Deep Space Nine remains, by an order of magnitude, my favorite of the Star Trek series.  Not surprisingly, then, it was the terrific DS9 relaunch of novels set after the series finale (which I wrote about in depth here) that rekindled my interest in (and love for) Pocket Books’ Star Trek novels.

But after the publication of David Mack’s phenomenal novel Warpath in April, 2006, the DS9 relaunch series hit something of a snag.  Warpath ended on a brutal cliffhanger, bur for whatever reason the next installment in the series, Fearful Symmetry, wasn’t scheduled to be published until a year later.  Unfortunately, it was actually over TWO years until that next novel was finally published (written by Olivia Woods, a different author than the one originally announced) in July, 2008.  Fearful Symmetry wound up being one of the shortest DS9 novels published (in the relaunch series, at least), and then we all had to wait still another year for the next novel: The Soul Key, also written by Olivia Woods, released this past August.

Such a long a wait put a lot of pressure on The Soul Key.  Things were exacerbated even more (in my mind, at least), when, a few months ago, Pocket Books released their schedule of novels for 2010.  Only one DS9 novel was included, and according to the description it will be set several years after the events of the entire DS9 relaunch series of novels, so that it can be a part of next year’s “Typhon Pact” Next Gen crossover story.  That sounds like a cool novel, but one that will be much more about the post-Destiny Next Gen stories as opposed to all of the DS9-centric stories of the DS9 relaunch.  So it might be another two years at least before more actual DS9 proper novels are published.  All of that means that Ms. Woods’ two novels (Fearful Symmetry and The Soul Key) could conceivably be the only new DS9 relaunch stories published for FIVE years.

That means that The Soul Key would have to be really magnificent to live up to all of the expectation placed upon it.  Sadly, it is not.

Although not as short as Fearful Symmetry, The Soul Key is still a fairly short novel — and it feels even shorter than it actually is.  That might be because, while there is a lot of PLOT covered in this novel (we do, at last, get some resolution to several of the story-lines that have been running through the past several DS9 novels, which means the last several YEARS of my life), there doesn’t seem to be a whole heck of a lot of depth to the proceedings.  Many of the great previous DS9 novels really explored individual characters (like Garak in A Stitch in Time) and/or explored in detail the situations that certain characters found themselves in (such as, just to pick a recent example from Warpath, the page-count Mr. Mack expends to involve the reader in Ensign Tenmei’s experience as a captive of the Jem’Hadar soldier Taranatar).  I didn’t really feel that depth in The Soul Key — the story moved along at such a brisk pace — boom, boom boom — that I didn’t really feel like sufficient time was spent focusing on any of the events that occurred.  There’s nothing wrong with fast-paced story-telling — that can make for a really exciting, action-packed novel (as Warpath was), but to me it almost felt as if Ms. Woods was just in a rush to get some of these long-running story-lines resolved already.

I also felt that Ms. Woods spent way too much time in the first half of the novel filling us in on the back-story of the characters and situations (particularly that of the two Iliana Ghemors).  This back-story is interesting stuff, but I really felt that it should have been included in the previous novel, Fearful Symmetry, whose raison d’etre seemed to me to have been the filling-in of important backstory before the story-lines moved forward.  I have no idea why some of this important info was left out of Fearful Symmetry.  It’s inclusion in that novel would have helped Fearful Symmetry feel like more of a complete story, and it would have left more room in this novel for the events depicted herein to be fleshed out more.

So… is there anything that I liked about Fearful Symmetry?  Well, yes.  There is a lot of exciting action here, and there is (as noted above), some nice resolution (finally) to some long-running story-lines.  Most of the major DS9 players have a role to play in the proceedings, which I appreciated.  In particular, I’ve been really enjoying the continued development of the created-in-the-novels character of Elias Vaughn, who gets some more tough breaks here.

