Mabfan's Musings

violetcheetah pointed gnomi and me to the following article from yesterday's Boston Globe. I have to say, I find it the most applicable article of child-rearing advice that anyone has sent us, given the circles we move in.

What to Do If Your Child Has Superpowers

On Monday night, thanks to the help of a friend whom I shall refer to as D., Nomi and I had a chance to see a preview of the film Watchmen, which opens tomorrow. Because I had a chance to see the movie early, I ended up writing a review for SF Scope, one of the premier websites for news of the speculative fiction fields. (SF Scope is run by my friend Ian Randal Strock, and has an RSS feed on LiveJournal at sf_scope.)

My review is posted as Contemplating Watchmen for anyone who wishes to read it.

This shabbat will be the day of Mom's yahrzeit. She died on January 25, 2007, which fell on 6 Shvat on the Hebrew calendar, and 6 Shvat this year falls on January 31.

In honor of my mom's yahrzeit, Nomi and I are sponsoring kiddush at our shul, Kadimah-Toras Moshe, on shabbas morning. That afternoon, I'm the speaker at shalosh seudos (the third meal), and for my topic I've decided to speak on "Superman and Moses." Mincha begins at 4:30 pm for anyone in the area who wants to hear my talk. However, for those who can't be there, I'll be basing much (but not all) of what I have to say on the book Up, Up, and Oy Vey!: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero by Rabbi Simcha Weinstein (and yes, I'll be giving him credit for it).

And yes, I know people still want me to write up my comments on "Spider-Man and Repentance." I will when I can.

Nomi and I spent the past two days observing the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashana, which meant spending much of the day in shul (synagogue).

Our shul has a tradition of having a member of the congregation give a talk every shabbat afternoon during shalosh seudos, or the third meal, which takes place between the afternoon and evening prayers. Dan, who arranges for speakers, asked if I would be willing to give the talk this shabbat. Dan always makes it clear that the talk doesn't have to tie into the Torah portion we're reading on that shabbat, but many speakers like to try to find a connection.

Well, given what else is going on this shabbat, a topic for my talk came to mind instantly.

We are now in the Days of Awe, the period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur when we are supposed to be reflective of our lives and do teshuvah, which loosely translated means repentance. This shabbat is therefore a special one, Shabbat Shuvah, or the Sabbath of Repentance.

So, my brain went, what better topic to talk about this shabbat than Spider-Man?

If this were anything more than a small talk for the shul, I'd probably promote it with something like, "Join award-winning science fiction writer Michael A. Burstein at Kadimah Toras-Moshe this shabbat as he gives the shalosh seudos talk on the topic of 'Spider-Man and Teshuvah.' Shalosh seudos will take place after the 5:50 pm Mincha at Kadimah Toras-Moshe, 113 Washington St., Brighton MA, on October 4 (5 Tishrei)."

However, since this is just a small talk, I'll merely note that if anyone local wants to stop by and hear what I have to say, consider yourself welcome.

I discovered from Brad Meltzer yesterday that Bob Greenberger is offering a Tuckerization in his next Iron Man novel. The eBay listing reads as follows:

"Iron Man 2" is an as-yet-unnamed original novel set in the Marvel Universe featuring the cast of characters now made world famous from the box office smash film. The novel will be published sometime in 2009 and the winner will be written in to a scene. The more donated, the larger the part.

Bob Greenberger is a long time comic book editor and administrator, currently serves as News Editor at www.comicmix.com. He additionally writes fiction and non-fiction such as this year’s Essential Batman Encyclopedia.

This item is a part of the Siegel & Shuster Society auction to help Save the Siegel House.

This is part of Brad's Ordinary People Change the World initiative, about which you can find more at the link.

The eBay item listing is here: Bob Greenberger – Iron Man 2.

So if you've ever wanted to appear in the same fictional universe as Tony Stark, now's your chance. But act fast; the auction ends in a week.

Thanks to Brad for letting me know.

Michael A. Burstein, Brad Meltzer Photo copyright ©2008 by Adam Conway.

I can't help but be amused to note that in the midst of this horrible financial crisis, my Marvel stock is up 1.18%.

