Episode 116 - Reflected Glory with Kieth Lehtinen and Special Guest Paul Kupperberg

Case has raved about the 90s anthology "Superheroes" a lot on this show and it's finally time to talk about one of the most memorable. In this case, Case got to even chat with the author! Case and Jmike are joined by Keith Lehtinen for a conversation about Reflected Glory with an interview with comics legend, Paul Kupperberg!

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Transcription

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00:00
Keith
Since I have not been able to hear the interview, I personally am hoping you got to talk to him about Supergirl and Power girl at all. I mentioned a couple of times I'm a big fan of his. The pre crisis Supergirl is one of my earliest Supergirl memories. I love that series. And that's Paul Copperberg. And the first volume of Power Girl was actually Paul Copperberg, too. And everybody knows, as far as Supers go, it's Supergirl. And Powergirl are my favorite. So for my sake, I hope you talk to him.

00:27
Case
For this interview, we stayed mostly focused on the short story. We did reference his experience working on the books, but it was mostly just allude to it. There is a reason why on the spinner rack behind me, Paul Copperberg's Supergirl run is the trade paperback on the top. But that is only because I was trying to be cool when I talk to him. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to the Men of Steel podcast. I'm case Aiken, and as always, I am joined by my co host, Jay Mike Falson.

01:16
Jmike
Hello. Welcome back, everybody.

01:19
Case
It has been a while, man.

01:21
Jmike
Has it been that long?

01:23
Case
Yeah, I mean, from a listener standpoint, there have been a lot of gaps in episode release. We actually banged a whole bunch right before I went on paternity leave with the expectation that they were going to go out, and some of them haven't. And the reason why some of them haven't is because of the sagstrike. And I don't know if anyone out there in the world thought about this, but it's easy to bank an episode about a movie and we don't want to talk about movies on the show right now while the sagstrike is going on. So we are in full support of the Writers Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, anyone who wants to strike right now. Like, fuck yeah, Superman is a man of the people and pro union. And that's why we're not talking about a movie today.

02:01
Case
That's why we're not talking about a tv show today. And you would think, okay, well, so they're going to talk about a comic book. No, we're not, actually. We're talking about a prose short story. It is by a comic book writer. It's by Paul Kupperberg. We're talking about the story reflected glory. And for that conversation today, we are joined by Keith from. We have issues and jukebox Vertico.

02:20
Keith
Hello, Keith.

02:22
Case
It is so good to have you back on. I actually can't remember off the top of my head when the last time was, because podcast time is something.

02:30
Keith
It's a lake death of.

02:33
Case
Yeah. Yeah. For world. Yep.

02:36
Keith
Yep.

02:36
Case
Remind everyone at home what you do out there.

02:39
Keith
I host we have issues, which is a weekly comic book review podcast. Currently running it solo as my beloved co host is on hiatus, the benefit of which is the show is no longer 3 hours long. It's less than an hour now. Definitely. Hostway was the source of that. Anyways. You can find that, of course we have issues. There are two. We have issues. Mine's the good one. I also do jukebox Vertigo, which is currently on hiatus. It's a music podcast, and it's currently in the process of restructuring and might relaunch soon. Might be relaunched by time this comes out. We'll see.

03:09
Keith
So I have a couple of other projects in mind, but most of the time I'm just reading, to be honest with you, because 40 plus comics a week takes up a lot of time, and I like to read for fun, too.

03:19
Case
Yeah, it does. Which is why we decided right off the bat weren't going to be a timely release on any comic books that was not in the cards for this show. We just want to talk about the archetype of Superman and why that's kind of cool. And I wanted to bring this short story to the group today for a couple of reasons, but the biggest is that it is an examination of the Superman archetype in a realistic world. It's a really good deconstruction of the Superman kind of mythos with some twists, and there's some other stuff going into it. Reason number two is that at the time of this recording, I am just putting the finishing touches on the video about Ultima for the Superman analog video series, which took a lot of work because there's no art to reference. Yeah.

04:03
Keith
Right.

04:04
Case
So it wasn't just a video of my animated head talking, getting creative with having AI generated, like, silhouetted Superman type poses and then imposing the text on it and doing stuff to try to make it look cool. I'm doing a lot with it. It's kind of like the villain, but with the actual script, like a bit more on there.

04:21
Keith
Right.

04:21
Case
And playing around with that. So trying to get creative with all that. And when I started working on the video, and it's been a while because I've just been slow because of a baby and having Covid for a stretch and all that, I actually connected with Paul Kuperberg online and got an interview with him about this short story so at some point, we're going to drop that into this conversation. But I figured we'll start off kind of talking about the story so people who are not familiar with it have, like, a baseline for what's going into that. Then we'll drop into the interview, and then we'll come back and finish up the conversation. So this is a short story that I was introduced to, I want to say, around 1999. It was a friend of mine from high school.

04:59
Case
It was Alan Kissler, who has been on the show a bunch of times, but he had mentioned this story to me, and I was like, oh, that sounds really cool. And then I was at a bookshop in Bethany Beach, Delaware, and I came across this anthology book called superheroes. Now, the mythos of cases, comic book reading. This is that same bookshop where there was, like a 50 cent rack that I picked up, like a billion fucking issues, but also they had a Sci-Fi section that I was devouring as well. And I came across this book and it's like, oh, this is cool. I'm reading, like, four or five stories in, and all of a sudden I'm like, I know which one this is. Oh, my God. I had heard about this by that guy in high school. And this is summer break.

05:36
Case
This is so cool. So read it, really enjoyed it, and then have since been like, oh, this is a pretty cool anthology. And every now and then, for people who are comic book nerds, I've picked it up and send them over to it. Keith, I bought you a copy and mailed it to you.

05:48
Keith
Yes, very much so. And appreciate that.

05:51
Case
Unfortunately, the anthology superheroes, is not available as an ebook, so every copy I have found is, like an old copy. In fact, the copy that I have right now is not my original copy, but has the stamp from the same bookstore that I bought my copy at, which is so weird because I bought this on eBay.

06:11
Keith
That's great. Mine was delightfully battered in a good way because I'm addicted to all the d d realms, forgotten realms, dragonlance, all those. And all of my trade paperbacks are really battered and ugly. And so it fits in just great with my collection. I love it.

06:26
Case
Oh, yeah.

06:28
Jmike
That means they're used and wanted and appreciated.

06:30
Keith
They were red.

06:32
Case
Yeah. I mean, this fits, like, right next to my collections of all the John Carter of Mars books. They're all, like, yellowed. They're not so old that it's like, clearly someone else's book before mine. But it's all, like, very clearly the printings from the 90s that have just stayed in fairly okay condition, but the spines have been cracked quite a bit and there's that musty spell to them. So the synthology has a whole bunch of stories and I will want to talk about some of the other ones on this show at other points. But today I just want to talk about reflected glory. And neither of you were familiar at all with this before I proposed? I mean, Keith, I sent you the book and I was like, hey, this is one of like the four that I'm really recommending, right? Yeah.

07:08
Case
And J Mike, I know I'd mentioned it to you.

07:11
Jmike
I'm not going to pretend like, oh my gosh. Yeah, I totally know. I'd never heard this before. Seems like someone else got some inspirations from this book though, man.

07:21
Keith
I was wondering how quickly we would get to that.

07:24
Jmike
It's a very familiar tale that happened, I want to say, about roughly twelve years after this. Seems kind of familiar. Just going to put it out there.

07:35
Case
Yeah. All right. So, J Mike, for the listeners who are not familiar with this short story, can you give a quick synopsis of what happens in the story?

07:45
Jmike
Oh, man. So there is a failed news kid who turns PR person by one of his former colleagues who gets ambushed in a dark alley one night and he gets saved by a mysterious hero that comes out of nowhere, who beats the ever loving crap out of the muggers. He's like, oh my gosh. Thank you, sir. Do you have a name? No.

08:11
Case
Awesome.

08:11
Jmike
Well, call me. And he gives him a car and the guy flies off. He gets arrested. The police officers like, you're drunk, you're crazy. Murder these guys. And then while they're interviewing him, they get phone calls from these other police officers who are like, hey, there's this crazy flying guy who just beat the crap out of some other guys. So maybe that kid's telling the truth. So they let him go. He ends up coming in contact with the superhero. He comes up with the name Ultima, he becomes the guy's pr person. Ultima, what's a good reference to the kind of hero that he is? You can't see my pants and I'm doing air quotes, but yeah, he doesn't take any prisoners. He just beats the crap out of everybody. Brutally.

08:51
Jmike
And there is like a warping of the mind of the main character where he's, you know, I'll be this guy's main pr person until totally Warner brothers at the end of this whole book where he's like, yes, the money, it's all mine. I can use him to make so much money. And then after Ultimate's killed, like, 200 and something people, he's like, you know what? I don't think I should do this anymore. I feel like people are more afraid of me than anything.

09:17
Case
Ultimate is right.

09:18
Jmike
Yeah. And at the end, he's like, man, I'm losing my cash cow. I can't let this happen. So the main character shoots him, he falls dead, and the main character is like, oh, man, I can make so much money off of this. The end. That's my very brief synopsis of this story.

09:37
Case
Yeah. That is, in a nutshell, what happens.

09:39
Jmike
There that do a good job.

09:41
Case
Yeah. No, it's a very accurate telling of this all. And I love the emphasis. The emphasis that you're giving on beats the ever living crap out of someone.

09:50
Jmike
Because he totally did.

09:51
Case
That is the name of the game. Of every actual sequence of any kind of action in this short story beats.

09:56
Jmike
The ever loving crap.

09:58
Case
I was shocked at how visceral it was in retrospect. Like, I came back to him, I was like, oh, there's some very specific words there that are like, I don't know about that.

10:06
Jmike
You mean when he punched the first mud in his head? Like, he's like a crack. Like an eggshell. And I was like, ooh, yeah. That's a visualization.

