The fourth chapter of The Case of the Syphilitic Sister is now up.
That covers most of what I already had written of this story. The response so far has been less than I’d hoped for, so I’m probably going to take a break from this story to concentrate on one set in Teleleli.
Life As Seen Through a Dark Angel’s Eyes has posted a review of Chapters Two and Three of The Case of the Syphilitic Sister.
The third chapter of The Case of the Syphilitic Sister is now up on JukePop Serials. Read it here. Note that you need to sign up for a free account to read past chapter one.
Some people might be interested in the Public Domain Super Heroes wiki.
I’ve been trying to find a similar listing for heroes from the ‘pulps’, but there doesn’t seem to be one.
None of the main characters in The Case of the Syphilitic Sister are pre-existing characters, but they’re intended to be recognisable ‘types’.
Bugbears For Breakfast has posted a review of Chapter One of The Case of the Syphilitic Sister.
I’m planning to post Chapter Two in roughly a week.
Daddy Grognard recently posted a review of the first chapter of The Case of the Syphilitic Sister. You can read the review here.
The title of my serial, The Case of the Syphilitic Sister, has gotten a variety of reactions.
Someone on the Scribophile forum said it was the best title on the site.
But this blog post suggests I change it.
The story was originally called All-American Detectives, which was meant to sound like a comic book (I was probably thinking of Detective Comics, which was a comic featuring Batman, and is also where DC gets its name).
However the editors of JukePop Serials thought it was too generic. The Case of the Syphilitic Sister is meant to sound like a ‘hardboiled’ detective story.
Anyway, I’d be interested to know what everyone thinks.
…America’s finest superheroic detective agency must find and destroy a sinister cult!
Chapter One of The Case of the Syphilitic Sister is now up on the new JukePop Serials site.
You can read it for free here:
http://www.jukepopserials.com/home/read/13
I have enough written for a couple more monthly updates. Whether I make finishing it a priority will of course depend on the response the story gets.
A lot of superhero role-playing products call superheroes ‘supers’.
This seems to be because DC and Marvel jointly claim a trademark on the phrase ‘Super Hero’.
That claim seems to this non-lawyer to be pretty far-fetched (a bit like McDonalds and Burger King claiming to own the word ‘burgers’). But that’s not the point. The point is this:
No one calls them ‘supers’.
No one. Not ever. Not even the role-playing designers who use the term in their products. The term doesn’t even appear in the Wikipedia article on superheroes.
EDIT: I was wrong. Apparently The Incredibles did. Still, that movie doesn’t seem to have brought the term ‘supers’ into common use outside of RPGs. It seems more likely to me that RPG creators’ main motivation in using ‘supers’ is fear of being sued, rather than wanting to use the term that The Incredibles used or that they usually say ‘supers’ rather than ‘super heroes’.
It makes me think of spam that I used to get trying to sell me ‘meds’.
Game designers, if you’re terrified of Marvel and DC, make up something like ‘science hero‘, which has its own retro charm.
PS Superheroes superheroes superheroes superheroes.