Exactly seven years ago today, terrorrists attacked the United States of America. They flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. They most likely would also have flown a plane into the Capitol building but were stopped by the passengers of United 93. Almost 3,000 people died that day.

Because I'm obsessed with exactness, I've made sure for a while now to know the exact times of certain events that took place on 9/11. The bare sequence of events at the World Trade Center was as follows:

8:46:26 AM: North Tower Hit
9:02:54 AM: South Tower Hit
9:59:04 AM: South Tower Collapsed
10:28:31 AM: North Tower Collapsed

I'm a New York City native, born and raised in Queens, and I grew up in a city in which the Towers always stood. On 9/11, I was at my teaching job in Newton, Massachusetts. The following comes from my journal, a hand-written one that I was keeping at the time.

"The second [staff] meeting ended early, and I went back to the Science lab to check my e-mail. I idly noted a message...which said that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.

"I didn't really think much of it and I went back to the Information Center. Shortly after the meeting...began, [a colleague] walked in and asked if we had heard the news. He told us that two planes had hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and he set up the small TV to receive CNN. They showed pictures of two commercial jets crashing into the twin towers...

"I ran to the phone...to call [my younger brother] at work. At 9:35 AM I called and got him. He had just gotten in, and he said that he seen the smoke from the 7 train. I told him to stay in touch, but due to circuits being busy, I wasn't able to reach New York City again for a while.

"The rest of the day passed in a blur of rumors and news. I kept checking webpages; when I couldn't reach cnn.com, I checked the New York Post webpage and the Newsday webpage. I called Nomi...

"At 10:15 AM, the...students returned from their physical education class...and...we told them the news...

"When the meeting with the students ended, I collapsed in tears..."

There's more, of course, but to summarize, I spent the day trying to get news of family and friends, making sure they were all safe. The drive home was surreal, knowing that fighter planes and battleships were protecting New York City. Nomi was already home, as her office had sent everyone home early. The rest of my family was safe, but my older brother, an emergency medicine physician, had been called up to report to New York City. Nomi and I took a walk at 5:30 PM, which included browsing at Brookline Booksmith and getting ice cream at JP Licks. Everything on TV was the news; we watched C-SPAN, which was running a feed from the CBC, so we could get the Canadian perspective.

The next few days, the events were fresh in everyone's mind. On Wednesday, I flinched at hearing an airplane in the sky, then remembered that all commercial flights had been grounded, so it had to be one of our military aircraft, protecting us. I bought my regular comic books that day; Adventures of Superman #596 had an eerie panel of the twin towers of Metropolis being repaired. A friend came over that evening after attending a local religious service.

On Thursday, Nomi and I were sick of the news, and Animal Planet had gone back to regular programming. We watched a documentary about moose to help us get our minds off things.

And life went on. Today, I'm no longer teaching, but editing textbooks in Boston; my younger brother no longer lives in New York City, but in Eugene, Oregon with his wife and three children; and my older brother is still an emergency medicine physician in the Boston area, specializing in disaster management.

Ever since 9/11, Nomi and I check in with each other every morning when we get to work. I'm very grateful that she's around to be a part of my life. I probably don't need to tell anyone this, but today's probably a very good day to remind your loved ones, familes, and friends how much they mean to you.

In honor of the fact that I'm missing Comicon this weekend, I thought I would finally get around to posting a piece of art I've been meaning to post here for a while.

Folks may recall that in December of last year, Marvel ended the J. Michael Straczynski run on Amazing Spider-Man with a little story about Peter Parker trading away his marriage with Mary Jane to the devil in order to save his aunt's life. (That still sounds odd seventh months later.) A few weeks afterward, I commented on the story line with my post Spider-Man: One More Day, in which I expressed the disappointment that many of us felt over where the story had gone.

One of the folks who used to work in my local New England Comics is the artist Lindsay Small, who blogs about her work at Lindsay Small is small, and she too was disappointed at the One More Day story line. Being an artist, however, Lindsay was able to express her disappointment with a work of art.

Why I Quit My Job - Art By Lindsay Small Art copyright ©2007 by Lindsay Small. Do not duplicate.

The sketch hung in our local New England Comics for a few weeks, but when I saw it, I knew I had to have it. I asked the other staff to find out how much she wanted for the art. She named a price, I agreed, and I bought the sketch.

