Confessions of the One and Only F.J.R. Titchenell (That I Know of) - Fiona J.R. Titchenell's Official Homepage

The Five Best Novels for Fans of Superhero Comics

11/15/2022

I've been invited to guest on a new book-browsing site called Shepherd.com, sharing my novel recommendations for people who, like me, also devour superhero comics.

Naturally, I get to talk a bit about the Almost Infamous and Pinnacle City universe, and I also share some favorites I haven't written about on this site before.

For example:

While this book/series doesn’t actually call its characters “superheroes,” it’s spot-on for fans of the more fantasy-based, mythological side of comics (think Thor or Wonder Woman). Maggie is an unwilling chosen one and magically gifted monster hunter from Dinétah, a former reservation and now one of the last outposts of humanity in a post-apocalyptic North America. All she wants to do is protect the people she loves, but she and her allies (some with their own magical abilities) keep getting dragged into the plotting and power struggles of Coyote and the other gods who now walk among them. It’s perfect if you like your heroes prickly, haunted, and inescapably loveable.

You can check out my full list here.

Happy reading!

Book Review: Who's Afraid of Amy Sinclair?

9/2/2019

Book Review:

Hopefuls #2: Who’s Afraid of Amy Sinclair?

Jenn Gott

2019

Grade: A

(Also check out my review of Hopefuls #1: The Private Life of Jane Maxwell)

The Basics:

After dying in a car wreck in her ordinary home universe, Amy Sinclair (“Clair” to her friends) has been resurrected in the body of her comic book universe doppelganger and reunited with her wife, Jane. Now she’s a mind-reading superhero on a team that Jane runs, and the two of them are surrounded by versions of people and places that are almost like the ones they remember, but not quite.

It’s all a lot better than being dead, but as Clair works to reconcile two sets of memories, as well as adjust to her invasive new superpowers, she begins having visions of her alternate self and wonders just how “back” her real self actually is.

Meanwhile, the team’s traitorous ex-member, Cal, has resurfaced as a political candidate running on an anti-superhero platform, and Clair’s erased doppleganger’s supervillainous ex-lover is back in force and bent on revenge.

The Downside:

Before delving into nitty-gritty analysis, I want to stress how much I continue to love this series, including the amount of analysis it invites. Unfortunately, this is the seemingly obligatory installment in a superhero series where the necessity, ethics, and legalities of superheroes are called into question, and as usual, the internal logic of the universe suffers for it.

Given how thoughtfully and incisively Gott handles Jane and Clair’s romance, and the challenges they face simply being themselves in the world, I think it’s a safe bet that her intentions are very different from those behind the best-known stories about the debatable need for superheroes, like Civil War (a vehicle for an anti-gun control message in its original comics form) or The Incredibles (a Randian rant against accountability for the rich and powerful). In fact, one of the oft-repeated messages of Who’s Afraid of Amy Sinclair? is one of responsibility and nonviolence. Killing isn’t the answer. Never escalate. Find another way. Yet one of the key scenes that ought to drive this point home only leaves the reader (or at least this reader) distractedly wondering how one of these no-kill superheroes made it this far in her career with a pair of twin pistols as her signature weapons in the first place, without ever having to grapple with the moral and emotional ramifications of pulling the trigger before this one defining moment.

Everything to do with the election plotline and its vigilante controversies feels adrift in this twilight zone of being too connected and yet not connected enough with reality, with rule-of-cool comic book concepts buckling under real world weights they aren’t cut out to bear. As a character, Cal’s portrayal is so spectacularly, uncomfortably realistic, particularly in his methods of exerting social control, that it’s hard not to look for timely parallels in everything remotely connected with him, yet his anti-superhero agenda seems to be a simple betrayal of his friends, our heroes, rather than any kind of cohesive metaphor.

Bottom line, it’s just really, really hard to craft a story around this theoretical comics-universe issue without getting bogged down in the reality that — as much as we may love fantasizing about having awesome abilities that would allow us to help people and solve problems single-handedly without having to deal with slow, flawed, official systems — superheroes do wield ridiculous amounts of power with no qualifications, often irresponsibly, and bystanders in their worlds have fair reason to be nervous. It’s a big ask, and I’ve yet to see any version of this story that 100% works.

