Monthly Archives: August 2015

The Deep Dork Forest

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You might think, with my background in comedy and my years as a writer in LA, that I should’ve been on dozens of podcasts by now. Or at least a few. Or hell, even started my own, by gum. But that just ain’t the case. In fact, my pending appearance on episode #307 of Jackie Kashian’s The Dork Forest is the official cherry-pop that will hopefully open a floodgate, or even just a small babbling brook of guest podcastery leading up to the release of my next magnum opus, CItizen Skin.

Recorded about a month ago, this was a fun, freewheeling conversation that used superhero prose fiction as a jumping off point to talk about the current state of mainstream comics, Marvel vs. DC movies, the ever-widening world of comics-based TV, and, in a moment of accidental depth, the value of redemption tales over bloody revenge stories (not that I don’t still love a good bloody revenge story from time to time).

Anyway, give a listen, and if you like what you hear, go ahead and subscribe to Jackie’s terrific show, where she invites a wide swath of guests from within and without the world of entertainment to come geek out about their favorite subject, from pop culture specifics to California surfing to obscure moments in history to hard futurist science to just about any topic worth throwing your mind, heart and soul into. She’s a great, game host with a quick wit and many dorkable passions of her own, and one of the best comedians on the scene these days.

And if you already know about her but are just now learning about me, go on and buy my books, cause I write better’n I talk!

Shameless Self-Promotion Tour 2015

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It’s been nearly two years since I first published The Villain’s Sidekick, and while I’d much rather be pushing the sequel by now, it’s been a bit more of an undertaking than I anticipated, so for purposes of trying to keep interest alive for the stuff that’s already out in the world, I’m throwing a little 2nd anniversary party for Villain’s. As such, for anyone out there who hasn’t read it, the Kindle Edition will be on sale for the mere pittance of .99c starting Friday Sept. 4th and continuing through Sept. 11.

As such, I did a little promotional interview with the e-reader targeted online publication, Book Reader Magazine and figured what the hell? Why not share it here and fill up some blogspace in the bargain?

Featured Author Stephen T. Brophy

Featured Author Stephen T. Brophy

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IMG_2501Featured Interview With Stephen T. Brophy

Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born and raised in Houston, Texas, which I ended up choosing as the setting for my first novella, The Villain’s Sidekick, even though I haven’t lived there in years. I left Texas after college and settled for a good long while in San Francisco, where I landed my first paid writing gig after many years working below my abilities in restaurants and cafes and the like. Once bitten, I couldn’t go back to those day jobs, so my girlfriend (now wife) and I relocated to Los Angeles a few years back. We now have a pretty amazing son and two wonderful, tragically aging dogs, a neurotic Lab mix and a pit bull/boxer.

At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was born to two voracious readers, so the love of reading was instilled from about as early as I can remember. I actually had a little difficulty learning to read but once I got it, I took to it like a Great White shark to a helpless sea lion, and within very short order I was bored with kiddie lit and moving on to grown-up books. I remember reading “Jaws” when I was 8 years old (hence the shark reference) after being so enthralled by the movie. So, fittingly enough, when I started writing, my first book was entitled “Jaws,” and involved a shark who could walk on land (SNL had just started airing around that time, too, so dual influences at work). I wrote a lot of derivative stuff until I found my own “voice.” Which is really probably just a mash-up of all the authors and stories I’ve encountered and loved ever since.

Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite genres are science fiction (Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, John Brunner, Ramez Naam), crime fiction (James Ellroy, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, Elmore Leonard), and the literature of the dissolute (Bukowski, Hunter S. Thompson, Don Delillo). They’ve all equally inspired what I do now. But the biggest influence over the last few years–and at my age maybe I should be embarrassed to admit this but I’m so not–has been a rekindled love of comics, from weird indies to straight up mainstream superhero fare. I’d read them off and on since adolescence, but when a friend introduced me to Sleeper by Ed Brubaker, and I went on to read his Captain America stuff, I became more immersed than I’d ever been. In fact, I’d been kind of stuck on a science fiction story I was telling and it was only when I got the inspiration that I could include superpowered characters and take it to a more interesting, liberating place. Since then, I’ve read a LOT of superhero prose fiction–basically comic books without the pictures, I guess, but so much more, too–like Austin Grossman’s “Soon I Will Be Invincible,” Jim Bernheimer’s “Confessions of a D-List Supervillain, Rafael Chandler’s “The Astounding Antagonists,” Blake Northcott’s “Arena Mode” series and on and on. It’s really a whole terrific genre just waiting to be discovered by the mainstream. And with the current popularity of superheroes in film, it seems just a matter of when.

