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Book Sale!!!

It’s that time again! There’s another book sale on at the Hamburg Field House today!!! Naturally, we’ll be digging through the stacks in search of treasure. Now that’s what I call a weekend!

Middle Ages

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle. ~Bob Hope

Yeah, I’m feeling that.

I’ve been busy beating keys, so I don’t really take the time to do any exercises that might help to reduce the old midsection.

I need to fix that.

Unfortunately, my inclination to go outside when it’s hot, bug-infested and blindingly bright out is basically nonexistent.

That ain’t me.

Nevertheless, I need to start making more of an effort to do so.

Supes

THE BOYS Season 3 Review (2022)

Season 3 of The Boys is up and ready to binge on Amazon Prime. It’s rude, crude and socially unacceptable.

That’s only half the fun. The comics that this series is based on is even more vile and violent than the live-action show.

They’ve got a cartoon spin-off called The Boys Presents: Diabolical. This collection of cartoons is wildly harsh. I had a hard time getting through some of them.

As the guy in the video says, The Boys take a swipe at the superhero genre on a variety of fronts.

That’s not really where I want to go with my stories. As much as I like The Boys and Deadpool for their irreverent and deliberately adolescent humor, it is its own thing.

As far as The Boys goes, it subverts the trope of big name super groups like The Avengers or the Justice League being paragons of virtue.

Good Guys

Be not simply good – be good for something. ~Henry David Thoreau

Even the newer iterations of these esteemed super teams have been recast as flawed people coming together against all odds to fight a potentially world-ending threat. That’s fine. It’s a more mature take, I suppose, but I really like my heroes to be unabashedly heroic and deliberately do-gooders.

That’s the way I’d like to write my The Sentinels series.

Foxfire started as a guy who just wanted to help. Picture a Mrs. Fletcher with Human Torch powers.

Captain Freedom was a kid who joined the Army to serve his country and enjoy some adventure in the Old West.

Mary Christmas is another matter entirely. She doesn’t want to be here, but she’s got no way to go home. She has suffered a lot of trauma in the short time she’s been here and she’s correspondingly irritable.

Blue Banshee never fit in until she saw The Sentinels at an assembly in 2nd Grade. She knew she wanted to be a superhero when she grew up. The little girl with the naturally blue hair who had always felt like an outsider until she discovered what she believed to be her purpose in life. She has prepared her entire life to be a superhero, but she didn’t feel as if she could measure up without super powers.

All of them mean well in their own way. Even Mary has gotten with the program of being a reluctant superhero.

That’s what I want from my good guys.

I want them to be good.

I want them to want to be good.

Nobody is good all the time. We all have bad days. We all slip.

That’s human nature and that’s the kind of internal conflict that makes fiction interesting.

That’s the kind of story I want to tell. Good guys being as good as they can reasonably be and what comes of that.

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That’s it for today. I’ve got to go book shopping. I hope you find your happy place today as well.