So Superman, Archie, and Jesus Walk Into A Bar…

Yesterday, I held a poll asking which character has had more stories written about them – Archie, Superman, or King Arthur?  This generated a lot of interesting discussion.  But in remembering the conversation, I phrased the question slightly wrong:
Mike did not argue that “Superman has had more stories written about him than any other character.”
Mike argued that “Superman has had more adventures than any other character.”
Now that’s a different kettle of fish.
Then again, once we start unpacking the whole “Who has the most stories written about them?” then we start analyzing what a story is, which makes this a really fascinating question.  Because there are a whole bunch of considerations to Mike’s question that really flavor how it works.  Let’s look at them:
Breadth of Adventure.  
While there are a lot of stories told about Jesus and King Arthur, they tend to be the same stories recycled in only slightly different forms – which makes them going on the same adventure over and over again.
Which is not to say that Superman is immune!  Baby Superman has the same adventure leaving Krypton over and over again, and much the same adventure in meeting Lex Luthor for the first time, and much the same adventure in that one time he had to save Lois after she investigated some angry mobsters.  There’s a lot of recycling in any comic book canon.
By these standards, Archie, lacking an origin story or recurring villains per se, may have even more adventures.  Sure, they’re very similar adventures (who will he date, Betty or Veronica? Uh-oh, he’s in trouble with the Bee again), but they are separate.  Then again, Archie was never turned into a giant golden ape by Red Kryptonite.
Depth of Fandom.
Harry Potter was mentioned repeatedly as something who’s arguably had more adventures, and this is where Archie falls behind.  On FanFiction.net, you’ll find hundreds of thousands of Harry Potter stories, lots of Superman stories (mostly Smallville), and pretty much no Archie stories.
People like Archie, but they’re just not invested in the mythology to create their own.  Certain fandoms inspire a lot of mucking around in the universe, and certain fandoms don’t.  Judging by the “self-created” stories, Archie falls far behind on any measure; yes, they can churn out twenty original stories a month, but a good fandom can do that without blinking.
Access To Technology/Length of Fandom.  
…that said, it’s not like King Arthur and the Greek and Roman Gods didn’t have a lot of adventures told about them.  Just not all of them survived.  It’s vital to remember that before Gutenberg created his crazy little press, storytelling was primarily vocal, and not recorded anywhere.  Yes, storytellers often told the “classics,” but I find it hard to believe that kids didn’t tell new stories with the same old heroes over campfires… Some of which, if they became popular enough to survive over the years, made it into the “official” canon, but most of which we never saw.
Tales told over campfires by illiterates don’t last, no matter how brilliantly told they may be.  (And one has to assume that given there often wasn’t much to do but think during the menial tasks of the day, some of that storytelling had to have been fantastically honed.)
Then again, the ancients were never in a space where a) their kids had this much free time, and b) could all be collected into one place where they could read the fanfic of people all over the world, inspiring and egging each other on.
So I’m not sure how much length counts.  We have a much more massive population now, and more communication.  It’s entirely possible that the amount of Harry Potter output actually has overtaken the original tales of the Greek mythos.
What Is A “Story”?  What is an “Adventure”?
Does a one-panel Archie gag count as a story?  What about a coloring book scene, where Superman is putting out a volcano?  What about some Mary Sue story, where the goal is to make Harry fall in love with a thinly-veiled version of the story’s writer?
Clearly, the characters are affected by these moments (even if it’s just “Archie falls prey to wily Jughead’s pun”), but is that a tale?  How’s that work?  Is it an “adventure” when the whole point of the story is that Watson’s cock winds up in Sherlock Holmes’ mouth?
And how far afield does one have to go before a the new details added to a retelling becomes a separate adventure?  If you turn Lex Luthor from a mad scientist into a greedy businessman, is that a new adventure?  Clearly Marion Zimmer Bradley’s take on King Arthur is a different adventure, but is Prince Valiant still King Arthur or has he become something else entirely?  When does it diverge sufficiently to become something new?
How does one delineate?
The Mythos
Superman’s not just Superman – he hangs out with a lot of friends.  So is it a separate story every time he shows up in the Justice League, or hangs around with Batman in a supporting role?  (I’d argue yes, but still.)  Likewise, the Greek and Roman pantheons are always hanging around each other, interfering and getting tangled up.
If you hang with a big pack of friends, you’re going to have more adventures.  Sorry, Jesus.
The Finality
With all that in mind, I’m going to agree with my friend Mike and say that based on the word “adventures,” I will proclaim him correct – Superman has had the most adventures.  But feel free to shill for your guy in the comments and explain why you think X has had more adventures.

