Watching superheroes beat up villains may not be the best image for boys to see if society wants to promote kinder, less stereotypical male behaviors, according to psychologists…

“There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic book superhero of yesterday,” said psychologist Sharon Lamb, PhD, distinguished professor of mental health at University of Massachusetts-Boston. “Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity. When not in superhero costume, these men, like Ironman, exploit women, flaunt bling and convey their manhood with high-powered guns.”

The comic book heroes of the past did fight criminals, she said, “but these were heroes boys could look up to and learn from because outside of their costumes, they were real people with real problems and many vulnerabilities,” she said.

My initial impression is that this is so luridly off-base I don’t know where to begin.

In particular, I’d like to take issue with “[the typical superhero] is aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity.”  Except for the Punisher and perhaps Spawn, I can’t think of any superhero movies over the past ~20 years that fit that description.  One of the unique traits of the superhero subgenre of action is that morals tend to play a larger role than in other action stories, not less.   How often does a typical Arnold Schwarzenegger or Steven Segal character discuss why he’s there to beat the hell out of people?  In contrast, the moral code of a superhero usually comes up pretty prominently.

• Superman: “Truth, justice and the American way all that stuff”
• Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”
• X-Men: tolerance and understanding (see Xavier’s justification for founding his academy)
• Batman: the desirability of law/order over anarchy/chaos.
• Ironman: making war obsolete (and also sharing technological progress with the world)

I think the virtue of doing good for humanity plays a much larger role in these works than in most works aimed at, ahem, middle-aged women like Sharon Lamb.  (Twilight? Sex and the City? Anything on the CW?)  Indeed, one of the recurring complaints about the new Sex and the City movie was how utterly self-absorbed its characters are.  According to reviews, one of the major objectives of the characters was escaping the Middle East without suffering the indignity of going on a second-class flight.  (Perish the thought!) Careful, ladies, you’ll set a bad example for the audience.

In short, this “research” looks considerably less grounded in reality than Seduction of the Innocent.

• Disney is paying roughly $50 per share, which is a 29% premium over Friday’s closing.  If you own Marvel stock, you will come out ahead quite nicely on this.  It was trading around $25 earlier this year.
• I am cautiously optimistic that Disney knows how to buy a successful firm without ruining what made it successful.  For example, Pixar’s movies didn’t drop in quality after the Disney buyout.  (Nor have they released a lot of straight-to-DVD sequels to successful movies).
• I doubt this will have a noticeable impact on Marvel’s products.  Even the movies.
• I think Disney is the biggest loser here.  It’s betting 4 billion dollars that it can leverage Marvel’s characters better than Marvel did.  I’m skeptical.

The Globe… is on track to lose $85 million this year.  Advertising revenue at the paper and its Web site declined more than 30 percent in the first quarter of the year…

Rooney said: “The [Globe's owner] has really handled this about as badly as you could.   The Boston Globe is the newspaper of record here. It would be like The Washington Post disappearing. That’s what the Globe is to this community. They still break news. They’re the only ones who really have the resources.”

Rooney is convinced that the Globe and its writers are indispensable to their community and bosses.  That’s totally wrong.  Writers are very easy to replace.  There are no magical “resources” that can make a writer irreplaceable.  That applies to novelists and comic book writers as much as journalists.

Publishers can easily dispense of you. They don’t care about your “resources” and they can find someone with better credentials, too.  But they cannot dispense with your audience. Your relationship with publishers is dictated by your audience.  If you have readers, publishers will pay accordingly to have you on board.  If you have no readers, you have no leverage and have to beg publishers to take you.  “Well, this could get readers if only you would publish me.”  That’s not a very compelling case.

Many young authors convince themselves that the only thing standing between them and getting published is quality.  Quality certainly matters, but let’s be real here.  Tom Clancy’s novels receive advances that are thousands of times larger than average.   Is it really because Tom Clancy writes that much better than everybody else?  Please.  (If you fear that your writing is really that much worse than TC’s, please read The Cardinal of the Kremlin to get up your self-esteem).  Tom Clancy is only paid so much because his books sell freakishly well.   He is published and paid at least as much for his audience as the quality of his writing.  In contrast, the Boston Globe is facing the prospect of extinction because it is hemorrhaging readers.  If you lose your audience (or never had one), you can and will be thrown away.

