Monthly Archive: April 2017

John Ostrander: The Secret Origin of Captain Boomerang

Last week in this space, we started discussing the latest volume in DC’s TPB re-issue of my Suicide Squad series. The book is called The Phoenix Gambit, which also was the name of the first arc.

Today we’re pushing on with the stand-alone story, Dark Matters, which also serves as the re-vamped and more detailed origin of George “Digger” Harkness, aka Captain Boomerang. Boomerbutt, as he became known in the Squad, was not originally one of my picks for the team; editor Robert Greenberger urged him on me. I thought Boomerang was pretty silly looking with an even sillier gimmick, but he was a prime member of the Flash’s Rogues’ Gallery. The Flash group wasn’t using the Rogues at that point so he became available to us.

I decided to model Boomerang after George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman character in his series of historical novels. Flashman remains a cad, a liar, a coward throughout the series but he’s an entertaining bounder and I thought I would go there with Boomerang. No matter how far he sunk, Boomerang could always find another level to sink to. He became a trickster character; always up to something but never quite as clever as he thought he was. I quickly became very fond of this version of Boomerang and so did the readers.

Since he was supposed to be Australian (boomerang connection, right?), I wanted him to sound Australian, which no one had ever done. Let’s go a little beyond “shrimp on the barbie” colloquialisms. So I got books on Aussie slang and peppered his dialogue with things I found.

After doing The Phoenix Gambit, I thought it was time for a “Private files” sort of story and why not focus on everyone’s favorite asshole? Kim wasn’t going to be co-writing this issue so I dragooned an old mate of mine, Australian David de Vries, to join me. Dave was already an accomplished comic book writer, co-creating the Southern Squadron, a down-under team of superheroes. He also did The Phantom for DC, as well as some Batman and Star Trek among scads of other things.

In fact, it was our conversation about Captain Boomerang during one of Dave’s visits to the States that gave me the idea for this story. Dave was telling me how he and his mates would get together and read Boomerang’s dialogue aloud and laugh themselves silly. Flustered, I protested that I had gotten the lingo from dictionaries and the like. “Well, yeah, mate,” Dave told me, “but nobody really talks that way.” Let’s just say it was slightly dated.

But having an actual Aussie there gave me the idea of having him help dialogue the guy and then I’d crib from Dave for future issues.

Which is what we did. You can find a dramatic shift in Boomerang’s speech patterns between The Phoenix Gambit and this story and the ones that followed.

The plot basically has Harkness going back to Australia along with his friend Deadshot to attend the funeral of Harkness’s mother. We meet his father and brother and get to see Harkness where he was born and raised. We meet “Uncle Walt” (W.W. Wiggins) who actually launched Harkness as Captain Boomerang and discover his real connection to the Harkness family.

All in all, it was a nice, tight single-issue story. Dave’s a real good storyteller in his own right and back in Australia he wrote and directed Camilla Hyde which has won a plethora of awards around the world. He’s a talented guy but, even better from my viewpoint, he’s been a good and loyal friend and I’m really proud of this story we did together.

And that’s the fair dinkum.

Okay, de Vries, you can laugh at me now.

Next week: the Squad visits Israel. Hey, what’s the worst that could happen?

Marc Alan Fishman: The Art of the Con

This past weekend saw the eighth annual Chicago Comic and Entertainment Exposition. You likely know it as its Star Wars designate, C2E2. Unshaven Comics, my li’l studio, has never missed this show. It’s always been profitable for us. To get to the nittiest of grits, it fell to the middle of the pack in terms of the serious sales numbers. We’ll get into that minutiae in a bit.

This year marked a very special metric for my wee company: it was the second time in a row where we saw falling book sales and fewer potential customers. This comes in spite of ReedPop – the owners of the con – boasting continually increasing attendance. In the nine-years Unshaven Comics has attended comic conventions, we’ve never seen a disappointment such as this.

So, what gives?

My first fear was that our series, The Samurnauts, was no longer appealing to the glut of pulpy purveyors in attendance. But data shall always set us free. Our closing ratio – the rate at which our cold pitches to new fans turns into a sale – has remained steady. Our lifetime average sits at 40%. C2E2 2017 clocked in at 37%. All in all, that’s well within reason to figure that our book is still of interest to all within earshot. Consider that fear squelched.