Framed, the sketch now hangs in our hallway. For me the most amusing thing about buying this art is the medium: black ink on back of New England Comics subscriber's weekly list.

(Please note that the copyright notice next to the sketch is to be taken literally. Although I own the original, Lindsay owns the rights to reproduce the sketch, and although she gave me permission to post it here, it should not be copied anywhere else without her permission.)

So, next year I'm up for re-election for Town Meeting.

I got an email today noting that as part of the festivities for the opening of the new New England Comics in New Bedford (that's three "new"s), Batman and Spider-Man will be appearing at the store on Sunday.

So...

Would it be a good idea or a bad idea for me to go the New Bedford store, get a photo of myself with Batman, and use his endorsement in my 2009 campaign?

As 530nm330hz suggests, maybe I should toss a coin...

It's being reported all over the place that E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dugeons & Dragons, died this morning at the age of 69.

Like many others, I found D&D to be a wonderful creative outlet. I started playing the game at a very young age, because I was fortunate enough to have an older brother who brought it home with him from high school. I remember playing the game with the original boxed set, before the advent of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons with the Player's Handbook and the Monster Manual. We had to use copies of Dragon magazine to supplement the rules.

I remember many afternoons of going to the Compleat Strategist on 33rd Street to buy gaming equipment – books, character sheets, and dice.

I remember the day the Dungeon Master's Guide came out, and how excited I was to finally hold a copy in my hands.

I fondly remember the two characters I played the most: Pureheart the Powerful, a Lawful Good paladin whose name I shamelessly stole from the Archie Comics superhero; and Mr. X, a thief whose origins were a mystery, even to himself.

I remember hours of bonding with others, regardless of age, over a gaming session. I remember how D&D led to me to discover Champions, and Boot Hill, and Top Secret, and Traveller. (My very first attempt at a professional submission was a new alien to the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society.)

All of us dreamers should be grateful for Gary Gygax. He invented a way for us to harness the imagination, and to do it together.

I originally hadn't planned to discuss my thoughts on the "One Day More" story line that just concluded in Amazing Spider-Man 545 a few weeks ago, for two reasons. First of all, I didn't think anyone would be interested in my opinion. And secondly, I presumed that there would be so much discussion in the blogosphere that any of the points I might make would have been made already.

As it happens, though, I've actually been asked for my opinion, since I'm not just a reader of Spider-Man, but someone who grew up in Forest Hills, just like Peter did (cf. my essay "The Friendly Neighborhood of Peter Parker" in the book Webslinger). And as I ruminated over the story, I realized that my thoughts on the story go deeper and further than just this one story itself, into the realm of general thoughts on serialized fiction.

So even if you don't read comic books, or don't care about the adventures of Spider-Man, I think you might find something interesting in here about the writing of franchised characters and the writing of fiction in general. Because I also bring into the discussion Stephen King, William Goldman, and the TV shows Lost and Gilmore Girls. Read on, or just cut to the end, which is a good bit and has Marvin in it. (Well, to be honest, Marvin doesn't appear at the end. But I do reveal if I plan to keep reading Spider-Man.)

( What Would You Do If You Only Had One More Day? )

Finally, for those of you who didn't read through all my pondering, the answer to your question is yes, I will continue to read Amazing Spider-Man for the foreseeable future. I may not be happy about this current development, but I still want to keep up with the life of Peter Parker.

There's an old saying: once is heresy, twice is tradition, three times is sacred tradition. With that thought in mind, welcome to my list of the top ten movies of 2007!

As you can remind yourself by clicking on the above links, Nomi and I don't usually manage to see a lot of new movies in the theatre in any given calendar year. In 2005, we saw only thirteen films, and in 2006, we only caught ten. And yet, I revel in the absurdity of making a top ten list based on such a small sample. So the magic number for 2007 was again thirteen, and out of those thirteen, here are what I consider the top ten films of the year.

[Warning: There might be minor spoilers in the discussion. If you want to be safe, just read the titles, which are in boldface.]

( Michael A. Burstein's Top Ten Movies of 2007 )

And the three that didn't make the list? Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Hm. The three movies that didn't make the list are all the second sequels to a previous film. Hollywood, I bet there's a lesson in there for you.

