end of my last ramble, I said I would give you a rundown of what DC Comics titles I'm buying come September.  I've been doing a lot of looking around since then, reading creator interviews and Newsarama/CBR articles and scrutinizing all the solicits, and I've realized that there's a lot more books I'm interested in than I thought.

First up is the sure thing, the one that I'd buy no matter what, even if they passed some sort of comics law that said "Only one title per person": All-Star Western.

When I became a regular comics-buyer, Jonah Hex didn't have a title anymore.  He was a member of the original stack, though, and thanks to a nascent interest in westerns, I sought him out in the back-issue boxes.  I got hooked really quick, but aside from the three Vertigo minis in the 1990s (which aren't the best representation of him), I never got to experience the thrill of getting a brand-new Jonah Hex comic every month until 2005.  I've been VERY happy with what Palmiotti & Gray have brought to the character (and have told them so many times), so while I am upset that Jonah's losing his self-titled book, I am glad that he's not losing J&J.  Plus we'll be getting back-up stories with all the other DC Western folk, so more bang for the buck.  Only shaky step for me is Jonah staying in 1880s Gotham long-term: He's not comfortable in cities, so this is going to be a little odd...but on the other hand, it'll make him even more ornery than usual, and that's always fun.

Coming in second place is DC Universe Presents.  I'm a sucker for anthology titles, and I've always had a fondness for Deadman (the original stack contained reprints of his Neal Adams-drawn debut) that's only grown since Brightest Day.  I'll give it a flip first, but most likely. this is a buy.

Everything after this is one "maybe" after another.  I'll give them all a good hard look on release, but I don't know how many will become monthly pulls.  In no particular order:

Green Lantern: I've been a regular buyer of GL since Rebirth, but I'm starting to feel burned out.  The Emerald Knight has been going on one Crusade after another for...what, two years?  Three?  Not to say I haven't enjoyed the stories, but when was the last time this space cop busted somebody?  Yeah, I don't remember, either.  I also might take a peek at the Red Lanterns title, simply because I like Dex-Starr...if the rage kitty is the headliner, I'll buy it!

Birds of Prey: I've been buying BoP since it was just a special starring Oracle and Black Canary, but this...I'm not sure if this is even the same dang book.  They're really got to wow me with their #1 or I'm done.

Batgirl: On the good side, it's Gail Simone writing, and I've had this on-again/off-again interest in various Batgirls over the years, Babs included.  On the bad side, I REALLY want an explanation as to how the heck she's getting out of the wheelchair.

Swamp Thing: My taste in the big green guy leans more towards Alan Moore and Rick Vetich, but I'm curious.  I suppose that's what this whole gig is about, right?  Hooking those who are curious about one title or another and giving them jumping-on point.  Problem here is, aside from the aforementioned writers, most everyone else who's written Swampy does it quite badly, so I might run the other way screaming.

Hawk and Dove: I've kinda gotten hooked on Dove thanks to her appearances in Brightest Day and Birds of Prey, but I don't like Hawk at all, so this one's really dicey for me.  On the plus side, they mention in the solicit that Deadman is Dove's boyfriend, and I'm curious to see how this works now he's...well...dead again.

Blackhawks: Number-one reason to crack this one open on release day?  To see if Zinda Blake is in it.  I've loved Lady Blackhawk ever since her first appearance in Birds of Prey, and since it looks like she won't be there anymore, I reckon this is the most likely place for her to turn up (the book's called "Blackhawks", fer cryin' out loud!  Why wouldn't she be in it?).  Or she might no longer exist.  In which case I'll raise a beer in her honor and then cry in it.  Even if Zinda's not here, though, I might pick it up, for the same reasons I'm considering Men of War when it hits: I've been known to read war books here and there.  However, being modern warfare instead of the WWII icons they take their names from, it's iffy that I'll stay with it.

So, that's the rundown.  When we get to September, I'll give you an update of what I decided to take the plunge on and what I passed over.