The next fear: Attendees are being more frugal. A cursory conversation held with numerous cohorts located in the Artist Alley and/or the vendor area disagreed with that concern. While some said the show remained on par with previous year metrics, just as many boasted increases in their sales. C2E2 usually hits shortly after tax time, so plenty of people walk in with money to burn. Fear two, forgone.

This leaves me in a lurch, as the culprit seems dutifully apparent. It if wasn’t our pitch, nor the pesos in pockets that left us plinking for purchasers… then the blame falls squarely on the specific location from which we tried to cultivate sales.

The layout of a comic con floor could be debated ad nauseam by any number of qualified debaters. ReedPop slices their floor into simple(ish) sections: Exhibitors, Vendors, Small Press, Celebrity Autographs, Artists, and Crafts-folk (“The Block”). To be fair and clear, Wizard World, the only comparably sized menagerie of conventioneering, fields mostly the same sections – save only for smashing together the craftspeople and artists into a single alley.

At this particular show, ReedPop placed the small press folks at the very foot of the con floor. When you entered the show you walked right past us as you made your way into the exhibitor area. Many cohorts in the Artist Alley were instantly jealous of the prime real estate. “You’re right at the front. Everyone will see you!” they exclaimed to us in yellow-bellied jealousy.

Oh, but, the Mephistos in the details, kiddos.

At the beginning of each day, con attendees enter the show floor with the bloodlust and fervor akin to nothing else on this mortal coil. When the torches were lit to allow entrance, a wave of humanity gushed into the hall racing towards the four corners of the massive McCormick Place. Large swaths of nerds sprinted toward the autograph area to queue up. Other groups walked in and immediately bee-lined towards Artist Alley, to secure those autographs. Whoever was left – the groups without Orange Lantern avarice in their immediate milieu – strolled briskly by our row.

“Folks! Can I tell you about our comic book?” Unshaven Kyle would beckon.

“Sorry, we just got here. We really need to see the whole show first!” the masses would reply (mostly kindly, I would note).

By the time we’d see those folks again, it’d be after they’d done exactly as they said. But having taken in the entirety of the show – including all the other areas opposite the exhibitors who sold goods – were simply on their way out, with their arms already full of the days’ haul.

Now, I could write a screed seven articles long as to why Unshaven Comics was… coerced to capitulate toward Small Press instead of our preferred Artist Alley. I could divulge dirty details that would paint ReedPop in a light far less-than-desirable. I could even continue to lay blame on anyone or anything save for Unshaven Comics itself. But, that simply isn’t necessary. As the WWE VP of Talent and Creative might say, it’s not what’s best for business.

The truth of the matter is that Unshaven Comics was not alone in having a less-than-perfect show. Whether it was the specificity of our booth location, or any number of other factors not yet discovered, reality is what it is. We left the show having sold enough product to pay for the print run of books brought. When we tally the cost of parking, food, and the table itself, it’s more than likely the show placed us severely in the red.

What happens from here? Well, we lick our wounds. We crunch the numbers and we match our passion for making comics to the logic of how to best profit in the long run. There’s no pithy conclusion to reach this week, my friends. Just sober numbers, and sober planning going forward.

Stay tuned. The best is yet to con.

A Cure for Wellness Makes House Calls May 30

A CURE FOR WELLNESS
From the director of The Ring comes this psychological thriller and “fantastically creepy experience” (Kyle Smith, New York Post) about an ambitious young executive sent to retrieve his company’s CEO from a remote and mysterious “wellness center.”  When he begins to unravel the retreat’s terrifying secrets, his sanity is tested, as he finds himself diagnosed with the same curious illness that keeps all the guests there longing for the cure.

Featuring hauntingly mesmerizing performances from Dane DeHaan (Chronicle), Jason Isaacs
(Harry Potter films) and Mia Goth (Everest), the Blu-ray and DVD includes a deleted sequence, a behind-the-scenes look at the scoring of the film and individual meditations from the wellness center.