The Upside:

This installment is, first and foremost, the story of Clair's rebirth, and in that respect, it's a complete and resounding success.

Like Jane in the first book, Clair has been dropped into a world where her life turned out very differently for the version of her who grew up there. Unlike Jane, if Clair digs deep enough, she has access to the memories and feelings that will allow her to piece together how exactly that happened. But does she even want to understand her alternate self? The Amy Sinclair of this world is a much darker and more complicated figure than the glimpse Jane got of her in book one. The thought that Clair could just as easily have been this other woman, that this other woman in fact has a stronger claim on her life than she does herself, is terrifying. Yet as painful as it is, Clair is compelled to look, to acknowledge her dark potential and all the strokes of luck that gave her the life she knows.

This is also the obligatory sequel to a romantic series opener in which the couple are required to fight a lot, but their conflict is much better realized than many. While some of the instigating moments that push Jane and Clair apart don’t feel quite as well motivated as they could be, once the distance begins to grow between them, Gott does an achingly fantastic job of capturing the snowballing misery of two people who love each other, but whose lines of communication have failed. That distance doesn’t feel like drama for the sake of drama either, clumsily extending a courtship story that’s already finished. It’s an integral part of Clair’s war with, and struggle to understand, herself.

The points of divergence between Clair and her counterpart are closely linked with the different versions of Jane each one had in her life, and how they made her sexual orientation and identity easier or harder to embrace. Alternate Jane, aside from being a supervillain, is cold, closed-off, and mired in deep denial about herself that manifests as callous homophobia. Instead of coming out alongside her version of Amy Sinclair in high school, alternate Jane pushed her away, deeper into the closet, and ultimately into the arms of emotionally unavailable women she could more easily keep separate from her “real” life.

Even the different names of the two versions of Amy Sinclair are emblematic of the crucial departure between them. Clair, our heroine, renamed herself early in life by shortening her last name, because she didn’t click with her given name. Amy, her erased comics universe doppelganger, tried to do the same but was eventually browbeaten into calling herself Amy again, cramming herself into the confining box she’d been assigned to, after those around her (led by Jane) refused to accept her gesture of self-definition.

Under all the masks and car chases and superpowered punch fights (which are still great fun and as awesomely cinematic as ever), this is a story about conquering everything from gender expectations to moral crises to imposter syndrome, in order to truly know yourself. It’s a worthy continuation of the Hopefuls series, and I look forward to seeing where these heroes are headed next.

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Book Review: The Private Life of Jane Maxwell

8/11/2019

Book Review:

Hopefuls #1: The Private Life of Jane Maxwell

Jenn Gott

2017

Grade: A+

The Basics:

Jane Maxwell, a comics artist and writer recently fired from her job in the wake of a social media firestorm kicked up by bigoted fans, finds herself dragged into a parallel universe where her hit superhero series is reality. Mostly. This world’s alternate versions of her high school friends really are the superheroes she based on them for her comics, with one exception. Instead of the male headliner Jane’s publisher demanded, the real heroes’ leader is Jane’s own counterpart. And she’s missing.

The team needs Jane to pose as her alternate self to draw out a diabolical new villain who’s wreaking havoc on their city. Jane wants to refuse, much more comfortable living on the safer side of the page, but there’s one other important difference in this alternate reality: Jane’s late wife, Clair, is still alive.

The Downside:

There are a few little errors and some awkward transitions between past and present tense. About half of the superhero team is pretty undeveloped, but that’s okay. Having a full team is necessary to the concept and setting, and they take an understandable back seat to the main characters’ story.

There’s also some slight muddying of the themes, in the nature of Clair’s superpowers and place on the team. Jane has often had misgivings about giving Clair’s character something as passive as empathy, which keeps her out of most of the action, but then finds out it’s because that’s just the way she is in the alternate universe — the same alternate universe where the sexism of her publisher generally doesn’t apply. That said, Clair’s powers are pretty essential to the plot, and she’s much more interesting than the average mind-powered love interest (*coughJeanGreycough*).

