My short story, “The God Machine,” is available in the Winter 2017 issue of Maisonneuve!

“Secret Identities” includes an essay on Jem & the Holograms and emotional labour by Cynara Geissler, excerpts from Alex Leslie‘s “Vancouver for Beginners,” an essay and prose-poems by andrea bennett and a poem about Batman by Kim Fu that was included in her new book, How Festive the Ambulance. The issue also features work by Marita Dachsel, David Alexander, Aaron Kreuter, Sina Queryas, Caroline Szpak and many other miraculous super-heroes of the poetry world.

Find out more about the issue and subscribe today!

This is about saving the world.  Steel Fury leans forward in the passenger seat of the Foxcar, stainless steel helmet knocking against the windshield, Foxboy grinding his teeth behind the wheel, suspension so terrible you really feel it when the Foxcar hits a crack in the pavement, or a pile of trash, or a dip in the road, one of hundreds left over by the earthquake.  They drive on through the Dead Zone, the ruins of suburbia, houses disappearing into soft earth.  Strip malls with smashed signs venting neon, like crushed caterpillars.  Nobody ever came to fix anything.  Steel Fury crosses her arms under her red cape and shouts at Foxboy to keep going, it’s getting away.  They’re trying to keep pace with their enemy: the Superheart blimp, making its nightly journey across the Zone and into the city, spreading the message of Superheart.

You hear it before it arrives: the tinny beat of the theme song.  The smell of lemon gobstoppers, scientifically proven to be the aroma of love on the go.  A vast pink hot-air balloon, heart-shaped and voluptuous, spewing purple promotional gas as it goes; gas that will linger as a pale haze until this time tomorrow.  Under her helmet, Steel Fury’s nose runs.  Her eyes water.  She can feel Foxboy looking at her.  The curtains of smoke tug, make you crave, stir up urges.  Take a sip, they say.  Feel loved.  Take your beloved by the hand, to the fridge, the vending machine, to the supermarket.  Open cans of Superheart and make a toast.  To love.

Go have a read, and let me know what you think.

Seconds

It’s a little unfair, knowing that Seconds will inevitably be compared to Scott Pilgrim.  I can’t help it, myself; Scott Pilgrim was one of the first things my MFA cohort bonded over when we started our program. I still have my original copies, battered and beaten-up as they are, even though new hardbound editions with colours by Nathan Fairbairn are being released as we speak. Those original copies were passed from person to person while we waited for the series to finish. We piled into rows of the theatre for the film adaption. Scott Pilgrim represents a thrilling, creatively engaged time in my life. But there was always the question: what comes next?

That was years ago. I’m at a different point in my life. O’Malley also seems like he’s at a different point, too. Katie, the protagonist of Seconds is somewhere completely different from Scott. While Scott had no clear path, was struggling to find himself, Katie knows exactly what she wants–too bad that getting what you want isn’t guaranteed. Until you encounter a weird fey girl hanging around your house-turned-restaurant who offers you the chance to change the past by eating magic mushrooms…

Seconds is not a sprawling epic. It holds a tight focus on Katie as she uses the mushrooms to change her world, rewriting her past to make her present more advantageous. Maybe things would be better if she’d done something different. Altering the past is a trope, it’s nothing new, but there’s something interesting about the scale that O’Malley employs, that the changes are centered around the restaurant, that even when it’s only a small space Katie still ends up navigating an ocean of altered worlds. Struggling to catch up with each new world as she wakes up into it, trying to piece together what her circumstances are without anyone noticing. Trying to put together a friendship with the anxious server Hazel, who is with Katie every step of the way even as her own memories are changed by the twists and turns of mushroom magic. Their relationship is the key to the book, even as we’re presented with the other things–a romantic relationship, a professional goal–that Katie is more willing to prioritize.

