SALE!

My publisher is running a promotional sale on WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of Billy B. right now. Sale price starts at 99 cents for the Kindle version and will go up periodically until it's back at full price. So grab a copy now!

And sales need to be good so that the fans can read the continuing adventures of Billy B and the other hyper heroes of Charlotte, NC! Grab a copy now! You'll get a kick out of it!

Kindle version! Buy it now!

Paperback version for you old Silver Age folk!

Paperback Release!

The paperback version of WORKING CLASS HERO is now out. Buy a paperback version or the Kindle ebook, depending on your tastes in formats.

WORKING CLASS HERO, By James Robert Smith.

And here is the book trailer for the novel. Enjoy!

WORKING CLASS HERO, the Paperback Cover!

The publisher sent me the image for the paperback version of the cover for WORKING CLASS HERO.

Just so everyone understands, I haven't had so much fun writing a novel since I penned THE FLOCK which ended up being optioned for film by Warner Brothers. The whole experience was so much fun I had to pry myself from the keyboard to do things like eat and bathe and exercise.

Working on the sequel now and should have it completed soon.

From the dedication:

"This book is dedicated to Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, two men who created a Universe."

WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of Billy B., A Hyper Human is my latest novel. Combining my working class background with my life-long love of comic book superheroes, I have crafted a work of affection for the loudly-colored characters of my childhood.

Release Day!

The Kindle version is live. Print version to follow. Introduction by Budd Root!

The general population refers to them as “Odds”, people who suffer from AOHD (Adult Onset Hyper-Development Disorder). Such people wake up one day to find that they’re suddenly super-human. They can do things like leap tall buildings. Lift bulldozers over their heads. Read minds. Throw fireballs. Melt steel with a thought. Fly at supersonic speeds, and so on. And what happens? Uncle Sam makes them sign up with the Feds and punch a clock. Or else.

Now, for the first time, we get the real deal, the true story. Told from the inside. WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of Billy B., a Hyper Human.

WORKING CLASS HERO. From Severed Press.

WORKING CLASS HERO Edits are Completed!

Whew! I finished editing the galleys for WORKING CLASS HERO, and looked over the added introduction from Budd Root, and sent in the back cover blurb.

This is the longest I've ever spent proofing the galleys of one of my books. Normally I have to force myself to go through the edits. But I had so much fun with this book, and I like the characters so much that it was not a job to go over the manuscript word by word with the editor.

So it is now in the hands of the publisher where it will be formatted and soon ready for publication.

The general population refers to them as “Odds”, people who suffer from AOHD (Adult Onset Hyper-Development Disorder). Such people wake up one day to find that they’re suddenly super-human. They can do things like leap tall buildings. Lift bulldozers over their heads. Read minds. Throw fireballs. Melt steel with a thought. Fly at supersonic speeds, and so on. And what happens? Uncle Sam makes them sign up with the Feds and punch a clock. Or else.

Now, for the first time, we get the real deal, the true story. Told from the inside. WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of Billy B., a Hyper Human.

Coming soon from Severed Press! WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Hyper Human.
By James Robert Smith, author of THE FLOCK.

Flying!

When I was a kid I used to dream of flying. In those dreams I'd just leap up and go flying. I'd be up there in the clouds looking down on the street where I lived, on the school I attended, on the house where I lived. All alone up there above it all.

Over the years I would ask other kids if they dreamed of flying. I thought maybe it was because of all of those superhero comics I read. But, no, just about every other kid I asked also had dreams that they could fly, whether they read comics or not.

When I ask women if they had such dreams, they usually look at me funny. "Are you daft?" So I decided to look that up and found that for some reason girls (and women) don't dream that they can fly. It is supposed that it has something to do with self-esteem issues and male-dominated society. That sounds reasonable, but it also may have something to do with the the idea that there are fundamental differences between male and female psyches. I can only shrug. I don't know such stuff.

As I got older I began to dream less and less of flying. I will assume here that as the realities of life are loaded onto adult shoulders one by one, the less likely even the dreaming mind can cut loose enough of those burdens to allow a man to believe he can fly. Not even in dreams. Finally, sometime in my early 20s I stopped having such dreams. They no longer came to me.

However...there are still similar dreams for me. I have them to this very day. Instead of flying, I dream that I can jump. Higher than anyone else. Generally I'll find myself in a building with a vast ceiling twenty or thirty or even one hundred feet high. And I'll brace myself, then bend my knees, and jump high enough to reach up and brush that ceiling with my hands.

No more open skies leading up to space, now. Instead I am greeted by ceilings--but sometimes those ceilings are so high that it's almost like the sky, and I can scrape them with my fingertips. Perhaps there's still hope for me in my old age, I reckon.

Mort Weisnger Superman stories! Every kid's dream!

Light fantasy.


Now it's dark.

Comic Cover as Comic Page

In the days at Marvel, before Jack Kirby brought the company back from the brink of destruction by introducing superheroes into the mix, it was a fairly common practice to use a certain cover style. Sometimes the artists would create a cover that was produced in a panelized illustration, almost as if the cover were a miniature comic story all its own. This was effective in whetting the appetite of the prospective buyer and getting that reader to pick up the book to continue the story. It must have been relatively successful it creating sales, because both Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko would create such covers from time to time. Lee and Goodman must have approved, because it was almost a trademark at the company. Perhaps they even encouraged it, the way Julie Schwartz encouraged gorilla covers at DC when it was noticed that covers featuring talking gorillas tended to sell out.

This cover is from THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #4. It's not the last time this kind of panelized cover was used on an early Marvel Comic, but it is one of the most extreme examples of such on a title after superheroes had taken over the company. Ditko referred to this form a few times afterward, but never again in just such a manner.

The cover to this book is one of the most recognizable of the early issues of Spider-Man. And I think it must have sold very well, because it's one of the most common issues that I would run across in my days as a dealer of back issue comic books. It was rare that I didn't have at least one copy of this issue in my back-issue stock. So the cover art obviously did its job. Why Marvel's artists trended away from it I cannot say. Perhaps they hit a point at which they began to look upon it as dated and archaic. I don't know.

My personal copy of The Amazing Spider-Man #4. What a great villain Ditko created in The Sandman!

Super...eh?

And they say there's no such thing as superheroes.

Or super-villains, depending on your point of view.

British riot police looking for all the world like some kind of dark versions of Capt. America.

Wanna rumble? I didn't think so.

Add yer own icon here. Endlessly customizable.

Super Drag, the Insult Super Hero

Watch the continuing adventures of the biggest asshole ever to don a superhero costume:

Super Drag hears complaints from one of his early adversaries.

Super Drag is recruited by the Avenging Demolishers