Digital HD, Blu-ray & DVD Special Features Include

  • Deleted Sequence: “It’s Wonderful Here”
  • Meditations
    • Water is the Cure
    • Air is the Cure
    • Earth is the Cure
  • The Score
  • Trailers
    • Theatrical trailer
    • Red Band trailer
    • International trailer

A CURE FOR WELLNESS Disc Specifications
Street Date:               June 6, 2017
Prebook Date:           May 3, 2017
Screen Format:         Widescreen 16:9 (1.78:1)
Audio:                        English 7.1 DTS-HD-MA / Spanish 5.1 DD / French 5.1 DD (Blu-ray)
English 5.1 DD / Spanish 2.0 Surround DD / French 2.0 Surround DD (DVD)
Subtitles:                   English / French / Spanish (Blu-ray & DVD)
Total Run Time:       Approximately 146 minutes
Rating:                       R
Closed Captioned:    Yes

The Strain Season Three hits Disc June 27

THE STRAIN: THE COMPLETE THIRD SEASON
The war between the bloodthirsty strigoi and the remaining human survivors of New York intensifies in the chilling third season of The Strain! Although Dr. Ephraim Goodweather’s (COREY STOLL) bioweapon initially helped stave off the vampiric creatures, they have evolved into a bigger threat to humanity than ever. Now, distraught over his kidnapped son, Eph teams with Dutch (RUTA GEDMINTAS) to search for signs of weakness in the strigoi. Meanwhile, Abraham Setrakian’s (DAVID BRADLEY) discovery of a mysterious shipment from Egypt brings a shocking realization in this pulse-pounding show filled with intense sci-fi action and thrilling plot twists.

SPECIAL FEATURES

  • Under Siege Companion Series Intro with Carlton Cuse
  • The Strain: Under Siege—Companion Series
  • Vamp Boom— Music Video
  • Deleted Scenes
  • Gag Reel

THE STRAIN SEASON 3 DVD:
Street Date:                             June 27, 2017
Screen Format:                       Widescreen 1.78:1
Audio:                                     English Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles:                                 English SDH, Spanish, French
Total Run Time:                      Approx. 440 minutes
U.S. Rating:                            TV-MA
Closed Captioned:                   Yes

REVIEW: Time Shifters

Time Shifters By Chris Grine
Scholastic Graphix, 266 pages, $12.99

Everyone processes loss in different ways. For young Luke, it’s been a year since his older brother died in a bullying incident. He’s still mourning when he sees something fantastic, goes to investigate, and gets swept up in a time travel, inter-dimensional romp that lasts almost the entire 266 pages of Chris Grine’s busy Time Shifters.

He stumbles upon three of the dumbest henchmen found in YA graphic novels — a skeleton in a pressurized space suit, a hollow mummy, and Vampire Napoleon – and winds up wearing their objective, a piece of tech that lets him cross dimensional boundaries. In the process, he buddies up with a scientist, a robot Abraham Lincoln riding a mutant T-Rex named Zinc, and Artemis, a sassy female ghost about his age.

Grine, best known for his Chckenhare, presents a done-in-one story that moves quickly, too quickly. There’s a lot of running, jumping, chasing and similar kinetic nonsense that does little to actually explain what’s really happening. Grine is a solid storytelling and has inventive character designs but there is no rhyme or reason to the having a Napoleon vampire or robot Lincoln. It’s just oddity for oddity’s sake when there should be a reason.

Similarly, when they spend a large chunk of the story in the other dimension, it is styled after frontier western town from the 19th Century. Why? I don’t know. He’s on a third and I don’t give a darn. Seriously, the lack of internal logic robs this imaginative story from being exceptional. There are some large themes to work with but Grine seems almost afraid to tackle them head on.

The tonal shifts occur throughout the book so you think you’re reading one thing then we’re on to another and you feel the whiplash. As a work intended for 9-12 year olds, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and may result in them finishing the book feeling dissatisfied despite an emotionally rousing epilogue.

Because Grine is moving at such a fast clip, any attempt at characterization is left to a few panels here and there so none of the characters, including Luke feel anything more than chess pieces.

Scholastic Graphix feels strongly about this, offering an excerpt as part of Free Comic Book Day, but this is far more of a misfire that should have been more carefully planned and edited.

The Law Is A Ass

Bob Ingersoll The Law Is A Ass #408

THE CHAMPIONS LOGO LOW BLOW

Sometimes I’m not here to tell you what went wrong with a story. Not what I usually do, but sometimes a story just gets the law right. Doesn’t stop me from writing about it. I can have as much fun explaining why the law works the way it was portrayed in a story as I can explaining why the law doesn’t work the way it was portrayed in a story. In fact, I can have more fun. When I write about why a story is right, no one gets mad at me.