Quality is a tricky thing.  For one, it’s controversial.  Very, very few manuscripts are so wildly awesome that they are accepted everywhere they are submitted.  So many people are involved– publisher’s assistants and editors and acquisitions staffers at publisher– that there’s a ton of room for personal tastes and preferences.  If you hope to sell a manuscript purely on quality rather than your audience,  you are leaving yourself at the mercy of their tastes.

Unlike quality, audiences are easy to measure and undeniable.  They are incontrovertible evidence that your work is generally good enough to read.  They strongly suggest that your style is effective.  Having an audience can make the difference between “this doesn’t work for me” and “this doesn’t work for me, but the sales potential is too big to ignore.”  It will be much easier for them to visualize your success if you are already succeeding.

My recommendation for you is that you build an audience before you start looking for publishers.  Blogging is an easy and extremely cheap way for a young author to establish that he’s good enough to publish.  For example, I’ve spent $100 and two years blogging and I’ve had 150,000 readers.  A blogger can find an audience even if he doesn’t have sterling writing credentials.  (If you would like some advice on starting a blog, please see here and the rest of our blogging category).

Alternately, write for a magazine or a newspaper or a journal.  They’re also a good place to start because they care less about the size of your audience than most novel publishers do.

Alternately, you may be so intelligent and articulate and research-savvy that your book will be of scholarly interest, regardless of your background. I recommend staying away from political fiction unless you are that brilliant (and/or a celebrity). If you think you may be brilliant enough, ask yourself whether you could get tens of thousands of people to read your blog. If they won’t read for free, they almost certainly won’t pay money for your work.

*Cadet Davis has suggested a revision here… “I think that you’re probably right about the author’s background being particularly important in political nonfiction, but I don’t think you have to hold a high rank to have an interesting perspective.  I imagine that a young soldier could easily sell an account of what he saw and learned during his tour in Iraq.  Whether he wrote it as a coming-of-age memoir or a more conventional polemic, he could plausibly clear his advance.”

Additionally, I think it’s slightly easier to write mysteries…

1. Explaining the parameters for a mystery is less of an obstacle than explaining magical or technological capabilities. It is usually hard to create suspense with a magical hero because we don’t really know the limits of his power. In contrast, we do know what a mystery hero is capable of, so it feels more impressive and less contrived when he finally wins.

2. Mystery writers don’t have to spend as much time explaining their world. Even if the reader doesn’t know anything about the gang portrayed in a mystery, it’s probably pretty similar to other gangs he’s heard about. In contrast, a fantasy author might have to spend more effort building up (say) a religious conspiracy for less effect.

3. The author of a mystery rarely has to worry about the self-esteem of his readers. In contrast, a fantasy writer may have to overcome reader anxieties about feeling juvenile. (Case in point: I enjoyed Soon I Will Be Invincible and its bright and flashy cover, but I absolutely would not read SIWBI in public).

4. This opinion may be shaped by reading more fantasy and sci-fi manuscripts than mysteries, but the cliches of the detective field are generally less obnoxious.

While I’m striving to write a book that I hope will be some kind of bestseller, I never forget that I’m also striving to write a book that *I* would want to read if I saw it on the shelf.

That is badly misguided. Whether you want to buy your book is irrelevant. You are not the audience of your book. Publishers do not want to publish a book for you. Publishers need to sell thousands of copies and they want books with that sort of appeal.

Authors that write a book they want to read tend to lose sight of the audience. I think that leads to self-absorbed and completely ineffective titles like “The Legend of Edarotag” and “Cimmeria’s Song*”. It may contribute to in-jokes and references that no one can relate to. As a rule, I think it’s safe to say that no one finds your interests as interesting as you do.

In conclusion, your career will probably be more successful if you forget about what you want to read and focus on finding what you can (and would be proud to) sell.

*These are both fictional titles (try reversing the letters in Edarotag).  I hope that demonstrated how easily in-jokes can disgruntle mass audiences.

Most attempts at persuasion are ineffective because the writers don’t know very much about the field. The people that read a book about a political subject are usually well-versed about the subject. You have to be even more knowledgeable than they are. Can you add anything to the perspectives of your readers? If your background is only as deep as what you’ve read in newspapers or heard on television, you probably don’t know enough to impress readers (let alone persuade them).

Selling political opinions is particularly tricky in fiction. You’ll probably modify real-life events to fit into your story, which is fine if you’re just writing a story but can be problematic if you want to convey a real-life political message. If the story is too fictionalized, the propaganda comes off as a bad joke. For example, The remake of War of the Worlds was supposed to be an allegory about the US invasion of Iraq. If you fictionalize the story too much, it will lose any real-world persuasiveness.

