So, right before the pandemic, my wife and I published The Hive, a book that was waaaay too prescient for its own good. At one point, there was a really good chance that it was going to become a TV series, but a succession of Hollywood strikes destroyed the momentum and the project died.

Still, when we thought it was going to happen, I took some time to knock out a pilot script. Morgan took a look at it, added some great flourishes and made some terrific suggestions, and then we had something that — in my humble opinion — is pretty damn good!

Here’s a taste of the beginning. If there’s a hue and a cry for more, I shall provide!

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IT’S THREE OR FOUR YEARS FROM NOW.

Things aren’t great.

FADE IN:

BLACK SCREEN WITH A SPINNING “POWER ON” CIRCLE IN THE CENTER…

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (V.O.)

Today, the promise of the internet is finally fulfilled in America. It’s going to be big. And beautiful. And I think people are really gonna like it, and I think it’s going to be very good for the United States of America.

Spinner stops…

A login screen appears…

WELCOME TO BLINQ!

Trend Positive!

FADE TO:

INT. MESSY BEDROOM

CASSIE McKINNEY (17, biracial) lays on her back on an unmade bed, looking up at us. We don’t know whose bedroom this is, but it’s not hers. She has seen better days — her hair is basically hacked to oblivion, as though she lost a battle with a samurai hairdresser, and she has bruises and cuts on her face. Some of the cuts are bandaged — those are the worst ones. She’s bone- tired, but there’s a glint in her eyes.

CASSIE

In retrospect… I probably shouldn’t have done it.

EXT. MICROSOFT/BUZZFEED UNIVERSITY CAMPUS QUAD — NIGHT

It’s several weeks prior. Cassie’s hair is in much better shape and she’s only got one or two bruises. And oh yeah — she’s running like hell in the dark, charging up a hill. From behind her, voices of a crowd and the relentless PING! of smartphone alerts going off EVERYWHERE. Cellphone lights bob and weave in the distance.

RACHEL (O.S.)

Run, Cassie! Run!

Cassie runs like hell, breathing hard, and the night closes around her and the screen goes black…

TITLE: THE HIVE fades in, then out.

Blinq messages (think tweets) begin to fly across the black screen…

Any Mobs today? I have the day off and I’m bored! #savemefrommyself

Nice day for some Hive Justice! Look at that sunshine! Who’s heading to #MonsterNotAMan?

#BLINQReaderPoll3995: Is #MichaelJones a monster or a man? Vote: bl.inq/poll3995

HIVE ALERT: #MonsterNotAMan rally happening now in Rasche Field

And so on…

We…

FADE IN:

EXT. RASCHE FIELD — DAY

TITLE: HIVE ALERT: #MichaelJones has arrived. Hive Justice set to begin momentarily. #RascheField #MonsterNotAMan

Now we jump back yet another week or so before the scene of Cassie running in the dark… (Don’t worry — we’ll be in this timeframe for a good long while!)

A crowd presses down the street and through the open gate in a chainlink fence to a local park/ball field. People are chanting “MONSTER NOT A MAN!” and “HIVE JUSTICE!” It feels like a mash-up of a pep rally and the storming of the Bastille. Some people are wearing FACE MASKS, some aren’t.

In amongst the throng, we focus in on Cassie, who is unmolested, unharmed, just fine thankyouverymuch. She’s caught up in the excitement, chanting along with everyone else. She wears a set of wireless earbuds.

SOCIAL FEED A.I.

(from earbuds)

Update on #HiveJustice #MonsterNotAMan! Michael Jones has arrived. Prepare to–

She taps her left earbud.

SOCIAL FEED A.I.

Would you like a recap?

CASSIE

Yes. I mean–

SOCIAL FEED A.I.

Michael Jones posted anonymously about his marital misgivings in the wake of his wife’s cancer diagnosis–

CASSIE

(rolling her eyes)

Stop recap!

SOCIAL FEED A.I.

–post went viral and doxxers exposed his identity four days ago. Condemn threshold was exceeded in three hours, leading to Level 1 and Range 1 sanction, #publicjunk. Final tally was two percent Like, thirty-one percent Dislike, sixty-seven percent Condemn.