The book isn’t perfect. O’Malley repeats himself by having the end result of all the time manipulation manifest as something very similar to one of Scott Pilgrim’s final battles. He doesn’t spend as much time as I would have liked to set up Katie’s world before it started changing wildly. But he makes up for it in the sheer energy of his artwork, the verve of his characters, and Nathan Fairbairn’s beautiful colours. The power of O’Malley’s work is almost always in his characters and their energy, and that holds true for Seconds.

If I’m going to be honest, it doesn’t have the same impact that Scott Pilgrim did. It’s a different book, a different project, a quieter piece. It isn’t nearly as immersive, but feels more sober, more meditative in places, strikes me in my soul a bit more. It speaks to the part of me that wonders how I got where I am now, how I might get back to some earlier island, some better region. It wraps itself quite tightly around my regrets, squeezes them ever so slightly. And knowing that my friends, the others from my cohort, are similarly far from where they expected to be–because that’s life–I am excited to be able to hand it over to them, each in turn.

(Seconds was published for the first time in 2014 by Ballentine Books)

I’d read and read and really enjoyed another of Meno’s novels, The Boy Detective Fails. That novel encapsulated a lot of my interests at the time–postmodern detective fiction, playful remixing of childhood favourites like Nancy Drew, the small assassinations of failure–and approached its subject with the gauge locked halfway between magic realism and flat-out surrealism. Consequently, when a friend was going down to Portland and stopping at Powell’s Books–then a mythical, mystical nexus to me–I asked him to look for some Meno. He did, but then the product of that quest fell into obscurity–

(like Sauron and that damn ring, I suppose.)

Tender as Hellfire is a much earlier novel–Meno’s first, in fact–and it is consequently rougher around the edges. That isn’t a bad thing, though. It is extremely episodic, straddling the line between short stories that bleed together and a more holistic novel.

Pill-Bug is thirteen years old, and Dough (our narrator) is ten. They have been dragged from Duluth, Texas to a town called Tenderloin so that their mother’s boyfriend French (a subject of the boys’ concentrated hate, despite being her first boyfriend not to be a complete asshole) can find work. Pill may also have been partially responsible, setting a fire near the end of their time in Duluth.

Essentially, the book is about Pill and Dough trying to make a go of it in a new town, living in a trailer park, with Pill on that strange and angry bluff called puberty and Dough struggling to find himself as the space between him and his brother fills with alien distance. Stories exploring masculinity, particularly in the milieu that Meno is drawing on, are not uncommon but Tender as Hellfire manages to balance by developing complicated relationships between Dough and the women in his world, notably a girl in his class named Lottie who both repels and comforts him.

Where Meno excels–and this is something that he’d return to in The Boy Detective Fails and the rest of his later work–is the blurry, hazy line between the natural and the supernatural. While never crossing the line into the fantastical, Dough’s perception of the events and his vivid ten-year-old imagination imbues everything around him with malevolence; he sees dark shapes in the night and is haunted by the Devil and how he believes his father died. For me, the high point of the novel was a sequence in which Dough–forced, for the first time, into hanging out with Lottie–is taken to an abandoned “haunted” barn, the site of a horrible local tragedy. There, beside the remains of a long-dead horse, Dough sees the Devil, an event that leaves a deep scar in the narrative.

It’s strange to look back at a book which has been followed by a fair number of younger siblings, siblings that have been more developed and stronger and healthier. The chapters never bleed into each other enough, we fail to get as much depth out of Pill-Bug as we’d like, their mother doesn’t quite get the dimensionality that she craves. Lottie. There isn’t enough Lottie, who is set-up as an interesting character but spends much of the book skirting along the edges of it. The climax doesn’t the perfect pitch and the promise of the book’s opening never really comes to anything.

However: I appreciated taking a sojourn back to the early point in Meno’s career, being more familiar with his later work; you can see the movements towards later strength. Even if it doesn’t hang together as well as it could, Dough’s voice is incredibly strong and the details are engaging enough–particularly the recurring image of Pill-Bug’s face, with a horrible black scab where an eyebrow lost to fire would have been–that I gobbled the novel up, enjoying it even as it recognized its flaws. It felt like reading something strange and awkward and precious, pulled from the earth, still gritty even when reflecting light.

