F. Simon Grant
Bio
I'm a fiction writer and a collage artist.
Stories (22/0)
Nightmare: Dr. Strange's First Enemy in the Shadow of Sandman
Nightmare, the likely villain of the Dr. Strange movie sequel, proves that Doc has one of the greatest rogues galleries in comics. I would describe Nightmare to any DC fan as the Joker with the power of Morpheus from Sandman though Nightmare's depiction over the years has been even more jarringly inconsistent than Joker's: at times Nightmare has been essentially the most powerful villain in the Marvel Universe (when he incapacitated Eternity, the embodiment of existence, during a classic Roy Thomas story), but at other times Hulk can beat him to death for some reason. In the Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon, Spider-Man beats Nightmare by simply not being afraid of him. When I saw that episode, I imagined a thickly sarcastic Benedict Cumberbatch saying, "If only the embodiment of all of existence had realized he could simply not be afraid. If only he had a teenage spider bite victim to teach him how to so simply beat a fellow god."
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Geeks
Colony of the Horizontal Tree (Chapter One)
Colony Colcolson happened to be reading The Exhaustive Catalogue of Tiny Kingdoms when the girl (Melanie Gellar) first wrapped his wrist in hair (he only realized this coincidence years later after Melanie Gellar [according to the (fake) public record] was dead and wished he’d held on to that book for so many different reasons). The action of hair wrapping was absentminded on her part, but in this simple act, Colony got a flash of the many ecstasies of open firmament and pure light of heaven, warming him from the inside. He saw the true structure of all of existence, all of the shimmering tendrils weaving in and out of everything and warming all the living with single-being interconnectedness like a cross-dimensional cuddle pile. He saw the blue sky fractaling into eleven other skies (at minimum) and all the other worlds beyond and all the gods of all these worlds.
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Futurism
Urthona and Rintrah: The Last Days of Dr. Strange, Vol. 2
Peter B. Gillis, my favorite Dr. Strange writer of the 1980s, debuted two underrated and tragically forgotten alien creatures in the same storyline that brought volume 2 to an end: Rintrah, the green minotaur apprentice, and the great devastating villain Urthona. Rintrah remained essentially just a quirky secondary character for the first few years of volume 3, but Urthona made a more significant first impression that should earn him a place on the top ten Dr. Strange villains of all time (though no one puts him on that list but me). Urthona essentially debuted in issue 79, and his storyline led to the end of volume 2 with issue 81 in 1987. Besides ending a volume, in his first appearance he achieved all of the following: 1) stealing all of Doc's stuff (and Doc, as a neurotic hoarder, loves his stuff [and it's also a major source of his power]); 2) stealing Doc's whole house; 3) torturing Wong (but all Dr. Strange villains torture Wong at some point [it's the one universal truth about Dr. Strange villainry]); 4) hospitalizing Doc (so he has to do the classic Doc-has-to-operate-on-himself-by-possessing-the-surgeon routine [yes, he's done that many times]); 5) and finally forcing him to destroy all his stuff (and Doc loves his stuff) because he has no other choice (many great Dr. Strange stories end with "because he had no other choice"). That's a heckuva a debut for Urthona.
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Geeks
Birdhead Father in Brightness
When Birdhead Father found the box baby (as his name in that moment went from being "Birdhead" to "Birdhead Father") the problem was his (literal) birdhead moved independently as a (literal) bird's might, and the more excited he got (and becoming a father for the first time was certainly exciting) the more wild became the thrashing of the birdhead. He was practiced in piecing together disparate images, but anything new to his well-pieced-together routine was an extra mystery, so images of his new son came to him in shattered pieces. Now was the time he most wanted and most needed to concentrate, but his head wouldn't let him.
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Futurism
Extra Bright
Greta Stromach prayed one night for heaven to save her and dreamt of these bright white tendrils descending from the sky like jellyfish tentacles, or what jellyfish tentacles would be like if jellyfish were some amalgamation of Jesus and grandmothers with purelight tendrils, they wrapped her and lifted her to heaven, but the dream ended before she got there.
