What Are You Reading?
Becoming Superman: A Writer's Journey from Poverty to Hollywood with Stops Along the Way at Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes by J Michael Straczynski
Review by Allen Stroud
You may know Straczynski for his work. You may have arrived at this book having enjoyed Babylon 5, or Changeling, or Jeremiah, or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, or his run on Amazing Spiderman, or Superman or something else. This is a writer who has shaped many of the most important stories in American science fiction over the last thirty years.
The words of Neil Gaiman in the introduction to Strasczynski’s autobiography describe the reading experience quite aptly. Here is a man who was pounded so hard as a child, as a teenager and as a young adult that he became a diamond. When you pick up this book, open the pages, or press play on your audiobook app, you are starting out on a journey that will astonish and horrify you with its revelations.
Straczynski begins at the start. The origin of the family name in America stems from the itinerant wanderings of his fortune seeking grandfather and the efforts of his grandmother to follow him. Sometime later, a little boy enters the scene and struggles to find his place in a family that resents his presence. There is fear and abuse at the heart of this story. Love is fleeting and the lack of it hardens layers around the heart of young Joe, the boy with a life in two boxes who wants to be a writer.
There are revelations that are held back, waiting for the moment when Joe, now established in his career, discovers details about his past that had been hidden from him.
The journey to Hollywood is one of devastating failures and fleeting triumphs. Throughout the narration, the emotional isolation of the narrator comes across. In success, Straczysnki is often baffled and astonished by his achievement and leaves others to describe their thoughts on his work, or the moment in question.
As a writer, analysing the text for insight and advice requires concentration. Straczynski is narrating his journey and describes some of the ways he learned different techniques from the storytellers who met him on the road. His focus is not on trying to provide the reader with secret insight. That said, there are moments every writer can identify with. The rejections and gnawing self-criticism are easy to see in my own journey. The moments of revelation for Straczynski are also powerful and resonate in comparison. Every creative individual determined to make a career out of their work struggles, learns and persists. If anything, this particular story is a lesson in how failure does not blight an individual’s chances, no matter what a specific agent, publisher, editor or executive says at the time. In the lowest moments, Straczynski decides to ‘write my way out’ and that required tremendous courage and self-confidence to stand up to the naysayers and the brain weasels.
Becoming Superman is not an easy read, but it is revealing. If you wanted to learn more about the politics behind Babylon 5’s development and the subsequent shut down of its sequel series, Crusade, you will learn as much as Straczynski can reveal without provoking litigation. If you are looking to get an insight into the ebb and flow of the studio processes in the different industries a writer might find themselves in, again, you will learn just how cutthroat the business can be. Throughout it all, Strasczynski comes across as noble, forged from hardship and cruelty into an uncompromising principled, generous and kind man.