I was also happy to see that, as the novel reached its conclusion, we got some tantalizing hints that other long-building DS9 story-lines (such as the emergence of the mysterious and dangerous Ascendants) had not been forgotten.  (And — small spoiler alert!! — I was quite surprised and pleased to read about the return of the Even Odds to the storyline.)  Who knows when the DS9 saga will continue (in addition to the lack of DS9 in the 2010 schedule, Pocket Books’ Star Trek line has been in upheaval recently with the firing, within the past year, of the two editors primarily responsible for shepherding the Trek novels: Marco Palmieri and Margaret Clark), but the final pages of The Soul Key give me hope that the same story-lines and questions that are on my mind are also on the minds of the Trek authors, and that we will see these stories continue (and reach a hopefully compelling conclusion).

I just hope I don’t have to wait too many more years!!

Pocket Books did publish one additional DS9 novel this past summer, albeit one that didn’t directly connect to the main story-line: The Never-Ending Sacrifice, by Una McCormack.  Was I more satisfied by that novel than I was by The Soul Key?  Indeed I was!!  I’ll be posting my thoughts on that novel next Friday.  For now, have a great weekend!

Alan Moore is one of the undisputed masters of the comic book form, and that’s putting things mildly.  He has authored a quite astounding body of work, including V For Vendetta, From Hell, and, of course, the magnum opus that is Watchmen.

TwoMorrows Publishing has, for the past few years, been publishing a wonderful series called Modern Masters, in which they spotlight a variety of the greatest artists in the field: Alan Davis, George Perez, Arthur Adams, John Byrne, etc.  The format of those books (I suppose I should call them books — they are the size of magazines, but they are square-bound and much lengthier than your average magazine) is a lengthy one-on-one interview with the subject.  Through these series of in-depth questions and answers, the reader is taken on a detailed journey through the life and career of the subject, and is also given great insight into his/her style, approach, and techniques.

First published in 2003, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore adheres to the format of the Modern Masters series.  The entire work is a lengthy interview with Mr. Moore, conducted by George Khoury.  But while the Modern Masters volumes are all in-depth, this work puts those volumes to shame, clocking in at a hefty 237 pages.  The new “Indispensable Edition,” which is what I have, was published a few months back, presumably with the intention of meeting the renewed interest in Mr. Moore’s work following the release of the Watchmen movie.  This new edition has a great new interview with Mr. Moore, conducted in 2008, that serves as a fine epilogue to the whole piece.

For anyone who has ever read and enjoyed any of Alan Moore’s amazing comic books, I cannot recommend this publication highly enough.  I thought that the early chapters, dealing with Moore’s youth and childhood, would be boring — but Mr. Moore’s wit brought great humor to those stories of his “early days.”  And once the story moves to his break-though stint writing Swamp Thing, the narrative really kicks into high gear.  The book is filled with behind-the-scenes stories of Moore’s time working on all of his seminal works.  I’ve read a good deal over the years, for example, about his run on Swamp Thing and the making of Watchmen, V For Vendetta, etc., but the stories found here quickly move beyond the familiar “legends” connected with those projects.  It’s endlessly fascinating to hear Moore’s thoughts on the development of those works, as well as his opinions about them now, looking back.  (I was quite interested to read about the reasons for his dislike, for example, of The Killing Joke, which — despite his feelings — I continue to regard as one of the definitive Batman stories.)  I was also pleased that the book spends a significant amount of time discussing some of Moore’s less well-known works, from the tantalizingly unfinished Big Numbers, to his time writing for Jim Lee’s Wildstorm and Rob Liefeld’s Awesome Comics universes, to his well-regarded but all-too-brief (to me, at least) development of his very own comic book “universe,” America’s Best Comics.

As if anything else was needed, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore is supplemented by a number of illustrated tributes to Mr. Moore by some of his best artistic collaborators: Brian Bolland, Rick Veitch, John Totleben, Mark Buckingham, Dave Gibbons, Chris Sprouse, and more.  There is also a wealth of imagery from all of Moore’s varied works that accompanies each page of the interview, including some great samples of his earlier, hard-to-find work from 2000 A.D. and other British publications.  I was also tickled to see that lots of samples of Mr. Moore’s own illustration work was included.  I had read that Moore had a decent talent for illustration himself, but I was quite blown away by the skill of his work (even drawings from 20-30 years ago!!) that was reprinted here.  The man has talent, that’s for damn sure.