10:14
Keith
It's especially funny if you're a fan of Paul Kupperberg's and his other work, which I might talk about later, but, yeah, I was like, oh, man, he went all out on this. Yeah.

10:24
Case
It definitely felt like cutting loose on ways that you're not allowed to when you're the writer on the bronze Age, Superman, and Supergirl books.

10:32
Jmike
I definitely felt more omni man than.

10:34
Case
A lot of other heroes.

10:36
Keith
I really liked it. I don't know if we're diving in yet about specifics or what, but there's a moment in the story where it all clicked for me, and I want to make sure to bring it up. It's one of the things J Mike didn't touch on, really, which is we keep cutting to a book interview that he's doing with Ultima throughout the story, and he makes the point that all of his powers are mental based. It's all based on his thoughts. So he's not just naturally invulnerable. He has to be aware there's a story he tells about the connection he has with his mother as a baby.

11:10
Case
Yeah.

11:11
Keith
And that reveal was like, holy shit.

11:15
Jmike
You kill your mom.

11:17
Keith
For those who don't know, he's like, people are always jealous of my mother because she knew exactly what I wanted as a baby. We just had an intimate connection. He's like, I have latent psychic powers. So she tapped into that passively, and then it's like, oh, what do I think of my mom? Well, I don't remember her. She died of a brain aneurysm when I was three, and I'm like.

11:35
Case
My.

11:35
Keith
Jaw just dropped open. Reading that, I was like, what? Yeah, that was an amazing twist.

11:41
Case
It's such, in a nutshell, what is going on with this character, because he does not realize that he killed his mom. It's very clear that's what's going on. And it's the same thing that sort of is going on with him for a while, where he does not understand that the innate harm that being a super being does to the world just by existing is one of the things that are being discussed. So for shocking reasons, I have always sort of focused on Ultima as sort of the character. Like, while wiser is an interesting, somewhat unreliable narrator, I actually don't have any reason to believe that he ever lies to us, per se, because he's fairly honest. Yeah.

12:15
Keith
If this is the cleaned up version of him, what's the real version? Look, he. He's pretty honest in all of his faults.

12:23
Case
Yeah, I mean, he kind of comes off, like, as scummy New Yorky as you could possibly imagine. Like, there's a bit of a Hans booby. There's a bit of a wolf of Wall street kind of, like, vibe for this character. He's a PR guy who is not a good person. They make that pretty clear early on, and he doesn't care. He's very honest about it all. The most he cleans up is when he talks about when he was a journalist and how he got washed out for embellishing the truth by telling a good story. And it's like, yeah, I mean, there's definitely more to that story, but aside from a couple of spots like that, you're like, he does not share certain details that would look bad until they are necessary to the story.

12:59
Case
But, man, he does not care if these were memoirs that were being read. This is very much like the DS nine episode the Pale moonlight, where at the very end, he deletes the recording.

13:10
Keith
Yes, 100%. He gave me very strong. I don't know if you guys are fans of the show, but re from entourage. Yes, 100%. Especially the first two seasons, because afterwards, they start making him a real human being. But in the first two seasons, if you told me that Ari thought Vince Chase was going to ruin his reputation and he was going to kill him before he could, I would believe you. Yeah, that was the vibe I got in my head. He was Jeremy Piven.

13:36
Jmike
Well, at the same time, he's trying to justify like, yeah, well, he's not that bad of a.

13:40
Case
He's.

13:40
Jmike
He's know what needs to be done. He's trying to justify it in his own head. And it's kind of like when he sees his old mentor and she's like, you're an idiot. This guy's killing people. And this one, it kind of clicks. And he's like, maybe it's not all about the money. And he's like, nah, it's all about the money for me.

13:55
Case
He doesn't listen to her for a second. It's more just ominous for him. Yeah. So minor spoiler for the conversation that I had with Paul, but one thing that was really interesting was that the impetus for the actual story was the wiser character was this unreliable pr person narrator. That character was apparently inspired by someone that Paul Copperberg worked with and did not like and used that as the inspiration for then everything kind of going off of that. Now, the way he explains it does not sound like it's Stan Lee, but also there's a part of me where I could imagine Jack Herbie writing this about.

14:35
Keith
I was. As soon as he said that, I started thinking of the DC crew at the time. I'm like, well, I know he likes Julie shorts, so it wasn't him.

14:43
Case
And Julie actually comes up in the story for how this all comes together as a story, which is interesting, but that's an element of the nature of the story that just shows how people will take different things from it. I really glommed on to Ultima as a character having these effects based on his powers that he couldn't control by virtue of him just not having the finesse to not hurt people when he tried to do good. And this extension of the character going into this ubermansh kind of idea, destroying the common man just by existing. And I always really thought that was so interesting. But then for the fact of the matter is the main story is about this person who is this scumbag trying to sell out everyone just to make a buck.

15:28
Case
And using the first superhero as the impetus for that is so cool that again, just different people take different things from it and you can have a richer world even though it's a short story and even though ultimately Ultima is very similar to Superman because Superman is shorthand for superhero.

15:48
Keith
That's just interesting to me that's the one you went to. The evil Superman trope is so in right now. You know what I mean? So in a way, this is a very timely one to talk about in that I don't think he's evil in the same way that, say, homelander is, obviously, and you mentioned omni man. I immediately compared him to Homelander because I really appreciate the subtlety of this story versus Homelander, where it's like he has mommy issues. Did you know that? Did you know he has mommy issues? Here's a whole season about his mommy issues with his romantic interest. I'm like, jesus Christ. But this was just one little scene. And that set up so much that I was like, oh, God. The implications were so much better than telling the story.

16:31
Keith
So, yeah, the evil Superman trope right now is really great, and I really liked it being told the Jimmy Olsen view, if you will. It's not Jimmy, obviously. It's much worse character.

16:43
Case
But thank you for saying that, because I think that comparison is also a really big part. There. He is definitely set up at the start to be. He is Superman's pal, Jimmy Olsen. In this case, it's Ultima's best friend, Jack wise.

16:55
Keith
Yeah, they actually make the point. He says right away. That's how people see him.

17:01
Jmike
Right.

17:01
Keith
They think, oh, I'm his buddy. I'm his pal. I think he uses the word pal, you know, and he's like, yeah, it's not really what it's like at all. As opposed to Jimmy. He's a failed newsman.

17:13
Case
Right.

17:13
Keith
I really like that, too, because it's not just the evil Superman, it's the evil Jimmy, too, which is really interesting. So, yeah, I definitely like that twist on it.

17:22
Case
Yeah. It's a very fun element of taking classic Superman stuff and perverting it for a lot of different ways because it's not just one twist. It's not just that this is a Superman who hurts people. It's a twist where he's allowed to be a Superman that hurts people by virtue of the person who is his publicity person, is as unscrupulous as you could imagine. It could be built up this way where it is all spit. It's like the boys in terms of it being like, well, there's a big pr thing about it, and they're actually like flawed individuals, behind the scenes kind of thing. This veil of celebrity, it makes the re comparisons also really good.

17:57
Case
I think that's what's really cool about this whole, like, on my reread, I came to this opinion that ultimate is way more like the golden age Superman than I had originally given him credit for his power set. His power set is literally like initial powers, Metallica nieces thing. And there's so many comparisons to be made to Superman characters of that period. We've got gladiator, we've got miracle man, Connell. But there's all these characters who have psionic abilities. Even Superman in the man of Steel Mini, they really hit home that he has psionic abilities. Like, he notes that it's lighter to pick up something when he's flying than when he's on the ground because his own power of flight is lifting up everything. And it's not just like him propelling himself.

18:41
Case
And then he's strong enough to pick up a thing, the costume not getting damaged because it's tight enough to his skin. He's got a force field around his body that's giving him all these extra abilities. And that is the sole idea going on with this character. So I had kind of taken it for granted that the actual performance of the character showing up out of nowhere, violently delivering justice. Like, one of his first scenes is him, like, stopping a car. And it feels very much like the COVID of action comics number one. It's him doing these very typical Superman type scenes, and they go poorly because he's so strong, he can't help but hurt people. And then he has this intense guilt and remorse about it, like the journey that he goes on, even though he's not our viewpoint character.

19:22
Case
But we get from those interviews, I think is really cool to see him kind of break because he was so convinced that he was doing the right thing. It was almost like fate was pushing him out that way, that he had to do something because he had that power, he had that great responsibility. It's just kind of sad that the world that he exists in is cartoonishly loaded with muggers and assailants and so forth. This is worse than any law and order episode in terms of the amount. Every alley you go into there just happens to be a mugger. Or like, oh, my car broke down. And I'm like, at the meatpacking district, outside of all the clubs, oh, there's a gang of hoodlums coming up for.

19:58
Jmike
Me, just like clockworks.

20:01
Keith
That was the thing, though, because reading it, I was like, okay, in my head because of the show, I'm immediately comparing him to Superman, but I was like, this is Gotham. This isn't Metropolis. The level of crime here is ridiculous. Like, this is Gotham.

20:15
Jmike
Speeding bullets.

20:19
Keith
The original costume, the way they described him, like, he's Batman. He's dressed like Batman, basically.

20:24
Case
Or worse, he's wearing hockey pads.

20:27
Keith
Yeah, exactly. I was kind of like, oh, that adds an interesting angle. Don't think of this as evil Superman. Imagine this as Batman with powers. He can't control them, but still wants to do his thing. And that kind of unlocked a bit for me because I was like, yeah, that's basically what this was. Batman has obviously, the promises not to kill. Obviously. It's not a perfect comparison, but that kind of was very interesting to.

20:50
Case
Yeah, well, like I said, I think this goes back to that golden age Superman where there is more of a vigilante component to him before he had become so defined. Like, in that first issue, the blue of his costume kind of has a black vibe to it.

21:03
Paul Kupperberg
Sure.

