This Week

I'm sorry for the lack of posting this week, as this weekend when I normally spend most of my time writing I was at Mid-Ohio Comic Con promoting my book.

I had planned this week to do a short article on why certain classes of heroes attract different types of readers and different age groups, and how this is associated with moral psychological development.

But, when I was at the comic con this past weekend explaining my book and it's concepts over and over again, I repeatedly received the same question. "So if you have defined what a Super Villain is then what are the villains who don't qualify?" This is a good question. I initially answered this in the same way I explain it in the book "The Super Villain" I imagine is similar to Plato and Aristotle's world of forms. An idealized state that very few ever achieve if any, and instead most characters are graduated aberrations of the form.

When I was initially writing the book I had toyed with a chapter that would lay out classifications for the levels of villainy, but this seemed to put the cart before the horse. Without a full and compete definition of the ideal how can we understand the lesser. And while Super Heroes are interesting maybe it is time to take up this discussion of classifying the lesser villains.

So that will be the project and direction over the coming weeks on this site. We have our Super Villain, and our shining examples of villainy and morality blended into perfect harmony in characters like Dr. Doom, Ozymandias, and those elite few that meet the stringent criteria laid forth in my book, but what about the losers?

I had planned my next book to be a similar to my first and to do the same thing with the Super Hero I had done with Super Villains, and that may yet still happen. But for the time being I'm going to try something different. Each week for the next few months I will post further work I do on the other classifications of villain. Now this will not be final draft work, more so meandering thoughts and some research. Essentially fleshing my ideas out online looking for feedback and input. These ideas once coalesced will go to create my next book.

I intend to rely heavily on the work of Owen Flanigan, Aristotle, and a few other famous philosophers to get to my goal, and we will see how this all plays out.