Champions v2 #7 is one of those stories that got it right. For those who haven’t read it, the new Champions comic tells the adventures of some teenaged Marvel super heroes who teamed up after they became disillusioned with the behavior of the adult Marvel super heroes. Particularly their behavior in Civil War II.

I don’t blame them. I’ve spent long hours writing about how I’m disillusioned with the recent behavior of Marvel’s heroes. Only I didn’t limit it to Civil War II. There’s also Standoff, Death of X, Inhumans v X-Men, Secret Invasion, Dark Reign and just about every crossover this side of Marvel’s first Civil War story. Or the other side of Marvel’s first Civil War  story, for that matter. (I’m looking at you Heroes Reborn.)

Anyway because they were disillusioned, Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man (the un-Amazing Miles Morales version), and Nova left the Avengers to form the Champions. Other young super heroes joined them. Their goal was to become heroes who would not use excessive force or unnecessary death to accomplish their goals. (I presume Champions will still use necessary death; like when the book needs a sales boost, but maybe that’s just the cynic in me.)

After their first adventure, Ms. Marvel made a speech laying out the team’s manifesto. “We’re in a war for a better tomorrow. Join us. Help us to not take the easy road, and – I promise we’ll fight every fight they can throw at us. Help us win the hard way – the right way – not with hate, not with retribution, but with wisdom and hope. Help us become champions.” Videos of the speech went viral and made the Champions’ mission public giving them a manifesto destiny.

It also inspired other young people to do good things such as clean up beaches or build low-income housing. These people tagged their activities with the Champions’ C logo to show solidarity with the Champions’ agenda. So the Champions put their copyrighted logo into the public domain. That way anyone could use it when doing a good deed and promote the cause.

Now as this is a comic book story, we know no good deed – especially the good deed of a super hero team – goes … Well, I was going to say goes unpunished, but Frank Castle wasn’t anywhere near this story. Let’s say goes unopposed by a super villain team.

The super villain team du jour was the Freelancers, a team of super powered juvenile delinquents for hire. Usually by big corporations looking for someone to do their dirty work. Like shutting down protesters who were trying to block Roxxon from building an oil pipeline. Or displacing homeless people who were living in tents on land where some other corporation wanted to build luxury condos.

The Champions and Freelancers fought a couple of times until the Champions finally won a decisive victory. Or as decisive as any comic-book victory can be in an era where writers have discovered the phrase “To be continued!”

After their victory over the Freelancers in Champions V2 #7, the Champions learned two things. First, they learned there’s a SPOILER WARNING! coming. (As in I’m about to reveal the cliffhanger of Champions Vol 2 #7, so if you don’t want to know what it is, you might want to read something else; like Marvel’s original Champions series.) The second thing the Champions learned was that while they had put their copyrighted logo in the public domain, the Freelancers had received a trademark on the Champions’ C logo. Now the Freelancers were licensing the Champions logo for “huge amounts” of money to companies making, “Luxury goods. Gated communities. Cigarettes,” to undermine the Champions’ crusade and make themselves a fortune.

How could the Freelancers trademark the Champions’ logo, when the Champions had the copyright on it? Because like a lot of people, the Champions didn’t realize there’s difference between copyright and trademark. While both are part of what the legal profession calls Intellectual Property Law, they cover and protect entirely different things.

Copyright grants the creator of any creative endeavor the right to control who can make or distribute a copy of the work. Copyright is an IP protection for creators.

Trademark, on the other hand, is an IP protection for businesses. It means someone established a mark they use in their trade and have the right to dictate who can use the mark in their business. They can. Anyone they license it to can. But other businesses can’t.

Under current copyright law in America, a person gains a copyright in a work of art as soon as the artwork is completed. However, to obtain a trademark, someone must apply to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the mark. If the Office feels that the requested trademark is valid, it can award the applicant the requested mark.

Some things can be trademarked, even though the original copyright associated with the property has fallen into public domain. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s original novel Tarzan of the Apes fell into public domain in the United States many years ago. But Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. https://www.edgarriceburroughs.com still holds a valid trademark on the name Tarzan. So while anyone is free to reprint a copy of the novel, ERB, Inc. can prevent that reprint from using the trademarked name Tarzan on the cover.

