On:

I can buy two comics for a quarterat the druggist near the department storenext to the restaurant where we eat outalmost every Friday night. ’66it is, and I’m just ten; my allowanceis twenty-five cents a week. I blow iton superheroes. I’m a good student,bring home A’s and B’s, and amContinue Reading

On:

This day limps and whimpersin a sudden mob of jeers and taunts.Remorse muscles in, blockingthe tease of possible lightwith a fuggy pulse of wayward,gravel-blind, monstrous self-absorption. This is the end of the worldand only imps and devils are afoot,the wrecks beset by iron-hearted lootersstealing movement from the air, invitinga tepidContinue Reading

On:

I stretch for the comic book at the topof the spinner rack but I can’t reach it–I’m too small and my heroes are too high.I don’t think about what that means then but,forty-three years later, it all makes senseand would make a good comic book, too, ifI could pencil andContinue Reading

On:

There’s a story in this, girls,and it doesn’t have any wolves in it for now, though you never knowwhat might come down the lane, in Neverland, especially nearthat mermaid bog of old. Which is the gateway toThemyscira, truth be told, though no one ever seemsto want to know where theContinue Reading

On:

I watched the groupie dress. The cool light slipping in the tour bus window ignited her magenta hair in a halo of color. I watched the dark line of her jeans slide over the curve of her hips to just above the line of her skimpy thong and thought aboutContinue Reading

On:

II. One way of looking at itSever the notion of quest from bloodand you get girls, leastways if the bloodis othered and the quest is sticky withswords and snares, beset with spitefulnymphs and pitiless trials, fool’s goldguarded by dragon-fire, the road toilluminant decency – or what passes as –marked byContinue Reading

On:

I have to admit to myself and therefore also to you: I am a baby inside. I work in an office. I have no illusions. But after punching out, after uncinching that tie, after sliding those slacks down the length of my regrettably adult-length shaven legs, I am nothing, ifContinue Reading

On:

Queen Cobra leaped out the window on the 39th floor of the Derossett Building. It wasn’t the tallest high-rise in Ark City but the fall would still kill her just the same. She snagged the line she had rappelled down earlier and moved deftly up it towards the roof. SheContinue Reading

On:

Long ago (350 million years ago, but who is counting?), there was a grave distress signal sent from a dying star, a star so endlessly far it could only be energy from that initial universal explosion, that big, big Big Bang, and, as far as our organization has observed, isContinue Reading