Hey Joe-- I thought it had an interesting beginning-- I really liked the opening line-- gives a very immediate feel, like you're about to be dropped right into some very interesting action.

Thing is, though, with respect to your actual question, "would I buy it something that starts like this?" is that you put it out there too baldly. Since on just a pure read, it seems sort of like a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic piece and those aren't genres I'm familiar with-- for me to want to read it, I have to have some idea what it is.

So you has to give at least a little context before anything else, the same way anyone going into a bookstore or an editor looking at a proposal would have context. Make sense?

Yeah, I guess.

I was just feeling tentative about continuing with it and was hoping for a "AWESOME! I will give you four million dollars to finish it!". Well, not really, but you know.

I'm just gonna go ahead and keep writing and see what happens, I guess. As usual.

Honey, we ALL want awesome and I will give you four million dollars to finish it. *g*

FWIW, I think it's really engaging, I just have to know WHAT I'm reading in order to give a fair assessment.

By all means, keep writing-- see what happens. It's what we do, babe. I swear.

It's...comic books. And sci-fi.

Like, you want it to be a comic book? Or it's using comic book-like characters?

Either way, nothing to do but write if it's interesting you right now, you know? You need to let it grow, figure out what the plot is, all that.

I liked it. Very lively...would I buy it? I don't know...are there dirty parts?

Like, you want it to be a comic book? Or it's using comic book-like characters?

It's using comic-book-type characters and events.

That's a great idea. To me, anyway, and keep in mind I don't read a lot of books like that, or comic books.

It's using comic-book-type characters and events.

I think that rocks. Seriously-- with comic books/graphic novels and the films from the aforementioned doing so well, I think it's an awesome take.

Little bit more:

Now I stand in the shadow of The Tower and think about that day. All through that day villains would come in and sit, drinking. Shimmer’s Glen Garioch vanished pretty quick. And everybody had a story to tell.
It wasn’t like you’d think. Nobody pulled a “Mwahaha!”. Nobody said it was a good thing. We were all sort of stunned and…inexplicably…sad. And, like the rest of the world, frightened.
Paragon had been around since 1941, at least. That was his first appearance, as Paragon anyway: December 8th, 1941. The story is he showed up hovering over the White House, asking very politely to speak to President Roosevelt. Secret Service went nuts, of course…a flying man? Asking to speak to the President? Somebody took a shot and it bounced off Paragon and he just gave them a look. But he didn’t lift a finger, he just stood there in the air, arms crossed, patiently waiting to be invited in.
You’ve heard the story, probably. It’s one of the most famous pictures of all time, him over the White House, serene and patient, his cape blowing in the winter wind, the flag behind and slightly below him.
And he’s been around ever since. Started the first Justice Coalition in 1946, became a senior consultant to the Second Coalition in ’62. Joined the Virtue Brigade in 1973 after the Tehran Incident.
He had last been seen June 12th, 1992. That was the last substantiated sighting. He had a brief conference with the Secretary General and flew away. And hasn’t been seen since.
The Sec-Gen said the conference was nothing special and that Paragon had given no indication of any intention of retiring or whatever. The meeting had been about the incipient visit of the I’kularr Potentate. Paragon had recommended that Starwatch 16 meet the Potentate as they had had dealings before. He made his recommendation and flew away with a wave. He’d even made an appointment for their next meeting, a week and a half later.
But he never showed up and nobody had seen him. And seven years and one day later, they decided he was probably dead.
And that’s when it finally hit us. Paragon was gone.
Those seven years, upon reflection, had been very weird. Paragon hadn’t been busting bent capes for some time, but we all operated as though he still was…or at least as though he still could. Any minute now, Daddy would come home and we would all be in biiiiig trouble.
Which is not to say that crime didn’t happen. But, after they pronounced Paragon officially dead, well…it got mean.
I read an article once by a sociologist who specialized in “super-villains” who said that the increase in viciousness and frequency of “super-crimes” was due to both a sense of “Yeehaw, the cat is fuckin’ dead, the mice rule!” and a sense of anger at Paragon for dying in the first place. Which at first didn’t make sense to me, but then I thought about it and, yeah…I could feel it. We got mean because we were angry that Daddy was gone. The criminal world was undergoing a child’s response to death. Except it stayed stuck in “anger” and never moved on to a calmer “acceptance”.
I finally broke in 2003.
I was never a gang leader type. I wasn’t a henchman, though, don’t get me wrong. I was a specialist, a consultant. Well, that’s what I told myself.
I’m tough. Bones and muscle and organs are pretty much invulnerable. Which would be great if my skin was too, but no such luck. I get cut, I bleed. I heal pretty quick, but it leaves a scar. Which means I’m not pretty. At all.
My left arm and the ribs on that side are pocked with little craters from a shotgun blast I took in 2000. My right ear is gone, chewed off by a freak named Feral while I was under the sea. I have a scar running diagonally from my forehead, across the bridge of my nose and down my cheek from when Katana Kid tried to chop my head off in ’98. A similar scar crosses that one, running from my cheekbone halfway up one side of my forehead from when I took a throwing axe (continued...)