21:03
Case
It's bright red, and it's early four color comics, so it's difficult to have that level of nuance of design. And he's like a circus strongman, kind of. But, like, he only operates at night. He's like, climbing up the sides of buildings, spying on, like, there is this vigilante element to him. He's coming off of the heels of the pulp fiction era, of the shadow of Doc Savage, of Tarzan, and before that, like the Buck Rogers type character.

21:27
Jmike
Right.

21:28
Case
So having a noir kind of style to the character wasn't that weird. It just quickly became defined in a different direction as the stories scaled upwards to deal with the fact that we have this person who can do anything. Right. Exactly. Yeah, I really liked it.

21:43
Keith
It was an adjustment for me because, again, I'm a big fan of Paul Copperberg. And so I was expecting one thing, because I've read a couple stories in this anthology, and I was like, oh, this is something completely different. So it did take me off guard a little bit, but I actually really like it. I really enjoyed the story. I didn't see the resolution coming right away. I thought it got me pretty good. I like the grizzled police chief type that made a brief appearance in one scene. I thought that was really great, the whole.

22:09
Jmike
That was a good scene. Yeah.

22:10
Keith
Just to show that the police don't trust this guy in the least, and they're very concerned with the fact he keeps killing people. I thought that was a really great addition because it did add a little bit of a grounding element to what could just be a power fantasy gone.

22:23
Case
Wrong kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, you could very much imagine that the comic books they would make based on Ultima in this world would be very much like Superman comics. It would be similar to how in Marvel comics. Marvel comics are a thing inside Marvel comics and how in Astro City, they play on the same thing where they're making comics that are based on these official characters that are out. And, like, you can imagine that Weiser, who is going to play himself up as, like, a superman's pal, Jimmy Olsen, that there's going to be a book about them having adventures together type of thing. And then you cut to the real world.

22:57
Case
And that's the other part that I think is really fun looking at this, which is that this is 1995 when this was published right in the thick of the deconstructionist movement. Obviously, there's the kickoff, really, in the 80s, but the early 90s was full of it, and it was doing weird deconstruction all over the place. But, like, this anthology, if you really look at the majority of the stories, are like, well, what type of story can we tell in this little known prose anthology book that we can't do in a big two comic book company? What stories can we do with these kinds of superheroes that we've always wanted to tell? That just wouldn't be allowed, and format wise wouldn't be allowed either. This is not the kind of story that you could do an ongoing book for it. It's a single short story.

23:38
Case
And while you could do a comic, I think it benefits from it being his voice. It benefits from wiser being the one telling the whole thing. Yeah, I agree.

23:49
Keith
Last time I was here, we talked about a Superman story just told from Jimmy Olsen's point of view. And I think you actually pitched that. I remember that now.

23:58
Case
Oh, yeah.

23:59
Keith
And that's what this is. And I really like that. I like the idea of Superman not being in the superhero's head is really interesting and opens up a lot of possibilities.

24:09
Case
Now that you're saying that, I remember that, and I was talking about a more fantastical version, but it was a point that I had made about getting back to this golden age kind of aspect. Superman wasn't necessarily the viewpoint character for a lot of things. A lot of times it was, can you imagine a being doing this kind of thing where the audience were supposed to be as much amazed by the feats of Superman as the people in the scenes with Superman?

24:34
Case
And so having characters like Jimmy Ellison be a viewpoint, having Lois Lane be a viewpoint character, where we get to see the drama from a human perspective is very strong for Superman and allows for him to be this beacon of good because we don't have to deal with his inner faults, because the inner faults are for the characters that we're with, and they're not seeing that necessarily for Superman or they're seeing a specific version of it. So I think that would be, generally speaking, a good thing to do to reassert a viewpoint of Superman that has some of that awe. And I think that this short story is taking that same idea, going for that point of like, yeah, from a human perspective, what does a super being look like? And a lot of people are scared of him.

25:13
Case
Like, we mentioned that the woman who set up Weiser at, I keep wanting to call him Mort because it's like Weissinger, but Jack, like, she sets him up with this whole gig doing pr, and then when he gets latched onto this thing that is objectively responsible for a lot of people's deaths, she's rightly like, this is a terrible idea. And we know that a lot of people out there are not swayed by the pr moves. It's not like the whole world just sees ultimate as a good thing. It's just enough people see him as a good thing. There's a zeitgeist level movement of the population in 2023.

25:49
Case
Having seen how polarized society can become, it's not surprising that you could have a scenario like that where people who are looking at the real parts of it all being like, yeah, this guy has killed a lot of people. He stopped those robbers. Yeah, they were stealing like a. They're dead.

26:05
Jmike
Yeah, they are very dead.

26:08
Case
There are people who see the problems, and then there are people who are swayed by Weisser, where he's actually pulling it off. Like, he's doing a good job. He's making a ton of money. And he wouldn't be if he was not successfully manipulating how the public is seeing Ultima. So it is interesting to have that split viewpoint in there because I think.

26:26
Jmike
It'S very prescient because Keith mentioned earlier was like, when the police chief talks to him at his first big press conference, I think he's killed like 45 or something people by that point. And he just started out. So when he meets his old coworker, I think it's like up to 100 and something. So this guy is, like, taking people out left and right.

26:46
Keith
I think the final number was 219, by the way.

26:48
Case
It's real fucking high, because I remember.

26:50
Keith
Thinking, oh, he just shorted 220. And then he quit. I was like. I was thinking there might be, like, a symbolic number somewhere, and I was waiting for that. But, yeah, it kind of makes me.

27:02
Case
Think of the scene in trans metropolitan where they ask Spider how many people he's killed? And I think he says, two. I think it's, like, a really low number, but it's still, like, a number. And they're all, like, taking aback, like it's occurred. Because in the real world, if I case Aiken asked J. Mike Fulson, how many people have you murdered? And your response was anything but zero.

27:23
Jmike
Well, in our case, I got a cape that ticket at night.

27:27
Case
I mean, frankly, here's the thing. Zero to five. I'm aghast. More than five. I don't believe you.

27:34
Jmike
So as a kid.

27:36
Case
As a kid, it's the Stalin thing of a big enough number is just a statistic. And so when you're reading that, you're like, well, that's a lot of dead bodies. But as an adult reading it, I'm like, oh, my God. What the fuck? That's so much. And especially, again, in 2023, when we're having big conversations about inappropriate escalation of force in response to what are ultimately not violent crimes. Holy fuck. When we're talking about Ultima. And then you get into the fact that the world that he's in is just like this cartoonishly villainous world where everyone out there is trying to mug everyone and like, well, I guess. But at the same hand, maybe it's not. Maybe that's just what wiser is telling us.

28:17
Jmike
There are literally villains in every street.

28:19
Case
I mean, my parents thought that when I lived in New York, that I was going to get mugged every single night. Every time I was like, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to take the subway. It's 07:00 so I'm leaving work. What do you expect? Oh, my gosh.

28:30
Jmike
Be careful.

28:31
Case
Well, exactly. This perception of, oh, the city, it's so scary. You can sell that to the general populace, but you can't sell that to the people living there. And I think maybe that's also kind of in play there, where it's like, yeah, you can set up New York as being this big, scary city. Look, the warriors are out there. Come out and play. But that's because a lot of the country was sold that New York is this big, scary city.

28:52
Jmike
Spooky.

28:53
Case
It needs a superhero to clean things up. It doesn't work when you're actually there and you're like, wait, no, this is a person who's just murdered 219 people.

29:02
Jmike
But he's the good guy. He's one of the good guys. He's cleaning up the streets. He's not afraid to do the things that people need to do.

29:10
Keith
I love the abruptness of his decisions because he's like, stop. And they're like, no. He's like, all right, well, you gave up your lives. There's no middle ground, bro. I was like, wow, okay, Jesus.

29:22
Case
Yeah. Because that then requires us to be like, well, maybe he is just kind of giving in to the violent tendencies of this all. When he talks about it in his flashback to being in college, them getting mugged ish by someone who may have wanted to rape ish, his girlfriend. And he was just like, I just let go and I beat the guy real bad. And he has this cathartic element to it. It is this release of his superhuman power that he feels good about. It is power through violence, which there's definitely an interesting conversation that I don't think that this piece is really big enough to be going into about having that power of action and having it being expressed through a violent means.

30:02
Case
There is a good scene in his first night of heroics where he saves some people from a burning building. And that's the moment where he's got cheers from people and it feels like, oh, hey, this is the thing. And it's like, yeah, do that.

30:14
Jmike
Do that.

30:14
Case
Just that. Every time there's a disaster. Fuck yeah. Go right there. Car fell off the bridge and the people are in the water drowning. Fly out down and save them. Absolutely. If you just did that, you would be exclusively saving lives in a good way and not having to put yourself even in the situation where you have to determine if the action that you're taking is a necessary level of force. Given the consequences of inaction, that would.

30:42
Jmike
Cut down at least 65 lives.

30:45
Case
God.

30:46
Jmike
Taking themselves away from those situations.

30:48
Case
Like, the 219 is like the net. Like, it's not even like the gross amount of death. It's just like if you factor in all the people he pulled out of burning buildings and stuff.

30:55
Jmike
Yeah.

30:56
Keith
He's like, I subtracted.

31:00
Jmike
This week. I saved 70 people, but I killed 300. Go with the bat here.

31:07
Keith
What's the value of a life, really? I did like the flashback to his college years. And the way he tells it is obviously it's what's going to be in the book, essentially, so it moves on quickly and it's just kind of like, yeah, I unloaded on him and she just thought I had the adrenaline going. I was like, that girl's damaged where that girl is right now. She is not okay. She probably just watched him thrash these guys and beat them to death, and then they just walked away. He didn't say. And then I called the cop, right? I was like, they just left two. Wait a minute. So technically, he's killed 221 people. At least.

