Metahumans vs the Undead: A Superhero vs Zombie Anthology
The war between Good and Evil has raged since before Time began.
Now the battle continues with the Ultimate Good versus the Ultimate Evil.
Metahumans vs the Undead
Metahuman: one of the human species endowed with one or more powers beyond that of mortal men; a person who uses those abilities to serve either themselves or society. Typically branded by a codename and colorful costume. AKA Superhero.
Undead: one of the human species endowed with life even after death; a walking corpse. Typically branded by their decayed form and appetite for human flesh. AKA Zombie.
In a world where superheroes and zombies collide, only one can prove the victor.
Featuring indie heroic favorites like Axiom-man, The Wraith and Shadowflame, while also introducing newcomers like Nightcat, Spectrolite, Midnight Angel and more, Metahumans vs the Undead is a terror-filled action adventure where Light and Darkness collide and only one can prevail.
Contains stories by: Rebecca Besser, Eric S. Brown, Frank Dirscherl, Lorne Dixon, A.P. Fuchs, Anthony Giangregorio, Keith Gouveia, J.L. MacDonald, Joe Martino, Rhiannon Paille, Gina Ranalli and J.B. Robb.
Mech Apocalypse: A Military Science Fiction Thriller
A Stolen Weapon.
A Rising Enemy.
A Change to History.
Riley Connor was one of the best skilled mech-pilots in the war between the Expherions and the Supremechs. Now, with the war over, he serves as a Peacemaker, part military, part law enforcement. When a secret weapon is stolen from the abandoned base Stake 47, he is suddenly thrust into a battle not just for the future security of the planet, but of the war he thought over with.
Teamed with Sophie Jones, another highly trained officer and someone he is close to, they seek to discover precisely what this weapon is and what it can do. Also paired with them is Nick Fox, a seasoned war vet, and Grayson Wilder, a rookie exo-suit warrior. Together, the four must not only locate the weapon, but bring the thieves to justice.
All goes haywire when the weapon is activated and an evil thought vanquished returns. Soon, Riley and Sophie find themselves in a place different from the world they left yet also familiar.
From high flying exo-suit battles to giant mech-bots exchanging missile fire, Mech Apocalypse is an action-packed military science fiction adventure that will leave you on the edge of your seat!
Redemption of the Dead (Undead World Trilogy, Book 3)
A Rising Army.
The Devil.
War.
The forces of Good and Evil are gathering, each side preparing themselves for what could be their last confrontation because the commander of the armies of darkness has arrived on Earth—the devil himself.
Overwhelmed after witnessing the manifestation of Heaven’s fallen angel, Lucifer, Billie is assigned two final tasks before the big battle. These assignments take her across the world where she meets two German brothers who prove to be tremendous allies as she goes to recruit brave men and women for humanity’s last stand, and the strange supernatural tool required to finally set all things right.
Back in the city, Joe and Tracy have to lean on each other and learn that a world full of zombies with Hell’s army at the door isn’t a time to keep secrets and risk the lives of others to keep them safe. The two go head-to-head as they struggle to survive what they discover are the last days of the zombie invasion and the powerful supernatural forces behind it.
This final installment in the Undead World Trilogy is a wild adventure through a post-apocalyptic world that takes the reader to the very gates of Hell for one last strike against an enemy that has destroyed a planet.
Possession of the Dead (Undead World Trilogy, Book 2)
Angels.
Demons.
Giant Zombies.
Things have changed.
Ever since returning through the Storm of Skulls to the present day, Joe, Billie and August have discovered the world they now inhabit, is not the world they left behind. The zombie threat has evolved to gargantuan proportions. Now aided by giant undead—massive monsters with phenomenal strength and power, with deadly appetites just as vast—the zombie population moves to devour any and all life.
Separated from his friends, Joe learns that not all hope is lost for humanity when he meets, Tracy, a woman who exudes a strength to rival his own. Tracy brings him to the Hub, an underground sanctuary where life continues in a dead world, but his thoughts linger on his missing friends.