In our story, the Champions owned the copyright on their logo and allowed it to go into public domain so others could use it to promote the cause. However, they forgot to get a trademark on the logo. So, unlike ERB, Inc., they don’t control their own logo. Instead the Freelancers control the Champions’ logo and are licensing it to any business that wants to spite the Champions.

The lawyer in me is amused by this story. Not only because it was perfectly correct in its portrayal of the legal system, but also because I can’t help but think it was inspired by the real-life legal dispute between Marvel Comics and Hero Comics over the trademark on the title Champions.

What trademark dispute? I may write about that one of these weeks. Just as soon as I figure out a way to make the topic entertaining. Remember, I said the lawyer in me was amused. But only lawyers would find a trademark dispute amusing.

Martha Thomases: Trapped In A Room Reading Comics!

Imagine that you find yourself far away from home. You’re in a room with six other people, five of whom are strangers to you. Also in the room are enormous piles of books and magazines.

All of them comics.

You have three and a half days to read all the books and magazines and establish some kind of hierarchy to evaluate them and the people who made them.

Sounds pretty sweet, doesn’t it? But, just like sweets, a diet of just these things, force-fed over 80 hours, gets kind of nauseating.

This is what it was like to be an Eisner judge. It was exhausting. My head hurts from wearing my glasses so long, and from my eyes focusing on so many different styles of lettering. My back hurts from sitting in chairs. My stomach rebels at the truly awesome amounts of junk food I consumed.

Being an Eisner judge trapped in that room was also pretty amazing. I’d done as much reading as I could in advance, but I was delighted to find more things I didn’t know about that were fabulous. Best of all, I found some books I would have dismissed as not my type that turned out to be gorgeous. I love it when my expectations are confounded.

It was delightful to meet the other judges. Dawn, the two Robs, Jamie and Alan each had much different tastes than I did (and from each other), but that made our deliberations much more interesting. We were a librarian, a critic, a retailer, an academic and me, the marketing person, so we all looked at comics differently. It also meant that when I recommended something that someone else really liked, I had a sense of triumph something like making a successful soufflé.

In the first day and a half, we eliminated all the books that we felt were average or worse. A lot of things I kind of liked were included here, perhaps because my appreciation of minor idiosyncrasies far exceeds that of the marketplace.

The much harder part was getting that list down to five (sometimes four, sometimes six) nominees in each category. We used a rating system of one through five, five being the highest, and weren’t allowed to give more than five fives in any category. For me, this caused a lot of heartache, because often there were seven or more books I thought deserved fives.

This is where Jackie Estrada really shone. I’ve known Jackie more than 25 years. We were part of the founding team of Friends of Lulu. She’s married to Batton Lash, one of my favorite people. Still, I was profoundly impressed by how well she runs the Eisners. She kept us on a schedule. She encouraged our laughter and banter while also keeping us reading.  She fed us very well. Hardest of all, she made it look like doing all those things was easy.

We promised to keep the nominations confidential until the nominees could be contacted, so I can’t talk about that. I can say that none of us got all of our first choices, but all of us got some of them. There were a few (very few) books on which we all agreed. I think you’ll be able to figure those out when the lists are announced. If there is any news you can use in this column, it’s that you run out and read those titles.

It’s been a day and a half since I left the Eisner judging room. I’ve taken a few long walks. I’ve started to eat vegetables again. Soon, I hope, I will be able to read another comic book.

Tweeks April TV Roundup

This week Anya talks about what TV she’s been watching. She gives her reviews on her latest Netflix binges (13 Reasons Why and Girl Boss) and then we break down the Freeform series Famous in Love and our feelings about Bella Thorne, which are complicated. There’s also some chit chat about the new Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt trailer.

Box Office Democracy: “Free Fire”

Something hit me like a bolt from the blue during the third act of Free Fire: I am all the way over nihilistic action movies.  I don’t want to watch movies full of people who don’t care about anything commit violence against each other anymore.  In my teens and twenties this felt ok; that it was worth it to explore the space of cinematic violence.  Either we’ve completely explored that space or I’ve aged out of it or maybe Free Fire is just a particularly bad example of the form, but I can’t stand for it anymore.  I need my action movies to have people who care about things in them and those things can’t be violence for the sake of violence or money.  I need more than that.