31:51
Case
Anyone who needs to find out the identity of Ultima, just look up the zeta theta PI massacre of 1975.

31:58
Jmike
He started counting after he started doing, like, the hero stuff. We don't know how many has gone on before.

32:05
Keith
I'm sure he's not counting his mother.

32:09
Case
That's a big one, man. Like I said, it's so interesting looking at this thing, because he exists in a world where it is presented to us as, frankly, a necessity that there was someone like Ultima out there, because there is just crime fucking everywhere. Or maybe it's not. And maybe it's all kind of being warped by wiser. And again, this could be the cleaned up version of his story where it's just like, yeah, no, I murdered a superhero. But at the same time, he killed a lot of people, too.

32:36
Jmike
A lot of people, like, a lot.

32:39
Keith
I almost imagine it as. So he's interviewing Ultima, right? And the idea is he's writing a book about Ultima. But in the end, I'm like, is this actually his book? Because the way he's telling people this story, it's presented as a narrative he's presenting. And I'm like, is this like his. Like, later on, he's like, how I killed the superhero and made money off of him? And I was kind of like, that's an interesting twist, actually, now that I think about it. That was just something.

33:06
Case
It could be like the recent interviews with Quincy Jones, where he came out talking about when they got, like, a session museum to cover Ringo and stuff like that. Yeah, it would be really funny if this is like, 85 year old version of Jack doesn't give a shit anymore. Yeah, I murdered a superhero. That got my business started off the ground. The foundation for superheroes. Maybe it is, Stanley. Jesus.

33:30
Keith
Hey, so Kupperberg did work with Kirby. Yeah, so I'm just throwing that out there.

33:38
Case
Or more Weisinger, but the name too.

33:41
Keith
On the nose, right?

33:42
Case
No, again, I don't honestly think it's any of those. I think it is a younger contemporary. On that note, we have alluded to this interview a bunch of times. Why don't we just cut to that interview so you at least know what I'm talking about. Even though I am a hack and I didn't let J Mike or Keith listen to this beforehand because that would have been great. So I am joined here with the esteemed Paul Cooperberg, writer of reflected Glory and also just a legend in the space of comic book writing. Paul, thank you for coming on the show.

34:13
Paul Kupperberg
My pleasure. I don't get asked to talk about my prose often, so this is good.

34:17
Case
I like that. As listeners joining us here will know from the beginning of the episode, the story reflected glory has always been one of my really favorite prose works about superhero fiction.

34:29
Paul Kupperberg
Thank you.

34:30
Case
The book superheroes was in the mythology of case Aiken comic book fandom. Finding this book was a big part of me branching out beyond just like, oh, I like comic books because they are fun images and cool stories and really sort of exploring from a deconstructionist lens a lot of the things you can do with superhero formatting, right? And it was really exciting because reflected Glory was a story that I had been told about independently. And then I came across this book when I was about two pages in. I was like, oh, it's that story. So, questions for you to start, just give a little background about how you got into comics and specifically superhero fiction. And then where does that take you in terms of getting into writing this entry in the anthology?

35:12
Paul Kupperberg
Well, I been a comic book reader and fan my entire life. I literally don't remember a time in my life when comic books weren't around that was always there. I read them all through the. Made friends with some other kids who were also comic book fans. And we started doing fan genes in the early 70s that led to both of us getting into comics. Paul Levitts, who I think he was working in the mailroom at DC for a while. I don't remember the details, but no. Paul went on to become executive editor and publisher and president of the company. And I never had a head for business, so I became a writer and worked in editorial. So comics are in my blood. They have been just something I've been doing my entire life.

36:00
Case
It's so exciting to see people who have these passions and actually being able to follow through and make a living out of it.

36:04
Paul Kupperberg
But the pro stuff, 1966, I think it was. It was Captain America and the great Gold steel by Ted White, which was a Captain America novel that came out. Marvel was still relatively new, and they published two novels. One was the Avengers versus the Earthwecker, written by Otto Binder, which is terrible book. And the other was Ted White's. The great Captain America and the great Gold Seal, which is a really good book. I had been reading, know, actually reading comics for four or five years at that point. When I read these things, and it was like, this is bigger than comic books. This is bigger than the Batman tv show. This is the first time you ever get into the heads of the characters.

36:51
Paul Kupperberg
Not just thought balloons, which know, but when you have that omniscient narrator, that third person narration going on, it's just like, that's what's going on in their heads. Not just. I can't explain it, but it just brought these characters to life. The next best example of that kind of thing was in the late 70s when there was the Marvel novel series, Pocketbooks published. There were supposed to be twelve, but they only did eleven.

37:19
Case
Only did eleven.

37:20
Paul Kupperberg
The twelveth one was silver Surfer. And at the last minute, it was deemed that only Stan was allowed to write the Silver Surfer. So this William Rotzler written surfer novel was scrapped. I wrote two of them. I wrote a Spider man novel and a Spiderman and Hulk novel for that series. Len Weed and Marv Wolfman were editing and packaging it. They also did one book of short stories, Marvel superheroes, and one of them was a daredevil short story written by Martin Pascoe under the pseudonym Kyle Christopher. It was the first time I ever really got a sense daredevil was never character I particularly cared for. I didn't much care for Gene Colon as an. You know, the character was just kind of. But Marty got inside this guy's, you know, he can't see.

38:07
Paul Kupperberg
So his radar sense and his other senses interpret everything around him. Marty showed that Marty had that thinking in the story. He kind of used all these weird adjectives to describe the way things felt instead of what they looked know, because he was seeing an image of it, but it's so detailed that it was almost better than sight. Marty was a great writer, but that was just kind of a holy crap. You can do things with superhero prose, which in my two novels, I hadn't gotten anywhere close to.

38:42
Case
We've talked about the shift in media for different properties. Obviously, right now, we're in this age of movies that are really showing off how things can move interesting ways. Like the opening of Captain America. Winter Soldier made Captain America feel vibrant and active in a way that is difficult to convey on the page. And we talked a lot about the Superman radio show on here, which just by virtue of, like, well, we have to describe things. We have to have narrators. We have to vocalize everything. It changes the types of actions and changes the types of stories you're going to tell just by virtue of that all.

39:13
Case
And it's really exciting to see how you can have all these different types of ways of telling a story that for a sizable percentage of my life, was viewed as strictly bound to this one particular format.

39:26
Paul Kupperberg
Yeah. And now we rule the world.

39:29
Case
Yeah. But really, we can highlight that these types of stories aren't bound to any one of these. It's just that certain types of those stories work better in each of those formats, and characters can click for you in ways that are very different. So seeing the potential of prose for that type of story, what were then the steps that led to doing the story reflected glory and having that be in the anthology superheroes? Was the story something kind of floating around for you for a while? Was it a bunch of ideas? Were you approached about the book or heard about the book and then started working on an idea for like, where did that start?

40:06
Paul Kupperberg
It was edited by John Varley and Risha Meinhardt. Risha was also a literary agent, and she was Julie Schwartz's agent. He was the editor at DC Comics, of course, and I had written a lot for Julie over the years, but this was after he had stopped active editing and was more consulting than anything else. But he was up at DC, I was up at DC. Risha was up at DC. And we met in the hall and we're talking, and Julie says to her, you ought to get him to write a story for that anthology you're doing with Varley. And Risha said, oh, ok. You want to write a short story for the anthology I'm editing with John Varley? And I said, oh, absolutely. I had written two Spider man novels.

40:52
Paul Kupperberg
To be fair, novels and short stories are also very different things in my entire life. Although I had fooled around scribbling as a teenager, I wrote a lot of stories. I didn't finish very many of them, and the ones that I did were not very good. I had never really written a. This is for a real book. I mean, who's the publisher? This was Ace books. This is big time publishing. But yes, it's like an actor. Can you ride a horse? Of course I can ride a horse. Then you go and learn to ride a horse. Same thing when I got approached to write a screenplay. Can you write a screenplay? Of course I can. Once I learn how.

41:30
Case
Yeah.

41:30
Paul Kupperberg
So I just took the gig, and then I was like, oh, crap, now I need a story. Fortunately, I had before me the real life example of the public relations agent in the story, Jack Weiser. Jack Weiser.

41:47
Case
Yes.

41:47
Paul Kupperberg
Jack Weiser is entirely based on a real person, a colleague and former friend.

41:53
Case
Question. Was the former at the time former or former as of now?

41:56
Paul Kupperberg
Former. It was in the process of becoming former.

42:00
Case
Okay.

42:01
Paul Kupperberg
The colleague part made things problematic. I had to maintain certain cordial relationships just because were working together. But the fuck off, I don't want to see you again part still lay in the future. But it suddenly occurred to me that this guy, he can best be summed up by a story from years later. A bunch of us were walking through Manhattan, the streets of Manhattan to Grand Central Station one night, and this guy said words which most people who know him have come to dread. Have I ever told you the story? And one of the other guys piped up without hesitation and went, oh, is this the one where you're the hero? That sums this guy up. Everything is about him.

42:48
Paul Kupperberg
He is the guy who has to have the idea, who has to have the credit, whether he had the idea or not, and was more about form than substance. So I had this guy to work with. He actually had a public relations background, so that even made it more convenient. And I kind of built a story from that. It's like, I know what he's done with comic book superheroes, but what would he do with a real superhero? And I kind of like, well, he'd make it about him. He'd build it into something for him. He'd rationalize like crazy as Jack does in the. You know, I'm just the steward of all this. Just, it's okay with. Ultimate should be okay with. But again, it was all there, kind of. The guy was just there.

43:38
Paul Kupperberg
And then, to be fair, there's a healthy ghost of ceiling from the bannershot. Liberty valance. The punchline to that. When the legend becomes bigger than the truth, print the legend. So that was what this guy decided to do. He would rather have the legend that he could control than the reality that was out of his hands.