(Tender as Hellfire was first published by Punk Planet in 1999.)

The first volume of Paul Pope’s graphic novel series, Battling Boy, is concerned with the rite of passage, bread and butter of the adventure narrative. On the day before his thirteenth birthday, our eponymous hero drops down through the swirling lightning cloud and is left alone on a world he’s never heard of, meant to prove himself by defending it from monsters.

Arcopolis–a city the size of a continent, on one of a million-billion parallel worlds–is beset upon by an army of super-villains, monsters with no apparent source and no aim beyond devastation and the kidnapping of children. There’s a curfew in effect, as the monsters tend to avoid coming out before early evening, and the monsters are thwarted to some small extent by a singular champion called Haggard West. West flies around with super-science and ray-guns, shooting them up and saving what kids he can–until he ends up dead, sacrificing himself to save some kids. The world’s left without a hero, and his daughter Aurora is left without a father.

Meanwhile, in a higher realm, up above the DNA-like spiral of worlds, a Teutonic demigod returns to a shining temple-city after defeating a monster. He’s here to usher his son into a rite of passage–the children of the shining realm must leave on their thirteenth birthday and prove themselves heroic and capable. He ushers his son through the swirling lightning cloud and onto a mountain on the edge of Arcopolis.

He does the dad things, the heroic challenge things: he lays out the task at hand (live among the people, save them from monsters), he hands over the divine gifts (one magical cloak; one invisible credit card; one map; one book of monsters; one set of keys for an apartment; two wrist-bracers; twelve magical T-shirts, emblazoned with animal totems to call upon). After that, while his son whimpers and begs him for help, the Demigod–who carries a hammer, who wears a horned and winged helmet–leaps up into the sky and disappears.

And then, Battling Boy has to survive on his own.  He has to prove himself. And, as this is only the start of the story, he does poorly.  Pope allows Battling Boy to fail right from the outset, forced to make use of his enchanted wrist-bracers to call his dad for help with fighting the first monster, a ravenous dog-creature eating everything in sight, no distinction between whether it’s edible or not. Dad is, as well, not really paying attention, something that I really appreciated; the old man’s busy fighting a flaming minotaur in some other dimension, and gets so fed up with his boy’s complaining that he simply fires a lightning bolt across worlds and destroys the monster.

Which is great, right? Except for the part where all anyone in Arcopolis saw was a twelve-year-old boy calling down a blast of magical lightning that incinerated a monster. He’s their new hero! He can handle anything! He gets the meet the mayor, gets his own parade, stands in front of TV cameras and the paparazzi, is paired with a beauty queen.  So desperate for a shred of hope are the people of Arcopolis that they’ll jump on anyone without question. Too bad he lies about being able to call down the lightning (and then he’s awkwardly questioned about the mechanics, because of course the city’s scientists and engineers want to reproduce the effect). Too bad that he feels mismatched right away, barely understanding his magical totem T-shirts.

Which I really enjoy. I love that Battling Boy has no idea what he’s doing and is struggling to keep his head up. He is from a better world and is gifted with tremendous power but is quite humble at the same time, even while he struggles to pretend like he can handle things. He doesn’t know how to work with the totems, has to learn their weaknesses and strengths (T-Rexes, for example, have no upper body strength) and by the end of the volume has already lost one, ripped right off his back by some of Pope’s more inventive monsters.

My favourite sequence from the book is a quiet moment in his apartment–Battling Boy doesn’t know what to do to save the city and decides he needs help. Two of his animal shirts offer a kind of intellectual help–the Clever Fox and the Wise Elephant. The sequence is beautiful and quite haunting–sliding the fox shirt on first, he’s is visited by the animal out of the darkness, a slinky trickster urging him to cheat right away.  Call his father.  When Battling Boy argues that Dad isn’t going to help him again, the fox encourages him to call his mother or lie to his father. Unsatisfied and unwilling to repeat his earlier show of weakness, he calls upon the elephant, wisdom incarnate, who suckles a houkah and tells him he knows what he has to do: be strong, be focused, do the work.