Tell us a little about your latest book?
I’ve written two novellas featuring my alter-ego, Duke “HandCannon” LaRue, a supervillain’s henchman with a machine gun arm, a steel jaw, an ex-wife who used to do crimes with him before the birth of their adorable precocious daughter, and all the troubles that go with being a semi-reformed bad guy in a 12-step program who may be harboring a hero beneath his frightening exterior. He’s basically the distillation of all that Bukowski, Jim Thompson and William Gibson I mentioned up top. There’s The Villain’s Sidekick and it’s short prequel, The Eternity Conundrum, and I’m currently working on a full-length sequel, Citizen Skin. The sequel alternates POVs from chapter to chapter between HandCannon and his badass best friend Trista Brooks, also known as Nightguard. She’s a supporting character in Villain’s who steps large on the stage in the follow up.

The Good Stuff

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I promised a while back that I would get better about posting to my blog with greater regularity, and I have all-but-failed mightily in keeping that promise. I was also hoping that this blog would take on some weighty theme that balanced my life in recovery with my love of comic books, superheroes and all manner of pop culture ephemera. Who knows? Maybe it still will. Someday.

But for now, I’m just going to throw up a lazy list of cool things I’ve stumbled across in my free time lately, the material that’s been filling my brain or stuff that just deserves a little extra exposure.

Thanks to Comixology, I read a lot of digital comics these days, filling up my e-shelves with runs of whatever they put on sale for .99c if they sound the least bit interesting, and doing my best to never pay more than $1.99 an issue for the premium stuff, which usually means waiting at least a month after the original release date for the prices to drop. Thanks to the convenience of the site, I’ve been exposed to all kinds of stuff I might have never discovered otherwise, especially since I haven’t been a single-issue print purchaser for decades, from mainstream “Big Two” books to all kinds of amazing indie material covering a multitude of genres.

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Far and away the most interesting, entertaining book I’ve been reading on the regular for the past couple of years–the one I look forward to most each month (or longer, if they’re shipping behind schedule)–is Lazarus from writer Greg Rucka (Gotham Central, Punisher: War Zone) and artist Michael Lark (Winter Soldier, lots of other terrific work with Ed Brubaker). Set in a dystopic American future (can we conceive of any other kind?), it’s the story of Forever Carlyle, the enhanced posthuman bodyguard for her family, one of a small group of corporate clans who control all of the world’s wealth and resources. Each clan has one family member who is dedicated as the family Lazarus, nigh-unkillable warrior-soldiers who protect their blood relations at all costs, and carry out much of the dirty work when it’s called for. And it’s called for pretty often. The rest of the populace falls into categories under an oligarchical caste system in which everyone’s societal status is determined by their value to their respective clans. Laborers are known as Serfs, and everyone below them–most of the 99%–are deemed Waste. And opportunities to change your station are slim to none at best. Which doesn’t stop people from trying, usually to their own regret.

It’s an impressive exercise in world-building science fiction and a brilliant allegory for our current state of income inequality, while also being action-packed, soap operatic, and immersively entertaining every step of the way.

Five Shots to the Skull! Highest rating!