I thought it would take me a while to read The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore in its entirety, but it was so enjoyable and fascinating that I blew through it at great speed.  Now I want to go back and read all of the Alan Moore comic books in my collection!!  (And I also have a list of other projects by Mr. Moore that I need to track down, such as A Small Killing, which he apparently holds in great esteem.)  For any comic book fan, this is indeed an indispensable work.

You can find more about The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore, the Modern Masters series, and lots of other fine TwoMorrow publications at www.twomorrows.com.

Yesterday I began reviewing a collection of short-stories entitled The Sky’s the Limit, which was part of Pocket Books’ 20th anniversary salute to Star Trek: The Next Generation.   In my last post, I reviewed the stories set during the run of the Next Gen TV show.  Today I’ll turn my attention to the stories set after “All Good Things,” Next Gen’s series finale.

‘Twould Ring the Bells of Heaven, by Amy Sisson — Set soon after the events of “All Good Things,” this tale finds Deanna Troi leading an away team assigned to help a group of scientists studying the ring system of a planet nicknamed Heaven.  There are some interesting scientific notions mixed into the story, which I enjoyed, and a nice sci-fi mystery.  It was a good idea to focus on Counselor Troi at this point in Next Gen’s history, as she began stepping into more of a leadership role among the Enterprise’s command structure.

Friends with the Sparrows, by Christopher L. Bennett — The classic Next Gen episode “Darmok” introduced us to the Children of Tama, a race of aliens who speak only in metaphor.  With this story, Mr. Bennett really dives into many of the fascinating questions that a consideration of that episode would bring: How do the Tamarians teach their vocabulary to their children?  How do they communicate technical information?  How do they convey to one another the full stories behind their myths in the first place?  It’s hard to avoid asking those questions after having watched “Darmok” a few times, and I was tickled by Mr. Bennett’s attempts to provide answers and flesh out Tamarian culture.  This story also focuses on Data’s struggles with his emotion chip (from Star Trek: Generations).  That aspect of the story is a quite a leap beyond what we saw of Data in that film, but nonetheless works when you consider how many more challenges Data must have had to struggle with (beyond what we saw in Generations) in terms of adjusting to his newfound emotions.  (I should also mention that this story contains the best line in the entire collection: “Mirab-his-sails-unfurled factor what, sir?”  Brilliant.)

Suicide Note, by Geoff Trowbridge — After the Federation’s alliance with the Romulan Empire (to fight against the Dominion, as depicted in the later seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Captain Picard is finally in a position to fulfill a promise made long before.  In the excellent third-season episode “The Defector” (one of the first scripts by Ronald D. Moore), Romulan Admiral Jarok defects to the Federation in an effort to prevent the outbreak of war.  When he discovers that he has been deceived (the evidence he thought he had discovered of Romulan war plans was just an elaborate test of his loyalty), the Admiral kills himself, leaving a message to his wife that Picard promises to one day deliver.  This is a wonderful, emotional story, and a great follow-up to a classic episode.  Just terrific.

Four Lights, by Keith R.A. DeCandido — Another great follow up to a classic Next Gen episode.  In the waning days of the Dominion War, Captain Picard and the U.S.S. Enterprise-E rescue a Cardassian survivor from a Dominion attack — Gul Madred, the Cardassian who brutally tortured Picard in the two-part episode “Chains of Command.”  Major credit to Mr. DeCandido for choosing to follow up on such a fascinating dangling story-line.  I was enjoyably surprised at the unexpected ways that Picard’s interactions with Madred unfolded.  I also loved the glimpse into just what the crew of the Enterprise was up to during the tumultuous years of the Dominion conflict.  This is a fertile ground for stories, and while a few novels have given us glimpses of some of the Enterprise’s adventures during this time period, I still feel that there are still a lot more stories to be told…

