08-28-24: City of Strange Gods!
The tenth Signalverse novel, City of Strange Gods, is available now! You can buy it here.
06-07-24: Progress Report
I'm almost finished with City of Strange Gods -- I've only got about a half a chapter left to go. Still plenty of work to do on it, though (proofreading, editing, formatting, and so on), and I haven't even thought about the cover art yet, so I have no idea when it will be available. Probably by the end of the year, though, at least.
It turned out a bit shorter than I was expecting -- only about 93,000 words -- but it's still the longest single Signalverse novel I've written so far, and almost as twice as long as the typical Signalverse adventure. That's because it's basically a sequel to four different novels, with four different POV's: Jack from The Adventures of Jack and Miracle Girl, Ally from Champions Weekly, Raye from Sneak and the Shadow of Darkplanet, and Chance from Galatea and the Dupe. Max and the gang from Disreputable Persons also appear.
I've been wanting to write a big crossover like this for a while, a sort of Avengers: Infinity War for the series as a whole. Needless to say, unlike most of the Signalverse books, this one is not a standalone; if you want to get the most out of it, you're going to have to go back and read several of the previous books (preferably the whole series, hint, hint).
I'm going to be taking a little break from the Signalverse after I finish this one -- it'll probably be a year or more before I return to it with Special Squad E, which is set to the eleventh book in the series. I'm also planning on releasing an updated edition of The Complete Guide to the Signalverse at some point after that, which will contain at least six hundred character entries, a new short story, and various other additions, but the market for insanely detailed world-guides like this is not exactly huge and it's very possible I'll wind up just printing out a few copies out for myself and a few fans via Lulu, and maybe making the book available for free as a PDF.
03-01-24: Progress Report
I'm currently working on City of Strange Gods, the tenth Signalverse novel. I'm about 40,000 words into it, but this book has four protagonists and is set to be considerably longer than the average Signalverse novel; I'm expecting it to run around 110,000-115,000 words. Hoping to finish it by the end of July, but that might be optimistic.
You can read the first chapter right now, if you subscribe to my Substack.
01-07-24: Erratum!
I just spotted an error in the latest Signalverse book, Galatea and the Dupe -- in chapter eight Chance tells Galatea about some of the superheroes of the 1950's, and mentions someone called "Straight Shooter". That's a mistake; the hero's name was supposed to be Straight Arrow. (His archenemy was a cowboy villain called Six-Shooter; I must have conflated the two.) It's not something most people would notice, but it annoys me, because I've spent a lot of time assembling this universe and I pride myself on getting these kinds of details right. Anyway, I'll probably fix it here shortly, with some updated editions.
So who is Straight Arrow? He was a Native American archer who fought crime in Signal City in the 1950's, as I said. He had a sidekick called the Second Stringer, who went on to become the second Straight Arrow in 1968. A third Straight Arrow then appeared in the mid-1990's, who had no real connection to the first two apart from the name; he retired in 2009, but his daughter, Flechette, continues to fight crime as a member of the Signal Corps and has appeared in several Signalverse novels, even getting her own POV interlude in one of the Jack and Miracle Girl books.
(If you're a fan of the series and you like this sort of background info, you might consider picking up The Complete Guide to the Signalverse, which is full of this kind of thing.)
11-20-23: Galatea and the Dupe is available now!
You can buy it here.
11-19-23: Where is Signal City?
This is a question I've been asked a few times. Where exactly is Signal City? In the Complete Guide to the Signalverse I said that it was "a major metropolitan area, about the size of Boston, located on the eastern seaboard of the United States" but I've never gone any further than that. I've never mentioned which state Signal City is supposed to be in, nor where it's situated relative to Boston, New York, or Philadelphia.
The truth is, I'm not really sure. Signal City is definitely not just a stand-in for New York, like Metropolis or Gotham in DC Comics -- New York City does exist in the Signalverse. It is, however, a considerably smaller and less important city than it is in our world, with perhaps a third of the population (making it even smaller than Boston), and it's only ever had a handful of superheroes and supervillains. Probably the most notable was the Brooklyn Giant, one of the earliest villains, who appeared in the 1920's.
I do know that Signal City is somewhere south of New York -- geographically speaking, I'd say it's probably somewhere in New Jersey, but that's not canon, and in fact I'm not even sure the state of New Jersey exists in the Signalverse. Signal City's biggest university is "Champion State", which I've always vaguely assumed was the nickname of the state in which Signal City was situated -- a state which obviously doesn't exist in our world.
But that's all I know.
11-06-23: Galatea and the Dupe!
Here's the completed cover art for Galatea and the Dupe, the ninth Signalverse novel, which will probably be released around the end of November:
The art is by Josh Howard, who also did the cover art for the second White Ribbon novel.
This is a pretty short book, about 43,000 words, and pretty dark, actually, for a Signalverse novel -- the protagonist, Chance, is a selfish jerk with a unique metahuman ability, who only begins to change his ways after he's taken prisoner by a gang of supervillains. The events of this novel lead almost directly into the big, 100,000-word Signalverse crossover I'm planning to write next year, which will bring back several characters from the previous books, including Jack and Miracle Girl.
I've also given the website a little bit of a redesign. I'm going to try to update the site a little more often from now on, with more news, more frequent updates, and maybe some essays and tidbits from The Complete Guide to the Signalverse, so keep an eye out for that, and as always, if you've got any questions, comments, or feedback of any kind, just shoot me an email at theblakeshow@gmail.com.