(ETA: I completely forgot that I went to see Transformers this year, sans Nomi. I frequently joked that it was the greatest movie ever made, but if I even forgot to mention it when I first posted this... well, I guess that tells us something about the impact that movie made.)

Normally, I don't sit down on Thanksgiving and come up with a list of reasons to be thankful. It's not that I don't feel gratitude for the benefits I enjoy on a daily basis. It's just that sometimes those benefits seem so trivial to me sometimes, and I feel that expressing gratitude for them would border on gloating.

One friend of mine who posts on LiveJournal ends every single one of her posts with a statement of something she is grateful for. While I admire her dedication, I know it's not something that I could ever do personally. And I do wonder if my expressions of gratitude might come off as self-indulgent.

However, this year is different. It can be hard to express gratitude to the universe in the year of a parent's death, especially when it's the second parent one is mourning. I've been reading a lot about what it is like for people to enter this stage of their life, and I've come to believe that it really is unprecedented, something that can't be completely understood by anyone who hasn't yet experienced it themselves.

So this year, with the loss of my mother still fresh in my mind, and the loss of my father still as poignant as ever, I've decided to note a tiny handful of the reasons why I am grateful to my parents.

I am grateful to Dad for my love of and interest in science fiction. Although by the time I knew him Dad's fiction reading was mostly devoted to paperback mysteries, he had been an enthusiastic science fiction reader in his earlier years. Dad encouraged me to read the short fiction magazines, and he would never turn down a request on my part for a book. It was at Dad's insistence that the family shlepped to an Isaac Asimov appearance at the Books of Wonder bookstore on Sunday, November 4, 1979; I still recall that event vividly, and I sometimes marvel at how much that shaped my life. My only regret is that Dad died before he could see how involved I would become in the world of science fiction.

I am grateful to Mom for never throwing out my comic books. This may sound silly, but over the years I've met many people whose mothers threw out some of the valued childhood possessions. I was lucky in a sense, because my father's mother had thrown out his comic books and my father always regretted that. So armed with that knowledge, my mother never threw out a single one of my comics, and today I still own every comic I ever bought all the back to age five. (Well, except for the ones I chose to weed out of my collection myself.) Mom was never into science fiction or comic books herself (except for Wonder Woman, she once told me), but she once called DC Comics for me and got a young artist named Al Milgrom to give our family a personal tour of their offices. I was in heaven.

I am grateful to Dad for my love of the news and newspapers. I grew up in a home that got four newspapers a day, and each paper presented the news with its own slant and ran editorials that sometimes opposed each other radically. The newspaper business may be changing, but I will continue to believe the importance of receiving my news from many sources.

I am grateful to Mom for taking the family to musicals and shows on Broadway. When she had been growing up in New York, her family had gone to many of the classic original performances of well-known actors and actresses. Thanks to Mom, we got to attend revivals of many of these shows. I saw Richard Burton in Camelot, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Herschel Bernardi in Fiddler on the Roof, Yul Brynner in The King and I, Mike Burstyn in The Rothschilds, and many others. After we saw Brigadoon, Mom took us to meet Lee Sullivan, who lived in a house across the street from ours, and who had played the original Charlie on Broadway. He signed our copy of the vinyl album jacket, and I still have that record.

I am grateful to Dad for instilling a love of justice, and of Judaism.

I am grateful to Mom for the laughter she brought to our world.

Finally, I am grateful to all my ancestors, Bursteins and Cohens and Bakers and Cohns and Sokolovskys who made the decision to come to this country, so I could lead a life that they could barely have imagined. In general, I enjoy my life a lot, and I am grateful for all the myriad steps that led to this point.

Exactly six years ago today, terrorrists attacked the United States of America. They flew planes into the World Trade Center in New York City and into the Pentagon in Washington, DC. They most likely would also have flown a plane into the Capitol building but were stopped by the passengers of United 93. Almost 3,000 people died that day.

Emotions are still raw for all of us, but I have to admit that in light of my own recent personal tragedies (can Mom's death be considered "recent" even though she died back in January?), this anniversary isn't hitting me as hard today as it did last year. (More on that below.)