43:59
Case
Yeah. Like the strength of a martyr kind of situation.

44:01
Jmike
Yeah.

44:02
Paul Kupperberg
Through Ultima, I was also a little bit able to.

44:06
Case
I mean, I had written a lot.

44:07
Paul Kupperberg
Of Superman during the 80s, just before the crisis. I was one of the main writers on all the Superman books. And I was doing Supergirl and Superboy and the Superman newspaper strip. So I had plenty of experience with the character and I never went very deep with him because by then, the editor, Julie, was kind of approaching the end of 40 plus years on the job. And I think he was supermaned out. And frankly, I don't think I was writer enough at the time to do it. I don't really think I had much to say about the character. So it kind of allowed me to go back and think about that stuff and kind of look at it from the hero's point of view. Before I started writing Superboy, young Clark was always the victim. Being Superboy victimized him.

44:54
Paul Kupperberg
He couldn't be a normal kid because he had this secret he had to keep. And even as a young reader, I was like, well, just because you can hit a baseball doesn't mean they're going to assume you're Superboy. All the other kids can hit a baseball. Nobody thinks they're Superboy. But that was the bit, that was the shtick. He has to be meek and mild. And it was like, well, he's the victim here and I can't have a girlfriend because she might discover I'm Superboy. So when I was writing the book, I finally got Julie to let me drop that stuff, to let Clark pick up a baseball bat and play with the rest of the kids. And everybody goes, oh, hey, that wasn't good. Okay. You know, and that was it. Nobody jumped up and said, you're Superboy.

45:42
Paul Kupperberg
I gave him a girlfriend and tried to integrate him into the real world because why was he being the victim? But I guess when you look at it from the point of view of this guy of Ultima, he made himself the victim, though he didn't have to do what he did.

45:57
Case
Yeah. There's actually like a specific passage that I can picture how your thought process was going on that where when he's describing being in college and walking a girl home, that's the moment where he realized that no one was out there to get him, no one was looking for.

46:10
Paul Kupperberg
Yeah.

46:11
Case
And then realizing that's now completely changed because he has gone into a public light. When you're working on Superboy, it's before we get to this idea of Clark hid his powers through his whole life, like the stuff that would be introduced post crisis, which has sort of become now the norm. Even when they play into the idea that he was doing stuff with his powers, it's still, he's a man of mystery. What was that blur like on Smallville or things like that? And you can see how the ideas you're tackling are the ones that are starting to emerge in the zeitgeist of like, well, he's not automatically going to be known as this being of superpowers.

46:45
Case
And whatever the original thoughts of Superboy being this puckish version of Superman, that they could tell less morally upright stories back in the late 40s, early 50s had totally shifted.

46:56
Paul Kupperberg
They're also kid stories. They're also stories about other kids getting in trouble or into mischief, those very first ones. So, yeah, it wasn't meant to be this complicated thing. It was just like, frankly, cheap exploitation, which brings us back to the story.

47:14
Case
So in terms of creating the story, it's mostly told from the perspective of Jack. But then we do get these interview segments with Ultima that are explicitly off the record once that he's keeping. And that sort of the twist at the end is that these are recordings that Jack can use to clear his name when things go wrong. How did you settle on that structure?

47:31
Paul Kupperberg
Well, we had to hear from Ultima. Jack's an unreliable narrator, so we needed something from the horse's mouth. I figured the interviews for the biography he was supposed to be working on would be the way to get to, you know, this is a guy who has no one to talk to. So when he does start talking, he's going to start saying things like, don't put that in the know because he's got to say it.

47:57
Case
It's got to come out like, jack is such an interesting viewpoint for this character, and, like, the name reflected glory coming from that sort of central point of it. But the subtitle, the difference between a hero and villain is spin. I believe that was their line.

48:10
Paul Kupperberg
The editors put that line in. But, yeah, that's such a fun take.

48:13
Case
On the character because you highlight very well that this would be terrifying and that these things could go wrong so easily. Talk a little bit about that because this is one of my examples of a deconstruction of a Superman type where there are consequences to his actions.

48:28
Paul Kupperberg
Well, there has to be. I mean, it's always a joke bit. I just watched the first episode of that new Superman animated thing, and they do it again where Clark opens a door and inadvertently rips the handle off the door. And you're like, oh, that's funny. It's a door handle. It could also be somebody's hand, right? I mean, if he can't control it, if he's not thinking and doesn't control it there, why are we to assume he's always going to be able to control it when it really matters? So that's kind of addressed all the stuff we joked about in the Larry Nivens, man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex and those types of things the next generation or the generation after that of writers came in and gone. What about that?

49:13
Paul Kupperberg
In a lot of ways, those are things best left unasked in superhero comic books, because superhero comic books, they're not meant to be deconstructed, because they fall apart very easily because people can't fly and beams don't shoot out of their eyes. And I'm always amused at what people choose to reality test in these stories. How can they recognize him with just a pair of glasses and a spit curl? And they don't know that Clark Kent is Superman. So that's where you draw the line. That's where your reality is tested, not the fact that he freaking flies and comes from another planet. So this stuff is very fragile. There was a, speaking of Martin Pascoe, there was a story he did at Julie's. Insistent.

49:54
Paul Kupperberg
And Marty would have insisted on telling you that if heard me telling you this story where they explained why nobody recognizes him, that he emits some kind of super hypnosis unconsciously that are magnified by the kryptonian glass lenses in his glasses. It goes out over tv waves, and it makes people see Clark as kind of a little bit more frail and stooped and all that. And it was like, okay, well, I suppose in this world, that's a good answer to a question that never should have been asked. You've accepted it for the last 40 plus years. Why is it now a problem? Well, because the fans are asking, how does this work? Why does this work? And you know what? You're too old to be asking these questions.

50:40
Paul Kupperberg
If you were younger and reading these things, you wouldn't think to ask them because your suspension of disbelief would be complete. Once you start questioning this stuff, it's got to fall apart. I mean, a one off story, you can take these tropes and deconstruct them. And it's one thing to make that the continuing arc of comic books kind of brought us to where we are, which is we have to change everything once a year because, yeah, there was.

51:06
Case
A long time of a status quo that you could sort of work with. And this book in general, most of the stories in it are saying, here's the status quo. Here's the one change we're making and how it kind of goes from there. Another story I really like in it is the one of the boys story where it's just like, well, if Superman's an alien, would he see things our way? Even if we see him as a human? Like, would he see us like. Like, how would that kind of go?

51:28
Paul Kupperberg
Right?

51:28
Case
And I enjoy those sort of takes of where resting on this shared cultural knowledge of the genre, of the medium of everything, and how we can change the one thing and see how the story, like you said, it kind of falls apart very quickly once you make those changes.

51:41
Paul Kupperberg
But that's the nature of fiction. I mean, that's what a story is. You take the status quo and Jack Reacher comes town and everything explodes. That's just storytelling. It's the story you're telling and the premise that you're setting up. My feeling is, by the premise, by the bit, if you accept that Clark Kent is Superman, shut up, get on with the story. You don't have to worry about the why and the what. Comic books spend so many know, two or three decades focusing on that whole park Lois Superman triangle with her always trying to find out his secret identity and trying to get Superman to marry her. And all those ridiculous Weisinger error stories that kind of became set into the character. Even today, there's still kind of those elements of it. They still occasionally will. Say, clark, you know, it couldn't be.

52:33
Case
I think there's a certain amount of buy in when we're talking about these kind of formats, because are we accepting that there's the flying character? Are we accepting that the secret identity works that way? Are we accepting all these elements to allow the story to move forward? And if you aren't accepting of part of that, then how does it all kind of click? It kind of makes me think of this joke about vampire fiction, which is that every time someone writes a new vampire story, the first thing they have to do is explain how their vampire is like the vampires from the movies and from lore and how they're different. And everything that's different is like, oh, that's just from the movies. Like, we don't care about garlic or whatever thing they decide is like, we.

53:07
Paul Kupperberg
Don'T care about whatever's inconvenient for my story.

53:10
Case
Right, exactly. And they'll argue like, well, this makes sense, but this part doesn't. But honestly, none of it makes sense. So where is your cutoff on the bullshit?

53:20
Paul Kupperberg
You know, there's also no international council of Rules for vampire fiction or for superhero fiction. Everybody is free to make up their own stuff, which is fine. And know Abraham Lincoln, vampire Hunter, I was know it would be nice if you could watch a thing and go, but that doesn't, oh, okay, that's just for this movie. If you kind of knew the rules going in. But figure it out. I guess there's a learning curve in any new thing you're watching.

53:49
Case
On that note, I want to talk a little bit about Ultima specifically. Obviously, the character is a Superman type character. He flies invulnerable super strength and is in the same way as, like, the golden age take on the character showing up and kind of just throwing cars around and this very active, aggressive kind of symbol of justice that's in there. A little bit of a bully. I would imagine that since the point is to do a story about a publicist and his reaction to a real superhero. Well, Superman's the first traditional superhero from that perspective. So you were taking it from there. How did you sort of decide on what was Ultima's deal? I mean, he has a very specific power set. He has very specific weakness, all these details.

54:28
Case
Where did you decide what things to put in versus what things to cut from the broader superhero lore that you could pull from?

54:34
Paul Kupperberg
Well, it was a short story. It's overstuffed as is. I think the first draft was, like, close to 13,000 words. I don't know what it's printed at, but it was already running long, so there's only so much you can do, and I don't need super breath. Once you start throwing fancy powers in there, you sort of have to explain them. One thing I did learn from Julie Schwartz, which is true, you never have a character walk into the room and you don't introduce them by name. And that also includes things like Superman two. And he rips that cellophaness off his costume and goes throwing it across the room, and everybody's like, what the hell is going on here? When you introduce something like that, you need to explain it.

55:13
Paul Kupperberg
So rather than come up with something that I'd have to spend time explaining, I just kept it simple. Everybody understands flying strength and invulnerability. I don't think I use any other powers.