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I recently discovered the British scifi comedy/drama Misfits, which ran for five tight, short seasons from 2009-2013 and was a moderate hit on BBC America. It’s an offbeat coming of age series about a group of young adults doing forced community service for various crimes, and on their first day on the job, they’re caught in a storm that imbues them with an odd assortment of superpowers that very much reflect their damaged personalities. In an American version, you might expect that these kids would fairly quickly realize their gifts and heed the call to become “proper superheroes,” but in this anarchic swirl of hormones and bad behavior, it takes this crew five years and a gradual but complete cast and character overhaul before they really pick up the mantle of herodom. In the meantime, they drink, drug, creatively curse, fuck and accidentally kill multiple probation workers in possibly the most punk rock TV show it’s ever been my pleasure to binge-view. It’s more reminiscent of Skins than it is The Avengers or even Mystery Men, with a hint of Buffy in the way that their young lives, their powers, and the monstrosities they encounter are frequently metaphors for the painful, puzzling struggles of adolescence and the agonizing transition to adulthood.

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Apparently loyal viewers during its original run were unhappy with the wholesale cast changes that took place, particularly from season 3 to 4, but watching it in one fell swoop made the transition feel much more organic, and eventual series lead Joseph Gilgun (a terrific bad guy in Lockout and soon to co-star as the Irish vampire Cassidy in HBO’s take on Preacher) is so goddamned entertaining he pretty much walks away with the whole show anyway. Also entertaining to see Iwan “Ramsay Bolton” Rheon as a likable nerd and burgeoning badass in the early seasons. It’ll make you hate his face just a little less.

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Three Strikes Against Your Record! Highest Rating!

This past week I read an article on the AV Club about David Fincher having the plug pulled on his proposed cable series Utopia, which was said to be a remake of a fairly recent scifi suspense series from Britain’s Ch. 4, in which an obscure graphic novel holds secrets that could apparently lead to either mankind’s salvation, or its doom. Maybe depending on who’s reading it? I dunno.

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This was the first I’d heard of it in any form, and considering my recent good luck with British scifi series, I tracked it down, finding several episodes from its two seasons available–in high-quality HD no less–for free on YouTube. Watch the first scene of that first episode and if you like your scifi thrillers gorgeously shot, intriguingly scored, shockingly dark and laced with brutal humor, you’ll be hooked from the jump. I’ve had to search a little harder to find episodes four and five but I have found them, and while I’m not quite through the first season, I’m enjoying it at least as much as I did the Wachowski’s Netflix series Sense8 (though that show is decidedly more utopian than Utopia for sure).

Four White Rabbits! Highest Rating!

Finally, for today, I want to mention Spring, an offbeat romantic horror fantasy that feels more like a well-made naturalistic indie drama before the high weirdness kicks in. It’s the story of an underemployed young man from California (Lou Taylor Pucci from the 2013 Evil Dead remake) who gets into some potential legal trouble shortly after the death of his mother and decides an impromptu trip to Europe is just what he needs to get free of the life that’s closing in on him at home. Once there, he meets some incredibly obnoxious British backpackers who drag him on a roadtrip to an idyllic resort town in the shadow of Vesuvius (and yes, SPOILER ALERT, that is definitely Chekhov’s volcano, destined to go off in the third act). There he meets Louise (the jaw-droppingly stunning Nadia Hilker)

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who is either God’s gift to weary travelers or a nightmare walking, depending on her blood sugar levels. It’s equal parts Before Sunrise and American Werewolf in London with a hint of another recent indie horror flick, The Afflicted, though it doesn’t suffer from that movie’s ill-considered choice to muck around in the exhausted subgenre of the found footage thriller. It’s solidly scripted, the leads are charming and likable, and the indie directors got a lot of mileage out of utilizing carefully planned drone shots to capture their Italian seaside setting. And even when it erupts into horror, it’s anything but a generic monster movie, emerging as something much more Lovecraftian while remaining thoroughly romantic and surprisingly sweet. This is a horror flick that, occasional grossouts aside, would make a better-than-average date movie.

Four Probing Tentacles! Highest Rating!