‘Til Death, by Bob Ingersoll & Thomas F. Zahler — When a terrible attack on an away mission leaves Will Riker near death just a few weeks before his marriage to Deanna Troi, he must contemplate what his final message to his imzadi could possibly be.  This is a sweet story with some fascinating connections to an episode of the Original Series.  But I must confess to some disappointment.  When I saw that there was a Riker story in this collection set before Star Trek: Nemesis, I had hoped that it would shed some light on something the films glossed over: what really prompted Riker and Troi, after years of friendship on board the Enterprise, to finally decide to resume their romantic relationship and then get married?  Yes, I know they hooked up under the sort-of-influence of the youthful properties of the Briar Patch in Star Trek: Insurrection, but was that really the only reason?  I’ve always felt there was more to that story.  This is nothing against ‘Til Death — it’s a lovely tale.  Just not the story I was hoping for.

On the Spot, by David A. McIntee — Worf deals with adopting Spot after Data’s demise in Star Trek: Nemesis, and a bizarre alien creature causes trouble on board the Enterprise.  Portions of this story are told from Spot’s perspective.  That’s an interesting choice, but not one that appealed to me.

Trust Yourself When All Men Doubt You, by Michael Schuster & Steve Mollmann — At a crossroads after the traumatic events of Star Trek: Nemesis, Jean-Luc Picard must decide whether he his truly ready to resume command of the Enterprise.  He finds some comfort in a letter to him written years earlier by Captain Thomas Halloway.  This final story is a nice bookend to the first story, also by Mr. Schuster and Mr. Mollmann, and the revelation of Captain Halloway’s ultimate fate is a powerful one.  If I have a complaint, it’s that the resolution of Picard’s emotional turmoil is a little too easy.  I think Picard’s mental state following the events of Nemesis probably warranted a longer story.

So there you have it.  The Sky’s the Limit is a terrifically entertaining collection of stories from some of Pocket Books’ most talented authors.  I really enjoyed the variety of the stories — they cover the entire time-period of the Next Generation and spread the focus amongst all of the characters.  While some stories spoke to me more than others, the over-all quality was very high.  In the end, it’s a worthy salute to The Next Generation, and reading this book made me want to go back and watch many of the episodes referenced within.  What more could I ask?

2007 was, believe it or not, the TWENTIETH anniversary of the launch of the very first Star Trek spin-off, Star Trek: The Next Generation.  The pilot episode, “Encounter at Farpoint,” is terribly clunky when looked at today, but as a kid watching that very first episode I was blown away, and hooked for life.

During 2007, Pocket Books released a number of great novels celebrating Next Gen’s 20th anniversary, but one that I missed was a short-story anthology called The Sky’s The Limit.  I’m glad that I have remedied my oversight, because this collection is a delight.  The fourteen stories are presented chronologically, spanning the years between a time immediately before “Encounter at Farpoint,” and the time immediately after the last Next Gen feature film, Star Trek: Nemesis.

Meet with Triumph and Disaster, by Michael Schuster & Steve Mollmann — As Starfleet prepares for the launch of the Enterprise-D, the man who supervised her construction, Captain Thomas Halloway, is faced with a momentous choice.  One of the shortest stories in the collection, it’s a great introduction to the era of Next Gen, and a delightful fleshing out of a man only glimpsed very briefly in one episode.

Acts of Compassion, by Dayton ward & Kevin Dilmore — Beverly Crusher and Tasha Yar are tasked with seeing to the safe return of three Starfleet Officers who were captured in Cardassian territory.  Needless to say, the mission hits a few bumps along the way.  I was glad to see that Tasha was not ignored by the authors contributing to this anthology, and I really enjoyed this glimpse at the relationship between these two women.  I can’t think of any first-season episodes that gave us much information about how Tasha and Beverly interacted, but Ward & Dilmore do a great job in conveying the very different ways that these two officers viewed the world.