Free Fire is about an arms deal that goes bad and that’s the entire plot.  We spend the first 20 minutes getting to know the 10 principal characters, and then spend 70 minutes watching them shoot at each other in a warehouse.  There are only two moments I would consider plot or character development after the shooting starts, and so we just get sequence after sequence of people mostly futilely shooting at each other.  There are no grand twists or revelations just an escalation of carnage.  Anyone that’s been to more than ten movies in their life could probably guess who “wins” from the trailer.  I kept waiting for some kind of escalation or turn and it never comes— we just get people crouching in the dirt until they run out of time.

I expected to come home and do my preliminary research for this review and discover the movie was based off of a novella or something.  It would be a fine novella, all of the characters could have internal lives and explored backstories.  It’s not often I come home from a movie wishing for more exposition or more navel-gazing, but here we are.

I don’t know what else there is to say about a movie that I reject so completely as a story.  The acting is fine.  Brie Larson is always fun to watch but she’s asked to do very little here.  Cillian Murphy is pretty good but I wish he reached in to his bag of expressions and came back with something that wasn’t “handsome pensive” a couple times.  Sharlto Copely gives a completely off-the-wall performance that I can’t decide if it’s brilliant or just completely random, but it’s probably at least 70/30 in favor of the former.  I’m not entirely sure why the movie needed to be set in the 70s other than some whimsical wardrobe choices, but it’s kind of fun seeing people dressed like that and I chuckled the first time I saw someone put in an 8-track tape.  It’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel when you’re giving a movie credit for using antiquated audio technology.

I’m honestly not sure if Free Fire is as bad as I’m making it sound.  Perhaps ten years ago I would have seen this and spent the next week gushing about it to anyone who would listen.  It’s neither offensive nor spectacular in its failures such that I could imagine no reasonable person liking it.  It’s just a bland film that never seems to aspire to be an interesting film.  Free Fire is a movie that might have seemed like a revelation in a world where Reservoir Dogs didn’t exist and we hadn’t been seeing movies inspired by it for the last quarter of a century.  But Reservoir Dogs does exist, and so I can’t see what use Free Fire has at all.

Dennis O’Neil: The Perils of Captain Mighty

Okay, let’s get this out of the way at the beginning: Yesterday I published a novel. The title is The Perils of Captain Mighty and the Redemption of Danny the Kid. I’ll add one more fact: The original title was The Perils of Captain Power and the Redemption of Danny the Kid, but there were a couple of still active copyrights for “Captain Power” and although these copyrights weren’t likely to cause any problems, they could, and so Power becomes Mighty and we proceed to the next paragraph.

Are you expecting a little chest-beating here? Not happening. Not that I have anything against some self-congratulation and some of the writers I most admire were not above it. To cite three, a trio of my favorite Nineteenth Century scribblers: Charles Dickens (who, according to one source “thrived in the spotlight”); Mark Twain (who, according to another, had a “flair self-promotion”); and Walt Whitman, who sought praise from Ralph Waldo Emerson and got it (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” the sage of Concord wrote in a five-page letter Whitman later used to promote his Leaves of Grass.) In my own time, I might cite Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer as writers unburdened by crippling modesty. (Anyone with absolutely nothing better to do might list a few more, but let’s hope you’re not that desperate for amusement.)

Indeed, the “book tour” has become a regular part of publishing in which a writer stumbles into a camera’s lens finder or audiences of bibliophiles and, perhaps, if luck is near, scintillates, and then goes to airports.

Ah, but what if the writer is modest? What if that person were taught, perhaps with the emphasis of a branding iron, that gentlefolk do not speak of themselves and never, ever indulge in self-praise. I guess he or she emulates another nineteenth-century New Englander and echoes Emily Dickenson: “I’m nobody.” Or the person does as an adopted New Englander named J.D. Salinger did, buys isolated lodging and hides for a few decades.

A question: Why are the people I’ve mentioned, and others, reclusive? What, exactly, is modesty/humility, anyway? Do such things even exist? I suspect that in my case they’re other words for fear though I doubt that I’ll ever be able to confirm that. We may not always call what happens to us intimidation, we shy ones, and we may not be aware that it’s there. And nobody in particular is doing the intimidating.

Meanwhile, I’ve published a book and I’d feel better if I knew that, if you read it, you won’t hate me for writing it. But it’s not your fault that you’re intimidating me.

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