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Futurism
When Clea Ruled: The Neglected Love of Dr. Strange
Roger Stern and Peter B. Gillis defined Dr. Strange in the 80s, and Stern was especially noteworthy in chronicling Clea’s rise to power in the Dark Dimension, peaking with Clea’s defeat of her mother, Umar the Unrelenting, in Dr. Strange Vol. 2, number 73. Despite some recent depictions of Dr. Strange as a Tony Stark-like ladies man (and despite some superficial similarities, he is definitely not Tony Stark) Doc maintained, for several decades, a monogamous relationship with Clea who even became his wife (by cosmic common law, whatever that means) and may still technically be married to him though the status of this former Dark Dimension queen remains in limbo (the Dark Dimension and Limbo are completely different dimensions in the Marvel Universe, but the limbo I’m referring to here is called “Writers not caring as much as I do about Clea”). She remains one of the most egregiously neglected characters in Marvel history as she has remained a dangling cliffhanger since the late 90s, yet in this peak moment of defeating her mother, Clea fully manifested as one of the greatest female counterparts to a superhero title character in all of comics, becoming stronger than her husband who is himself one of Marvel's strongest superheroes.
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Geeks
The Horse with a Jellyfish Belly
Junior Magicolo felt a little embarrassed to walk down the halls of his high school with his best and only friend, his Living Nightmare named Moths and Bats, fully aware most other kids (probably all other kids) lacked the delights of a flesh and blood nightmare as their best friend. Moths and Bats was made of two interlocking tornadoes of literal moths and literal bats, the moths part of his body billowing downward like a billowy hoopskirt, the bats part of his body billowing upward like a hoopskirt-wearing lady standing on her head, both funnels spinning and churning, eternally eating each other (or eating himself more accurately (the bats part of his body eating the moths part of his body, the moths part of his body constantly breeding to replace the parts of himself he’d eaten))(This awesomeness was detrimentally distracting in class, and Junior Magicolo had to constantly apologize to his teachers (“Sorry for my distractibility, but my Nightmare is too awesome.”))
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Futurism
The Forgotten and Undying Ones: The Most Compelling Dr. Strange Stories You Probably Missed
In anticipation of the movie version of Dr. Strange, my favorite character since I started reading comics, I attempted to reread all the Dr. Strange comics in my possession and often such a massive reread leads to out-of-body, who-did-I-used-to-be? shame and terror, especially since the decade I started reading was the 1990s, a decade notoriously prone to such why-did-we-ever-think-that-was-cool? experiences: the Gambits of our youth simply have dumb gloves and headgear with the wisdom of age, and that all the Avengers are wearing matching leather jackets seems less cutting edge and more like the forced cool of ill-conceived family photos. Plus, Dr. Strange was always an exponentially nerdier and niche-ier comic than the X-Mens and the Avengerses of that era, which makes a comprehensive retrospective a little easier; a singular character with a stuttering start-and-stop publishing history makes the full publishing history easier (and cheaper) to cover, but the lack of central editorial focus makes quality a total gamble.
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Geeks
Postal Automations
“As you may know, the Red Queen Corporation, when it bought the U.S. Postal Service, decreed all of you would be replaced by robots.” Maury Holliday, the postal supervisor, had given a similar sort of speech for a million mornings (it seemed) with dispassionate tones he hoped sounded professional and authoritative and stone-like in its superior power, but certainly his subordinates must have seen it as the pure, broken, sucked dry dispassion it actually was. All the postal faces he spoke to were so drawn down by gravity, so prone to dying at any moment, how could he put any passion into any of this variety of speechifying? “We’ve known for a long time you’d be integral in training the robots who’d replace you. However, news has come down the pipeline that, considering the expense of programming robots, the Red Queen Corporation has outsourced the development to mad scientists who work on the cheap with the agreement that their robots may also be used one day to take over the world. That being said, as you train your robot replacements, please, and this is vital: don’t let them take over the world.”
By F. Simon Grant7 years ago in Futurism