I don’t think so. I think that a qualified reviewer is anyone who can articulate 1) whether the work was effective for them and 2) that they are similar enough to their audience that their reactions to the product are relevant. For example, I think that for the average young American, my opinion of fast-food is actually more relevant than a professional chef’s, not less. I imagine that my expectations for food are similar to those of most young Americans, whereas the chef would have very different concerns.

So when an author challenges the authorial credentials of a reviewer, I think that’s completely missing the point. Reviewers are speaking to the concerns of readers, and most readers aren’t authors. They don’t think like authors do! Second, I think that challenging the reviewer is inappropriate because it usually misreads the reviewer’s message. Most reviewers are not trying to insinuate that “my work is better than yours.”  Even if their own fiction suffered from every one of the mistakes they pointed out in your work, pointing that out wouldn’t make your work any better.

ADDENDUM: I think there’s one instance when it’s OK to say that an observer is unqualified to review: when he doesn’t know what is feasible. For example, a artist might look at an engineer’s building plan and give some outlandishly unfeasible objection like “this building is ugly, because the base isn’t two-dimensional.” The engineer could rightly say that “that’s crazy– it’s not even remotely possible to design a building with a 2-D base. Because you have no idea what engineers are able to do, you should stop reviewing us.” However, I think that this exception generally does not apply to unpublished reviewers of fiction. When a reviewer says that “Eragon’s characterization is poor compared to Harry Potter/Narnia/etc.,” he is demonstrating that he has a realistic standard for what good writing can be. (Of course, we can disagree whether Narnia or HP are actually good standards for characterization, but they are certainly feasible).

I’ll leave you with this parting thought: You don’t have to be a car designer to know that the Pontiac Aztek came straight from the deepest and darkest pits of hell.

“You’re going to see a lot of bad guys,” he said to Sci Fi Wire. “We’re playing off the idea of our characters as heroes or villains. So it’s really the duality of good and evil.” T.K., I will see your duality of good and evil and raise you character development, interesting traits and a well-rounded cast. For one, I’d start by killing off about half the cast…

• Molly (way too cute and causes far too much mushiness for the cop and Suresh)
• Suresh (he was useless in season 2 and killing him might help the writers overcome their proclivity to start every episode with a Dramatic Narration… I did, however, like him in season 1 except for the narrations).
• Mikah (almost as bad as Molly, but with more spunkiness!)
• Maya (in retrospect, I hope she and her brother were a cruel joke at the expense of proponents of more diversity in TV casts).
• Everyone in Mikah’s extended family except for D.L. (no, he’s not really dead) and maybe Nikki.
• Maybe Peter Petrelli (I found him a lot more likeable when he was Farmhand Luke than an amnesiac Luke Skywalker. Also, his actor only shows emotion with a deer-in-the-headlight look).

The single biggest problem with Heroes was that the writers overreached because they were too confident that they could make a slew of stock characters interesting by painting quickly with broad strokes. The Darling Daughter, Noble but Troubled Scientist, Spunky Son, and whatever the hell Maya is fell apart completely. The only one of the stock characters on the show that is remotely interesting is Syler, the Nietzschean psychopath. “This is usually the part when people start screaming,” indeed.

–Cadet Davis

I assigned a research paper. This time around, the students were to elucidate the positions of scholars on two sides of a historical controversy. Why did Truman remove MacArthur? Did the United States covertly support the construction of the Berlin Wall? Their job in the paper, as I explained it, was to take my arm and introduce me as a stranger to scholars A, B, and C, who stood on one side of the issue, and to scholars D, E, and F, who were firmly on the other—as though they were hosting a party.

A future state trooper snorted. “Some party,” he said.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you have a 500 inch waist, you probably do not have a 24.1 BMI.

If this lawsuit works out, I’m going to sue every romance publisher because they’ve all ripped off a story I wrote last year where a guy and a girl struggle through adversity and finally get together.

(Wait a minute…)

I’m not sure I can think of a superhero story set in the real world where a New York landmark isn’t endangered. In fact, superhero stories are probably more likely to endanger NYC landmarks than romances are to show guys and girls getting together, because some romances are tragedies).

As as for the supposed ripping-off of a superpower (painting the future), again pretty much every superpower is a direct and blatant ripoff of something that’s already been used. Some of the superpowers used on Heroes are…

1. Superstrength

2. Regeneration

3. Flying

4. Mind-reading

5. Time-travel
   

Groundbreaking stuff there!

–Mr. Andrews