She slaps at the earbud until it shuts up. A roar goes up from the crowd and she re-focuses her attention on… …a slight, white, sandy-haired man slowly mounting a set of bleachers. He’s about thirty-five and wears glasses. The crowd goes crazy. Cassie gets back into it, chanting and thrusting her fist into the sky. It’s a moment of sheer mob mentality. People are in a frenzy.

He gets to the top bleacher, turns to the crowd. There’s a quiet, inevitable dignity to his poise. He sighs, unbuttons the first button on his shirt– –crowd LOSES IT–

Then he pauses, removes his glasses, and tucks them into his shirt pocket.

Cassie freezes at the sight, as though someone has just punched her in the gut and stolen her breath. The crowd around her goes nuts as the man begins removing his clothes to reveal a very ordinary dad-bod.

CASSIE

Wait…

The crowd starts filming. Cellphones and the occasional DSLR raised up, jostling for the best shot. The Man bears up under it well, not giving the jeering mob the satisfaction of reacting as they taunt and film him.

As with all things video game-related these days, I am late to the party, but I really dig Blue Prince. In the game, you play an heir to a fortune that can only be claimed by attaining entrance to the hidden 46th room in your uncle’s estate. The gimmick is that the estate itself is in a state of flux — every time you open a door, you have to choose which room is behind it. And at the end of the day, the house resets back to zero, erasing any progress you’ve made. Along the way there are secrets to uncover, mysteries to solve, puzzles to complete, all as you try to construct a route that will wend through the mansion to that elusive 46th room. Great fun, a terrific brain-teaser, and since there’s no time limit, you can play at your leisure.

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After my launch event in late June, the local bookseller gifted me a copy of Talking Man, a short novel from the ancient days of the 1980s. He thought I’d enjoy it because I’d talked to him about Stone Junction (a book I discussed briefly here) a while back and the books have similar attitudes and voices. He was right! I am really digging it, even though my schedule is making it hard to plow through this very short book! Stone Junction made my list of top books for 2025, and so far Talking Man looks to do the same this year…

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“We’ve known each other for 14 years and she’s never shown a sign or an ounce of this,” said Aurora Phelps’s husband. “If she did do it, damn, she put one over on me.”

By do it, he means tempt, lure, drug, rob, and sometimes kill a slew of men over the course of decades. Not bad for a 44-year-old.

If you’re reading this newsletter, then you know I’m, uh, interested in female serial killers. Aurora Phelps fits the bill, even though there’s a chance she didn’t actually intend to kill her victims. She seduced and stole from a bunch of guys, many of whom lived to tell the tale, so maybe she just went too far with the drugs in a few cases.

In any event, it’s very obvious that whether they lived or died meant nothing to her.

A Las Vegas resident, Phelps was married to a man who — check the above quote again — apparently had no idea that she was spending her time on the apps, as the kids say, luring in lonely old dudes, then taking them for every penny. In at least three cases, her depredations led to the deaths of the men in question, usually from an overdose or a complication of the overdose of the drugs she plied them with in order to steal from them. (In one case, she put so much Valium in a dude’s milkshake that he nearly died in his own bathtub.)

Anyway, even the guys who lived lost big time. One guy was drugged into compliance and gave her access to his accounts — Phelps proceeded to sell three millions dollars worth of Apple stock! Not bad for a day’s work.

Bilingual and having lived in both the U.S. and Mexico, Phelps traipsed back and forth across the border with her victims, isolating them from family and friends while she robbed them blind and occasionally left them to die. She was finally arrested in Mexico in 2023, where one of her murder trials began a couple of months ago. After that, she’ll be extradited to the U.S. for more.

Be safe out there on those apps, old dudes… 

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Well, now we know for certain that Supergirl (2026) was a box office flop. Damn shame, that. I’ve loved the character since I was a kid, particularly in her adventures with the Legion of Super-Heroes (natch), and I was really hoping for something wonderful on-screen. I wish I could say that my opinion defied the wisdom of the crowds and that the movie was great, but alas its box office performance is probably a fair indicator of its quality.

The movie’s just not good.