Redshift, by Richard C. White — Set during Next Gen’s second season, this story focuses on the early days aboard the Enterprise of new Chief Medical Officer Dr. Katherine Pulaski.  Pulaski was an interesting character who, I feel, was done a disservice by the writers when she vanished off the show at the end of that season.  It’s nice to see her character fleshed out here, and White creates a crackling adventure scenario that keeps the story moving.

Among the Clouds, by Scott Pearson –A mishap in the lower stratosphere of a Jovian planet sends Geordi LaForge plummeting down through the clouds of ammonia ice to his certain death.  The story moves at a rapid pace, bouncing back and forth between the events that lead to Geordi’s situation and his efforts to save himself.  This is a wonderful story of exploration, and Mr. Pearson creates a vivid alien world in his depiction of this planet and the strange life that the Enterprise crew discovers living within it.  There’s a nice grounding in real science mixed with some delightful sci-fi extrapolation, all wrapped up in a great story of Geordi’s good heart and incredible engineering abilities.  One of my favorite stories in the collection.

Thinking of You, by Greg Cox — Mr. Cox sends some love towards two great Next Gen supporting characters: Ensign Ro and Lieutenant Reginald Barclay.  The unlikely pair is sent to provide engineering assistance to Lwaxana Troi, but quickly find themselves caught up in a diplomatic negotiation gone terribly wrong.  Cox has a great ear for writing the dialogue of these three distinct characters — I loved the way he bounces the three of them off one another.  There are also some fascinating digressions that explore the dynamics of just how a holodeck would work.  Great stuff.

Turncoats, by Susan Schwartz — This story is a follow-up to the sixth season episode, “Face of the Enemy.”  I am not a big fan of that episode, but was nonetheless taken by this tale.  ”Face of the Enemy” introduced the character of Stefan DeSeve, a Federation defector to Romulus who returns to the Federation bearing critical information from Ambassador Spock.  That is an intriguing idea for a character, but DeSeve doesn’t get a lot of attention in the episode — he’s there more as a plot device, and after the episode he’s never heard from again.  Ms. Schwartz sets out to tell us more of his story.  It’s an interesting choice, to focus on so minor a character, but the result was successful (although I was less taken by the Enterprise-in-jeopardy side of the tale, as that didn’t seem to track all that consistently from where “Face of the Enemy” had left off).

Ordinary Days, by James Swallow — My favorite story in this collection.  Wesley Crusher is married and living on Dorvan V when Starfleet informs the colonists that they need to relocate, because a new treaty has ceded the planet to the Cardassians.  When the colonists resist the idea of leaving their home, Starfleet sends the U.S.S. Enterprise, commanded by Edward Jellico, to supervise their relocation.  This story is a bittersweet, emotional glimpse at the life that young Wesley Crusher COULD have lived, had he suppressed his unique gifts in an effort to live a more ordinary life.  The story unfolds at a leisurely pace, allowing the reader to slowly discover what is going on (and also to get to know and sympathize with Wesley in a way that we seldom did on the show).  Mr. Swallow resists any urge to present things simplistically — while Wesley’s absence from the Enterprise resulted in some terrible tragedies befalling that ship and crew, in many ways Wesley was able to find a home and personal connections in this life that he never did in the life we saw him live over the years of Next Gen.  Ordinary Days is a sweet, sad story, and it’s absolutely dynamite.

I’ll be back on Friday to discuss the rest of the short stories from The Sky’s the Limit, set during the period of the Next Gen movies.  See you then!

Click here for a terrific three-essay series that delves into the first three Indiana Jones films.  These are all really well-written pieces, filled to the brim with love for the cinematic adventures of Dr. Jones.

Clever tourists wrecking the world one monument at a time.  Don’t think — just follow that link.  You won’t regret it.

Click here for a fascinating list of the twenty best non-fiction books for people who think they hate to read non-fiction.  I need to get on this, having only read two of the items on this list!