The Upside:

The Private Life of Jane Maxwell is an absolute must for any prose-reading comics fan, written with evident understanding and love for both media. Thoughtful internal monologue, too detailed to be contained in little square text boxes, is interspersed with visual descriptions so bright and vivid they’re like having the lovingly composed pages of a comic book beamed directly into your mind, all wrapped around a story that embraces both the colorful, silly melodrama and the complex emotional speculation that comics universes are capable of.

For all the lush, immersive description, not a word is wasted without pulling the reader deeper into the story and the hopes and fears of its characters. Within a few short chapters of being introduced to Jane, seeing her thrown into a room with her dead wife’s doppelganger has the kind of impact so many superhero TV shows can only dream of pulling off with the help of five or six seasons of familiarity and context.

This is a story that contains flamboyant costumes, evil twins, and a guy called Doctor Demolition. It’s also a story that delves deeply into what it would feel like to learn that your life is just one possible version of itself, and to meet another version of your lost love, who isn’t lost and was never your love, at least not yet. Where so many writers would only get as far as recognizing that this is awkward and painful, Gott pushes through to what comes after that, what the strange nature of their relationship is, and how that shakes their understanding not only of relationships but of their own identities.

The result is a unique adventure and love story, plus an introduction to a compelling new superhero title with the potential to be as iconic as the best of them.

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Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir — Now Available!!!

8/14/2018

It's here, it's here, it's here...

Matt and I are pleased and proud to announce that our latest dark sci-fi adventure, Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir, is now available from Talos Press!

If you've already read Matt's Almost Infamous: A Supervillain Novel, you might notice that Pinnacle City takes place in the same universe, but the characters and story are entirely new. If you haven't read Almost Infamous, don't worry. You don't need any special knowledge going into this one.

What do you need to know about Pinnacle City? Read on.

What It's About:

To some people, Pinnacle City is a glittering metropolis, a symbol of prosperity watched over by the all-star superhero team, the Pinnacle City Guardians. But beneath the glitz and glamour is a gritty underbelly, one still feeling the physical and economic damage of the superhero-villain battles of generations past, where the lower class―immigrants, criminals, aliens, sorcerers, and non-humans alike―jostle and elbow for scraps to scrape by on.

Private investigator Eddie Enriquez is an ex-con and veteran with powers of his own who still bears the scars of his time as a minion for a low-level supervillain. Good work’s been hard to come by until a mysterious woman shows up at his office with a case the police and superheroes are ignoring: the suspicious death of a prominent non-human rights activist.

Meanwhile, superhero Kimberly Kline, a.k.a. Solar Flare, has just hit it big, graduating to the Pinnacle City Guardians. With good looks, incredible superpowers, and a family name that opens doors, the sky is the limit. But in trying to make the world a better place . . . she’ll discover Pinnacle City isn’t as black and white as it once seemed.

From the minds of Matt Carter and Fiona J. R. Titchenell, Pinnacle City is a pulpy, throwback noir of yesteryear, where two people from opposite sides of the track must team up to do good in a world full of bad.

What People Are Saying:

“In this skillfully constructed secondary-world noir novel, having superpowers isn’t always so super, and everyone has something to hide. . . . By allowing everyone to be a little morally grey, Carter and Titchenell spin a superhero story with staying power.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A rollicking take on the all-American superhero tale. It’s Stan Lee meets Dashiell Hammett, with just a little Clive Barker thrown in for good measure.”

—Scott Kenemore, author of The Grand Hotel and Zombie, Ohio

“Lively and endearing, funny and hip, Pinnacle City puts gumshoe to cape and in a fantastic adult alternate history throbbing with modern pop-cultural conflict and absurdities.”

—Johnny Worthen, award-winning author of The Finger Trap

Where can you get a copy? We're glad you asked...

Just about anywhere you'd like:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Kobo

Google Play

Indigo

Books-a-Million

Indiebound

Or if you want to be especially retro-awesome, request it at your local bricks & mortar bookstore.