Look, Milly Alcock is charming as all get-out and when she turns it on, she turns it on. Her Kara Zor-El has the makings of a great movie character, but the script hamstrings her with a series of incredibly jejune choices that don’t let her sing.

Jason Momoa as Lobo is exactly what you would want and what you would expect. No quibbles here.

Other than that… Yeesh. The cast in this movie is not good. David Krumholtz’s Zor-El is pretty good, but from the villains to the allies to the ancillary characters, the film is a dud. No shade on the actors — the script just doesn’t deliver for them. Even Krypto, whose shenanigans eventually won me over in Superman (2025), is dull here, spending most of the movie…lying down.

The villain of the piece — the imaginatively named Krem — is right out of the Generic Evil Villain Handbook (1984 edition). Krem majored in facial piercings in college, with a minor in mustache-twirling. There is nothing even remotely interesting about this character. Nothing that makes him memorable or distinct. He and his crew of ne’er-do-wells just seem to like killing and torturing for the sake of killing and torturing. Oh, and they run a sex trafficking ring on the side because this movie is for…who?

Seriously. Who is this movie for? My tween daughter is the prime audience for the girl power message…but seemed freaked out by the very casual asides about, you know, child sex slavery. Girls her age rounded up and called brides and…

Like, really? Space Epstein and his pals? That’s what we’re showing girls? That if you don’t have super-powers you’re a victim from jump?

OK. Sure.

Look, this isn’t a full-fledged review. The time is long past for that. But I have things to say and this is my blog, so I’m gonna say them.

Supergirl: Murderer

So…that happened. Supergirl straight up murders a dude in cold blood. Right. Great.

I agree philosophically that Krem is too damn evil to let live, and I also agree that Ruthye couldn’t kill him, thematically, AND I further agree that having him die incidentally or by his own actions would be a cop-out.

But you’ve got Lobo RIGHT THERE! Come on!

Imagine Kara is about to kill Krem. First she slashes him with the sword. “That’s for poisoning my dog! And this… This is for what you did to that girl!”

And she swings…

And Lobo photobombs the execution, slipping in and ripping Krem’s head off his shoulders. Laughing.

“I didn’t think you’d do it!” he chortles. “And you know what? I still don’t! You would have pussied out at the last second.”

“No! I was going to kill him!” Supergirl protests.

“Well, now you’ll never know!” And Lobo rides off, laughing his Czarnian ass off.

Of course, you can’t fix this movie just by fixing its ending. A friend of mine who’s a screenwriter told me that the movie is basically just the outline of a story, not a story itself, and that jibes for me. It very much has “And then this! And then this!” energy, a series of bullet points connected by…nothing.

Look up out

The whole movie was sold on a vibe. “She’s edgy!” And then her “edge” is…getting drunk and being sarcastic. Yawn. Seen it before. Like Dark Willow said: Bored now.

The whole movie was paint-by-numbers super-hero sci-fi. Its color palette, its design, its entire aesthetic could have been plugged into almost any other super-hero movie. Krem and his crew looked like slightly more sinister versions of Griff Tannen’s gang from Back to the Future II. I kept waiting for something new and exciting and original and innovative, and the film kept shoveling slop I’ve seen a million times before onto my plate. Bleh.

Needle Drops

Stop it. Please. Just… Just stop it. Stop the goddamn needle drops, OK? I know this isn’t a James Gunn movie, but his fingerprints are all over it, and the needle drops just…

Please. I’m begging you. Stop.

The Good

Was there good in the movie? Sure. Like I said, when she was allowed to be charming and charismatic, Milly Alcock brought the heat. And I was beyond thrilled to see Argo City in live action. I honestly never thought for a single second that Hollywood would have the guts to say, “Yeah, the planet blew up, but this one city survived…” They really adhered (mostly) to Supergirl’s comic book origins, and I’m both shocked and pleased.

And hey — nicely done with avoiding the question of why Kara never told Clark his parents were doucherockets. She never knew them and she was born so long after they died that it probably never came up. Bonus points for Alura’s off-hand comment indicating Jor-El was slightly nuts, meaning all Kryptonians in the DCU aren’t/weren’t bigoted asshats. Just Superman’s dad. Which is still a problem, but not as big a problem.