The Fleshlight: A Review

On Friday, I posted a link to the Zombie Fleshlights, and in the comments a number of people asked, “I mean, how good can the Fleshlight be, anyway?”
I figured I might as well tell you.  I mean, I do own one.  I don’t use it much, but you should know why.  So, as with most sexy things I’m doing these days, I posted an essay over at FetLife (the Facebook for kinksters!) that you can go read, assuming you want a surfeit of personal details.  Here’s the opening, if you’re curious:

If you’re looking for a vagina in a can, the Fleshlight allows you to pork your portable pussy in a properly perky procedure. But it’s not until you explode into delight into an artificial mouth that you realize just how convenient it is having an actual girl attached to the vagina.
Because the thing about having sex with a girl is that when you’re done, she nips off to the bathroom to tidy up, and then all of those helpful organs and biological processes take care of the rest. The Fleshlight, being an inert mass of food-grade (GAH!) polymers, merely sits there, leaving your semen to a) drool back out onto the floor, or b) sit inside its enfolded interior until it congeals, rots, merges with a new form of germ to gain sentience, and then slither up your cock the next time you stick it in side to lay eggs and give birth to the new army of manborg sex toys. Awkward.

Anyway, if you want to see it, signing up for FetLife is free, and as an added bonus, you can friend Poppy Z. Brite over there and see his writings, which are phenomenal.  Just make sure to tell me where you know me from if you friend me, so I can associate LJ names with Fet names.  Danke!

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I was hoping to post my thoughts on the Gay In YA today, then realized I owed an essay to someone else that I had promised a long time ago.  So that’ll have to wait for Monday.
In the meantime, you know about Fleshlights, don’t you? Those male sex toys that are the size of a large flashlight so you can insert your – well, anyway, they now have Halloween-themed versions in Zombie, Frankenstein and Alien versions, among others. (This isn’t unusual for them – they also, infamously, came out with the double-clitorised Na’vi Fleshlight.)
I wonder how many of these will be gotten as joke gifts for friends. And then how many in, the wake of a lonely night spent drinking, will quietly be unwrapped from the packages as some horny college kid looks at his fake zombie pussy and realizes just how low his life is about to sink….

A Brief Plug For A Book, Newly Cheap

A while back, I reviewed my friend Sara Harvey‘s “Convent of the Pure.”  You can read the review here, where I said, “The best part about Convent is the very real, very sexy, and very tender relationship between a woman and the lover she can no longer have. While Portia is battling succubi and demons and mad scientists, the heart of the story is about two women who love each other so deeply that they’re trying to stay together even after life itself.”
Well, Sara’s novel is now only 99 cents on Kindle for a limited period of time, so if that sounds interesting to you – I mean, hey, it’s a buck.  Why not try it out?  I liked it, and I find it hard to turn up almost any decent read for just under a dollar.  Check it out.

I'm Not IT

A friend of mine has an insanely good idea – she’s holding an IT reunion party, since (as all good Stephen King fans know), the next anniversary of Derry’s 27-year cycle is coming up next year on May 30th.  So why not get the Losers’ Club together and play our assigned roles?
Naturally, I called Stuttering Bill Denbrough – the famous writer, the noble man, the man who’s just awesome.  But as I said, “I’m requesting Bill, but frankly I suspect I’m gonna wind up as Richie.”
The response: “You are just so totally Richie.”
Know Your Role, Steinmetz!  Wacka, wacka, wacka.  And now I do the dance of crazy for your amusement!

