RUSE #3

Do I not have good ideas? Or are my ideas just so damn good that others also have them and they become published & filmed? I wrote a book, Small Town, about a twenty year-old writer in the suburbs that inadvertently becomes a private investigator, albeit not licensed or trained or anything. HBO has a show now with the same premise, Bored to Death, based on a short story by Jonathan Ames. I had an idea for a comic book titled Alpha Delta Death that was basically Lord of the Flies but with Sorority girls. A new book just came out called Beauty Queens that has the same premise, albeit it's a plane of beauty pageant girls that crash on an island. & I'm currently writing Detectives in London, a novel that features a female investigator working alongside a male investigator in old-times London. Ruse, Mark Waid's comic, has a similar premise; what if a female was paired with a Sherlock Holmes type dude? Ruse has been out for awhile; they did thirty-odd issues when it was published at Cross-Gen. That company went out of business but Marvel just bought the rights to all their books and are putting out a few new mini-series of the same books. Mark Waid is still writing this but artist Butch Guice is sadly only doing the covers. They've also nixed the gargoyles walking amongst the people but otherwise it's the same. The problem is that it's an utter rip-off of Sherlock Holmes. The art in this particular issue is fairly awful, done by Rob Steen, who didn't even bother to pencil #1 or #2 (a fill-in artist on a four part series makes little sense). It tries to be whip-smart and fun, but it's merely adequate. Even the big mystery is fairly murky stuff. I don't know...maybe I'm just jealous that this got published before me. *1/2