Happy reading!

Cover Reveal! Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir

5/16/2018

Time to ooh and ahh over the unbelievably gorgeous cover of Matt's and my upcoming adult sci-fi title, Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir!

This one's coming in August from Talos Press (pre-orderable now!), and you might or might not have heard Matt or me talking excitedly about it approximately a billion times by now.

It's chock-full of our signature dark humor, some affectionate riffing on comics tropes and history, plenty of social satire, and tons of gritty noir flavor. We're champing at the bit to share it.

And just look at this cover!

About Pinnacle City: A Superhero Noir

To some people, Pinnacle City is a glittering metropolis, a symbol of prosperity watched over by the all-star superhero team, the Pinnacle City Guardians. But beneath the glitz and glamour is a gritty underbelly, one still feeling the physical and economic damage of the superhero-villain battles of generations past, where the lower class―immigrants, criminals, aliens, sorcerers, and non-humans alike―jostle and elbow for scraps to scrape by on.

Private investigator Eddie Enriquez is an ex-con and veteran with powers of his own who still bears the scars of his time as a minion for a low-level supervillain. Good work’s been hard to come by until a mysterious woman shows up at his office with a case the police and superheroes are ignoring: the suspicious death of a prominent non-human rights activist.

Meanwhile, superhero Kimberly Kline, a.k.a. Solar Flare, has just hit it big, graduating to the Pinnacle City Guardians. With good looks, incredible superpowers, and a family name that opens doors, the sky is the limit. But in trying to make the world a better place . . . she’ll discover Pinnacle City isn’t as black and white as it once seemed.

From the minds of Matt Carter and Fiona J. R. Titchenell, Pinnacle City is a pulpy, throwback noir of yesteryear, where two people from opposite sides of the track must team up to do good in a world full of bad.

Coming August 7th 2018, from Talos Press.

Oh, hey, look! Pre-order links!

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

iBooks

Google Play

Indigo

Book Review: Piper

2/1/2018

Book Review:

Piper

Jay Asher, Jessica Freeburg, Jeff Stokely

Razorbill, 2017

A-

The Basics:

The town of Hameln is overrun with rats. A mysterious wandering piper offers to get rid of them, for a price. This part of the story we know, but a young woman named Magdalena, immune to the piper’s strange powers due to her deafness, is curious to capture the rest of his tale, and once she does, she has a tendency to embellish.

The Downside:

Although told from a different perspective, Piper adheres very closely to the beats of the Pied Piper story and is stark and simple as a result. The added story, mainly the romance between Magdalena and the piper, could have benefited from a bit more lingering in places. In particular, there’s a moment where Magdalena has to reassess her level of trust in the piper based on a rapid succession of new information. Blink and you’ll miss the interchange of her train of thought, and end up spending some of the most crucial emotional moments trying to catch up.

The Upside:

The original Pied Piper can be interpreted as the instrument of a cautionary tale about the importance of honoring agreements, but as a character, he’s a scary, dangerous guy. For such a minimalist expansion on the story, Piper does a surprisingly smart and nuanced job with him as an ambiguous romantic hero, neither undoing nor excusing his elements of villainy, while adding enough pathos to make his connection with Magdalena credible and sympathetic.

This version of the piper is the perfect self-perpetuating cycle of an outcast. People distrust him for having control over other life forms, including people, through his music, a skill his family passes down as a way of getting by in a world that distrusts them. He also lives with the constant temptation to abuse his power by responding with magical force to the many injustices he faces and witnesses, but as pitiable as his frustrations may be, they don’t erase his responsibility or the seriousness of his slips.

Magdalena, meanwhile, is a ray of defiant optimism in the face of the cynicism and cruelty around her. Her tall-tale-telling coping method, and her supportive home life with her adoptive mother, are particular highlights that make the sadness of the story resonate that much more deeply.

The relationship between the piper and Magdalena is intense and sincere, but it explores the question so often ignored in both paranormal romances and superhero stories, of whether healthy love can ever truly coexist with a staggering imbalance of power, even with the best intentions of both sides.