Because I'm obsessed with exactness, I've made sure for a while now to know the exact times of certain events that took place on 9/11. The bare sequence of events at the World Trade Center was as follows:

8:46:26 AM: North Tower Hit
9:02:54 AM: South Tower Hit
9:59:04 AM: South Tower Collapsed
10:28:31 AM: North Tower Collapsed

I'm a New York City native, born and raised in Queens, and I grew up in a city in which the Towers always stood. On 9/11, I was at my teaching job in Newton, Massachusetts. The following comes from my journal, a hand-written one that I was keeping at the time.

"The second [staff] meeting ended early, and I went back to the Science lab to check my e-mail. I idly noted a message...which said that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center.

"I didn't really think much of it and I went back to the Information Center. Shortly after the meeting...began, [a colleague] walked in and asked if we had heard the news. He told us that two planes had hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and he set up the small TV to receive CNN. They showed pictures of two commercial jets crashing into the twin towers...

"I ran to the phone...to call [my younger brother] at work. At 9:35 AM I called and got him. He had just gotten in, and he said that he seen the smoke from the 7 train. I told him to stay in touch, but due to circuits being busy, I wasn't able to reach New York City again for a while.

"The rest of the day passed in a blur of rumors and news. I kept checking webpages; when I couldn't reach cnn.com, I checked the New York Post webpage and the Newsday webpage. I called Nomi...

"At 10:15 AM, the...students returned from their physical education class...and...we told them the news...

"When the meeting with the students ended, I collapsed in tears..."

There's more, of course, but to summarize, I spent the day trying to get news of family and friends, making sure they were all safe. The drive home was surreal, knowing that fighter planes and battleships were protecting New York City. Nomi was already home, as her office had sent everyone home early. The rest of my family was safe, but my older brother, an emergency medicine physician, had been called up to report to New York City. Nomi and I took a walk at 5:30 PM, which included browsing at Brookline Booksmith and getting ice cream at JP Licks. Everything on TV was the news; we watched C-SPAN, which was running a feed from the CBC, so we could get the Canadian perspective.

The next few days, the events were fresh in everyone's mind. On Wednesday, I flinched at hearing an airplane in the sky, then remembered that all commercial flights had been grounded, so it had to be one of our military aircraft, protecting us. I bought my regular comic books that day; Adventures of Superman #596 had an eerie panel of the twin towers of Metropolis being repaired. A friend came over that evening after attending a local religious service.

On Thursday, Nomi and I were sick of the news, and Animal Planet had gone back to regular programming. We watched a documentary about moose to help us get our minds off things.

And life went on. Today, I'm no longer teaching, but editing textbooks in Boston; my younger brother no longer lives in New York City, but in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and two children, soon to be three children; and my older brother is still an emergency medicine physician in the Boston area, specializing in disaster management.

But...last year I noted that "my mother still lives in New York City, as do my two older half-brothers." Anyone who knows me understands that this year's 9/11 anniversary feels a touch different. All my life, Mom worried about my brothers and me, to the point where it would be a joke that she would call to check in on us because of a plane crash that took place halfway around the world. On 9/11, it took me a long time to finally get through to Mom on a phone, and when I did, I collapsed with relief. (I did a lot of collapsing that day.) The idea that Mom is no longer around to call and check up on us in the event of another emergency or disaster...well, it should be no surprise that it's an empty and upsetting feeling.

So even though I'm grateful that I didn't lose anyone close in the 9/11 attacks, I still think about losing Dad in 1990 and losing Mom in 2007. In some way, there's a part of me stuck in both those years. Dad never got to see how the world played out after his death, and neither will Mom see how this country finally adjusts to the fact of 9/11.

One final note about 9/11. Ever since then, Nomi and I check in with each other every morning when we get to work. I'm very grateful that she's around to be a part of my life. I probably don't need to tell anyone this, but today's probably a very good day to remind your loved ones, familes, and friends how much they mean to you.

Ever since I moved to the Boston area in 1995, I've purchased my comic books at the New England Comics in Coolidge Corner, Brookline.