Part of why I love that sequence is that Battling Boy uses good judgement even when he’s down, and neither path solves the problem, just reminds him that it is his problem. It’s also eerie, as the audience is reminded that he isn’t literally being visited by these animals–he’s essentially hallucinating in the middle of his apartment, both speaking to his totems and being filled with them.

Another element that I love about the story is Aurora West, Haggard’s orphaned daughter. While Battling Boy gets ready to drop from the sky, we see her mourning her father and deciding to finally follow in his footsteps. While the boy is gifted with divine powers and gifts, Aurora has to actually learn the physics behind her father’s technology, feels less a need to prove herself and more a desire to see her father’s legacy fulfilled. She’s upset when she learns of the new hero in Arcopolis but that only fires her on, making her take action alongside him when some of the monsters attack during the parade. They don’t get a chance to speak, not really, and I’m very curious how their relationship will evolve in the second volume; Aurora is a teenager with a legacy, and I’m curious how she’ll handle working alongside an upstart from another world with magic.

Pope’s artwork is spectacular, scratchy and detailed. His depiction of the shining realm overtly references the work of Jack Kirby, of course, but brings his own distinct eye to it. He works in visual cues to the long line of mythological heroes in modern comics that Battling Boy is a part of–before he starts wearing his animal totems, he arrives in a shirt emblazoned with an eagle pattern that (along with his wrist-bracers) evokes Wonder Woman. His father is a Thunder God. His broach & epaulette-laden cloak summons the image of C.C. Beck’s Captain Marvel (also summoned via lightning).

His monsters are detailed and strange, as well. Sadisto and his minions, Coil and Nails. The Spiders. The Hyena. They are all nasty and grotesque and spend their time off gambling, drinking uranium-enriched booze. We are given hints to the true villain, the ultimate monster, who seems to have some capacity or desire to drain children of their dreams–hence the kidnapping.

The story is simple and straightforward, but doesn’t allow easy answers for its heroes. Pope employs interesting forms of repetition to draw connections between Arcopolis and the higher realm. With Pope, knowing his political leanings, I tend to go into his work loving the artwork but wary of the story, but nothing strongly flagged for me beyond the typical issues with the hero narrative, one man against the world.

My biggest frustration was that I don’t quite know why the lead character had to be the traditional blond boy-child, particularly when his mother is shown to not be white, the choice felt a little lazy, a little too conservative, given that the story felt so assured of itself. That said, I still enjoy it and want more, as soon as possible.

(Battling Boy volume 1 is published by First-Second Books in 2013.)

I’ve been trying—over and over—to approach the question of “What the hell is wrong with DC Comics?” for a while now and it’s been a process of me hitting my head against a wall over and over.  A minor footnote in the larger conversation of DC’s madness is that they recently cancelled Legion of Super-Heroes, one of those long-standing recurring infections of the super-hero genre.  I am a Legion nerd. I can still remember my first issue. It’s a future story: inspired by the example of Superboy (Superman when he was a boy!), a bunch of teenagers in the Thirtieth Century—more recently the Thirty-First, because even DC’s future has a dumb sliding scale timeline—put on costumes and fight crime. They’re also typically jerks, because it started in the Silver Age. And because of it being comics, the Legion went back in time to meet their inspiration and take him to the future without consideration of time paradoxes. I mean, certainly, I’d probably go back in time and drag Dorothy Parker with me, promising martinis and no consequences to her disappearance from the timeline.

I wrote a piece for the Boom Tube this week on how much I’d love to see DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes property reimagined with more non-het, genderqueer characters–all centered on a teenaged clone of Superman coming to terms with her identity as a trans person.