August and Billie have problems of their own, and soon learn the same plight that affected a past friend of theirs now affects many: zombies with shapeshifting capability. Now, anyone is suspect. Yet even with this newfound knowledge, more is heaped upon them when the agenda of the undead is revealed and humanity is the one caught in the crossfire.
A war is raging, one between angels and demons, monsters and man.
The Haven became the only place in the city free of the walking dead. A place of community. A place to be safe.
Now, things have changed.
The zombies are coming to the Haven, seeking out the remaining survivors of the human race.
Joe Bailey prowls the Haven’s streets, taking them back from the undead, each kill one step closer to reclaiming a life once stolen from him. Billie Friday and Des Nottingham soon have Joe to thank for their lives.
As the dead push into the Haven, the trio is forced into the one place where folks fear to tread: the heart of the city, a place overrun with flesh-eating zombies.
They soon discover they are not the only humans there. After meeting an old man with a peculiar past, Joe and the others must make one last stand against the undead or unwillingly meet the same fate.
A desperate escape leads them to a place thought impossible to exist and to a discovery that will shake the future.
This entry was prompted because I’ve come across it more than once. Three times, to be exact, so I figure it’s worth blogging about.
Authors and starting their own publishing company.
This is the approach to publishing I strongly advocate in Getting Down and Digital: How to Self-publish Your Book. It’s my opinion that taking the time to set up a publishing business the proper way opens doors to taking your self-publishing career in multiple positive directions, on-line and off-.
But can you just start a publishing company? On three separate occasions I’ve seen authors simply “start companies,” that is, just making up a business name and start and/or plan to publish under it without registering it through the proper channels.
While the nuances of business start-up rules vary country to country, state to state, province to province, if a person wants to start a company, there is a certain way to go about it because each industry functions on different rules of trade and sales depending on where you live.
When I started Coscom Entertainment and any if its imprints, I had to go to the Companies Office downtown, fill out paperwork, explain what my business was and pay a fee. This was in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
I know from speaking with other Canadian and US publishers that they, too, had to go through a formal procedure to get their company up and running.
But I have also seen authors pull a company out of thin air and aim to start using it. I don’t know if this is simply because they don’t know any better or if it’s because of all the Kindle talk that people think all areas of publishing are free and one can do whatever they want when it comes to it. Or maybe, like most writers and artists, money is hard to come by so they want to do things as cheaply as possible and free is about as cheap as it gets. Perhaps it’s the Internet mentality because a lot of people view the Web as a “place to get stuff free” so why not start up a company for free, too? The problem with this kind of free is it’s unethical. Why create the groundwork of your career on something that’s wrong? It’ll only lead to problems down the road.
The publishing industry is changing, this is true, and things are not what they used to be–and this extends past the whole eBook thing–but other things have remained, and that is the need to properly start a business if setting up a publishing house is part of your self-publishing plan.
If you’re not sure what to do, pull out your phone book and look up your local Companies Office. Tell them what you plan on doing–publish books–and they’ll let you know what you need to do so that if your business is ever looked into, you can produce the proper paperwork that states you are allowed to run your business whether out of your home or an outside office. Likewise, when it comes tax time and you claim your writing income, claiming it under a company might work to your advantage in terms of write-offs. Talk to an accountant about this as the rules vary place to place.
In the end, if you wish to self-publish via your own imprint, part of the deal is registering that imprint with the proper authorities.
Start your career on the right foot. It can only payoff in the end.
Note: This post was originally published on Jeffrey Allen Davis’s blog
The Axiom-man Saga at the C4 Comic Con 2013
The Axiom-man Origin and Why I Write Superhero Fiction by A.P. Fuchs
The Axiom-man Saga is an old story. A couple decades, in fact, as it was around then that I started to daydream about a similar hero while walking my paper route each morning. I’d get so lost in this story about a hero caught in a cosmic war between Good and Evil that I’d be done my route before I knew it and would often run house-to-house to double check and make sure I delivered the paper to the right places.
In that fantasy, of course, I played the hero. As the story grew and I got older, I ended up transferring the honor of being that character to someone else, a fictitious someone else who would one day go by the name of Gabriel Garrison.