Throughout the years, Nomi and I have become friendly with many of the store managers and staff at NEC. Folks like Bob Shortell, Scott Arthur, Rich Carbonneau, and many others who are also no longer there, were always warm and helpful. In our family, I'm the one who mostly reads comics, but Nomi frequently would drop by on her own to pick up my books for the week, and everyone behind the desk would always be just as friendly even when she was by herself. The current manager, Benn Robbins (LJ: bukket1138), has continued in this fine tradition of being a good friend.

Benn Robbins Photo copyright ©2007 by Michael A. Burstein

One of the other friendly staff members is a delightful young woman named Gwen David.

Gwen David Photo copyright ©2007 by Michael A. Burstein

In November 2002, Gwen started to work for NEC. She was a student at Massachusetts College of Art. She grew up in Queens and Long Island, and so she and I knew a lot of places in common. For the past five years, Nomi and I have gotten to know her very well. Every Wednesday, Gwen's presence made a trip to the comic book store that much more enjoyable. We would talk about movies and TV shows and books and comics (of course), but we would also talk about art and Judaism and philosophy and family. Once, Nomi and I invited Gwen over for shabbat dinner; in a small way, we wanted to pay her back for the joy she brought into our lives.

Gwen earned her BFA in Art History this year, and she's off to Georgetown University in Washington, DC, for a Master's program in Museum Studies. Yesterday was her last day working at NEC, and we gave her a card. Gwen, who needed to unload some of her books for the move, gave me a book about Queens that I had borrowed from her once and that she knew I wanted.

We wish her the best of luck. We will miss her terribly.

Nomi S. Burstein, Gwen David, Michael A. Burstein Photo copyright ©2007 by Benn Robbins. Used with permission.

[Rule quoted from Robert's Rules of Writing: 101 Unconventional Lessons Every Writer Needs to Know by Robert Masello (Writer's Digest Books, 2005). See my original post for the rules of this discussion.]

With rule #69, Masello advises us that writers are never completely satisfied with our work. Even after we've been over a draft a dozen times, when the work finally appears in print we're still liable to read it with far too critical an eye, scouring it for flaws that may seem inconsequential to others.

But Masello says that this isn't such a bad thing. As writers, we're supposed to want to get every word perfect. I can definitely understand where he's coming from. If we're really totally satisfied with our work, we'll never look for ways to improve. It's true that many of us have debates between our inner writer and inner editor, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. As long as we don't let ourselves get paralyzed by over-analysis, it's okay to grumble and fuss over our writing.

It's one thing when it's ourselves doing it, but quite another thing when it's others. I was just at Readercon, and one of the many conversations I had with other writers dealt with the difference between critique and criticism. Those of us in the discussion had pretty much the same opinion. Before the story has been sent out, when we're submitting it to a workshop or an ideal reader, we're looking for critique that will help us improve the story. But once the story is published and out in the world, in a final, somewhat irrevocable form, we really don't want to hear any criticism. There's nothing more we can do with that story now, and all the criticism will do is make us feel bad.

I recall once hearing a story about Stan Lee. It may be apocryphal, but it's still a good story. Supposedly, a fan getting an autograph from Lee referred to one of Lee's comics as one of the worst pieces of trash ever written. Lee smiled throughout the criticism. When that fan left, the next fan on line asked Lee how he deals with that sort of thing. Lee's response: "I'm my own biggest fan. You have to be."

I'll grumble and fuss over my own work, thank you very much.

Copyright © Michael A. Burstein

Yesterday evening, I went to the Harvard Coop to hear one of my college classmates, Austin Grossman, read from his first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible.

I didn't actually know Grossman in college, but I spent freshman year in the same entry with his twin brother Lev. I did meet Grossman once, at one of our reunions, but it was by accident. I thought he was his brother, and I greeted him as such. He corrected me, and told me that Lev wasn't actually at the reunion. I apologized for the mistake, and moved on.

A few weeks ago, I heard about Grossman's first novel, and from the description it sounded like he had written it specifically for me to enjoy. The novel is set in a world of super-powered beings, and it focuses on the evil and brilliant Doctor Impossible and the good and powerful cyborg Fatale. Doctor Impossible has come up with another scheme to take over the world, and Fatale has to learn how to become a superhero. The book has a fully-realized set of superbeings, and from the description it feels influenced by Kurt Busiek's Astro City and Brad Bird's The Incredibles.