I really wanted to like this movie. Fortunately, it didn’t do anything fatal to the character, and I genuinely look forward to seeing Alcock in future DCU films.

On to Clayface…

A silly little nothing that I wrote years ago… I was so annoyed by the overwrought promotion around the then-incipient Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (said promotion commingling with the nauseating “Batgod” version of Bruce Wayne that completely misunderstands the strength of the character, imbuing a powerless character with a super-power: to never lose) that I wrote this little comic page for a friend to illustrate, but we never got around to it…

BATMAN V. SUPERMAN:

The Late Afternoon, Like After Lunch But Too Early for Something From the Vending Machine

OF JUSTICE

PANEL 1: Batman in the Batcave, pulling on one of his gloves.
CAPTION: The time has come.

PANEL 2: Pulling on the other glove.
CAPTION: The Kryptonian has gone too far. And I am the balance.

PANEL 3: He picks up a gadget from a table.
CAPTION: I am the night!

PANEL 4: Close up on his eye. The gadget is in the foreground, glowing green like kryptonite.
CAPTION: I respect his powers, but I do not fear them.
CAPTION: With preparation, I can accomplish anything…

PANEL 5: He puts the gadget in his utility belt.
CAPTION: And tonight, Clark…
CAPTION: Tonight, what I accomplish…

PANEL 6: Awesome panel of kick-ass Batman, teeth gritted, fists clenched, ready for war.
CAPTION: Will be your humility.

PANEL 7: Blinding light.
SOUND EFFECT: FWASH!

PANEL 8: Batman in same stance as in Panel 6, but his expression is one of “oops.” His armor and such hangs off of him in burned threads. We can see he’s wearing boxers that have bat-symbols on them.

PANEL 9: Space, in orbit around Earth. Superman hovers there, arms folded over his chest, a bored expression on his face. A wisp of smoke from one eye tells us that he just used his heat vision.
SUPERMAN: That was easy.
SUPERMAN: Next? 

Rick Veitch’s Swamp Thing 1989 continues apace, now up to its third issue. This series is an eighties-comic slap across the face, in the best way possible. Veitch’s love and respect for the DC Universe of the day is evident in every panel, and his ambition is equally on display. The story is a little uneven by modern standards, but in 1989, it would have firmly cemented Veitch as one of DC’s most prodigious talents.

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There is no definitive science on what causes a serial killer — nature? nurture? — but surely the fact that Carl Eugene Watts nearly died as a child from meningitis plays into his later depredations. Before his brush with death, he was apparently a normal child. Afterwards, he began having dreams of torturing and killing women and girls. Crucially, these dreams did not bother Watts — he enjoyed having them.

At some point, dreams weren’t enough. As a young teen, he beat a customer on his paper route, and in college he lost his football scholarship and was expelled for stalking and assaulting women.

He went to a new college and escalated from assault to outright murder. Unlike most serial killers, Watts did not only “hunt” close to home — he traveled all over Michigan to find his victims, and when he later relocated to Texas, he drove out of his way to Houston to find more. Also unlike most serial killers, Watts did not hunt within his racial group; most of his victims were white.

Eventually arrested, Watts was primed to be paroled early due to a legal technicality. Prosecutors essentially begged witnesses to come forward so that they could charge him with something — anything — to keep him in prison. The tactic worked and a new case saw him sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2007 of prostate cancer.

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Disclosure Day is Stephen Spielberg once again grappling with existential questions of family, isolation, and expanded consciousness, treading similar ground as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., but this time in our monumentally, well, fucked-up modern world. The result is big and blockbuster-y, of course, but also uneven. Still, the thrust of the story overcomes its bumps and potholes…and Colman Domingo is a goddamn revelation as Hugo, to the point that I find it difficult to watch him in anything else now. He is so good in this movie, playing a character type we rarely see. You can truly believe that this is a man who has had his psychic computer rebooted and upgraded by his experiences, that he walks in our world, but no longer sees it as the rest of us do. An Oscar-worthy performance, I promise, executed with small touches and glorious subtlety.

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