Axiom-man began to take shape in concept throughout all my years of delivering the paper—and went by a different name, which was featured in my novel, April, written as Peter Fox (for that secret name, you’ll just have to read the book to find out). In 1995, Axiom-man received his new costume, the one he wears today. At the time, Axiom-man—originally called Trinity—and this concept character of mine were two different people. Trinity was more of a supernatural hero ala Spawn and fought demons, whereas my other hero was more down-to-Earth in nature and had very Superman-like powers. Yes, I know: Superman isn’t very down-to-Earth, but he does deal with things on this plane of existence 9 times out of 10. Anyway, as time went on, Trinity became Axiom—who was yet another character at the time—and as even more time went on and after being inspired by the likes of Frank Dirscherl and his Wraith character—who back in 2005 had one novel, a comic and a movie in the works—I decided it was time to put my long-thought-about superhero to paper. I merged my paper route fantasy character with Axiom because I always had an affinity for him, and after doing a quick web search on the Axiom name and finding a company out there with the same name, I went and made it my own by adding “man” to the end of it, hyphenated, of course, because that’s who Axiom-man really is: a self-evident truth embodied in a single person, in his case the self-evident truth of being one to do good rather than evil. From there it was an issue of scaling his powers waaaay back and settling upon three of them: strength, flight and eye beams. And when I say I scaled his powers way back, I mean way, way back. When Axiom-man debuted, he could only lift around 1000 pounds, could fly at about 60 kilometers an hour, and his energy beams only carried so much force. I didn’t want to make him too powerful thus making him always the winner and, because of his great strength, have no choice but to always pit him against ultra powerful foes. My story was to take place in our world under the idea of, “If this happened in our reality tomorrow, how would it most likely play out?” Making him with that kind of power set helped keep him grounded in reality and gave me plenty of options for enemies he could fight to sometimes win and sometimes lose against.
His backstory and mythology were left unaltered and kept the same as the character I thought about growing up, still the product of a nameless messenger having visited him and granting him his abilities without explanation. As the story goes on, Axiom-man finds out why he received his powers and how he is caught in a cosmic war that has raged since time immemorial.
The reason Axiom-man made his debut in books rather than comics was because, at the time I brought him to market, I knew of superhero fiction but didn’t think to do it independently. Frank Dirscherl’s The Wraith and Knight Seeker by Eric Cooper showed me otherwise. Axiom-man was originally a comic book character and I even drew a 21- or 22-page comic with him when he was called Trinity back in high school. I still have it somewhere and might publish it one day as a kind of behind-the-scenes thing. Anyway . . .
By doing superheroes in prose, I was able to work alone, could tell the story exactly how I wanted it, and because I was already self-publishing other fiction at the time, had the system in place to get Axiom-man out there.
You know, even though Axiom-man was my first official superhero release, I look over my fiction and every book I’ve written is a superhero novel in some way. Take A Red Dark Night, for example. It’s about a summer camp under siege by blood creatures. One of the protagonists, Tarek, is superheroic in nature, wears an otherworldly outfit complete with a cape, and shoots blue fire from a gauntlet on his forearm.
My epic fantasy book, some quarter million words long, called The Way of the Fog, is about a group of people who get superpowers in a medieval/fantasy-style setting.
My zombie trilogy, Undead World, deals with the supernatural, time travel, and each character is superheroic in how they act, even archetypical in some cases, with comic book-like good vs evil action.
Zombie Fight Night—aside from an aged Axiom-man making an appearance in there, is full of comic book characters monster-wise, everything from werewolves to vampires; to robots to pirates; to ninjas to samurai; and beyond, all battling the undead.
The Metahumans vs anthology series is, obviously, about Metahumans aka superheroes fighting a themed foe throughout each book.
As mentioned, my love story, April, is about a comic book writer who’s fallen in love, and what does he write? Superhero comics.
I think it’s only fitting that superhero fiction in its truest form—an actual superhero storyline—became a part of my repertoire. It seemed inevitable considering my love for the genre. Ever since I knew what a superhero was—at three years old, I think—I’ve been hooked, and not a day in my life has gone by where I haven’t thought about them, theorized about them, fantasized about them, pretended to be them and more. I even wear Superman and Batman onesies to bed for crying out loud!