I’m not exactly recommending this lengthy essay, because I disagree with it wildly, but it’s sort of bizarrely fascinating two see two individuals who really don’t seem to like Star Trek at all go on an enormous length about it as they revisit the first six Trek films.  (Well, one of the two authors seems to be a fan, but he doesn’t seem to put up much of a fight whenever the other one bashes the series.)

Speaking of Trek, here is a link to a lengthy, fascinating Q & A that’s been going on over at Trekmovie.com between Star Trek screenwriters Bob Orci & Alex Kurtzman and a number of fans who, like me, had lots of questions about elements of the new movie’s plots.  I really respect Mr. Orci for engaging with the fans in this way — though I feel most of his responses are pretty flimsy.  Check it out and see what you think.  (UPDATE:  Still MORE Q & A with Mr. Orci & Mr. Kurtzman can be found here!)

It’s pretty obvious that the new Star Trek movie was pretty heavily influenced by the action and dynamism of Star Wars.  But have you considered just how deep those similarities run?  Shocking!  (And hysterical.)

Let’s close with three intriguing trailers: Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Junior, the bizarre-looking Nine and (can you believe it?) Toy Story 3.

That should keep you all good and busy until tomorrow!  See you back here then!

After my lengthy series of posts about Star Trek novels from last month, I bet people think that’s all I read.  And, its true, sci-fi novels make up the bulk of my regular reading list.  But every now and then I do branch out, and I’d like to share several great books I’ve recently read that peak behind the scenes of Hollywoodland.

What Just Happened?, by Art Linson — Mr. Linson has been a producer in Hollywood for a few decades now, and this book covers a period of several years in the late ’90s in which he went to work for 20th Century Fox and proceeded to produce a large number of bombs.  Now, did these movies bomb because of bad luck and ridiculous studio politics and lack of support (as Mr. Linson contends), or is Linson just bereft of talent?  Well, I don’t know the man, so I can’t really judge.  But either way, this book is relentlessly entertaining as Linson takes us through the making of several movies that, to put it gently, did not do well.  Linson is a good storyteller, and in the book he focuses on anecdotes — putting the reader right in the middle of a series of hilarious (and painful for the people involved in them) situations.  We join Linson as he tries to deal with Alec Baldwin who, tapped to play the young and handsome photographer in the David Mamet-scripted The Edge, shows up to the set overweight and bearing an enormous mountain-man beard which he refuses to shave.  We see him trying to respond when studio head Tom Rothman asserts that they absolutely positively cannot cast Gwyneth Paltrow in Great Expectations because she has no chin.  We see him flummoxed the day he finds out that a central scene in that movie, that of a young man sketching his female paramour in the nude, is also a centerpiece of another soon-to-be-released Fox movie, James Cameron’s Titanic.  And we’re right there with him the first time he and David Fincher screen Fight Club for a room full of horrified Fox execs.  

If there’s any weakness to the book, its the framing device that Linson uses for these anecdotes — that of a series of lunches he has with a former studio head.  There are some funny interactions between these two, but each time the book cut back to their lunches, I kept thinking “let’s get back to the real stories!”  Despite this, Linson’s book is really engaging — and at less than 200 pages, you’ll breeze right through it.  Its a lot of fun.

By the way, this book is being adapted into a film starring Robert DeNiro.  (This is very amusing, since in the book Linson makes a number of references to his friendship with DeNiro, and to his many failed attempts to get DeNiro to star in one of his pictures.)  Two trailers have been released — you can see them here and here.  It looks from the trailer like the movie is a fictionalized story of the making of a film that incorporates many of the real-life stories that Linson detailed in his book.  By the way, they’ve also released the version of the Alec Baldwin beard-shaving argument, in which it is Bruce Willis who is refusing to trim his locks.  Check that out here.