You Are All Bad And You Should Feel Bad If You Think This

When I discuss health care, people tell me, “I have good insurance.” I always reply, “Have you gotten seriously sick?  Have you ever had to make a serious claim on your insurance for major surgery or a large-scale illness?”
To which they have until this point inevitably replied, “Why, no, I haven’t.”
You don’t know, then.  So shut the hell up.
The problem I have with a lot of the health care debate is that it frames “health insurance” as some sort of magic shield where everything is covered and you can’t go broke.  But here.  Take a look at Jay Lake, successful fantasy writer and owner of a fully-fledged and well-paying Day Jobbe with what he considers fairly good insurance.  He got cancer, pretty bad cancer that’s required multiple surgeries and chemotherapy.  He’s paying roughly $200 a week in co-payments for his medicine,  and estimates that the cancer is costing him at least $10,000 a year in medical bills alone.  No word on what it costs him in terms of time off from work, his inability to attend writing workshops as an instructor, his lost writing time thanks to cancer-brain, et al. Lord knows what will happen if his Day Jobbe is callous and finds that Jay’s fogged brain is a liability to his productivity, and sorry, time to let you go.
If not Jay, then think of my sister-in-law Kristi, who had health insurance through her husband.  She got a deadly, rare illness – and the insurance company refused to pay for the only known surgery that was known to treat it.  In the meantime, they pulled every bit of bureaucratic bullshit they could get, delaying her payments to the point where she had to keep switching to other pharmacies because it was three months before they paid up, switching representatives whenever she convinced one this surgery was in her favor, denying routine claims on the first couple of tries.  If it wasn’t for our constant advocacy (terminally sick people don’t have the strength to fight bureaucracy) and her family kicking in the money to hire a lawyer, she’d probably be dead.
Insurance doesn’t necessarily save you.  As my wife the bankruptcy lawyer can tell you, over 60% of all bankruptcies in the US are due to medical costs…. And 78% of those people had insurance when they started out.
Here’s the deal: your insurance is always good on paper.  But that’s like assuming all your friends are close, reliable buddies because they hang out at the bar and drink beer with you.  Of course your insurance is awesome now, when all you’re doing is the occasional doctor’s visit for that cold and the Advair you need to keep breathing!  You’re not asking anything of them.
The real test of a friend comes when your partner’s left you, and you have to move out of hir apartment, and there’s a shit-ton of heavy dressers to move while you’re on the verge of crying and your girlfriend’s there and there’s a good chance a new fight’s gonna start up while you decide who gets the Blu-Ray, and your friends know all this is likely to happen and yet they show up anyway.
Every insurance is wonderful until you say, “BTDubs, I’ve got $150,000 in surgery I need.”  Then a lot of them make their excuses at the bar and find somewhere else to be on moving day.
So you know what? Stop talking about “insurance” as though the act of having insurance keeps you safe from any illness.  There are levels of insurance, and levels of disease even within good insurance, that can still leave you utterly untouched or bankrupt should you get the wrong kind of sick.
That’s what the conservatives don’t want to acknowledge: you can do everything right according to the system and still get screwed.  That’s the core problem.  And I don’t mind them exploring other solutions to it aside from Universal Health Care, but I do mind them acting as though “insurance” is a generically wonderful thing that saves everyone equally.
It doesn’t.  Try to face reality when making decisions, folks.

Can't Decide If This One's For Poppy Or Seanan

You know what I want?  A “LARRY UNDERWOOD AMERICAN TOUR” T-shirt, showcasing all the lovely stops Larry made on his trip across America, flogging his great new hit “Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?”
The year would have to be smudged, of course.  And the final dates of the tour would be Boulder, then Vegas.