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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Nerd More Today in Nerd

Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 5:29 PM

It has been a busy day for nerds. In my earlier post*, Dingo Rossi asks:

What, no coverage of Stan Lee's gay superhero? You guys are slacking.

Sorry, Dingo. Whenever I see the name Stan Lee, my eyes glaze over. (Have you read anything he's produced since 1970? Christ!) Anyway, here's the scoop:

Stan Lee is developing an hour-long drama at Showtime about the life of a gay teenage superhero. The series is based on a 2007 novel by Perry Moore called Hero. Moore is a screenwriter and film director, but is best known as the producer of the Chronicles of Narnia movies. He is writing the pilot for the Showtime series.

In Hero, high schooler Thom Creed finds his superpowers manifesting just as he's beginning to realize his own sexual orientation. Fearing shame and backlash from his homophobic hometown, he struggles to keep both his powers and homosexuality a secret.

I have heard good things about Hero, but I have not read it. It's a young adult novel. I bet your local independent bookseller has it in stock.

And just because I feel like it, I am going to put up this fabulous waste of time, in which someone imagined what a Dark Knight 8-bit Nintendo game would look like:

*Also in the previous post, TheFang asks:"Shouldn't we be worried about Spider-man being laid off too from the Daily Bugle?" I know the answer to this one, TheFang. Actually, Spider-Man got a job working for a news website in the comics. I have no idea how he's getting paid to do that, but maybe the publisher has a mutant power to somehow run a profitable news website.

Comments (24) RSS

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Cool game! But I really wished someone would hit start before the video stopped running!

Posted by sasha on January 14, 2009 at 5:52 PM

No kidding, Sasha...let's see some CodeMonkeys-esque side-scrolling, has nothing to do with the expensive movie-tie-in license gameplay action!!!!

Biff! Pow!!! Zowie!!!

Posted by pg on January 14, 2009 at 6:20 PM

I would play that!

Posted by Chris on January 14, 2009 at 6:28 PM

Hero is truly an awesome book. As far as young adult books go, it's a real accomplisment for the genre.

Posted by monica on January 14, 2009 at 6:42 PM

Gay superhero...how does that work? By day he wears red and blue silk tights, but then goes into a phone booth and emerges wearing torn jeans, a Canucks t-shirt and a pack of beer?

Posted by Had To Say It on January 14, 2009 at 6:51 PM

I remember it from when I read it the first time, when it was called X-MEN.

Posted by Sirkowski on January 14, 2009 at 7:06 PM

That trailer is SO 16 bit. Whoever did that clearly never played any NES games.

Posted by Chip on January 14, 2009 at 7:09 PM

#7: Actually, the Sunsoft Batman games on the 8-bit NES did look like that, which is what's being parodied.

Posted by JMS on January 14, 2009 at 7:47 PM

@8: The problem with the parody is that they badly fucked up the color depth and resolution on the images. Sure, they're downsampled & dithered, but the NES supported only four colors for each sprite block, and one of those had to be transparent. Plus, it only supported four different palettes at one time - the character portraits have got at least 4 colors in each color block, too many blocks, and blocks which are far too high-resolution to boot. In other words: IT LOOKS ALL WRONG AND I AM NOT SATISFIED.

Posted by Chip on January 14, 2009 at 8:41 PM

I wanted to like Hero, but it's not good. It's poorly written and none of the characters' motivations make any sense. The author didn't even bother to construct a valid timeline for his plot. If you think that young adult novels should be held to the same quality standards as 'grown up' novels, I don't think you'll enjoy this book.

Posted by rrr on January 14, 2009 at 9:35 PM

Wait. What? I'm confused. I thought all superheros were gay. The tight tights, uber buffed bodies, always hiding their true identities from the public... gay, gay, and gay. And the 1960s TV version of Batman was the very definition of camp.

What we're talking about here isn't the first gay superhero. This is the first OUT superhero.

Posted by Reverse Polarity on January 14, 2009 at 9:43 PM

Is the gay kid's power Gaydar?

Posted by Had to on January 14, 2009 at 9:51 PM

I was going to say what #7/9 said, but he beat me to it. I'm so sad. So very very sad.

Posted by Sweets on January 14, 2009 at 10:01 PM

Hero is good! I should know, I'm a librarian.

Posted by newradio on January 14, 2009 at 10:45 PM

"Hero" was a fun book to read that wasn't written very well. I enjoyed reading it while I occasionally cringed at some of the writing.

As for the series... it will have to be a loose adaption since it was a pretty selfcontained book.

Posted by clearlyhere on January 15, 2009 at 7:10 AM

Well there you go.

Posted by TheFang on January 15, 2009 at 7:41 AM

Hero is written by a film producer. In short, the writing is technically terrible, but it's still a lot of fun to read. It does what books about gay teenage superheroes should do: make you giggle, make you try to figure out the big secrets before they're revealed, and at the end, make you smile/cringe at the heart-warming conclusion. Hopefully the Showtime series will up the edge factor a bit.

Posted by Lara on January 15, 2009 at 9:18 AM

> Hopefully the Showtime series will up the edge factor a bit.

Hot Gay Superhero sex scene?

Posted by Dingo Rossi on January 15, 2009 at 10:23 AM

Not the first gay superhero. For those interested, check out: prismcomics.org

Posted by YeahRight on January 15, 2009 at 10:47 AM

I thought all Marvel Comics were gay. DC Rules!

Posted by elswinger on January 15, 2009 at 8:29 PM

You can read more about this at:

http://www.MarvelComicsGaySuperhero.com

Posted by John Alan Martinson, Jr. on January 17, 2009 at 6:29 AM

I didn't think the writing in Hero was bad at all: just workmanlike. The narrator's voice is believable and engaging, which is mostly what you need from that kind of book. I enjoyed it a lot.

Posted by shannon on January 21, 2009 at 7:38 PM

John Alan Martinson, Jr is the Faggot!!!

Posted by ricker on April 29, 2009 at 1:09 PM

John Alan Martinson, Jr is the Faggot!!!

Posted by ricker on April 29, 2009 at 1:10 PM