55:25
Case
You mentioned that he's smarter and faster. Oh, yeah. That's on the same kind of. Now, you specifically went with psychic powers for it. And I feel like that was kind of in the zeitgeist at that point. When this was being written, it wasn't.

55:35
Paul Kupperberg
So much that as it know, I needed a backdoor. Specifically, his powers are psychic and that he has to be focused and on guard for them to be active was my back door. That's how Jack's able to catch him in a moment of unawares and do what he does. You're writing the story, and you get to a certain point, you go, oh, that's how I'm going to do it. And then you go back and you.

55:58
Case
Put that thing, okay, so you started with, like, he's got superpowers. What is his weakness? And then you work back to how his powers work. So that weakness worked.

56:05
Paul Kupperberg
Okay, right.

56:06
Case
That's very cool. Yeah. Because it seemed like mid eighty s up through the 90s, there were a lot of characters who had Superman type powers that they tried to use, like, psychic power justifications.

56:16
Paul Kupperberg
That was burns thing. That's what he did in man of Steel is like, Superman's powers are largely psychic. That's how he can lift an airplane without it snapping in half.

56:24
Case
Or like Gladiator, who actually kind of shares a similar kind of weakness in that if he's not confident, he is lacking the power. And then the flip side of it, we're recording this in 2023. We recently had the anniversary of the death and return of Superman. And one thing we identified when were really talking about it was that it was interesting that Superboy, the con l Superboy, like the 90s Superboy, who has psychic powers. It's interesting there because he's almost the reverse of the Ultima situation where the psychic powers allows him to be more slap dash and more shoddy with how he does his stuff without hurting people. Like, he'll pick people up and flip them around and so forth. And it's because he's psychically holding them.

57:00
Case
When he picks up Jimmy Olsen and is holding him upside down, Jimmy's not hurt by it because he's actually being telekinetically lifted. So it's interesting where that's a scenario where a very similar concept of powers is being used to be like, here's a kid friendly, safer version of it to justify, well, no one never got hurt in the stories, and that's because x, y and z reasons of powers. And then this one is doing the same basic power set, but then really exploring what the consequences of it would be if it was just focused on you.

57:27
Paul Kupperberg
And if there's no gauge on those powers, if it's on or off, what's going to happen. Yeah, you watch the old Batman shows and you have these battles with the gangs and Batman Robin are getting smacked across the face and punched all over the place. And I'm sitting there thinking it shows you how old and jaded I am is how the hell does Bruce Wayne explain that the next day? Bruce, your face looks like it's been a meat through a meat grinder. Oh, it's a tough board meeting, let me tell. Mean, he just had the crap beat out of him by a bunch of hired thugs on tv. You get a crowbar across the head, you shake it off, and you go on. In real life, you lay there unconscious, concussed, and possibly dead. So I can't look at these things like that anymore.

58:13
Paul Kupperberg
After crisis, I started writing less superheroes and more grounded characters like vigilante and checkmate. I was much happier doing that stuff than I was superheroes. I had written a lot of superheroes, and I'm glad I did. I love this stuff, and I got it out of my system. But it was much easier to write these guys when you don't have to explain those heat beams coming out of his eyes and where the stories can be more grounded and more based on emotion than the physical activity. I'm currently conducting interviews with creators for my next book and talking about creativity and things like that. And one guy who's been working for the last ten years or so said, I envy what you guys used to do.

58:54
Paul Kupperberg
You could do these stories where people that sit around have quiet moments, but now you do that, and the editor goes, no, get to the action. Let's stop this. We don't want this character stuff. That's more my speed. That became more my speed, which is why when I shifted over to writing prose a few years later, now I can get into it. I can write about my characters as opposed to just do these kind of relatively superficial stories. Not that the stories in comics are superficial. They are complete for what they are. But again, you can't get the depth of a story in comic book form that you can in prose. When I was an editor at DC, I worked in licensed publishing for a while. And one of the things I edited was a trilogy of Green Lantern novels plotted by Christopher Priest.

59:41
Paul Kupperberg
And then he wrote the third book, and I had to pursue him to the ends of the earth to get him to write the goddamn novel. He just kept pushing back and resisting, and father was like, all know the deadline is here. So he finally sat down and did it. Now he curses me because that's what he wants to do. Now. He doesn't want to write comic books anymore. He wants to write novels because you can actually sit down and write. There's no continuity hanging over you. When he wrote the Green Lantern thing, he said, I didn't have to ask anybody for know. I just had to ask Paul, is it okay for Superman to have a dog? Yes, it's fine. This is its own continuity. It doesn't matter what you do. Have fun. And he did.

01:00:24
Case
And even though he's writing on a deadline, it's under a different type of deadline. It's a different set of circumstances. It's different people that are beholden to it. He doesn't have to get it to an artist to draw everything, right? Yeah.

01:00:34
Paul Kupperberg
And also, when you're writing a story or a novel, it's just you. If it's good, it's yours. If it's bad, it's yours. But there's nobody in between. There's an editor, but generally, there's not as much control put on books as there are over comic book stories, especially these days. And you don't have to rely on an artist to interpret it and anchor to muddy it up and a letterer to put the words in the wrong order and a colorist to make it even muddier. I'm not saying that's what they all do, but there are worst case scenarios, and they happen. So it's all yours. You do what you do, and nobody else has any say over it. It's freaking amazing.

01:01:11
Case
I've always lauded the collaborative element of comic book fiction, but it certainly has limitations in terms of if someone has a very clear vision unto themselves, then they have to make it work with people.

01:01:23
Paul Kupperberg
It's also largely not as collaborative as most people who don't do it think. In all my years of doing it, I was writing a script that I gave to an editor who gave it to an artist. And I got to see it when it was published. I wasn't talking to Norm Bray Foville. I wasn't talking to the Kennedy brothers on that stuff. Certainly never talked to Kurt Swan or Kurt Schappenberger about a Superman or Superboy story. I wrote a script and I gave it to Julie, and Julie attacked it with his lead pencil. And the next time I saw it was, if I happen to be the office. And I saw the art, great. If not, usually when it was published. I did a six issue miniseries that Jack Kirby drew, but I never worked with Jack Kirby.

01:02:02
Case
There's a lot of viewpoints going into it, even if it's how someone interprets your script, but because it's not a.

01:02:07
Paul Kupperberg
True mean, you know? Yes, there were instances. There was Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson on Manhunter. There were guys who sat down and talked, writers and artists who talked Len Weane and Bernie on swamp thing. These guys talked about the stories with the artists. But for the most part, it's a factory. Everybody's at their own know, I'm putting the engine in and this guy is slapping on the wheels and that guy's doing this. And we talk to each other at conventions, but not all the work is getting done.

01:02:37
Case
Sure. And with comics, of course, it's such a grind to get everything out there in such a rush. I don't want to take up too much more of your time. So I had two last questions for you about the story. So, one, when I was doing an image search for this, I could not for the life of me find any official art or really any art related to the character of Ultima. Like any sort of interpretation of the character?

01:02:57
Paul Kupperberg
None that I'm aware of.

01:02:58
Case
Yeah, I was just curious if anyone had ever sent you anything or anything just because while you can visualize the character from the description, like I said, I was working on a video for the character and I just didn't have.

01:03:09
Paul Kupperberg
Anything to even reference, as far as I know. No, I mean, the only outside mention of this that I've ever seen was a review of the book in some science fiction magazine. And they singled out my story, which was very nice. But then I later found out it was written by an old friend, so who knows?

01:03:27
Case
Well, clearly, and unfortunately for me, there hasn't been a lot of people, like, trying to interpret it into a visual media. Yeah, the last question I have is, so when I was trying to track this down to give it to my co host so he could read it was very difficult. I was able to find some physical copies of the superheroes anthology available. But in terms of a digital version, the only one I found was a later collection that you had put out called in my shorts.

01:03:53
Paul Kupperberg
Right.

01:03:54
Case
And so I was curious, like, well, what has been the life of this since then?

01:03:58
Paul Kupperberg
You have just described it.

01:03:59
Case
Yeah, just that.

01:04:00
Paul Kupperberg
Yeah, I put out in my shorts in the teens. I don't know, I guess 1617 maybe before then, I don't remember. But, yeah, that was it. Those two appearances. And which, by the way, copy is available at Paul Kupperberg. Net.

01:04:16
Case
Have you ever thought about doing anything else with. It's. It's such a fun story that, like I said, stood out to people who told me about it before I even found the book has always stood out to me. Any thoughts of anyone ever approaching you discussing adaptation of some form?

01:04:30
Paul Kupperberg
Once I got a call from a producer at Universal. I was working at DC at the time, and I got a call there at my office and he said it was just the type of story he was looking forward to. Adapt into a movie. And he thought it was a great idea and yada, yada. And he gives you this whole Hollywood bullshit is being piled on me. And if there's one thing I know, it ain't real until the check's been deposited and cast. So I went, yeah, great, whatever. He goes, all right, you'll either hear from me in the next week or two, or you'll never hear from me again. Never heard from him again. However, I did see the Will Smith movie, Hancock.

01:05:08
Case
When that movie came out, it actually gave me vibes. Gave me.

01:05:15
Paul Kupperberg
So, you know, I don't know. I did call an IP attorney and he said, yeah, probably stole the idea from you, but you'll never be able to prove, yeah, save your time, if.

01:05:26
Case
It makes you feel any better, like the movie is not particularly well loved.

01:05:30
Paul Kupperberg
It's not a particularly good movie. I see it and I just want to slap Will Smith. No, I kid. I kid about slapping Will Smith, about slapping anybody. I don't believe in violence. I just write about it in graphic detail.

01:05:44
Case
In this short story, my ex wife.