Roleplay and the Art of Storytelling

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Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes - The Walking Dead _ Season 5B, Key Art - Photo Credit: Courtesy of AMC

Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes – The Walking Dead _ Season 5B, Key Art – Photo Credit: Courtesy of AMC

For a few months now, my 9-year-old and I have been playing our own “role playing game” based on his favorite TV show, The Walking Dead. I put RPG in quotes because the fact is, while we did make character sheets in the early going, we’ve never used them, nor do we make maps or roll dice. We just pick which character or set of characters we want to play as, and one of us serves as game-master, pitching out scenarios and asking the other what their response will be. It’s a very free-form version of roleplaying, basically an interactive way of telling each other stories using these characters and scenarios. We mix and match characters from the show, the comic, and the videogame, so Darryl can interact with Dwight when they stumble across Clementine and Lee wandering the Georgia wasteland. It can be a lot of fun, and my boy came up with a very entertaining do-over of the war with the Governor which ended with a much more satisfying death for that old bastard than what we got on the show.

However, after several weeks of playing for fifteen or thirty minutes before bed a few nights a week, I noticed that our narrative thrust was suffering from some of the same inertia as the show frequently does. A lot of time was being spent navigating a bus down abandoned-vehicle-choked back roads, fighting zombies and ill-tempered human survivors in the woods or at one broken-down compound or another, then hitting the road again. We were trying to juggle too many characters, completely forgetting some were even on hand while continuously focusing on our favorites. In short, what started as an enjoyable diversion became dull (more for me than him) fairly quickly.

So last week, after the boy caught me rewatching episodes of Netflix Daredevil series, he abruptly switched gears and suggested that instead of Walking Dead, we should start a new game involving everybody’s favorite blind-attorney-turned-vigilante from Hell’s Kitchen. Now it could be just my own prejudices and personal predilections at play, but right away, I was more into our little no-rules RPG than I had been for a long while. Part of the reason was the freedom that came with playing only as one lead character, rather than trying to juggle a Michonne/Rick/Darryl combo, then needing to switch to play as Tyrese/Sasha/Carl when the scene shifted. I liked the focus, and my familiarity with the character was enough that I didn’t need dice or stats to know what my guy was capable of, what kind of damage he could inflict on which type of nemesis, and what his specific limitations were. And whether I was the quester or the gamemaster, I felt like I never ran out of options, and I could be a lot more creative than the “zombie/bad human attacks, kill zombie/bad human” status quo we’d been mired in. I think we both felt the change, because suddenly we were jumping up and acting out our fisticuffs and pitched supervillain beatdown campaigns. New York City was an instantly more exciting backdrop than the endless rural South, and I could be attacked by anyone from Tombstone to Elektra while receiving unexpected aid from the Punisher or SHIELD, or having a chance encounter with Spidey and Doc Ock.

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I think what really got my juices flowing more than anything was the simple narrative elegance of those classic Daredevil stories, and the endless options afforded by the Marvel Multiverse, and although he’s read and seen more Walking Dead than anything from Marvel, Ash was equally inspired in his yarn-spinning–the narrative twists he’s come up with have been smart, exciting and frequently hilarious. Not a lot of laughs as humanity dies off one by one, but when guys dress up in longjohns to prowl for crime, well, there should always be room for a good gag or seven. Rather than open-ended wandering through an apocalyptic wasteland with no end of danger, misery or suffering in sight, we get to indulge in boss fights with nigh-invulnerable mob goons in a cramped midtown alley or the Silver Samurai suddenly bursting from a shipping container on a fog-shrouded New York dock.

This is not to say that Daredevil is a better, more tightly constructed vessel for storytelling than Walking Dead (I shouldn’t have to say it because it’s just a simple, straightforward–and utterly subjective–factpinion). But there’s something to be said for the sense of mission, purpose, and the possibility for achieving a goal–stopping a bad guy, saving an innocent, getting through the night without killing anyone, even when/if they’ve more than earned it–beyond mere brute survival. My point being that all the problems I’ve had with that wildly popular zombie narrative on the screen seem to be so much an organic part of its overall structure that they couldn’t help but reassert themselves even when we had nothing holding us back but the limits of our own unrestricted imaginations.  Then again, maybe I was just dragging my own subconscious baggage with me into our gameplay.

Anyway whatever else happens, whether our next RPG is based on Mad Max or They Live, I just hope I’m not begging for Jon Bernthal’s character to die (when he joins season 2 of DD as the Punisher) the way I was for him to bite the big one when he played Shane on WD. Know what I mean?

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