Author: TJ Dawe

Remember those Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels? Here are some failed knockoffs: Choice-Is-An-Illusion-Adventure: You decide what happens next, but every choice brings you to the same place. Choose-Someone-Else’s-Adventure: You choose what happens next, causing the pages to flip to that spot in someone else’s copy. Choose-Not-To-Go-On-An-Adventure: The story is so boring that you can’t help but put the book down and do something else. Choose-Your-Own-Answers: Each choice requires solving a story problem, and halfway through it drops the pretense of being an adventure and turns into a math test. Choose-What-To-Do-With-Your-Life: The adventure plays out what’ll happen if you choose different paths in education,…

Welcome to DC Comics. I’m the sub-editor who on-boards new writers. I’ll tell you what you need to know, but first, remember our guiding principle: justify every single thing about our children’s characters from the 1930s, and make them fucking badass. What do I mean by badass? Picture a bottomless pit of rage transformed into a human jackhammer kicking the snot out of a cuckoo clock while a woman shaped like Jessica Rabbit cowers nearby, dressed in ninety-nine percent torn-off fetish gear. And what do I mean by justify? Take every detail of a character’s many-decades-old mythology and defend them…

Lord Vader, we have received the transmissions from our scout ships’ mission to a galaxy whose distance our navigators calculated as “far, far away.” They’ve discovered a planet whose dominant species looks identical to us. Roughly twenty percent of them speak our standard language, in our exact same array of accents. The odds of this being the case are vanishingly thin, but our asteroid belts do sometimes include humongous shoes and potatoes, so impossible things can happen. Their technology, though primitive, sometimes overlaps with our own. Several decades ago their most advanced machines employed large, colorful, chunky buttons, like those…