01:05:47
Paul Kupperberg
I wrote a short story called Food for the Beast, which was a horror story about a writer who cleaned up his life and doesn't feel he can write as well as he used to. And an old friend comes back and convinces him to turn to the dark side to regain his writing mojo. And he goes off on this tear and kills a shrink and his wife. And my ex wife read it and she's like, now I'm afraid of you. No, that's just in here. It's very dark and creaky in here, and your feet stick to the floor. But I don't act out on it.

01:06:21
Case
I get to write about it. These are the dark places of my soul. But don't worry about it. They never escape.

01:06:26
Paul Kupperberg
Yeah, they don't come out except when I'm sleeping. Those are the screams you hear.

01:06:32
Case
Well, Paul, thank you so much for coming on. I don't want to take up any more of your time, but I do really appreciate this and I did just want to let you like, this was a story that really meant a lot to me when I first read it and has always been a thing I've recommended to people over the years. And it's just really cool to talk to you.

01:06:47
Paul Kupperberg
Well, I appreciate it.

01:06:48
Case
Thank you.

01:06:48
Paul Kupperberg
It's nice to know it didn't just drop off into the void.

01:06:52
Case
Well, we're going to cut back over to the main episode, but again, thank you, Paul. And you can find it@paulcooperberg.net.

01:06:59
Paul Kupperberg
You said Paulcooperberg. Net? Yeah, just go to my shop. There's copies of in my shorts available for purchase, signed and personalized.

01:07:08
Case
Awesome. Everyone should go check that out. And we're back. So, yeah, that was Paul. He was great to talk to. It was so nice that he was just very open. I had been depressed about the death of Twitter. Still am. It is depressing to lose this means of marketing and communicating with audiences in sort of a very big, open broad, not like too personal, but at the same time, you're actually connecting with them kind of way that Twitter has recently. I got onto blue sky. It's pretty cool. It's just Twitter, but as far as I can tell at the moment, a lot of comic book professionals have come over there. A lot of content people have come over that are cool. Like all the cpov people are slowly coming over. It's kind of a fun space.

01:07:49
Case
And so I was glad that I saw Paul on there while I was working on this video. And I was like, oh, hell, fuck, yeah. Reached out to him and he was super chill and recorded it within a week of me reaching out to him in the first place. So awesome to have that conversation since it was already on the radar for us to talk about. It's very fun listening to him explain what went into actually writing the short story in the first place. It was written for the anthology because they were getting writers together to put this book together and each were, like, contributing stories. And so he got roped in by Julie Schwartz, which is really fun.

01:08:23
Case
And so he got involved, wrote the story, kind of venting about a dude he just didn't like at work, which I think is really funny, and did this really fun deconstructionist work, which I could make comparisons. The big ones I make, beyond the more modern bad Superman stuff, is miracle man. I think that what does a real superhero in a real world look like where every superhero battle is going to have a body count to it and that their powers are so similar. There's these big, broad strokes, but the craziest part is the psychic powers for Ultima are only there so that Ultima could be shot at the end.

01:09:00
Jmike
Well, it did kind of say he had to be, like, paying attention, but that's.

01:09:03
Case
So he had the weakness to bullets.

01:09:08
Keith
Yeah, they had to give him weakness to be able to take him out.

01:09:10
Case
Yeah.

01:09:10
Keith
I like the comparison of win.

01:09:12
Case
I think that's a great comparison. Obviously.

01:09:14
Keith
I'm currently reading the release note they call remasters actually, of the Neil Gaiman run that Marvel's putting out. And it's something I haven't read in a very long time, so it's really interesting to go back through it. And it is kind of like, what if Ultima didn't quit? Like, what if he just kept going? And I was like, yeah, that's kind of what this is now I think about it.

01:09:33
Case
I mean, you could very much read this as, like, kid Miracle Man's first days after the bomb while everyone else is gone. It feels like, oh, yeah, world of cardboard. Everyone you touch, you just tear right through just by virtue of the fact that you're the way. Definitely also really fascinating because he brings it up in the interview. He also brings it up in the essay. At the start of, in my shorts version, he has an axe to grind with.

01:09:58
Paul Kupperberg
He.

01:09:59
Keith
What are you talking about?

01:10:00
Jmike
What are you talking about, Case? Oh, my gosh.

01:10:03
Case
And it's funny because when the movie was announced, I got the same vibes then I watched the movie. And for those who've seen Hancock, and at some point we'll talk about that on this show, the whole prospect of a Superman who needs a pr guy kind of dies, like, halfway in the movie and doesn't ever really come back.

01:10:22
Jmike
Halfway? Halfway?

01:10:23
Keith
Yeah, directly.

01:10:26
Case
And starts, like, a little bit earlier in terms of like, well, he's like a hobo version of Superman. Yeah. There's definitely comparisons to be made with it all, but it's also more farcical. So it's there. I can certainly see it. I could certainly imagine someone taking that story and ripping it or making a screenplay and not giving him any credit and making it just different enough and then grabbing the other half of a different screenplay and mixing up the pages so that no AI bot could say, like, oh, hey, is this a hack job? Oh, no. The second thing is about gods.

01:10:59
Jmike
It's straight up Hawkman and Hawk girl, the reincarnated versions.

01:11:06
Keith
I would say it's a coincidence, but the fact he was approached for the project and then they made it, basically, I'm like, how many times does that happen, man?

01:11:19
Case
Probably more than you think, though, because like I said, while there are definitely similarities and I could certainly imagine someone having read this, really influencing things and that being the stuff that they ended up juicing up in the final movie because they get Jason Bateman to be the talent agent guy. And for the commercials, they're like, yeah, let's focus on these things because these are the fun, good parts about the script. Oh, yeah. It just happens resembling? Is it likely? It might be. I don't know. It might be a ripoff. It might be a coincidence. This is also in the zeitgeist. Like we said, there are elements of Ari Gold in this character, and that's not a related project. Like, entourage is just a straight up different thing. For one thing, Ari Gold is based on Ari Emanuel. He's based on a real.

01:12:02
Case
So, like. And the fact that they didn't even fucking change the first name. Jesus Christ.

01:12:07
Keith
You think that's bad? This isn't an entourage podcast, but they're Harvey parody.

01:12:13
Case
Oh, right. For a long time, I didn't even realize they didn't change the name at all. It was like, Weingard.

01:12:19
Keith
Yeah. I was like, come on, man.

01:12:21
Case
Harvey wine. Yeah, Weinstein. Okay, whatever. And didn't even process that. It wasn't. That said, I'm much happier with them taking the shots there.

01:12:28
Keith
Oh, 100%. Screw that guy.

01:12:31
Case
That said, there was a space in pop culture for these kind of, like, cutthroat agent type characters. There's a desire to show off these fast talking, mean reflections of opulence that are sort of like the 2000s bounce back of the 80s kind of greed is good kind of mentality. So I think that there was a space for it when Hancock came out.

01:12:52
Keith
I could see that.

01:12:52
Case
Yeah, but the fact that there was a space for it and the fact that they emphasized those parts in all the publicity material and all of that. Yeah, it totally could have been. It could have been a treatment or a scriptment that was then warped and mixed with something else because they liked that part. The second half was actually the thing that they had sold. And they're like, how do we start it? Here's this treatment from a different script. Can you work some of that in? Yeah, fuck it. Okay, whatever. Where'd you get that idea? I don't know. Fuck that guy.

01:13:17
Keith
Could have been totally, don't worry about it. Move on.

01:13:21
Case
But the point is, it's funny.

01:13:23
Keith
Yes.

01:13:25
Case
I mean, if it is actually a rip off, like, that's bad. I'm not making fun of the situation. That totally sucks. If it is actually, like, straight up plagiarism, but the vitriol at this point, because Hancock's not very good. This is the thing that's funny about it.

01:13:36
Jmike
The first half had problems.

01:13:38
Case
It did.

01:13:39
Jmike
The second half fell off a cliff.

01:13:41
Case
But I guess what I'm saying is it's a weird axe to grind when it was a failure of a project in the first place.

01:13:49
Keith
This really bad movie was a ripoff of my project.

01:13:52
Case
It's honestly better that it isn't called reflected chlorine or ultima or whatever.

01:13:59
Keith
I'm just imagining someone being like, I came up with Waterworld. I wouldn't brag about that.

01:14:06
Case
You know what I will say Waterworld's better than we'll have to when we finally do Hancock, which I have no idea when we'll ever talk about Hancock on this show. Listeners, if we don't ask, is it better than water world? At the end of this, you can come for me. That's all I'll say.

01:14:30
Jmike
Careful what you wish for, case.

01:14:32
Case
Yeah. So that's reflected glory. I'm really glad to come back to looking at the story. I think it is a lot of fun. Like I said, looking at the taken for granted elements of superhero stuff that exist in the short story. There's just crime everywhere in New York kind of element to it all. Oh, we need a superhero because the world is that way. Assuming that it is not an unreliable narrator telling us those parts, I find those bits uncomfortable and the amount of violence in response to it all because we are, as a society, having a reckoning with these sort of depictions of law and order kind of stuff. But I don't think it's bad to have a discussion about it because it's not coming down on ultimate side. Like, he is experiencing PTSD for the amount of murder he's done.

01:15:18
Case
And the rest of the city, the sane people that we see in the city are all like, there's a dude who's killing a lot of people.

01:15:23
Jmike
This is bad.

01:15:24
Case
What do we do? And I like that dynamic that's going on in it all. And the fact that then there's a lot of rubes that a fast talking PR guy can manipulate into being in favor of someone who is obviously a threat to everyone feels very familiar to right now. There's a lot of stuff going on here that I'm like, oh, I really like that. It's good. So I'm really glad to look at it. I'm ecstatic. I got a chance to talk to Paul about it. I'm so glad to have you guys on to talk about it. Keith, do you have any closing thoughts about the piece that you really want to get off your chest before we kind of wrap this one up? Not really.