Calling me a geek is an understatement, but I don’t care. Geeks make the world go round and fanboys are the ones providing people with entertainment. Superhero fiction just happens to be my main venue for doing so.
And where is Axiom-man going from here? Well, thus far, 7 prose books have been released along with a few comics and short stories. The whole saga is planned to be 50 books long, so I’m coming up on being 20 percent finished. The good part is the story is pretty much all mentally written. I had 9 years or so of delivering papers to get the story right, after all.
What I’m enjoying about the superhero fiction format is I’m able to do things with my characters that comic books don’t allow, at least, current superhero comics don’t allow. I’ve long advocated—and still do—that the comic book is the greatest storytelling medium to ever come down the pike, with books being a close second. Why? Because it’s the one-two punch of pictures combined with narration, whereas prose is a text-only medium. I still believe that, but being that at this stage in my career I’m primarily a writer versus a writer/artist, I’m sticking to books and the book medium is capable of telling superhero stories in a way comics haven’t as yet, namely getting inside a character’s head. Very few comic writers have succeeded in that in the past. Superhero comics are far too picture-heavy these days, with flashy computer coloring jobs, flimsy stories and scant dialogue. I miss the old days where there were almost equal amounts of text and pictures. At least with The Axiom-man Saga as it stands now, I can bring the reader dense characters where every thought and feeling is brought to the fore and, hopefully, pull the reader into the characters’ shoes in a way that superhero comics don’t. That’s my main goal with this: bring the reader in so that they feel they are experiencing my fiction versus just reading it. I’ve yet to read a superhero comic where this has happened. I have, however, read superhero books where this has occurred, Batman: Knightfall by Dennis O’Neil being a major favorite of mine and my first foray into the superhero fiction world.
What also sets The Axiom-man Saga apart from any of the current superhero offerings is that it’s a cross-medium superhero story that encompasses books, comics and short stories, all part of the same continuity. This has never been done before, and putting new spins on old things is one of the things I’ve always striven for in my fiction, especially in this industry where things are pretty copycat and cookie-cutter (we all know of certain authors that seem to turn out the same book over and over again just under a different title, right?).
Whether Axiom-man becomes this wild success or remains under the radar, for me it’s about writing the superhero story I always wanted to read, the one I’ve always thought about, and the one that, when my time on Earth is done, is the one I’ll be remembered by. It’s meant to be a career piece, a giant story with a beginning, middle and end, the story of a superhero, his life, and what that means to the world around us.
I invite you to come along for the ride.
Hope you enjoyed this little insight into the Axiom-man origin.
Some moments come along and your world—your life—changes. Something shifts inside and everything’s the same yet somehow different. Sometimes someone comes into your life and helps you to breathe for the first time, to think with clarity and to give you truth and joy.
Often, we never see it coming. But it also happens when we need it the most and, usually, when we don’t realize we need it.
For Joseph Bailey, life has come to a standstill; existence, living, call it what you will, have stopped moving, stopped flowing, stopped growing. Those he knew while growing up seemed to have gone down the right path, creating a so-called normal life. He’s not sure if he followed.
Spending lonely nights writing comic book scripts and hazy afternoons watching cartoons brings him to his knees, and he needs something—maybe even someone—more. One Friday, while at a coffee shop working on a new comic script, Joseph is interrupted when a quirky girl with long black hair and smooth-as-marble gray eyes sits down across from him, seeking sanctuary from her controlling boyfriend, Dan.
Her name is April.
All seems under control even when Dan follows her in to the coffee shop, looking to patch things up. At least, that’s what was supposed to have happened. Once Dan leaves, Joseph figures his work is done and April will be on her way, never to be seen again. Instead, she stays, removes her sweater and orders an apple cider. Just then something slips inside Joseph, something good, right and pure.
Their weekend begins.
From a quiet night in an old railway car to seeking the undertones of humanity at the art gallery, to bringing to light the tender commonalities that we as humans share, April is a story of how a simple chance meeting can hold you and protect you, and give you what the human heart is continuously after—