Finally, the art is done in a beautifully atmospheric style, reminiscent of a fairytale storybook, with great attention to the characters’ visual expressiveness, leaving behind a memorable moodiness long after the story is over.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Book Review: Zatanna

8/17/2017

Book Review:

Zatanna

Paul Dini

DC Comics, 2017

B+

The Basics:

By day, Zatanna is a legendary Vegas stage magician. By night, she uses her vast and very real magical abilities to keep the world safe from all manner of demonic and dark mystical harm. Wait… I’m pretty sure the stage magic happens at night too.

The Downside:

Most of the time, Zatanna’s that character other heroes call upon for a special occasion magic-based issue or episode. She shows up, dazzles with her extraordinary power and charming sense of whimsy, and leaves the audience wanting more, as a legendary stage magician is wont to do.

Sadly, this volume makes it easy to understand why we generally can’t have more of Zatanna, however much we might think we want to. As fleetingly annoying as it may be when characters who’ve called on her before must conveniently forget about her or explain why she can’t be called in to fix other potentially world-ending problems with a few magic words, the rationalizing of continued stakes is even more difficult when that magical quick fix is the ever-present main character.

As a result, most of the major arcs of this omnibus revolve around creating or revealing different ill-defined and inconsistent weaknesses in Zatanna’s power, which apart from being problematic from a continuity standpoint, make it very difficult to feel that we really know Zatanna, no matter how much time we spend with her.

The Upside:

Thankfully, a good portion of the issues take the form in which Zatanna shines best -- episodic.

Easily the most enjoyable parts are the run-ins with magical monsters of the month, the weirder the better, from possessed ventriloquy dummies to time-manipulators who make her speak in palindromes. And naturally, one issue’s worth of vicious Zatanna/Constantine banter is worth the whole read, an extra concentrated dose of too-special-for-every-issue, within a comic about a character who’s already too-special-for-every-issue.

In all these self-encapsulated portions, Zatanna’s just as much fun on her own as she is backing up a more grounded lead, and when things drift further into the mythos, her cool, bubbly, slightly mischievous presence usually remains incentive enough to unplug from pondering the many questions begged by her brand of magic, to better enjoy the show.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Book Review: Jessica Jones, Vol. 1: Uncaged!

7/10/2017

Book Review:

Jessica Jones, Vol. 1: Uncaged!

Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Gaydos

Marvel, 2017

A-

The Basics:

Superpowered private detective, Jessica Jones, is fresh out of prison and, as the volume title suggests, on the outs with her husband, Luke Cage. Both the Avengers and an anti-superhero underground organization want her help, each to bring down the other, while Jessica herself craves a slice of peace and normality and, as ever, to do the elusive right thing.

The Downside:

This new return to Jessica’s story abandons the more optimistic tone of The Pulse without fully recapturing the bite of the original Alias series, leaving it with a slightly more generic feel. The two plotlines of this volume never intersect quite satisfyingly, both of them seemingly constructed to connect with the wider Marvel universe more than to complement each other. As in Alias, the frequent two-page spreads of panels aren’t always visually obvious, making it easy to read the dialogue inadvertently out of order (one of my only complaints about the original series).

The obliteration of Jessica’s previous happy ending, and the dubious reasoning behind it, have some of the contrived feeling typical of an unplanned resurrection installment, and yet…

The Upside:

If there were ever a character who could snatch life-shattering angst from the jaws of happy ever after without too much suspension of disbelief, it would be Jessica Jones.

Jessica’s still the “hot mess dumpster fire” (as one of her in-universe critics puts it) with a heart of gold we’ve come to know and love, and she’s back in her gorgeously hideous home sliver of the Marvel universe, which is reason in itself for celebration.