( continues...) to the face during the Dwarf Invasion of Iceland in 2004. I shave my head ever since half my scalp got burned away during the Second Hell Incursion of 1999. Various other maulings, shootings, stabbings, burnings, etc. have made me, frankly, one stone ugly son of a bitch.
But, as I said, I’m tough and strong; strong enough to heave a sedan about thirty feet. I’m a 12 or 13 on the Evans Scale, which doesn’t put me anywhere near the big 50s up in The Tower, but I can hold my own okay on the mean streets.
So that’s what I did for most of my adult life. Bad guy needed a heavy hand, I provided it. Need a safe yanked out of a wall? Okay. Go toe-to-toe with the Silver Spear or Straight Shooter, I’m your man. Even tangled with Hawkshade once and did okay, though the fucker nerve-gassed me in the end and I ended up in St. Lawrence for my troubles.
But in 2003, I shifted sides.
The Questionnaire wasn’t a “rogue”, in the usual sense. Fact was, he just didn’t rate. Hawkshade had handled him a few times, Maximan once. He’d gone up against Flashbang and escaped, gotten away from Leonine. He was a third-rater, but he’d gotten enough money to hire me and a couple of real lowlifes, outfit the lowlifes with AKs and we were holding an orphanage hostage.
I wasn’t real comfortable with the gig in the first place. I like kids. Kids aren’t usually afraid of me, or repulsed. Kids just take shit as it comes.
I didn’t really expect Questionnaire to pull this one off. His thought was that the city’d pay rather than call a cape because kids were involved and that would make them scared. I was of the opinion that holding kids was guaranteed to generate cape interest and the plan would be fucked from go. But I had my own escape worked out that the Questionnaire didn’t know about and I’d got my full fee up front, though I was due a share of any ransom. It was under control.
But I didn’t know the Questionnaire had snapped.
I knew things weren’t going to go well when, right off the bat, the Questionnaire throws open his coat and revealed the C4 strapped to his body.
“Hey, man,” I said. “This was not in the plan we discussed.”
“Shut up,” he snapped. “I’ll increase your share.”
“Share of what?” I asked. “Share of getting my organs splattered all over the street?”
“It won’t happen,” he answered. I caught a tone in his voice that made me shiver. He wasn’t really there anymore.
Three hours of negotiation later, though, I had almost forgotten about the C4 and the tone. I was entertaining the kids, showing off my scars and telling them the gruesome stories of how I got them. Kids love that.
There was one little girl, Irene, who was really into it. She was about four or five. She sat in my lap and kept pointing to scars, some of which I had almost forgotten about.
“What’s that long one on the back of your neck?” she’d say.
“Oh, that. The Templar Knight tried to chop my head off.”
She looked skeptical. “Really?”
“Yep.”
“But he’s a good guy.”
“Yeah, well. He was really trying to chop up a parking meter I was trying to hit him with. I jumped at the wrong time, he caught me in the back of the neck.” Which was kind of true. Templar was something of a prick in reality.
“And this one?” She pointed to my lips where a line ran vertically across them. Have a notch missing from my top lip.
“Knife fight in Vancouver.”
“With a superhero?”
“Nope. With just a guy.”
Questionnaire was pacing and muttering to himself. His two low-lifes just sat and stared. I think they were drunk or stoned. Useless when the hammer came down.
And then there were footsteps on the roof.
“Fuck!” Questionnaire screamed. He ran to the window, brandishing his dead-man switch and his stupid question-mark shaped gun. I have no idea where he got the thing. He bashed out a pane of the window and started screaming at the cops on the street.
“You cocksuckers! You fucking cocksuckers! I (continued...)