Billion-Dollar Kiss: The Kiss That Saved Dawson’s Creek and Other Adventures in TV Writing, by Jeffrey Stepakoff — Since Dawson’s Creek isn’t exactly the type of TV show that I watch (to put it mildly), one wouldn’t think that this book would be of any interest to me.  But there’s much more to this book than just stories from the Creek.   It is partly a memoir of Stepakoff’s twenty years as a TV writer, freelancing scripts as well as spending several seasons on staff at TV shows as varied as The Wonder Years, Sisters, and eventually Dawson’s Creek, and partly a history of the TV industry during that time.  We first meet Stepakoff as a completely inexperienced college graduate who heads to LA right at the start of what he describes as a Hollywood gold-rush for writers, in which the studios began to throw huge amounts of money at any writer they felt had a hint of buzz.  We follow his early efforts at writing spec scripts, getting an agent, and finally winding up as a staff writer on The Wonder Years.  Stepakoff takes us through the explosion of writers in the late nineties and the collapse of the market for writers in the early aughts, as the number of writers all competing for a limited number of staff positions on TV shows reached its breaking point at the same time as the networks began having great success with reality programming that did not require highly-paid union writers.  Stepakoff balances stories of many of his bizarre and wonderful experiences working for various shows with a detailed but easy to understand description of the various ins-and-outs of the industry.  This includes details about the salaries available for writers at various levels of the staff writers’ totem pole, the way studio and network politics can impact the quality of a new or established series, and the structure of the Hollywood year from pilot season onward.  

Stepakoff is a skilled writer, and he is able to write well about various background topics (salaries, contracts, etc.) that might otherwise seem dry.  And he has lead quite an interesting life for the last twenty years, working on a number of successful and not-so-successful shows, so he doesn’t have to work too hard to make his stories interesting.  I will admit that there were some times, when he would go into great detail about the enormous amount of money he was making as a “baby writer” in Hollywood, that I started to lose my connection with his stories.  How could I empathize with someone making such an insane amount of money??  But the exorbitant sums thrown at young writers in the ’90s is an important part of the rise-and-fall-and-hopefully-rise-again story of writers in Hollywood that Stepakoff is telling, so I suppose those details are important.  Overall, its a great work.  I’ll definitely be paying attention for his name as I read  the credits for current and upcoming shows.

After reading What Just Happened? and Billion-Dollar Kiss, I decided to revisit one of my very favorite works about adventures in Hollywood:

Fortune and Glory, by Brian Michael Bendis — Mr. Bendis has become, over the past few years, one of the pre-eminent writers working in comic books today.  He’s one of the top stars at Marvel Comics, responsible for writing books such as The Avengers, Ultimate Spider-Man, the current company-wide crossover Secret Invasion, and many others.  Bendis started out in the world of independent publishing, writing and illustrating several (really great) black-and-white crime comics: Goldfish, Jinx, Torso, and others.  Fortune and Glory is a graphic novel written and drawn by Bendis (it was originally published as a three-issue series by Oni Press in 1999-2000), that follows his experiences trying to get his series Goldfish (and, later, his series Torso) made into movies, in hilarious detail.

Well, needless to say if you’re thinking to yourself, I don’t remember seeing Goldfish or Torso playing at my local google-plex, well, that’s ‘cuz they never got made.  (Maybe someday???  One hopes!!)  But the story of how these films sort-of-almost-nearly got made is the subject of this fall-on-the-floor-laughing work.  From Bendis’ opening explanation of what it means to be in alternative comics (”alternative to what?  I don’t know…alternative to popular?”), to his initial contacts with Hollywood (”Pauly Shore is Goldfish!”), his attempts to pitch Goldfish (”Is this one of those comic books?  Man, I hate those comic books!”), his attempts to pitch Torso (”This Elliot Ness.  Who owns him?”), and lots more fun and ridiculous goings-on in between, this is a tough work to put down.  (It’s also got a terrific title.)

If Billion-Dollar Kiss helped me understand why there are a lot of crappy TV shows out there, then Fortune and Glory helps me understand why there are a lot of crappy movies.  The comic is — I say again — absolutely hilarious.  I can’t recommend it higher.  Check it out!