So when I discovered that Grossman's book tour was taking him back to Cambridge, I decided to attend. The bookseller who organized the reading gave Grossman a flattering introduction, and then Grossman began to read.

Austin Grossman Reads From His Book Grossman reads from his novel (June 26, 2007). Photo copyright ©2007 by Michael A. Burstein.

Grossman is a very funny reader. He doesn't read from his book like an author, but he doesn't do it like an actor, either. The book is written in first-person, and Grossman takes on the persona of Doctor Impossible as he reads, all the while still managing to keep an ironic detachment, as if to reassure the audience that he really is a nice guy. (And, no, I don't understand what I mean by this either.) I laughed quite a few times, as did others in the audience.

After his reading, Grossman called for questions. I asked about his comic book influences, and I wasn't surprised to hear that Grossman has been a comic book reader from way back. If I recall correctly, he said that he started reading comics with the Claremont run on X-Men. He also named some of the usual current writers as people whose work he enjoys. (Oddly, even though Grossman and Busiek went to the same high school, I had to prompt Grossman to mention Astro City.)

Only one other person asked a question, so Grossman began signing books quite early on. Since I had sat in the front row, I was the first person to get my copy signed. I thanked him for writing a book that appeals to me perfectly, which I think amused him. At the very least, he was willing to pose for a picture, even after I told him it would be going up on my blog:

Austin Grossman and His First Novel Grossman poses with his novel (June 26, 2007). Photo copyright ©2007 by Michael A. Burstein.

Obviously, I haven't read the book yet, but if you're a fan of comic book superheroes, you ought to check it out. And the website for the book is a hoot.

Copyright © Michael A. Burstein

Many of you know that as a comic book fan, I've recommended the wonderful in-depth articles by Alan Kistler over on the Monitor Duty website. I've also enjoyed his series of articles on Doctor Who.

I'm delighted to discover that Mr. Kistler (okay, Alan) has begun a new series of articles, under the heading In a Nutshell. As Mr. Kistler himself puts it:

It occurs to me that for some topics, people would like a short, more concise and by-the-basics approach so that they can just get a quick idea of what the character is about....

So, I'm starting a new thing called "IN A NUTSHELL" which is basically a 2-6 page explanation of what the subject involves. More detailed than Wikipedia, but not as long-winded as my larger articles.

He's got articles up on Doctor Who and the New Gods, and hopefully more will be coming soon. Go read and enjoy.

From "Spider-Man is a hero we can identify with" by Bob Fischbach (Omaha World-Herald, April 29):

In the newly released book "Webslinger: Unauthorized Essays on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man" (Benbella Books, Dallas), writers who take the subject way more seriously than most of us wax philosophical.

For example, former Comics Journal editor Darren Hudson Hick says that when a genetically mutated spider bites Peter Parker, causing him to take on insectlike qualities, teens going through the horrors of puberty totally relate to Peter's scary transformation.

And fiction writer Michael Burstein says Peter's blue-collar roots in Queens, N.Y., make him someone a broad audience can relate to. Unlike Batman, he has rent to pay. Unlike Superman, he's human. And he may be the original multitasker, struggling to get the girl, take care of Aunt May and fight crime while holding down a job....

For those of you who, like me, are anticipating Jodi Picoult's run on Wonder Woman, New Hampshire magazine has just published an Interview with Jodi Picoult. She has some fascinating things to say:

DC Comics came to me, after “The 10th Circle” was published and they saw the graphic novel in it and they were intrigued. The editor said we would really like you to write some issues of “Wonder Woman” for us. My first instinct was, “Are you kidding? I don’t have time to write Wonder Woman.” Then my kids said, “Are you kidding? You have to write Wonder Woman. It’s so cool mom.”...

You not only have to read up on Wonder Woman, you have to read up on her villains and the Justice League, because she is part of that. Your due diligence becomes the entire history of Wonder Woman....

I’m coming into the writing of Wonder Woman after the murder of Maxwell Lord. Which I found a very interesting psychological piece which was in the [writer Greg] Rucka run. Basically she winds up committing murder in front of this broadcast to humanity. She’s doing it because it’s the only way to save Superman. But it sure doesn’t make her look good. That’s a pretty heavy piece of baggage to carry around....

Go read.