01:16:01
Keith
I kind of got one over everything. I really wanted to, and it is a short, mean. I thought it was really cool. I thought it was a really interesting take. And I recommend the superheroes anthology that case mentioned because there are some really cool takes. I will mention another one that I think kind of runs alongside this one in a really interesting way, which is a superhero who saves the day, and then suddenly everybody's suing him for all the damage he caused. And he has a lawyer be like, I'll represent you, but you're going to have to do this. You're going to do that. And the reality of it is really interesting. So having the two stories, one about a PR guy, one about a lawyer trying to help a superhero who's probably idealistic, and it's like, I could just solve problems.

01:16:44
Keith
No, it's much harder than that in modern world. I like that one a lot, too. So I recommend that anthology. It's been a really interesting read. I like picking it up and just reading through one of the short stories. I'm not even done with it yet because I just pick it up every once in a while. But, yeah, recommend that.

01:16:57
Jmike
Definitely.

01:16:57
Case
I do want to say something about the anthology, that there are a lot of stories in it that happen to address the legalities of superheroes. And I don't mean, like, isn't legal to beat people, but the broader concepts of, like. There's one where their version of the Justice League is an LLC based in Newark, Delaware, because that's where all the big companies have main offices that are like one dinky little office in this complex where there's one employee there just to answer the phone if they get a call from the IRS. There are so many other ones where it's like, dealing with what are the logistics behind the scenes of it all. And it's, like, really fun that this was on the mind of every writer in 1995 when they were working on this book.

01:17:37
Keith
Yeah, there's another really great one. I'll highlight that there's, like, a Batman like character, and he's literally up against his entire version of the Justice League for saving a child, for being basically kidnapped by their parent and put into a religious cult. And it brings up the legality of, like, isn't it the parent's decision what to do with the child? What if the parents disagree and it gets in this really interesting thought I really like.

01:18:00
Case
So that one's called peer review. Yes, that's another one of the ones. I highly recommend for it. If anyone's wondering. I would say this one peer review and one of the boys are the first three that come to mind for me as really fun ones. But it's a good book. It's definitely worth tracking down. John Varley. And Alicia Maynhart are the editors, the people who actually compiled this anthology. So check that out. But like we said, paul Copperberg's one of the writers. Denny O'Neill is another writer on this one. Lots of people who have big bona Fide's for comics are involved in this. And it was a really fun book that, again, is not available in modern formats, but you can track down a copy and is worth it if you can. And the version I have is like a big, oversized print.

01:18:42
Case
But I know that there are smaller paperbacks, if you can check that out. If not, check out the collection of short stories in my shorts by Paul Copperberg, because that's also a fun book. J Mike, when you read this, what was your vibe on it? Do you have any strong takes that we haven't addressed yet?

01:18:59
Jmike
I was like, this story sounds very familiar. It's almost like I watched this a decade ago in a dvd somewhere. I was like, oh, cool, there is some guy rehabilitating a drunken superhero. That's pretty cool. And I was like, wait, this came out in 19, 95, 96. Who came out first? Man, this is a fun story. I just laugh because I'm like, man, they really just switched out some of the story beats and got a Hancock or, like, speeding bullets. But if Clark had, like, zero restraint and was just Falcon punching people through the streets all day, it was like 345 people.

01:19:45
Case
He killed the gross.

01:19:46
Jmike
Yeah, I'm going to keep going up every time I mention it.

01:19:48
Case
Yeah. So in the superhero strike that would be going on right now, he's trying to get credit on the gross instead of the net. Like, this is the number of people I saved killed.

01:20:00
Jmike
These are the amount of people I put in the hospital. This is a fun story. I encourage everyone to read it. It's a really good little. What if Batman had superpowers? No, what if Damien had superpowers? It's more like it.

01:20:13
Case
There you go.

01:20:13
Jmike
Bam.

01:20:14
Keith
That's actually really accurate.

01:20:16
Case
Well, but he's not trained, though. It's like a Frank Castle got superpowers but didn't lose his wife. So it was just like the PTSD of war or something driving him. It kind of feels like a daredevil, but instead of blind, it's invulnerable.

01:20:34
Keith
And -80% catholic, we don't know.

01:20:37
Case
He might have a shitload of catholic guilt out there. This story resonated to me when I was a young boy at a jesuit high school. Anyway, so thank you both for coming for this. Thank you way out there to Paul Copperberg for being awesome and being interviewed for this. It was a ton of fun talking to an absolute legend in the comic book industry. It was so cool that he made time to talk about this random short story from 30 years ago. That's really cool. I really like this story. I'm really glad that we're talking about this one first amongst this anthology.

01:21:08
Case
It's not the first prose work that we've talked about on the show, but we're going to talk about more of these because I've got more videos coming on characters from this anthology that will inevitably inspire me to be like, hey, I have to reread this anyway. Do you want to do a full episode about. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's how the show works. It's like, what do we feel like talking? Yeah. All right, cool. The answer is always Superman. Keith, thank you again for coming on. Where can people find you? Follow you? What do you have going on?

01:21:35
Keith
All right, so the best place to find me still is Twitter. Unfortunately, for now, you can find me at whipodcast. Keith on there. My show we have issues is at Whipodcast. That's the better one to follow because you do get announcement whenever a new episode comes out. We get timestamps for each publisher, we get a link to the episode and a list of every issue that we review. You can also follow my co host Jose, and the more followers he gets, maybe he'll come back quicker. And that's Jose reads hostsway on Twitter and our producer liz at whipodcast. Liz. Our other show is jukebox vertigo. That's at jukebox vertigo also on Twitter. Make sure to follow Joseway at Joseway plays Hoswei on Twitch because that is linked to our jukebox stuff.

01:22:17
Keith
Other than that, I don't think I have a lot coming out other than my normal stuff. A lot in the works. Just reading a lot, a lot. And new d d campaign. You know how that eats up your.

01:22:29
Case
And, j Mike, it's been a minute, but what have you got going on? Where can people find you and follow you?

01:22:34
Jmike
I need to recognize that app. Don't even know I need to say it anymore because I'm like, it's going to burn down any day now. I'm on X at J Mike 101 occasionally. I'm 95% sure it won't make it to the end of the year. I might just close out that account and move over to blue sky. Who knows? It sounds like everyone's having fun over there.

01:22:57
Keith
I am on Blue sky now. And we have it for the record.

01:23:02
Case
All right, well, thank you guys for joining us for this conversation here. It is a lot of fun to revisit some of these really fun prose works that dealt with the Superman archetype. And I feel like this was a really solid example of that. Even if, again, part of the reason for the exploration of the Superman archetype is that it is really easy to get the shorthand across because everyone knows who Superman is. That's kind of the point of this show. Thank you both for being here, listeners, thank you for being patient with us as we have had some release issues. Again, part of that is some stuff we had banked is not stuff we want to release right now because of the strikes, and we are in total solidarity with all of the unions striking right now.

01:23:42
Case
So we are not going to be covering any kind of movie or tv related stuff in the meantime, because, again, just total solidarity. So that's one of the reasons. Another, I have a baby that has been hell on staying on top of even just getting the files together when people send them to me to put them together and give them to my editor and be like, this is the thing. And here's the money for the editor. By the way, Jeff, we love you. Thank you.

01:24:08
Jmike
Awesome.

01:24:09
Case
But those are like mental hurdles right there that sometimes when you've been woken up every 3 hours for five days in a row, you just don't have the spoons. So there's that. I had a bout of COVID that I'm actually still recovering from, so you might hear it in my voice. And just like life, it's a lot. It's a living. We'll be back soon with more episodes of the men of Steel podcast. In the meantime, you should head on over to certainpov.com, where you can find all kinds of other great shows that are coming out on a more regular basis, such as, I don't know, screenstark. They've done a wonderful job pivoting away from all of the SAG content that was like the majority of what their show was about, and now it's not. They're talking about non SAG material. That's pretty cool.

01:24:50
Case
I'm very proud of the way they pivoted. I thought that was really cool. Former editor Matt is awesome. And Rachel, enemy of the show is also awesome outside of the context of being enemy of the show. I curse her. I curse, you know, check out. We have issues. It's a great podcast, too. That's also awesome. And while you are checking out the stuff that we're working on, you should head on over to the discord server. You can find a link@certainpov.com where you can come chat with all of like, it's a lot of fun. Otherwise, you can find me on blue sky at case Aiken. You can still find me on the hell site for the time being at Ksaiken. If he starts charging everyone, I'm dropping it. I swear to fucking God. I cannot deal with that. Like, I'm still going there by habit.

01:25:34
Case
But if I have to pay money, it's not happening.

01:25:37
Jmike
Like I said, it's going to be gone very soon.

01:25:40
Case
I will pay for some stupid shit, but not for a thing that I'm already mad about. It was free. That was the point. That was the point. You push ads in exchange for us all just venting about nothing, and now you just made us mad and you're charging us and also pushing ads. Fuck off. Anyway, enough about that. You can find me on Instagram at Ketzelquattle five because I'm holding on to my aim screen name for dear life. And you can find the stuff that I'm working on outside of podcasting on YouTube at certain POV Media. Check all those out. We'll be back as soon as we can. As soon as I can get my shit together. I am sorry, guys. And until next time, stay super man.

01:26:41
Jmike
Men of Steel is a certain POv production. Our hosts are J. Mike Folson and case Aiken. The show is scored and edited by Jeff Moonin, and our logo and episode art is by case Aiken.

01:27:02
JD
So I have a question. Have you ever wanted to get into comics, but you just didn't know where to start? Well, welcome to comics quest. I'm JD Martin, and every week I sit down with a guest to talk. A comic that I think anybody can pick up and start their comics reading journey. We take a look at psychedelic Sci-Fi fantastic action, heart wrenching love stories, and, of course, superheroes. So check us out@certainpov.com. Or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Cpov certainpov.com.