Her sweet but always difficult friendship with Carol Danvers is back in force, as is her stony-yet-receptive professional façade over her unshakeable drive to use her talents for good, and the end of this volume holds a gut-punch that takes any tentative curiosity for volume two and twists it into an edge-of-your-seat wait.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Book Review: Mockingbird, Vol. 1: I Can Explain

5/22/2017

Book Review:

Mockingbird Vol. 1: I Can Explain

Chelsea Cain, Kate Niemczyk, Ibrahim Moustafa

Marvel, 2016

Grade: A+

The Basics:

Bobbi Morse, A.K.A Mockingbird, is a superhero. Not that her bosses at S.H.I.E.L.D or her former idols on the camera-facing core lineup of the Avengers tend to notice much, but she is a scientist and martial artist who helps people for a living. She particularly excels at talking down mutant twelve-year-old girls who can’t get anyone else to explain what’s happening to their bodies, and bailing out Hawkeye, who’s totally not her boyfriend.

The Downside:

While I find it works well enough, the non-linear presentation of these five issues may frustrate many readers and doesn’t add exceptionally much.

The Upside:

Bobbi exemplifies the best possible version of the terms “attitude” and “snark,” in potently concentrated doses. She’s the angry, undervalued female superhero who knows exactly what she has to be angry about and how to point it out in a few sharply chosen words at exactly the right moments, before continuing to get the job done.

The sarcastic sense of humor here is constant without ever feeling forced, and toys with Marvel conventions, not only about gender, but about such tropes as hordes of faceless non-human enemies (allowing heroes to show off their fighting skills without looking like jerks) and the dubious morality of S.H.I.E.L.D’s shadowy government status.

The dysfunctional relationship between Bobbi and Hawkeye is the real treat of this volume, and detracts nothing from her character. Quite the opposite. This is where things gets complicated, and we get to see, as cool as she is, why Bobbi Morse is not someone you want to be. Or be anywhere near.

Bobbi is a bad significant other. Really bad. Almost as bad as the average male superhero, but unlike those guys, her story doesn’t pretend otherwise. She’s that aloof, dishonest, emotionally abusive partner who will nevertheless show up to save you whenever you need it, the one you can’t help liking in those rare moments when things are going well.

In other words, she’s an action hero with a love interest.

Depending on how much patience you have for the abundance of bad male partners in fiction, Bobbi can be viewed either as a welcome reversal, giving the woman a chance to be the layered jerk for a change, or as a commentary on why this archetype is so readily accepted the other way around in the first place.

Altogether, this is a series I’ll definitely be following for as long as it- What? It’s already been cancelled?

Typical. Right, Bobbi?

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

Book Review: Lumberjanes, Vol. 1: Beware the Kitten Holy

5/8/2017

Book Review:

Lumberjanes Vol. 1: Beware The Kitten Holy

By Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Shannon Watters, Brooke A. Allen

BOOM! Box, 2015

Grade: C+

The Basics:

The Lumberjanes are a scouting organization for, in the words of the back cover, “Badass Lady-Types.” Beyond earning survival badges and forging friendships (“to the max!”), the girls have to contend with a whole forest full of paranormal weirdness.

The Upside:

It’s harmless and intermittently cute, with a few educational interludes and the occasional laugh, appropriate for pre-teens getting into comics and looking for positive representations of female friendship.

The Downside:

The modern comic book renaissance has many better examples to offer of all the above positive elements.

Lumberjanes attempts to imitate the optimistic, lighthearted style of female-led peers like Squirrel Girl, Ms. Marvel, and even Harley Quinn, but seems to have confused “lighthearted” with “insubstantial.” In an apparent effort to demonstrate the independence and competence of the Lumberjanes, every obstacle they face falls before the might of their teamwork and smarts, effortlessly and within seconds, eliminating the possibility of any tension or stakes.

The girls are fairly interchangeable, particularly in their bulletproof self-confidence which, while admirable in role models for girls, leaves little room for conflict or even self-discovery when the entire main cast shares this same immunity to all doubt.

What plot exists is instead pushed along by bizarre paranormal phenomena that come and go not only without explanation (which can work), but without resolution or any identifiable point, at least not within this first volume.

The bright colors and mood of wacky hijinks are probably sufficient to entertain younger readers while introducing concepts like anagrams and the Fibonacci sequence, but there’s nothing here to earn the firm stamp of crossover appeal that Lumberjanes seems to aspire to.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!